34. Sir Thomas Malory Goes to Prison for Treason, London, England 1468

Old Newgate Prison
The Newgate Prison pictured here was both the city gate and a prison, notoriously unhealthy and noxious. Destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666, it got rebuilt, much larger, and was finally torn down in 1904. Sir Thomas Malory spent the last years of his life here. Even with money, it can’t have been a good time. But there was a perk; it was next door to the Greyfriars Monastery, which had an excellent library. And that’s why we have Le Morte d’Arthur. Cause Thomas Malory had a library he could spend time in whilst imprisoned for treason.

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.

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33. The Theft of the Book of Kells, Kells, Ireland 1006

the Canon Tables in the Book of Kells
The canon tables from the Book of Kells (Trinity College Dublin MS 58, 5v) gives a helpful guide to pretty much nothing at all, since really the book was never meant to be used as a text; it’s all about the visuals.

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!

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

Join us to hear Peter Konieczny tell tales about medieval frauds in London! Fake earls, fake ale inspectors! But, really, mostly, Bad Things Done To Bread. Alas. Above, a baker who has been caught at his perfidy is dragged on a hurdle, with one of his Bad Loaves hung around his neck. From Liber Albus (the White Book of the City of London) Vol 3; translation by H.T. Riley.

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.

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31. Christmas Episode: The Murder of Thomas Becket, Canterbury, England 1170

Henry II and Thomas Becket having an argument
Here, in a 13th century manuscript, we see Henry II and Thomas Becket having an argument. Which of them, exactly, is winning the argument at the moment we do not know; the long battle will be ending, however, when some knights at Henry’s court, mistaking a temper tantrum for a royal dictum, go and slice the top of Thomas’s head off. From Peter of Langtoft’s Chronicle, British Library Royal 20 A II.

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.

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30. Albigensian Crusade, Languedoc 1209-1229

Beziers cathedral
The cathedral in Béziers was rebuilt after the Crusaders destroyed the one there before, but it was, as this one is, fortified. So was the city. A military mistake allowed the Crusaders to take the city and kill everyone they could, Catholics and Cathars alike. But to be fair, the fortifications wouldn’t have helped for long — the Crusaders were well heeled, well trained, and ruthless. (Photo is from Wikipedia.)

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.

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29. People’s Crusade, France and Germany, 1096

Dore's engraving of massacred People's Crusade
Above, the soldiers of the Second Crusade come upon what’s left of the People’s Crusade, lying where it got ambushed at Civetot. Joseph François Michaud’s Histoire des croisades finally got published in 6 volumes in 1840 — in 1875, Gustave Doré illustrated, copiously, a special edition; this engraving is found there.

At the end of 1095, Pope Urban II called for  the first of what would be several crusades, wherein the Latin Christian Europeans were supposed to go take the Holy Land away from the Islamic rulers who held it at that time.  So the nobility of Europe, mostly from France, started putting together forces and money, so as to travel and fight.  That was the Prince’s Crusade, the First Crusade, and it would leave Europe in the summer of 1096.  It takes a while to gather the wherewithal needed for such a venture.  Unless you just plan on being a mob!  In that case, you can be the People’s Crusade, and leave for the Holy Land in April! It takes no time at all to gather money if you just steal it from other people.  The People’s Crusade slaughtered the Jewish communities that they came across, creating the first of the giant massacres of the Jews of Europe which would continue on through the Middle Ages. They never  got to the Holy Land; those of them that survived the journey (and the Hungarians, who managed to kill a lot of them)  managed to get as far as Civetot, where the Seljuk Turks slaughtered them.  Your hosts aren’t sorry about this.

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28. The Sicilian Vespers, Sicily, Kingdom of Sicily, Easter 1282

Sicilian Vespers, Hayez 1846
Painted in 1846 by Francesco Hayez, this presentation of the Sicilian Vespers (and oh, there are so many — go google Sicilian Vespers and click on images — they go on and on and on) shows us the outraged Sicilian woman; the Frenchman who assaulted her dying on the ground, in unimpressive clothes; a much better dressed Sicilian standing over him; lots of other Frenchmen getting massacred; and, oddly, a host of Sicilians storming out of the church, to join the fray. Since everybody was hanging out outside the church, waiting for the vespers service, it’s unclear to us what they were all doing in there, other than getting ready to swarm dramatically out the doors when all hell broke loose. Hayez painted three versions of the Sicilian Vespers — this one is held in the Galleria nazionale d’arte moderna e contemporanea,  in Rome.

On Easter Monday, 1282, the Sicilians revolted against the French government that had been in place since 1266; in the course of a few weeks 4,000 to 8,000 French people were slaughtered, depending on what source you are reading. We explain how things got to such a pass, and Michelle has a lovely trip down a rabbit hole wherein she discovers the awesomeness of Stephen Runciman.  George Orwell makes a cameo appearance.

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27. Halloween Episode: Arche the Miller and his Drunken Buddies Pretend to be Ghosts, Cambridgeshire, England 1592

Talking skeleton from the middle ages
Medieval ghosts usually looked like the humans they had been, only much paler, but they more and more began to look like skeletons. Either way, the main thing they did was waylay living humans in order to give them orders — either concerning how the living could manage to stay out of Purgatory, or how the living could help the dead get out of Purgatory (by finding the stuff they stole in life and giving it back, for instance). Here, a living person is waylaid by a skeletonized dead person, clearly giving unwanted instructions. From a 14th C French Book of Hours, held at the Esztergom Metropolitan Library, Hungary.

When Arche the Miller and a bunch of his cohorts got very very drunk and pretended to be ghosts, they were living in Early Modern England, but they were pretending to be Medieval Ghosts, new ghosts having not been invented yet. In this episode, we explain medieval ghosts and how to pretend to be one, tell medieval ghosts stories, and try to wrap our minds around the well-known medieval forensic tool wherein murdered bodies bleed when the murderer comes by. Happy Halloween!

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26. Robert the Bruce Kills John Comyn, Dumfries, Scotland 1306

The Death of John Comyn
In this rendition of the death of John Comyn, which indeed Robert the Bruce caused, by stabbing him, we see the angry and fierce Bruce and a sort of angelic and serene dead Comyn. The clothes are wrong, but that’s the Victorians for you; also, we don’t actually know if the killing was outright murder or self defense; we do know that since Comyn had thrown Bruce under the Edward I of England bus, Bruce was not in a good mood. Henri Félix Emmanuel Philippoteaux, “Death of Comyn,” from Cassell’s Illustrated History of England, vol. 1, p. 330.

Robert the Bruce was not yet King of the Scots when he stabbed John Comyn in front of the high altar in Greyfriars’ Church in Dumfries. But he would be, pretty soon, in spite of being excommunicated for violence in the church. We explain the fight for the crown of Scotland and the interfering bossiness of Edward I of England, but we don’t explain whether the Bruce murdered Comyn or it was self-defense, because we don’t really know.  Because chroniclers. 

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The Great Cause genealogical chart
As promised, or threatened, depending on how you look at it, a lovely graph of the family connections of the contenders for the Scottish Crown, in the Great Cause. It is a doozy. Created by Czar Brodie; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitors_for_the_Crown_of_Scotland