Transcripts V

95. Henry d’Almain is Murdered, Viterbo, Italy 1271

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:33 

And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:36 

Today we are going to talk about a really, really stupid bad crime, that was just stupid and bad and dumb. So that’s what we’re going to talk about and it was awful. We’re going to Viterbo, Italy in 1271, where Henry de Almain was murdered by Guy and Simon de Montfort–Simon de Montfort the younger–who were his cousins, the sons of Simon de Montfort, in retaliation for their father having been killed and mutilated at the Battle of Eversham, a battle that Henry hadn’t been at. What the hell. Here’s our background. That battle had been in the Second Barons war. The First Barons war lasted from 1215 to 1217, and in it, some barons rebelled against King John at that time because he wasn’t abiding by what he had said he would abide by in the Magna Carta, which had been signed in 1215. The signing of the Magna Carta had come after rebellions against John’s taxes, which had been grievous, on account of John had been busy trying to get the Angevin lands back from King Phillip the second of France and he kept losing. So then he needed more money because he had to pay things like ransoms and fees, and ‘I’m sorry’ money, the kinds of thing that you have to pay after war if you don’t win it. Also, John was just horrible. I mean, we often say this, that he wasn’t a good king, he wasn’t a good man. That’s just how it was. One of the things he believed with that was that kings were above the law, which is one of the reasons Magna Carta got invented at all.  It was like, ‘no, you also have to abide by some principles.’ So that was the First Barons war. John died of dysentery in 1216–the First Barons war wasn’t over yet–and his nine year old son, who was Henry, became king. But really, of course, his regent was running things. That was William Marshal, who shows up in our podcasts quite often. William Marshal, here he is, Michelle, back again.

Michelle Butler  2:48 

Yay.

Anne Brannen  2:51 

Very quickly, a revived Magna Carta was reissued and signed. So that reinforced some of the baronial support for the English monarchy. That was important because the French, led by Philip’s son Louie had been being defeated on English territory, including the Battle of Sandwich, where Eustace the pirate monk was killed. We have a podcast about Eustace the pirate monk. So the First Barons war ended in 1217. Got a new Magna Carta, got the French off English territory, although the English aren’t completely off French territory, but there you are. France agreed that France was not the ruler of England. The barons said they were sorry. The French told the Scots and the Welsh that they shouldn’t fight the English anymore, like that does any good. ‘Oh, the French say that we shouldn’t go over the border and whack the English.’ That’s what the French said. Because, you know, they’d been using them as allies. William Marshal saved the royal day, and so that’s great. So that’s the First Barons war, where the barons rebelled against John. The Second Barons war, which is the one which we’re more concerned with, was when the barons fought his son–this would be King Henry the third–who had been nine during the first one but now was all grown up and his regent had done so well in bringing the First Barons war to a close. So Henry grew up and the reasons for the Second Barons war were much the same. There was hard taxing–the barons also didn’t like Henry–and also there was a famine and that didn’t make things any better. This war lasted 1264 to 1267, so three years. Neither one of them are really long wars. They’re not like the Cousins War, which most people call the War of the Roses. They’re not like the Cousins War, which really went on for a long, long time. Long, long, long, long time. Long time. Long time. We have several generations. This was just like ‘on, on, on’ and then, you know, you sign something. The barons were led in the Second Barons war by Simon de Montfort–Simon de Montfort, senior, not junior, who was going to be misbehaving later. Simon de Montfort wanted the king to rule with the barons, with a council of the barons, rather than just a few guys that the king likes, which had really been…you know, ‘who are the counselors?’ ‘Oh, some guys I picked who are my best buddies.’ Simon  de Montfort wanted a representative council. He’d been in France. In fact, he was born in France. He had, when young, been a leader of the Albigensian crusade–we have a podcast on that too– where the French slaughtered the Cathars of the Occitan because they were the wrong sort of Christians. He gave up his lands in France and he kept his lands in England, and by 1236, he was one of Henry the third’s favorites, and he became the Earl of Leicester. In 1238, he married the king’s sister Eleanor, who was the widow of William Marshal. Da-ta-da! Billy Marshal back again. They’re all related. They’re all related. Everybody’s married to everybody’s family. So this is the widow of  William Marshal. She was 16 when William Marshal died, and she swore a vow of chastity–she was never going to marry again. She broke this vow a year later, when she married Simon de Montfort. The Archbishop condemned the marriage and the barons were all pissed off because Simon wasn’t of high rank and he was French and, you know, the princess of England had married him and this was bad. Richard of Cornwall, who was Eleanor and Henry’s brother, rebelled and had to be bought off. So there wasn’t a really good reaction to this wedding. But Simon and Eleanor named their first son Henry, and Henry named Simon as one of the godfathers when Prince Edward was born. So things were okay for a little while–a little while–and then they fell apart. Because Simon owed one of Eleanor’s uncles some money, and he named Henry, King Henry, as his security. The king flipped right out and said some very bad things, and also said that he was going to imprison Simon in the tower. So Simon and Eleanor went to France. Then Simon went on crusade. I forgot to mention that during his time in England, he had also thrown the Jews out of Lincoln. He was that sort of person. At any rate, he went on crusade. These things are related. People who are not Christians, and the right sort of Christian. So that’s the kind of guy he was. He didn’t fight on this crusade. Then he came back and he helped Henry fight King Louie the ninth who was the Louie who had been in England, the son of Philip, and now he was king because Philip died–as humans do, really, always eventually–and he had inherited the throne. But that actually lessened the admiration that he had for Henry, who was really a very dreadful military leader. He worked for Henry as the administrator for Aquitaine, only there were complaints. There were complaints. So he got investigated for oppressing people in Aquitaine. He was acquitted, but Henry was still suspicious, and he thought he’d misused the funds. So Simon went back to France. But he really wanted to reconcile with Henry. God love him. And he did. But really, it was just too contentious. It was too contentious, and they had very different ideas about how the world should be run. There were a couple of Parliaments and at the second, Simon was going to be one of the king’s official councillors. But the king, who had earlier agreed to the council, changed his mind. So Simon left again. He came back in 1263, with other barons who who had invited him back, because he actually was a good military leader, a very good military leader, unlike Henry, who was not so great. Some barons invited him back, and Simon led a rebellion against the king. That’s just where we are at this point. The rebellion was involved in massacring Jews, who were an integral part of the royal money making and taxation process. Simon’s sons, Simon and Henry, were leaders in the massacres, along with Robert Ferrers and John fitzjohn and Gilbert de Clare. A massacre is at Worcester and London and Winchester and Canterbury and Derby and Lincoln and Northampton. They murdered the humans and they took their money and possessions and they burnt any records of debts there so there were no debts to the Jews. At that point, the king lets Simon de Montfort be the head of the council. But Henry’s son, who was the future Edward the first–Michelle and I talk a lot about Edward the first because we consider him to be an incredibly good king, but we don’t like stuff he does. It’s really hard to admire the greatness of a king who built castles all over Wales and stole the Stone of Scotland but this is the future Edward the first. Henry’s not dead yet. He’s going to be one of the strongest and most intelligent and scary of the English kings. He got a bunch of the barons onto the royal side with bribes of money and offices. He was very canny in that way. And so there’s a civil war. That’s the beginning of the Second Barons war in 1264. The royalists trap the rebel barons in London but Simon de Montfort marched out and won the Battle of Lewes. At that point, King Henry, Prince Edward, and Richard of Cornwall were all captured. De Montfort canceled all the debts that Christians owed to the Jews in England. He set up a government wherein the king would govern but with the approval of the council, and he would consult with Parliament. There had been elected Parliaments before in England but de Montfort, besides sending orders to the counties of England and the charter towns–the chartered boroughs–to elect two representatives. So that’s where the representatives were coming from. It included not just nobles, but regular citizens. That’s the first of the elected Parliaments. It’s Simon de Montfort’s parliament that includes the commoners. That structure of Parliament is what is still existing in England. However, Prince Edward escaped because he was Prince Edward–I forget what he did, I think he bribed one of the guards–but he got out and the Anglo-Norman marcher lords in Wales favored him. Gilbert de Clared defected because he got jealous and resentful of Simon’s power and success, and Edward captured more of Simon’s followers. Then what he did–and this is one of those brilliant military moves that’s just God awful in terms of, is this moral? No. Is it brilliant? Yes, it is. He fooled Simon–who was, as I said, also a very really good military leader–by marching with the de Montfort banners that he had captured, thereby maneuvering him into having to fight in desperate conditions. Simon’s forces were fighting uphill against a much larger crew, and he would never have done that, except that he had been maneuvered into it. His son Henry was killed. At that point, Simon said it’s time to die. Edward had actually sent a death squad to track down Simon de Montfort in the battle and make sure he was dead. They found him and he was killed by being stabbed in the neck–it was Roger Mortimer who stabbed him in the neck with a lance–and then the royalists went berserk. They cut off his head and testicles, and they put his testicles on either side of his nose. Roger Mortimer sent that head to his wife Maud as a gift. Had you heard that, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  12:44 

I did know that they had…yeah.

Anne Brannen  12:47 

And that it had been sent as a gift?

Michelle Butler  12:50 

Yeah, I did know that.

Anne Brannen  12:52 

Because who is Maude, that he would think that this is a good gift? We just had Valentine’s Day over here and I don’t think anybody got this kind of thing as a gift. Really? I mean, it’s mostly chocolate and flowers, right? It’s like here’s a gift, honey, somebody’s decomposing head with their genitals tacked on it. I don’t think that’s a good present.

Michelle Butler  13:12 

You know, that actually is…there’s a difference between going into battle…there’s two things that have happened. Having tossed out the code of chivalry enough to say, ‘we need to end this, if you find him kill him.’ Edward’s the one who gave that order. I think that in some ways, the de Montfort boys could have accepted that because they would have done the same thing.

Anne Brannen  13:37 

People die in battle, and you do your battle the best you can and you don’t go around hunting down people who were in the battle later, because you already had the battle.

Michelle Butler  13:47 

In general, the note the nobles don’t kill each other. They capture each other and they ransom each other.

Anne Brannen  13:52 

Yes. So something has really changed here, that Edward sent a death squad.

Michelle Butler  13:57 

We’ve seen that before. That’s what William the Conqueror did at Hastings.

Anne Brannen  14:02 

Yes, he did. He was very bad.

Michelle Butler  14:05 

So there’s a code of chivalry unless it really matters, in which case, send a pack of six guys to hunt your dude down and kill him. Make sure he doesn’t walk off the field because that’s how you win. But the mutilation. The mutilation. There’s no justification.

Anne Brannen  14:21 

There’s really no reason. It does make sense if you’re up against Simon de Montfort, you want him off the table because you notice, in this story that he kept leaving and coming back and leaving and coming back. I mean, there’s no way to get Simon de Montfort to stop except by stopping him. That’s just how it is. So fair enough. Okay. Okay. It was a trick using those banners. And I think it’s just so wrong. It was so wrong to use the banners.

Michelle Butler  14:53 

Because of that Edward has to do reputation management, when he becomes king.

Anne Brannen  14:59 

Killing Simon alone, he wouldn’t have had to make that be okay.

Michelle Butler  15:04 

He gets called a leopard.

Anne Brannen  15:08 

Yeah, that’s not good.

Michelle Butler  15:11 

He should be a lion but he’s a leopard, and so he has to do rebranding to salvage his reputation because otherwise nobody would go into any agreements with him. He’s not trustworthy.

Anne Brannen  15:22 

On the subject of Simon de Montfort’s head and the gift to Maud. Roger Mortimer is a marcher lord. Maud is Maud de Braose. She’s the daughter of William de Braose.

Michelle Butler  15:33 

God almighty.

Anne Brannen  15:34 

Her mother is one of the daughters of William Marshal. That really was a very bloody family. So as I say, this is a very, very bad thing to send your wife as a present unless maybe she’s Maud de Braose, I guess that would be okay. There’s nothing about Maud saying, ‘Oh, my God, what the hell have you done? Why did you send this to me? I wanted chocolates.’ We don’t have that, actually. That’s not written down any place. So maybe Maud went, ‘Oh, yay, look at this.’ What do you do with then? Oh, like, ‘would you put this over the castle walls on a pike?’ Because, you know, you can’t leave it in the hall. You got to do something with it. At any rate, I’m fascinated by that gift, but we can move on. 

Michelle Butler  16:18 

The Normans.

Anne Brannen  16:20 

So besides doing that, they also cut de Montfort’s hands and feet off and sent them to various places. Then they buried the rest of them in a church. But the commoners, later they would keep visiting the grave and thinking of it as holy ground. So Henry is going to later have him dug up and be buried in some secret places. After the battle, the soldiers who had fled were found dead in a nearby village. So that was the end of the Second Barons war. That’s all over. So that’s the background to the crime of today. The crime of today wasn’t even what they did to Simon de Montfort. We’re moving on from that. That’s just a thing that happened. The Battle of Evesham, this battle, had been in 1265 and our crime takes place in 1271. Okay. Our dead person. Henry of Almain was the son of Richard of Cornwall, this brother of Henry’s and Eleanor’s, who was the elected king of Germany. So that’s how Henry got his name. It’s from Allemayne. Allemayne. Almain. Fair enough. We remember that Richard is the son of King John, and Henry’s mother was Isabel Marshal, who is the daughter of William Marshal. Everybody’s related, not just by being related to the Plantagenets, but everybody’s related to William Marshal.

Michelle Butler  17:36 

He had a ton of kids and he married them off well, particularly the daughters.

Anne Brannen  17:42 

He’s the nephew of Henry the third. He’s also the nephew of Simon de Montfort, because, you remember, Simon was married to Eleanor, who’s also the daughter of King John and the sister of King Henry and Richard Cornwall. You remember that part. So he was, not surprisingly, very divided in loyalty at the beginning of the Second Barons war, and he told Simon De Montfort that he would not take up arms against either one of them. But he ended up having to do something. He had to decide. So he went with the Royalists. He was captured, along with the other hostages–the king, his cousin Prince Edward–they were all captured at the Battle of Lewes, and then he was released in 1268. So that was great. He went on crusade–ta da do da do–but he got sent back because Edward, who was also on crusade at that point with him, wanted him to go and take care of some problems that had come up in Gascony. Instead of sailing, Henry took the land route from Sicily up on through Italy, and that’s why he was in Viterbo on the 12th of May, in 1271. Guy de Montfort and his brother Simon de Montfort, Jr. had been roaming around Europe since 1266, when Guy, who had been captured at the Battle of Evesham escaped, and Simon Jr., who had missed the battle because he got there too late to help his dad, whom he saw up on a pike. He had tried a little rebellion, which didn’t go anyplace, and he had surrendered and then he escaped. So they got together and they were roaming around Europe. They eventually ended up in Italy, where they heard that their cousin was in Viterbo and they found him at mass at the Church of St. Sylvester. They murdered him while he clutched the altar, begging for mercy. Guy said, ‘you had no mercy for my father and brothers.’ But Henry hadn’t even been at the Battle of Evesham. Oh, and by the way, did anybody see this? Yes, because the cardinals were there. They were having a papal election. So were the kings of France and Sicily. So people saw this. It wasn’t done in secret. The brothers were both excommunicated. King Henry was really pissed off. The Pope was really pissed off. Edward let the pope know that Henry was on a peace mission. He hadn’t been at Evesham. They just killed him because he was associated with the people that had done bad things. Simon died that same year, we are told, cursed by God, a murderer and a fugitive. I don’t know what he died of, but he had been cursed by God. So maybe he died of that. Guy went to fight for Charles of Anjou, which he had done before, but he got captured in 1287 fighting the Aragonese at the Battle of the Counts in 1287 and he died in prison. So that’s what happened to them. Henry’s body was taken to Gloucestershire, and buried at Hailes Abbey, but his heart was put into a golden shrine and is buried in Westminster Abbey, next to the shrine of Edward the Confessor. So that was our crime. It’s a little bitty crime in the middle of a great big story. Michelle, you got lots of stuff, didn’t you? Because obviously, this is going to be something that catches the imagination.

Michelle Butler  21:02 

It really was a scandal. Killing somebody in a church. You know, it’s pretty scandalous.

Anne Brannen  21:09 

We want to do a whole episode on this, by the way, on killing people in churches and claiming sanctuary.

Michelle Butler  21:16 

It’s pretty scandalous. A measure of how scandalous it is, is that Dante references this. Inferno’s completed by 1314. It’s set in 1300. He puts Guy–I think it’s Guy–in hell. He’s in a river of boiling blood. But the way he refers to it, I actually had to read it twice to find it. Because he doesn’t ever say ‘Guy de Montfort.’  He doesn’t ever say ‘Henry de Almain.’ It’s this really oblique reference. He says, “He cleft asunder in God’s bosom, the heart that still upon the Thames is honored.”

Anne Brannen  21:58 

Oh.

Michelle Butler  22:00 

That deeply oblique reference tells me that this was hot news. And it stayed hot for a long time.

Anne Brannen  22:13 

Everybody would have known who this was.

Michelle Butler  22:15 

Everybody knew what that meant.

Anne Brannen  22:17 

Oh, it was it was a terrible crime. They murdered their cousin, who hadn’t even done the thing that they murdered him for. They murdered him in the church at mass during a papal election.

Michelle Butler  22:30 

When the priest tried to stop between them, they killed him too.

Anne Brannen  22:33 

Oh I didn’t know that part. Thank you.

Michelle Butler  22:34 

Oh my god. Yep. It’s just so dreadful. It’s terrible.

Anne Brannen  22:38 

Would Simon de Montfort himself have ever done that? No, he has these really…these are inferior children, I tell you.

Michelle Butler  22:47 

Some sources that I found said that Henry was clutching to the altar, and they chopped off three of his fingers to drag him out. So it’s bad.

Anne Brannen  22:58 

Henry had been at one of the battles and he hadn’t ever wanted to fight at all. It wasn’t a political thing for him. It was, ‘these are my uncles. These are my uncles.’ So it was very bad of his cousins to kill him.

Michelle Butler  23:12 

His dad kind of likes this approach too. The ‘stay down here in Cornwall and mind our own business.’ This is not the first time we’ve run across Dante sticking one of our murderers in hell.

Anne Brannen  23:27 

Oh, no. We started with Dante, but he wasn’t in hell…Cangrande della Scala.

Michelle Butler  23:33 

Oh, yes.

Anne Brannen  23:34 

That was why we did it. Because it was Dante and you want Dante.

Michelle Butler  23:38 

Mm hmm. There was another one though. Ulberto, who is also in hell. This amuses me greatly, because you run across discussions of Dante and it’s all about this elevated poetry and it’s thinking big thoughts. Yeah, okay. But it’s also settling medieval scores and spilling the tea about contemporary–

Anne Brannen  24:03 

Yes, because he put somebody into hell who wasn’t dead yet, didn’t he?

Michelle Butler  24:07 

Yeah.

Anne Brannen  24:08 

I remember that.

Michelle Butler  24:09 

There’s a lost play that we know existed, from 1592. We know it existed because it’s discussed by Henslowe in his inaccurately named Henslowe’s Diary. It’s not a diary. It’s business records of what they were doing. It’s actually really important. It’s one of the ways we know about the economics of early modern theatre.

Anne Brannen  24:36 

That was one of the ways that they use the word ‘diary.’

Michelle Butler  24:38 

So maybe that’s what’s going on.

Anne Brannen  24:38 

We think of it as a journal, but journal meant journal, and that meant daily accounts.

Michelle Butler  24:40 

So that’s what’s going on then. The word has shifted its meaning. Henslowe’s son-in-law was Edward Alleyn, the actor, and between the two of them, they have 1000s of pages of manuscripts that have this stuff in it. There’s also a couple of other useful things among that. One of them is the sole surviving actor’s part from a play from the period from Orlando Furioso. That’s part of this archive. Here’s a quote from the Henslowe-Alleyn digitization project, which is henslowe-alleyn.org.uk: “As a group, these manuscripts comprise the largest and most important single extant archive of material on the professional theater and dramatic performance in early modern England.” So it’s a really important collection.

Anne Brannen  25:42 

And it’s digitized, we can go and look at it?

Michelle Butler  25:44 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  25:45 

You’ll give us the link.

Michelle Butler  25:46 

Yep. It’s important stuff. Alleyn is the founder of Dulwich College in London, which is actually a K through 12 school. It was in their archive that this was held for a very long time.

Anne Brannen  26:05 

When did they find it?

Michelle Butler  26:07 

It was found in the 19th century. The manuscript has suffered some trials and tribulations. Edward Malone took it home for a while…Edward Malone, he is a great scholar, the Malone society is named for him. But the 19th century just didn’t have developed scholarly concepts, I guess, as much as now, because he took souvenirs from this manuscript.

Anne Brannen  26:37 

It’s kind of like the whole feeling of imperialism and colonization spilled over into medieval manuscripts. The same way that you can, like, take statues out of Egypt and bring them on over and just stick them in the museum, you can take a manuscript and cut pieces out if you like–I mean, hello–because you’re English.

Michelle Butler  26:59 

Famous people, people whose signatures he really wanted, were in there, and he just snipped them out and kept them.

Anne Brannen  27:07 

Totally entitled. Nowadays, if he showed up, we could write a little thing and send it into Reddit, you know, entitled people. Yep.

Michelle Butler  27:13 

Oh, yes. Before I move off into 19th century scholars mistreating early modern records, the actual play was called Harry of Cornwall. Yeah, I’m so traumatized by the…

Anne Brannen  27:28 

I’m so sorry, Michelle, that you had to read about manuscripts being hurt.

Michelle Butler  27:31 

Oh, my Lord.

Anne Brannen  27:32 

At least no cheese sandwiches were being used as bookmarks. That was, I remember, an issue in one of our earlier podcasts.

Michelle Butler  27:40 

It was performed by Lord Strange’s men at the Rose Playhouse in 1592. It did really well. ‘Received: 32 shillings.’

Anne Brannen  27:49 

Ooh, nice.

Michelle Butler  27:50 

Yes. There’s a different website called Henslowe as a Blog that takes an entry per day and puts it out there, and so this day’s entry, what we get told about it is “Harry of Cornwall provided Henslowe with his most impressive box office so far. It made more than twice as much as Sir John Mandeville did yesterday”–so, the play they were talking about the day before. But it’s lost.

So it was called Henry of Cornwall.

It’s called Harry of Cornwall.

Anne Brannen  28:25 

Harry of Cornwall, rather than Harry Almain.

Michelle Butler  28:30 

They’re pretty sure–we don’t know for certain but they’re pretty sure it’s about Henry getting murdered. One of the reasons they think that is that another play in the repertoire, it’s an Edward the first play and it starts with–totally not historically what happened–Simon and Guy getting dragged in front of Edward the first to answer for the murder of Henry.

Anne Brannen  28:40 

That would have been nice, but it didn’t happen.

Michelle Butler  28:54 

They think that these plays were being done in repertoire together.

Anne Brannen  29:02 

Also if you’re going to have a play called Harry of Cornwall, and it’s about Henry of Almain, really the only thing that’s dramatic that you could put on the stage would be the murder. You’d have to build up to it, kinda like I did with the Barons Wars.

Michelle Butler  29:16 

Yeah.

Anne Brannen  29:18 

That’s it. Things that Henry did: got murdered at the altar.

Michelle Butler  29:22 

This blogger says that the Italians apparently believed that Henry’s heart had been placed in a golden cup on London Bridge, where it still dripped blood into the Thames because Henry had not been avenged.

Anne Brannen  29:34 

I think they’re right. And it’s probably still there. Oh, wait, no, this is London Bridge?

Michelle Butler  29:39 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  29:40 

Well, that’s in Arizona so it can’t do that anymore.

Michelle Butler  29:42 

That’s connected to Dante. How it’s discussed in Dante. Anyway. Henry’s heart probably isn’t actually in Westminster Abbey anymore because the heart shrine was placed in the shrine of Edward the Confessor, but then that shrine was rebuilt in the reign of Mary the first and it appears to have gotten lost in the renovations, as sometimes happens.

Anne Brannen  30:05 

A heart would get lost. The gold shrine probably didn’t get lost so much as repurposed.

Michelle Butler  30:11 

It didn’t make the leap once things were being put back in.

Anne Brannen  30:15 

Well, so it’s not there anymore. I didn’t know that. I don’t like to know that because I wanted his heart to still be there in Westminster.

Michelle Butler  30:22 

According to Westminster Abbey, it’s not.

Anne Brannen  30:24 

If I was Westminster Abbey, I’d be much more liable, if I was going to lie, to say that something was there that wasn’t, but you just can’t see it.

Michelle Butler  30:31 

I mean, maybe they do a full inventory…

Anne Brannen  30:36 

Nobody ever does full inventories. Everybody’s always gonna do an inventory–even if you do a partial inventory, you always find some stuff. ‘Oh, my God. Look at that.’

Michelle Butler  30:45 

The big old forger that I ran across that I’m hoping to have a reason to talk about at some point in more detail is John Payne Collier, who was notorious.

Anne Brannen  30:45 

This sounds like a 19th century name.

Michelle Butler  31:00 

He is so much. Let me quote this blog post by Matthew Lyons. “John Payne Collier. Three words sure to chill the heart of any scholar working on early modern literary texts, because Collier was that most interesting a phenomena: a fine scholar who was also a first class fraud.” One of the things he did was borrow–they let him walk out with the manuscript, the unique manuscript of Henslowe’s Diary–and then when he published it, he interpolated stuff that should have been there.

Anne Brannen  31:38 

Okay, wait. Was some of that stuff the stuff that had been cut out?

Michelle Butler  31:42 

No. Edward Malone made off with signatures of people he wanted to be able to post into his autograph book like some kind of early modern fanboy.

Anne Brannen  31:53 

So Collier just added some stuff?

Michelle Butler  31:55 

He added things that he wanted to be there. I had known about JW Walker doing this with the Towneley plays, wanting to connect them to Wakefield.

Anne Brannen  32:07 

Which you can do if you make some stuff up.

Michelle Butler  32:08 

My goodness gracious. This was not as uncommon…Collier did this a lot, actually.

Anne Brannen  32:14 

What was he making up in Henslow’s Diary?

Michelle Butler  32:18 

He’s making up additional entries. He is wild. He pretended at one point to have found a second first folio in which he had written–it was called the Perkins folio–in which he passed off–now I’m quoting–“he passed off his own emendations to Shakespeare as the work of a near contemporary” and there are over 20,000 corrections that he added. In 2004, a brand new book came out that is the authoritative, exhaustive work–I can’t imagine how long it took these people to do this–on him as both a critic and a forger. It is 14,183 pages long in  two volumes. I have ordered a copy because I need to see this but it hasn’t come yet.

Anne Brannen  33:11 

Did you buy it or are you–

Michelle Butler  33:12 

I bought it. From a delightful bookstore in, I think, New Hampshire.

Anne Brannen  33:24 

So it’s like one volume about the criticism and the other volume about the forgeries or are they just kind of sprinkled…?

Michelle Butler  33:30 

He forged so many things. Here, I’ll just read this. It’s wild. “Aside from including deliberate fictions and falsehoods in printed records of archival material, he also introduced forgeries into the archives themselves, faking official documents, adding information to letters and diaries, falsifying registers and inventories, and more. He tampered with at least 57 authentic manuscripts and rare printed material.”

Anne Brannen  33:57 

Oh good god.

Michelle Butler  34:00 

He forged entire ballads, some of which have made their way into anthologies as authentic.

Anne Brannen  34:09 

I was going to ask how much impact he’s had on scholarship because surely some of this stuff wasn’t caught until later.

Michelle Butler  34:16 

It’s so difficult because, say, 75% of his work is really good scholarship. Then you have this other 25% where he’s like, ‘it should have been like this,’ or ‘this will make a great paper,’ or, ‘I’m sure this is true, I just haven’t found the evidence so I’ll just fudge it.’

Anne Brannen  34:33 

This is not a scholarly method.

Michelle Butler  34:35 

It’s so much worse than somebody like Thomas Middleton who was forging ballads, medieval ballads. We know that all of them, all his stuff, is forged. So great, that’s so much easier. This is terrible.

Anne Brannen  34:50 

Because some of it’s true. Is there a kind of consensus now that we’ve been able to sift the chaff from the grain?

Michelle Butler  34:58 

Yeah, we’ve got the big two volumes set that does that work but if you have to work with this guy, you have to check everything and of course there have to be new editions of everything he worked on because you have to go through and check it all. But his edition of Henslowe’s Diary was the published ones for like 60 years, until somebody went ‘wait a second, that’s not real.’ Where they really haven’t Cafe

Anne Brannen  35:25 

‘Were they really having cafe oles over in Dorset?’ I don’t think so. ‘Did they really put on Angels in America?’ No, they did not.

Michelle Butler  35:31 

I had to really restrain myself from wandering off down a John Collier rabbit hole. But if that 1500 page book had come I absolutely would have been reading it before this. The church where Henry was murdered is still there. You can go visit it. There’s a plaque commemorating the murder.

Anne Brannen  35:47 

Yeah, because the Italians must have been pretty upset.

Michelle Butler  35:49 

They weren’t thrilled. Sharon Kay Penman’s Welsh Princess trilogy, the second book in it is all about Simon de Montfort.

Anne Brannen  35:57 

I like that trilogy.

Michelle Butler  35:59 

The third book is after Simon is dead, but it shows the murder of Henry de Almain.

Anne Brannen  36:06 

Eleanor gets real upset.

Michelle Butler  36:07 

There is a brand new, 2022 book by Carol McGrath called The Damask Rose that is actually about Eleanor of Castile, Edward’s queen, but it does mention the murder of Henry. I would have liked to have read Harry of Cornwall. I’m sad that that’s lost. That would have been really interesting. It did well. They did it in London, they earned money, and then they took it on tour when the plague shut down the theaters–the next year when they had to go to Bristol they took it on tour. So it would have been nice to read it.

Anne Brannen  36:37 

I would like to see how it is they built up to the murder. You know, how it is they contextualize it. I would like to see that.

Michelle Butler  36:44 

I would have liked to have known what they did with it and where the sympathy is in the play. Because sometimes I’m surprised where the sympathies of a piece are. There’s so much stuff going on with history plays in the 1590s. It just would have been really interesting to see this one, not usual suspects of Richard the third or the Henrys. It would have been interesting to see. But alas, nobody bothered to keep it.

Anne Brannen  37:09 

Or they did keep it and then as Byron says, somebody used it to line pie tins.

Michelle Butler  37:14 

It’s hard with the plays, because if you write them down, then somebody else can do them. So you’re trying to keep your economic advantage by keeping your play secret. I understand. But it would have been nice.

Anne Brannen  37:25 

It’s not like if you’re in York, where you have to write things down because some other people are going to be doing the same thing next year. No. That’s what happens when you make theatres professional. Everything changes, doesn’t it?

Michelle Butler  37:36 

So that’s what I have. A play I don’t have. Dante telling us that it was a super huge scandal that he could refer to very obliquely half a century later, and everybody was like, ‘Yeah, we know that, we remember.’

Anne Brannen  37:50 

It was really bad.

Michelle Butler  37:51 

Oh it was super bad. I’m totally fascinated by the image of what they think is happening, that the shrine’s been clamped on to London Bridge and is just sitting there dripping, because nobody’s avenged–

Anne Brannen  38:06 

Yeah, who made this up?

Michelle Butler  38:07 

That’s a great image.

Anne Brannen  38:08 

The heart got put into a golden shrine. So it’s encased in gold. Clearly that is information that is the foundation of this particular picture that someone has invented, but I really am like when? who’s the first to say this? When did this start? It was in Italy that they were saying this? Nobody said this in England. For one thing, you could go to London and notice that it wasn’t there. So there was that.

Michelle Butler  38:33 

But you know, from Italy you’re not going to do that.

Anne Brannen  38:38 

So that is interesting. But avenging–what would that have looked like? I mean, just more deaths. They got excommunicated. Nobody liked them. They had sad, short little lives after this. His death was supposedly some kind of avenging of their dad’s death, and it didn’t avenge anything. He didn’t do it. He wasn’t there. He wasn’t even nearby.

Michelle Butler  39:05 

He’s who they could get ahold of. They couldn’t get ahold of Edward, who had given the order to kill Simon, although I would be astonished if Edward had given the order to mutilate him.

Anne Brannen  39:18 

I don’t think he did. I think they just went berserk.

Michelle Butler  39:21 

Edward’s a pretty pragmatic person, and I just don’t see that.

Anne Brannen  39:25 

They couldn’t get a hold of Mortimer, who seems to be a big instigator of the hacking things up.

Michelle Butler  39:32 

He’s who they could get a hold of. But I’m starting to think that every war in the Middle Ages is a cousin’s war.

Anne Brannen  39:37 

Well, it sure as hell is in England. They’re all related. That is our discussion of the very, very sad murder of a guy who didn’t deserve it at all in 1271. The next time that you hear from us, we’re going to be in Poland in the 13th century, where the high Duke of Poland got murdered kind of ignominiously. So we’re gonna be discussing that. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. We can be found on Spotify and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. The website is Truecrimemedieval.com, true crimemedieval is all one word. You can find the show notes and links to the podcast and transcriptions. You can leave comments and get a hold of us there. We’d love to hear from you. The Middle Ages. Some very badly behaved people today. Bye.

93. Michael Servetus is Murdered, Geneva, Republic of Geneva 1553

Anne Brannen  0:24 

Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Branenn. I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:32 

And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:35 

Last time we were around, we were doing something over in Puritan England, which really isn’t medieval at all, but it was a special episode for Christmas. Today we’re going back into the Middle Ages, where really we’re supposed to be, and we are in Geneva, in 1553, where Michael Servetus was burned at the stake for heresy. That’s where we are. Sometimes in the 1000 years of people behaving badly, they behave really, really badly. That’s where we are. Servetus was born in 1511, in either Aragon or Navarre–it’s unclear. What his name actually is, we’re not clear on either, but we’re going to call him Servetus. His father was a notary, so education was a thing that was expected and liked in his household. He was a notary at a nearby monastery and Servetus, as he grew up, studied widely–widely, I tell you, both in subjects and in places. He was proficient in Latin and Greek, he could read Hebrew, looks like he could read Arabic. I’m assuming he knew Spanish and French also. He was a polymath. He studied widely. First he went to a grammar school–a grammar studium–in Aragon. By 1520, he was studying Liberal Arts at the University of Zaragoza, where he got a bachelor’s and a master’s degree–he got those degrees there. In 1527, he started studying law at the University of Toulouse. Then there was a little interval where he didn’t have any formal schooling. It wasn’t like he stopped studying because basically his entire life was him studying all things. But for a while, he wasn’t in school. He was traveling in Germany and Italy, he was serving as secretary to Charles the fifth’s–Holy Roman Emperor Charles the fifth’s–confessor. In 1531, he started publishing his writing. The first works were in theology, The Errors of the Trinity, Dialogues on the Trinit,  and On the Justice of Christ’s Reign. In 1533, he started studying at the College de Calvi, which was a literary college attached to the Sorbonne, and he published a translation into French of Ptolemy’s Geography and an edition of the Bible. He wrote a medical treatise defending the work of Champier, a doctor and his patron. Then he published a bunch of other medical books. After which, in 1536, he studied medicine. I love this timeline. He wrote a bunch of medical books, and then he studied medicine. But in the medical books that he was writing before he actually started studying medicine, he made discoveries. [sigh] How old was he, when he died? He was like, in his 30s, I think?

Michelle Butler  3:39 

He was born in 1511, and he died in 1553. So 42.

Anne Brannen  3:48 

So 42 is still young in my book, and even at that time, because although life expectancy was lower, but not because adults died younger than they do later. It’s because of the enormously large infant death rate. At any rate, I think he was young when he died. So, 1536, he’s studying medicine in Paris, and also while he was studying, he was teaching medicine and astrology. He made an astronomy prediction concerning Mars and the Moon, and Mars occluding the moon, that turned out to be true. The medicine professors were just really annoyed at him. You know, he was writing about astrology and they were annoyed. So the Dean of the School of Medicine suspended his teaching. It’s like being a TA and they throw you out. You still have to go to your classes. So Servetus wrote a treatise against the dean, the dean argued to the university that Servetus should be put to death on account of teaching Cicero’s work on divination. At that point, Servetus left Paris. He finished up his medical study at Montpellier. In 1539, he became a doctor of medicine. Okay, so that’s his last degree. That’s the end of his formal training. We’ve now gone through all of his training all over Europe. So he’s a doctor, an actual doctor, not a doctor like me and Michelle, which are doctors of literature. If you have a horrible, horrible emergency where you need to know something about medieval drama, we’re there for you. We’re there. But we can’t actually fix you if you fall and break your leg. He became a physician to some important people. He began at that time to correspond with John Calvin. Okay, Michelle, and I just had our little moment where we were sad.

Michelle Butler  5:48 

That was a bad turn of events.

Anne Brannen  5:51 

You can see why he would want to correspond with Calvin, because Calvin’s a theologian and a thinker, and he’s in Geneva, and he’s founded an entire religion, you know, an entire branch of Protestantism. At any rate he did. He began to correspond with John Calvin, and he became a French citizen. So now he’s no longer Spanish. He’s now a Frenchman. He wrote a book, again, on the Trinity and how it doesn’t exist. That would be The Restoration of Christianity, which he published in 1553. Besides the theology, which included an argument against predestination, something that would annoy Calvin, he included a description of the pulmonary system. It was the first one to be written down in Europe, although it was probably connected to an earlier Arabic work. It’s in the middle of all this theology, which explains why later, it’s not really going to be discovered until sometime after his death. Because, you know, if you were looking for medical treatises, you didn’t go on over to the thing about the restoration of Christianity and how there’s no predestination and started looking for medical works. He just stuck it in there. It’s just not in the same genre whatsoever. So Calvin didn’t like this, as was predictable. He had seen an early version. Years before, while Servetus was working on it, he’d sent an early draft. So then he’d sent a book that he’d written to Servetus and Servetus wrote all in the margin a whole bunch of criticism and sent it back to Calvin, and Calvin didn’t like that. Calvin wrote to Servetus, saying he was insulting sound doctrine doctrine with great audacity.

Michelle Butler  7:43 

That’s pretty much Servetus’ life motto.

Anne Brannen  7:46 

I think really it is. It’s like not just that he was thinking about things, making theories about things he wasn’t supposed to be having theories about, he just was not kind of mild and meek, when he did it.

Michelle Butler  8:00 

No. My favorite little thing about him–well, there’s many things I like, but one of them is that on the title page of this book, the one that gets him into all kinds of trouble, it has, in Hebrew, “and at that time shall Michael stand up and war broke out in heaven.”  Which is not really what you do. That’s not the work of a modest sort of person. And somebody who’s supposedly trying to keep his authorship secret.

Anne Brannen  8:31 

Yes, and not, you know, die. So it was at this time, after this thing with the exchanging of books and writing stuff down in the margin, it was about this time that Calvin said to a friend in Geneva that if Servetus came to Geneva, Calvin would not let him leave alive. Though Servetus, much like Abelard–we had a podcast on Abelard and we were discussing how Abelard went all over to all these different places making everybody annoyed. Servetus kind of did that. He was really good at annoying people. But it’s there that things began to fall apart in 1553. He was denounced-he was still in France at Vienne–he was denounced by another friend of Calvin and letters that he had sent to Calvin and sections of his book were the evidence for his heresy. He was arrested and the authorities–these are the Roman Catholics who are arresting him, later it will be the Protestants– but they were both after him. The Roman Catholics in France arrested him but he escaped. He escaped. This is the point at which he actually could have gotten away. Like, not just escaping but you know, not getting dead very, very quickly. While he was at large, he and his books were burned in effigy because he wasn’t there to be burnt. So they burned his books and they burnt an effigy of him, because he had been found guilty of heresy. Calvin sent a bunch more letters proving his horrible badness and then–what the hell?–he was gonna go to Italy and he stopped in Geneva. I do not…why? Why does he do this? Michelle, did you find anything that explained why the hell Servetus went to Geneva?

Michelle Butler  10:34 

Nope. I found a whole bunch of people asking the same question. What was he thinking?

Anne Brannen  10:38 

So along with everybody else who thinks about this, we are in agreement. What the hell? What the hell? Did he have to go to Geneva? No. He could have gone to Italy, written some more books, gotten in trouble with the Roman Catholics there, then gone to Germany, written some more books got in trouble with the Protestants.

Michelle Butler  10:59 

He could have come to the new world.

Anne Brannen  11:00 

He could have, actually yes, there. That was a thing that could have happened. I don’t know. The Pilgrims wouldn’t have like him. Especially if he celebrates Christmas. That would not have been good. So he went to Geneva. And not only was he in Geneva, he attended one of Calvin’s sermons, where he got arrested.

Michelle Butler  11:24 

The choices here are just puzzling.

Anne Brannen  11:28 

Stupid. They’re stupid. He’s not a stupid person. Something’s going on in his thinking. What he’s planning, we have no idea. Anyway, he was arrested. France wanted him back. They wanted to extradite him to France, because they had condemned him first. So really, they should get to kill him. But Calvin wouldn’t let him be extradited. Because he was just as as good at punishing heretics as the Roman Catholics were. It’s a point of pride, really. So Servetus was condemned. Hello. Specifically, he was condemned for arguing against the Trinity, and for arguing against the baptism of infants. In other words, God is not three parts of God in one, God is God, and he sort of makes himself into other things such as Jesus or the Holy Spirit, but God is God, Jesus, Jesus, Holy Spirit,  Holy Spirit. The point about the baptism being that it makes no sense to baptize people who don’t know what kind of commitment they’re making on account of they are babies. Those are the main points, though he was also questioned about why he wasn’t married, which is probably a way of trying to see if they could get at his sexuality and drag that in there. But that didn’t work. He said that he had some kind of injury that caused him to not be part of the crew of people that gets married. They were also concerned because he had read the Koran. They accused him of having read the Koran, which actually he had, and because he defended both Jews and Muslims. I mean, there’s really nothing to dislike about this guy. Except that, you know, he has no manners.

Michelle Butler  13:14 

Yeah. I hadn’t made the connection with Abelard. But you’re right, he’s one of these brilliant people who don’t understand or have any patience for other people. So he’s constantly stepping on toes, because the whole manner is, ‘keep up.’

Anne Brannen  13:30 

Yeah, keep up, keep up.

Michelle Butler  13:32 

My favorite part of his defense is when he wrote a little treatise that argued that…because they got tired of letting him talk in the courtroom because he was running rings around their prosecutor, he asked for a piece of paper, so he could prepare his defense. They gave him one piece of paper. What he wrote up was a treatise arguing that punishing heretics with capital punishment is not consistent with the Bible. It’s great. I mean, he’s not wrong. It’s not in the New Testament.

Anne Brannen  14:11 

No, I mean, his thinking is good. His thinking was good.

Michelle Butler  14:15 

But it’s this sad moment, you know, because he thinks that logic is still gonna matter.

Anne Brannen  14:20 

Right. Right. Right. And it doesn’t.

Michelle Butler  14:23 

Not a bit.

Anne Brannen  14:23 

He gets into trouble in Paris because he’s annoying the other professors of medicine. He gets into trouble in Geneva because he annoys Calvin.

Michelle Butler  14:34 

You are a special sort of person in the 16th century if the Catholics and the Calvinists hate you with the same fervor.

Anne Brannen  14:43 

There really should be some kind of medal for this.

Michelle Butler  14:46 

This also reminds me of the Cathars. 

Anne Brannen  14:49 

How so?

Michelle Butler  14:50 

In terms of his primary concern is about having a Christianity that is more about compassion.

Anne Brannen  14:56 

Ah. Right.

Michelle Butler  14:59 

It’s not that it’s theologically similar, it’s that it’s coming from this impulse of why are we so nasty?

Anne Brannen  15:05 

Which is part of the being accepting of other religions, which is something that is going to get mentioned later by me. Also, when he was being tried, he refused to name his friends. That might have mitigated the punishment, but he refused to do it. As with Joan of Arc–now we are reminded of Joan of Arc–because the law did not cover Servetus getting executed. It was illegal to execute him, because he was not a citizen of Geneva. They were supposed to banish him. But the way that they got around this was essentially by ignoring it. With Joan of Arc, they did some convoluted things to make the charges and have some reasoning behind them even though they didn’t. Basically, they wanted her dead, so they figured out how to do it and how to make it look legal. But it was not with Servetus. They wanted him dead, and they didn’t even bother to make it look legal. Calvin wanted him beheaded. Which was nice of Calvin. It’s so beautiful for a little moment here, where Calvin is really well behaved. But burning at the stake, it was what he got sentenced to. It was the 27th of October 1553. He was burned alive on a pile of his books and green wood so as to keep things going longer and make it more torturous. He had one of his books tied to him. It was bad. It was really bad. So that’s, that’s it. I think you wanted to say something about the book being tied to him. Michelle, what were you telling me? It was Marguerite Porete that you were reminded of?

Michelle Butler  16:50 

Yes. The emphasis not just on destroying the person, but on destroying the ideas reminded me of Marguerite. These ideas are considered to be so dangerous that they’re trying to destroy them.

Anne Brannen  17:03 

In both cases, as it turned out, they didn’t manage to do it. Because there was just like three copies in this case, I think one in Marguerite’s case. If a copy of a book survives, the book can be read. So what happened, now that I have told you all the story? There was a great deal of criticism of Servetus’ execution. There was strong criticism of Calvin, though it didn’t do any damage to Calvin’s reputation in Geneva, or at least his power in Geneva. The rest of Europe was really upset about this. But having Servetus executed is the beginning of Calvin’s consolidation of his authority. After he got rid of Servetus, he got rid of the Libertines. The Libertines were a group of powerful Genevans, they were big in the city, who argued that having been saved by grace, they did not have to follow the laws of either church or state. Calvin didn’t like that. So he got them executed too, in 1555. They were no longer a force, and Calvin was unopposed in Geneva. He was known across Europe as a major reformer. Killing off Servetus was useful for Calvin. So Servetus’ death had not much impact on Calvin. Indeed, it seems to have been a good career move, really, as regards his power at least, but he was criticized by the humanists across Europe for killing Servetus. Modern day Calvinists need to kind of need to explain this away, because this is not a good piece of Calvin’s reputation. The arguments for Calvin not being horrendous in this case. Here’s the points. Powers across Europe were killing heretics and the Roman Catholic Church wanted Servetus dead too so, you know, there you go. He was going to be dead anyway. Also, Calvin was just following the law. Although not really. It was a law about heresy, but it wasn’t a law about ‘can you kill the heretics in Geneva?’ It was the Council of Geneva that made the final decision. It wasn’t Kelvin. And he wanted Servetus to be beheaded rather than burned at the stake. Also Servetus was the only heretic that was executed in Geneva while Calvin was alive. There were lots and lots and lots more people killed in the rest of Europe, all throughout Europe, 1000s and 1000s of people killed for being heretics. So Calvin’s not so bad. Basically, this is a whole list of whataboutism.  There’s really no good argument for the goodness of Calvin concerning the burning at the stake of Servetus. It’s just basically ‘some other people behaved badly too.’ I don’t find that a compelling sort of argument myself.

Michelle Butler  20:04 

Interesting. The book that I read talked some about the Catholic Protestant wars that happen, the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and then the 30 Years War. I really didn’t know too much about that because my education has largely been England focused. The discussion over there is, oh, that stuff was happening over in Europe, but not here.

Anne Brannen  20:27 

Why the pilgrims went to Holland.  That’s the only connection. But Servetus did have an impact on the world. Some decades after his death, his work on the pulmonary system was found–that one that was kind of hidden in the theological treatise. And so three copies managed to not get burnt at the stake, the treatise on the pulmonary system was discovered, and he wrote other books that contributed to the field of medicine. And his theology had an impact. His writings were first studied in Italy. The humanists there, being exiled, went to Poland and Transylvania, which is where they established what would become the Unitarian Church. Servetus was not Unitarian, although the connection to early Unitarianism is not holding with the Trinity existing. But he’s recognized as the first martyr in Unitarianism, the first Unitarian martyr, and there’s some other groups that claim connections to him. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, for instance, are an example. Besides the theology per se, his execution for his ideas has had a very powerful legacy in the struggle for freedom of thought and conscience. As mentioned above, there was indignation across Europe at Servetus’ murder. Also, one of the things he had been in trouble about was his tolerance and defense of the of Jews and Muslims. So the humanists spoke out. Sebastian Castillo wrote, here’s my quote, “to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, it is to kill a man. If Calvin had killed Servetus for saying what he believed to be true, then Calvin killed him for telling the truth. He should have been taught, not killed, if he was wrong. I believe that on judgment day, God will judge morals and not doctrines.” And there are scholars on Ángel Alcalá and Marian Hillar, for instance, who posits Servetus as the starting point for a whole line of history which ends up forming Western democracies and the rule of law. So the Italian humanists, as mentioned, had fled to Poland and Transylvania. After that, they went to Holland, where their ideas from there went to England and then to America and Thomas Jefferson was interested in Servetus’ ideas, which then influenced the Constitution. So Servetus continued through history to influence thought very strongly. But my final thing. I want to explain finally that Servetus had been burned in effigy, then he was actually burned at the stake. But he got burned in effigy again. Did you know this, Michelle?

Michelle Butler  23:15 

No.

Anne Brannen  23:15 

I think that you will like this. In 1941, the Vichy government in France that was collaborating with the Nazis melted down a commemorative statue of Servetus, which had been erected in  Annemasse, close to Geneva, but in French territory, because Geneva itself didn’t want the statue, but they said it was okay to have a plaque. So the statue of Servetus got burnt down. The French Resistance put a ribbon on the monument that read “To Michael Servetus, first victim of fascism.” The statue got rebuilt in 1960. So that is what I came with. Michelle, you found some stuff. What did you find?

Michelle Butler  24:00 

You want to know about the surviving copies first?

Anne Brannen  24:03 

Tell me about the surviving copies.

Michelle Butler  24:05 

I’m working from a 2002 book called Out of the Flames. It is one of these popular books that is scholarly informed, so it’s not always easy to track their sources. They do have a bunch of sources, but it’s not copiously footnoted, because that’s not how this genre of work goes. It’s published by Random House, so it’s intended for a popular audience. I will say it’s very well written. It is surprisingly fun to read. I have been trying to corroborate it, because what it does is trace the provenance of these three surviving books, and I have been trying to double check that provenance. I do find people who generally agree with the provenance. So the delicious irony of these three surviving copies is that there’s a really good chance that two of them survive because they were part of the trial.

Anne Brannen  25:01 

So they were in the trial documents?

Michelle Butler  25:03 

No. There’s no way to definitively prove this, but one looks very much as if it’s Calvin’s personal copy, in which he wrote a bunch of notes about why he was mad about it. The other one looks very much as if it is the prosecutor’s. Germain Colladon, who was acting on behalf of the city in the trial. It’s got his notes.

Anne Brannen  25:34 

So they look like pieces of evidence. They were pieces of evidence in the trial.

Michelle Butler  25:38 

Yes. Now, the third copy is in the National Library of Vienna, and we know how that one got there. Its provenance can be traced all the way back to the 17th century. It turns up in a book stall in England in 1665, and an expat Hungarian…so what’s going on is that England has been the repository for a bunch of expat aristocrats and their stuff because at the moment, it’s a more stable place than the rest of Europe because of the Protestant Catholic fighting that’s going on.

Anne Brannen  26:21 

Right.By this time in England…it had been bad, but by this time in England, it had gotten settled.

Michelle Butler  26:26 

It was a little bit more stable. An Expat Hungarian aristocrat sees it, recognizes what it is, takes it home, and donates it to the Unitarian Church in Transylvania.

Anne Brannen  26:38 

Oh, so it was a Hungarian who knew about the Unitarian Church, and therefore knew about Servetus.

Michelle Butler  26:45 

Yeah. This particular aristocrat was a Unitarian. He takes it home, donates it, where it stays for about another 100 years, until the king of that area–let me find my note on this–the king of that area really, really, really wanted a copy of this book. The Hungarian aristocrat is Count Teleki, by the way.

I know that name. Why…? Probably when I was hanging out with the Unitarians. I’ve probably heard the name.

He also started one of the first Hungarian public libraries, in 1802. Joseph the second was king of the area, and he really, really wanted a copy of this book. A French book collector and scholar, the Duc de Lavalliere had pulled together a library of 100,000 volumes. He had started collecting in 1738. When he died in 1780, he had 100,000 volumes. Among them was a copy of Servetus’ book, the one that was probably owned by or probably used by the prosecutor Colladon.

Anne Brannen  27:57 

Okay, so that’s where that one is.

Michelle Butler  27:58 

That’s where that one is. Joseph the second really, really wants it. So he sends a representative there to bid on it. But he loses out to the Bibliotech Royale, which is about to become the Bibliotech Nationale.

Anne Brannen  28:12 

Some crimes that are past our time, even when we’re doing special episodes.

Michelle Butler  28:21 

What happens is that the Unitarians back in Transylvania see their moment, and it ends up being a gift to the king in order to protect them. He’s really thrilled when they give him this beautiful–and this is the only unmarked copy. This one apparently went straight from the publisher to somebody’s shelf, and then it sat there for a while. So that one ends up in the National Library in Vienna. The Colladon copy, the one that was used by the prosecutor, is now in the Bibliotech Nationale. We need a tiny moment to acknowledge Joseph van Praet, book hero. He’d worked for the Duc collecting… can you imagine? This would suck so hard. He’s the apprentice for the Duc’s clerk, his librarian. Joseph van Praet’s younger, obviously. But they work for that Duc, collecting his library together, and then the Duc dies, and the daughter says, you know, I’m just not interested in this, turn it into cash, and they had to work it and sell it all off. That would be terrible. The two of them go and start working for the Bibliotech Royale, which even though it’s a royal library, the French kings had one moment of brilliance and said, we will allow the public to come in. In the 18th century, they create public reading rooms.

Anne Brannen  28:31 

On the other hand, there will be no bread Sorry about that part, but you can read.

Michelle Butler  30:02 

You can use it. It’s there. They’re allowing it to be a public service.

Anne Brannen  30:06 

Which saves it during the revolution. Of course. I love that. I did not know.

Michelle Butler  30:12 

But book hero Joseph van Praet, he’s in charge of the Bibliotech Nationale at that point–he’s not even French by the way, he’s Dutch–as things are getting worse and worse in the revolution and becoming the terror, the desire to do something terrible to the library is overriding–

Anne Brannen  30:32 

Sure. Because it’s probably a fancy building, is my guess. Have I been there? No, but I’m guessing, fancy building. They might even have a fancy tea room. Of course they’d going to burn it down. Burn it down.

Michelle Butler  30:46 

Yeah, there’s all this, we want to burn it down. He is very good at persuading and culling the ones that are actually, you know, we don’t need that one. So he says, you’re absolutely right. Here’s one that is the genealogy of this aristocrat you hate. Take that one out and burn it. But he saves the ones–

Anne Brannen  31:10 

Right.

Michelle Butler  31:11 

He doesn’t just hand them books willy-nilly. He decides which are the ones that can be–

Anne Brannen  31:18 

Burnt.

Michelle Butler  31:19 

Gotten rid of, you know, without too much loss. Anyway, he is so important in building the Bibliotech Nationale and he worked there until his death in 1831, that the private reading room, I’m quoting now “the private reading room in the rare book section of the National Library’s new Francois Mitterrand center is named for him.”

Anne Brannen  31:44 

So not only is he figuring out what books they can get rid of without, you know, completely destroying the integrity of the library, he’s also clearly making them sound like really good things to burn because they’re connected with the things which must be burnt, you know, and so they end up being really desirable burning objects. Because if you said, Oh, well, here’s a cookbook, that wouldn’t work. Although you could say, here’s a cookbook, which was owned by the cook of Marie Antoinette. You could do things like that, and then you would want to burn it, but you’d have to put them in context. You can’t just hand some stuff over.

Michelle Butler  32:28 

He’s a really important dude. He is protecting the books of the Bibliotech Nationale but also, with all of this chaos going on and aristocratic libraries being dispersed to the winds, he is gathering 1000s of the books and bringing them to the Bibliotech Nationale.

Anne Brannen  32:45 

How did he…? Okay, so the aristocrats at this time in France are in danger, very bad danger. So they get dragged off and their heads get cut off, and then their mansions their mansions get taken over?

Michelle Butler  33:03 

Right. But he had contacts where people would bring books to him. Pretty cool. So that’s two of the three copies. The prosecutor’s is in the Bibliotech Nationale, the copy found in the English bookstore is now in Vienna. The third copy is in the University of Edinburgh. It was not recognized for what it was until the late 19th century. 1888.

Anne Brannen  33:34 

Wow.

Michelle Butler  33:42 

Sorry, 1870 is when it was found.

Anne Brannen  33:46 

So it’s not one of the ones that had any effect on history.

Michelle Butler  33:49 

There is a possibility that it is Calvin’s own personal, because it matches–

Anne Brannen  33:54 

It’s hilariously ironic that it survives.

Michelle Butler  33:54 

The first 16 pages of the printed are gone and they’ve been replaced by a handwritten copy. He describes in letters having, in order to prove that Servetus, because he was living under an assumed name in Vienne.

Anne Brannen  34:22 

That’s right. That’s right. He was using that to prove his dreadfulness and so he needed to take it out.

Michelle Butler  34:28 

Right. So he sent both the printed–he slashed out the 16 pages and had the manuscript version that he’d been sent, and he sent them both to the authorities in France and said, look, it’s the same guy. So those those 16 pages had been replaced with a handwritten–not in his handwriting, a scribe’s handwriting. How it ended up there is kind of a hoot. In the 1690s, a young Scottish aristocrat named George Douglas, who was the son of the Duke of Queensberry, went on the tour– you’re supposed to go do your tour of the world. He and his tutor, Cunningham, went together. They spent so much money on books. They just hit every used bookstore that they could find.

Anne Brannen  35:26 

So this is one time that the grand tour that the rich and the nobles take actually seems like a good idea. Let’s go get books. Let’s go get books.

Michelle Butler  35:37 

Dad is having trouble at home, things are happening politically back at home, and he’s saying, ‘you know, you got to come home’ and they’re like, ‘oh, we can’t hear you.’

Anne Brannen  35:47 

‘I’m sorry. You’re breaking up.’

Michelle Butler  35:50 

They bought 800 books.

Anne Brannen  35:52 

Which clearly they did not carry around in their backpacks.

Michelle Butler  35:55 

No, they’re sending books home by the truckload.

Anne Brannen  36:00 

You know his dad was pissed. I need you here. I need him here. I need him here. And I’ve got this bunch of books instead. So one of them…but we don’t know where he got it.

Michelle Butler  36:11 

We don’t know. We don’t know where he got it.

Anne Brannen  36:15 

Somewhere in Europe.

Michelle Butler  36:17 

It could have been anywhere. They went to Strasburg, they went to Milan, they went to Florence. I mean, it really could have been anywhere. But somewhere among those 800 books was this one, that got packed up and went to Scotland. But tragically, young George, when he came home, got sick and he died. His father donated all of those books to the library at the University of Edinburgh in his honor.

Anne Brannen  36:47 

Well, that’s a good thing to have done with the books and it kept the books safe.

Michelle Butler  36:51 

The reason we know this is that it says in the book, it says it was donated in 1695 in honor of…

Anne Brannen  36:59 

So it really is deliciously ironic, because it’s not like it ended up in Scotland because of the connection to Calvin.

Michelle Butler  37:07 

It just a Scottish boy and his book loving teacher with a blank check wandering through Europe.

Anne Brannen  37:15 

Probably didn’t even know what it was. Do you think he did?

Michelle Butler  37:17 

No, they didn’t know what it was. ‘Oh, this looks old. Here, send that home.’

Anne Brannen  37:25 

‘Along with the Chaucer, that’d be good.’ My, my. Thank you.

Michelle Butler  37:28 

I have some contemporary works for you. There’s this book, of course, from 2002. Everybody shows up in Servetus’ story. Voltaire loves him. One of the doctors who helped found Johns Hopkins loves him. He’s one of the guys was really instrumental in making sure that Servetus gets credit for the pulmonary circulation idea. There was a play in 1909–I can’t find it–but when that statue was installed–

The statue that the French Nazis burned.

Somebody wrote a play. I cannot find it. The book that I read said it was dreadful. “While this was going on, the town fathers of Vienne, not to be outdone, decided to erect their own monument to Servetus to be unveiled in August 1909. The town even sponsored the production of a particularly awful, overwrought play called ‘Michel Servet: episode dramatique in deaux acts and verse.”  So it’s 2 acts, in verse. I’m sure it’s wonderful. I cannot find it. I looked. It’s not on the internet. Not yet. I can’t even find it on the Internet Archive, but you know, drama is ephemeral. I can find confirmation that it existed but I can’t find the text of it. There is another play from 2008.

Anne Brannen  39:00 

No. No.

Michelle Butler  39:01 

I’m not even kidding you. That appears to be–if I have found the right person–by a neuro behavioral researcher at the University of Montreal who appears to, as a side gig, write plays about famous scientists, because he has one about Galileo and one about Kepler.

Anne Brannen  39:25 

That’s a really good hobby. Were you able to find this one?

Michelle Butler  39:30 

Those ones I can find.

Anne Brannen  39:33 

Is it a play that you would wish to go see?

Michelle Butler  39:37 

Pieces. The one about Servetus is also about Vesalius, this other medical student. When Servetus was a medical student at the University of Paris, he and this other dude Vesalius worked together as teaching assistants during the dissections. They kind of were friends. Vesalius goes on to be a really famous physician. So the play traces the two of them and then Calvin off in Geneva, and then the getting together when Servetus comes and they argue. There’s pieces of it that are not bad. There’s a weird subplot around whoring that I don’t understand that doesn’t involve either of them.

Anne Brannen  40:25 

Around what? 

Michelle Butler  40:25 

Around going to sex workers.

Anne Brannen  40:27 

Whoring is what you said.

Michelle Butler  40:28 

I did.

Anne Brannen  40:29 

It was so out of context that I didn’t think I’d heard the word right.

Michelle Butler  40:34 

I also found it…I mean, if you had made me take a quiz about what I was expecting to find in a play about Servetus and Vesalius, I would not have guessed there was a whole subplot about whoring.

Anne Brannen  40:47 

And neither one of them are going to be–

Michelle Butler  40:52 

Involved, no. It’s not them, it’s some fellow students. So I don’t understand that. But the actual conversation between Calvin and Servetus is pretty good. If I had been the editor, I would have said more of that. Give me more of that.

Anne Brannen  41:07 

Well, maybe–I’m still on the sex workers–do the two doctors have things to say? Do they theology about the prostitutes? Do they react to it? Maybe it’s in there to show who they are, you know, telling their fellow students ‘don’t go visit the sex workers’ or something.

Michelle Butler  41:31 

There is kind of a thing about, ‘well, you’re getting in trouble for this, what were you expecting?’

Anne Brannen  41:41 

You could get in trouble for a lot of things.

Michelle Butler  41:44 

The conversation…I really would have liked more of the play to focus on this. We have this really nice scene where they’re talking. Servetus says,  “Is it you on my last day on earth? You are the first to visit me yet I cannot bid you welcome.” That’s kind of nice.

Anne Brannen  42:07 

Yeah, that’s nicely done.

Michelle Butler  42:09 

Calvin says, “As a Paris student, I hazarded my life for you.” Servetus: “But yet we failed to meet.” Calvin says, “My letters peaceably admonished you.”  Servetus says, “Which I dismissed.” Calvin says, “What more can we know? If you persist in false and heinous opinions, embrace death in this world and the next.” Servetus replies, “Confident flesh quavers without fainting.” So this scene I actually really like. The rest of it, I’m like, what the heck. But this scene–this is act five, scene three–is pretty good. And I will have you know there is an opera from–

Anne Brannen  42:49 

No. From when?

Michelle Butler  42:54 

2011.

Anne Brannen  42:56 

Oh my God. I don’t think it’s come to the Santa Fe Opera. I haven’t seen anything.

Michelle Butler  43:02 

I cannot find anything about it except for the announcement that it happened.

Anne Brannen  43:08 

Where was that?

Michelle Butler  43:09 

Weirdly, it was in Geneva.

Anne Brannen  43:12 

So Geneva has kind of gotten over the whole thing about the embarrassment of having–

Michelle Butler  43:17 

It’s The Trial of Michel Servette: a New Opera, written by composer Shauna Beesley and libretto by John-Claude Humbert at the Salle Centrale Madeleine in 204 Geneva.

Anne Brannen  43:29 

I can see how it would make a good opera.

Michelle Butler  43:32 

I think it would make a great opera. But I was surprised. I should just always know to look for an opera. Always look for an opera. I was not expecting there to be quite this much pop culture about this. Although I will say that I think that, as that one scene in that play shows, having the two of them in the room talking is absolutely a place where you can get good drama.

Anne Brannen  44:04 

Yeah. And you had told me–in the piece that you just read, Calvin mentions this–you told me that they were both at the University of Paris at the same time.

Michelle Butler  44:15 

Yes, they were and they knew each other.

Anne Brannen  44:17 

Oh, they did know each other.

Michelle Butler  44:18 

They did know each other. Ignatius Loyola was there at the same time too. But they did not know him because they ran in different circles. Yeah, it was really interesting. They knew each other at the University of Paris. They had agreed to get together and debate because they were fussing with each other and they had agreed to get together and debate but Servetus doesn’t show up. He’s apparently concerned that…see, at that point, his star was higher than Calvin’s because he had  released a book to great acclaim and Calvin’s first book had kind of bombed. So he must have decided he just didn’t need to show up and do this. Yeah, it’s real interesting. They have these repeated contacts over the course of their lives that end up in 1553 ending in tragedy.

Anne Brannen  45:12 

There’s a whole another sort of layer to what Calvin’s doing. Because he’s basically…he’s turned on someone that he knows.

Michelle Butler  45:25 

I would not say they ever liked each other, but they knew each other. The University of Paris though. Can you imagine? Servetus and Calvin and Ignatius Loyola.

Anne Brannen  45:36 

It’s a hot place for all kinds of thinking.

Michelle Butler  45:39 

Oh, I forgot to tell you this. The book is so expensive, right? People know it existed and they can’t find copies of it. So in 1721, there is an enterprising publisher, Georg Serpilius who creates…they’re kind of forged editions. They’re a reprint of the original book, but he’s trying to make them look as if they’re from 1553.

Anne Brannen  46:10 

Oh, really? Instead of just saying ‘reprint,’ which would be good enough. 

Michelle Butler  46:18 

Yes.

Anne Brannen  46:19 

But you could get more money if you could convince people that you’ve had an old one that had somehow survived the flames?

Michelle Butler  46:26 

Yes. I’ll just quote this because it’s kind of amusing. “They were intended to be all but indistinguishable from the originals. And they were, except for Serpilius’ inexplicable use of single rather than double dash on the title page.” Sorry, pause for a second. You can actually tell the difference because the typeface is different and stuff but unless you have them sitting beside each other, you’re not necessarily going to be able to tell.

Anne Brannen  46:53 

Which you wouldn’t have them sitting next to each other if you were one of the people wanting to buy them because there weren’t any copies.

Michelle Butler  46:59 

“Reprints hot in hand, Serpilius then contacted book collectors and prominent Unitarians and told them that he had heard of the existence of extremely rare books by the Spanish heretic, Michael Servetus, and that he was willing to act as a middleman if the collector wished to purchase them. If the collector agreed, Serpilius sold the reprints as originals. Since the counterfeits were not discovered for some years, and there is no record of Serpilius ever been caught, the scam seems to have been successful.” I do not know how many of these survive.

Anne Brannen  47:42 

When it is that they figured out that he was selling that he had been selling?

Michelle Butler  47:47 

I do not know when this was uncovered.

Anne Brannen  47:52 

Because we don’t know who he sold them to.

Michelle Butler  47:55 

I didn’t go tracking down how many of those existed.

Anne Brannen  48:00 

That is very interesting. You couldn’t nowadays get away with that because the book collectors are connected to each other throughout the world. You can send information so quickly. So you wouldn’t be able to do that. People would want to know the provenance. And then they check on it. They’d send a picture of the title page to their friend in Edinburgh, and they would say no.

Michelle Butler  48:28 

And you’d be able to date the ink and date the paper and everything.

Anne Brannen  48:34 

But it was an interesting and well thought out scam for its time. Well, thank you.

Michelle Butler  48:42 

This was wild. I enjoyed this research.

Anne Brannen  48:45 

Well, that is our discussion about Michael Servetius, who was murdered by being burnt at the stake illegally in Geneva, because Calvin thought it was a good idea and a bunch of other people too. To be fair, somebody was going to burn him at the stake at some point. Unless he had been better at running. He just wasn’t good at being incognito.

Michelle Butler  48:49 

He’s exhibit A as to why if Christopher Marlowe had not actually been killed, we would know.

Anne Brannen  49:22 

Christopher Marlowe did not survive and go hide out someplace. Because if he had, we would have so much work that he wrote.

Constitutionally incapable of not. 

‘My name’s Billy Watkins, and I’ve written a play.’ And everyone would go, ‘God, this reads just like Marlowe.’ No, there’s nothing like this. This isn’t happening. Servertius did indeed die also and three copies of his work survived. Maybe more. Everybody, go look in your attic. Make sure you don’t have any that are in Latin. The next time that you hear from us, we are going to go to Crimea because we want to talk about the slave trade in Crimea. Michelle, when is that? When is the time period for that?

Michelle Butler  50:08 

Late medieval. So 14th, 15th century. That was one of the other reasons I wanted to put it on the list because that’s kind of late.

Anne Brannen  50:15 

It is. Yeah, I think of medieval slavery and I’m mostly thinking about Vikings. I mean, it continues because it’s a thing, but waves of it. Yeah. So we’re gonna go to Crimea. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. We can be found at Spotify and Apple podcast and other places where the podcasts are hanging out. That’s where we are. You can reach us at Truecrimemedieval.com, Truecrimemedieval is all one word. You can leave comments, and find show notes and transcriptions and links to the podcast. You can write you can write to us, you can give us suggestions about…if you’ve got any medieval crimes that you think maybe we don’t know about, you should let us know. Yes, let’s go to Crimea next time. Bye.

Michelle Butler  51:20 

Bye.

90. The Jacquerie Smashes Property, France 1358

Anne Brannen  0:21 

Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.

Michelle Butler  0:31 

And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.

Anne Brannen  0:34 

Today–we’re really excited about this because this was a lot of fun for us. I don’t know, it may be, Michelle, that whenever something is a lot of fun for us, it’s really not much fun for anybody else.

Michelle Butler  0:46 

It’s possible.

Anne Brannen  0:47 

But we don’t know, do we, and we’re gonna go on with this. Because we’re going to talk about the Jacquerie, the French peasants revolt in 1358. When the French peasants terrorize the nobility, mostly in the Oise valley. That’s where it started in France. 1358. It’s all famous and everything. We talked about the English peasants revolt, which happens, oh, like, what 30 years later?

Michelle Butler  1:18 

The English revolt is in 1381, and this is 1358.

Anne Brannen  1:24 

The Jacquerie started in May of 1358 when some peasants in St Leu massacred some noblemen and their families, and continued for a few months until the nobility managed to massacre them in retaliation, and brought some measure of order back, though many peasants left the area. The name Jacquerie comes down in history. We call peasant revolts everywhere ‘jacqueries.’ So you can find things like the jacquerie of Ukraine, the jacquerie of Russia, Japan, Korea. If there’s any kind of little peasant revolt, big or small, it’s a jacquerie. But the name itself comes from jacques, which was what the commoners used as armor. it’s a name, but also jacques–like, our word jacket. That’s where it comes from.

Michelle Butler  2:14 

Hmmm!

Anne Brannen  2:16 

I knew you’d love that. The commoners used it as armor. It’s a padded quilted jacket, which bizarrely–I was surprised to find this out–it really was pretty good at keeping arrows from coming through, even heavy ones. It’s not as good as metal armor, but, you know, it’s better than you would think. So that’s what the peasants wore. The jacques. And they were called jacques. It’s the name for peasants. Alright. So what the hell what happened? Where are we? Why did this happen? The jacquerie get presented from about the time the revolt is suppressed to really a few years ago, as if it’s something that happened out of nowhere. It just like it was out of the blue, no discernible reason. Peasants, they just went nuts. They became barbaric savages. They were indeed sort of barbaric during the revolt, but they weren’t acting without reason. As usual, there’s a background to this, which was kind of getting ignored by everybody, especially the French nobility completely ignored what the background was. So I will now tell you all the background of the Jacquerie. There’s a lot of it, let me tell you. First of all, the revolt comes about 40 years after the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317, which decimated the population of Europe, and five years after the end of the Black Death, which further decimated the populace of Europe. One of the effects of having a fewer number of people at that time was that there were not enough commoners to do the work needed to keep the feudal system going. We noticed that we don’t have one now, do we? So it meant both that work was harder, and kind of conversely that the commoners had more freedom because they were more in demand. But this sort of wasn’t true in France. They were just kind of being overworked. It was also the middle of the Hundred Years War between England and France, which had started in 1337, 20 years previously, and it was going to continue on and off until 1453. Joan of Arc doesn’t show up until the fifteenth century–she’s not coming for a while. So Joan of Arc has nothing to do with the Jacquerie. Though the war was between England and France, all of the land battles took place on French soil. So all the depredations happened there, and more than two years before the uprising, the King of France had been captured in one of these Hundred Years wars, by Edward the Black Prince who was the son of Edward the third who was being the king of England at that time. He was captured at the Battle of Poitier. So the country had been being governed for a couple of years by the Dauphin, who was acting as regent. He’s going to be Charles the fifth later, but he’s just a prince right now. With advice and some supposed help from the top general. It doesn’t really act like the English parliament–it’s more advisory. Doesn’t really get to do a whole lot of stuff. But it tells you things and has opinions. Charles had raised the taxes in order to strengthen the military, because, of coursse, he had a war, didn’t he, and his dad had been captured by England. The nobility, of course, didn’t like this because they don’t want to pay more taxes, and they got divided. Some were favoring the king of Navarre as a claimant to the throne. Besides their disunity, the nobles had also not been really behaving really well as soldiers. At the beginning of the century, the French nobles had been massacred by the Flemish at the Battle of the Golden Spurs, which though it had taken place 50 years before, was an infamous battle and very much in people’s minds. Since the Hundred Years War started, England was winning. I mean, England was winning all the stuff. The King had been captured the Battle of Poitiers and the understanding was that the nobles had let the King be captured because they panicked. Just as in the Battle of the Golden Spurs, the nobles had run. I mean, many of them were killed, but they had left and let the infantry, which was commoners, be slaughtered. Oh, by the way, spoiler alert, the English win most of the battles for quite a while in the Hundred Years War, but they don’t actually win them at the end, do they? Which is why when you go to Aquitaine, you are in France and not England. Haha, they lost, okay. You remember also that the taxes had been raised. That meant that the nobles wanted the peasants to be even more productive because they needed more money, so they could give more money to the king for the military, which they weren’t being very good in. Even though the population had been diminished, so there should have been more availability of land and therefore movement of the lower classes, one of the things going on was that the land in France was connected to status. The nobles kept their land, you know, even through all these time and the peasants were stuck, and the nobles wanted more out of them. And then the money went to the military, and the military kept getting defeated. It was all really disheartening. But there’s more. Because the battles in the aforementioned Hundred Years War happened in France, and the French kept mostly losing, mercenaries and various ruffians the English had hired to fight, if they stayed there, or when the English didn’t need them anymore, they were fired and so they were still around. So what they did all, of the mercenaries that had been fighting for the English, they were roaming around Northern France and robbing people and plundering and raping and basically being completely uncontrolled. Since feudalism was supposedly only fair to the peasants because they could count on the nobles, whose land they were working and for whom they were making all this money, in terms of grain, the nobles protected them, didn’t they, but then the nobles kind of weren’t, were they? They were just not living up to their side of the military bargain. They mostly made things worse. Okay. That’s my background. Do you have anything to add to the background? I think I got it all. Do you think I got it all?

Michelle Butler  9:13 

This thing that I didn’t know about, until I was reading this, is how bad the Battle of Poitiers was.

Anne Brannen  9:23 

Oh, so bad.

Michelle Butler  9:24 

It was so bad. On the English side of things we always hear about Agincourt–

Anne Brannen  9:29 

Yes we do.

Michelle Butler  9:30 

–because it’s become such a big piece of how England understands itself.

Anne Brannen  9:37 

They won the battle of Poitiers too, but it’s not, I don’t know.

Michelle Butler  9:41 

They did, but it didn’t become this piece of their self-mythologizing. So I did not know how bad, or if I’d known I’d forgotten. The French king was captured and so many of the nobles were were killed, and it had this huge, huge impact on how the French understood themselves. The non-nobles had a legitimate grievance here about being not only not protected when you have all of these armies stealing from them. They’re replenishing their supplies by stealing from the non-nobles. I think that’s a legitimate thing to be upset about.

Anne Brannen  10:27 

Yeah, yeah. Both the French had been losing stuff and that the these battles in which the nobles basically turn tail and run, you know, they’re getting slaughtered, but they also abandoned the king.

Michelle Butler  10:41 

The French king had sent home…some of the non-nobles had gotten a group together, ‘hey, we’re here to help.’ He’s like, ‘go home. It’s not your job to fight. And anyway, we’ll do so much better of a job than you.’

Anne Brannen  10:54 

‘An account of being noble.’ Yeah. ‘Because we’re like, hot stuff.’ All right. That’s our background. We go on to our Jacquerie in May of 1358. There were some peasants who met together in St Leu to discuss their political and economic situation. Their target consisted specifically of nine noblemen who had been sent to garrison a castle, which was meant to be used to attack Paris. What’s going on there? Another little revolt. Etienne Marcel, who was a revolutionary leader from the town, held Paris after having had a coup against the crown. So that’s what was going on. Paris was being held by revolutionaries. The Jacquerie killed the nine noblemen in sympathy with Paris, where they said they killed nobles, you know, and then the revolt spread. They continued to support Paris, but their objective pretty much was to destroy the nobility, which held money and military and wasn’t doing any good with either one of them. The idea that there was actually reasoning behind the Jacquerie, and there was organization–this is a fairly new idea. So we are completely impressed with Justine Firnhaber-Baker. She’s a professor at St. Andrews? Do you remember? I think it’s St. Andrews.

Michelle Butler  12:25 

I know when the book was published, and who published it.

Anne Brannen  12:28 

Well, I know the 2021. Who published it?

Michelle Butler  12:31 

Oxford.

Anne Brannen  12:33 

In 2021, she published the first book, The Jacquerie, since the first one, which had been written in 1859.

Michelle Butler  12:41 

You are correct. She’s at the University of St. Andrews.

Anne Brannen  12:43 

St. Andrews. Yeah. It’s wonderful. It’s a matter of going back and looking at the archives and the records, and figuring out what happened. She says at one point that it’s actually difficult to figure out what happened because the sources are so sketchy. One of the things that hadn’t occurred to me was that with the English peasants’ revolt, we have writing from the side of the peasants revolt itself. We have stuff. Nothing from the Jacquerie. It’s all from chronicles that, almost all of them, were written some time after. One is closer, but there’s still been some buffer time. The chronicles are the ones that tell us there was atrocities and there was barbarism, and there was no reason for any of this, blah, blah, blah. It’s the medieval chronicles that tell us that. 

Michelle Butler  12:43 

They’re sympathizing with their patrons.

Anne Brannen  12:50 

They sure as hell are. But one of the things also that we have are the remissions. Later, when there’s an amnesty, we have it all written down when people are being pardoned and whatnot. So we kind of know what it was, which pretty much was not anything that the medieval chroniclers said. So it’s extremely recently that scholars have been talking about it as a political revolt rather than some spontaneous barbaric fury, which is really how the French nobles looked at it because there was no reason for the peasants to be unhappy, obviously, since they were peasants and the nobles weren’t. There you go. So it was prominently chronicle. There was a lot of writing about it in the histories, The medieval chronicles focus on the atrocities and the barbarism, but the peasants in the Jacquerie did massacre some nobles when they found them. The chronicles present the Jacquerie as irrational and the nobles as terrified. There’s no political context for the uprising in the chronicles, but they were not a mob. They had military organization–they had captains, they had lieutenants. They were violent. This is absolutely true. But the accusations of atrocities are actually not backed up by the archival evidence. It looks like there was a fear of noblewomen being raped, for instance, rather than noblewomen actually being raped. The story of the Jacques roasting a nobleman on a spit in front of his children and his wife does seem to have some evidence. But that’s it. They killed noblemen, they killed women, and it looks like it amounted to about 20 people. But they were scary to the nobles. What they were doing–what they really did–was they were very violent against property. That’s what they were. They attacked houses and fortresses and castles and towers, and they destroyed them and whatever was in them. They didn’t loot them. They did not loot them. They destroyed the stuff that was in them. So they were not going around raping. There was always stories of gang rape and it was not happening. All these stories of massacres of noblemen…they did indeed kill some people. But they did not do what the stories have come down to us. This is fascinating to me.

Michelle Butler  16:14 

I really appreciated her discussion of the role of Charles of Navarre.

Anne Brannen  16:20 

Oh, Charles of Navarre, yes. Because he was a claimant to the throne and mortal enemy of the Dauphin and the Dauphin’s father. I’m about to say what he did. Yes.

Michelle Butler  16:32 

That was pretty fascinating.

Anne Brannen  16:34 

You’ll probably be adding some stuff. So this revolt happened, and it got suppressed, didn’t it, it is not still going on, it got stopped. It was suppressed when the Dauphin allied with Charles of Navarre, as we were just saying, who was the other claimant to the throne, and they lead a company of nobles at Mello. In June, they invited the leader of the Jacquerie–his name was William Cale–they invited him to truce talks, and then they tortured him to death and cut his head off because they said that he wasn’t their equal and so the laws of chivalry didn’t apply to him.  Because generally you’re not supposed to invite people to a truce talk and then kill them. That’s really bad manners and goes against the chivalric code. You remember that one of the William de Braoses did that to Seisyll ap Dyfnwal? Yeah. ‘Come to a peace talk.’ Then he shut the doors and killed everybody. So they killed him because he foolishly believed that they were going to treat him as a military equal. No, no. At that point, the peasant army fell apart and the knights slaughtered them. At the same time at the town of Meaux, Etienne Marcel led a troop of armed commoners from out of Paris–bourgeois from Paris–to support the uprising. The town of Meaux took them in– took the rebels in, they were very hospitable, but that Gaston Phebus…did you read about him? Because he’s fascinating.

Michelle Butler  18:07 

I don’t think so. I was trying to hunt down stuff about the spice merchant.

Anne Brannen  18:11 

You were on the spice merchant? I didn’t get to that. Gaston Phebus. He’s one of the few people we know of who actually gave themselves their own nickname and it stuck. He gives himself the nickname Phebus–Apollo, the sun–this is after he has been in one of the crusades against Prussia because, you know, Russians weren’t being Christian enough. Any rate, he gave himself that name.  Phebus came back with a force of lancers and came toward the town. While he was coming, the nobles who were being besieged in the fortress, they took heart because, you know, literally the cavalry was coming. They burned up a bunch of townsmen in a town nearby and they hang the mayor along with some other important townsmen, and then they set fire to the town. The town burned for quite some time, two weeks or something. Then they went out in the countryside, and they killed all the peasants they could find. For two more months, towns that had sheltered the Jacquerie fought back against the noble forces and the peasants got all slaughtered. The gist of all this is that the nobles who put down the revolution were much, much, much more brutal than the peasants were. Here’s us not being surprised. And it’s from their point of view that the story is told. The reason they had to suppress this at all was that the peasants had been being so badly behaved. So the Dauphin declared amnesty at the end of the two months and he put heavy fines on all the places where the Jacquerie had been supported–more money for the crown. But his letter of amnesty condemned the nobles’ violence as much as the peasants’. So I actually have some good feelings about that. So at that point in time, they knew. That disappears. And though the remissions list the crimes, the infamous atrocities are just simply not in there. Now, there’s a wonderful annotated map of incidents in the Jacquerie, which is online. It’s one of the Google Maps. I could not find the name of the user who put it together. You can click on things, you can see where all the damage was done, and who did what. We’ll put the link in the show notes. Did you run across that?

Michelle Butler  20:43 

You’ll have to send that to me.

Anne Brannen  20:45 

I’ll send it to you.

Michelle Butler  20:46 

So I can put that in the show notes. Because yeah, I didn’t find that.

Anne Brannen  20:49 

It’s wonderful. Yeah, there’s no atrocities. The Jacquerie had no political impact on France. It changed nothing structural. It did nothing to help the peasants or make their lives easier. What it did was it terrorized the nobility, and it caused them to have, you know, very, very horrible fantasies about what was happening, what the peasants were doing to them. That was its impact. Its impact was a legend of the atrocities committed by the barbarous peasants for no reason. If the nobles learned anything at all from this, was it that we should perhaps treat the peasants better? Or maybe we shouldn’t take so much money from them? Or, I don’t know, maybe we should, like, do some military exercises and become better soldiers? The only thing they learned was that the peasants were dangerous. That did lead to some things, as castle reinforcements and, you know, making structures safer against the peasants. But the term ‘Jacquerie’ for the revolt didn’t come into general usage until the French Revolution. Since then, it’s remained as a label for bloody and brutal peasant rebellions. The noble suppression was much more bloody and brutal than the Jacquerie. What were you going to tell me about Charles of Navarre?

Michelle Butler  22:14 

I enjoyed her discussion of him because he really is just a force of chaos in this.

Anne Brannen  22:23 

Was it his idea to slaughter all the peasants?

Michelle Butler  22:27 

He’s king of this independent country that is between France and Spain. Navarre is part of northern Spain and it was its own standalone country at this point. He encourages the peasant uprising until it’s in his best interest to switch sides, because it’s causing problems for the Dauphin. So he’s encouraging this, and he’s got his own mercenaries that he’s brought back and he’s put up in some of his empty castles, and they’re out also causing problems.

Anne Brannen  23:04 

Of course they are.

Michelle Butler  23:07 

He is working from the assumption that the more problems he can cause in France, the better for him, because that’s lighting fires that the Dauphin has to try to put out. Until it becomes in his best interest to turn on this and put it down. What a rat bastard. One of the novels that I found calls him Charles the wicked. 

Anne Brannen  23:29 

I like that.

Michelle Butler  23:30 

I’m not going to argue with that as a way of understanding him.

Anne Brannen  23:35 

He never did become king of France, by the way, in case anybody was wondering. So my understanding, Michelle, is that you were able to find many things that you were excited about.

Michelle Butler  23:46 

Oh my gosh.

Anne Brannen  23:47 

Popular treatment of the Jacquerie episode of French medieval history.

Michelle Butler  23:53 

I did. I did not find as much as I would have liked to have found about the historical personage who was a spice merchant from Montpelier.

Anne Brannen  24:04 

What spice merchant? What are you talking about?

Michelle Butler  24:06 

His name was Pierre Gilles.

Anne Brannen  24:08 

Gilles

Michelle Butler  24:08 

Gilles. He was a spice merchant, and he becomes a rebel commander who works with the other one that you just mentioned.

Anne Brannen  24:20 

William Cale.

Michelle Butler  24:21 

And there’s another one who was a Hospitaler.

Anne Brannen  24:24 

Oh, really? So one of the knight-monk orders…somebody from the morders was in on this.

Michelle Butler  24:34 

I wanted to find out more about that, but I didn’t. So there we go.

Anne Brannen  24:41 

Yes and now I want to know, did he ever adulterate the saffron? We refer you to our previous podcast on saffron. Don’t adulterate it in Nuremberg in the Middle Ages, because it’s a deathly thing to do.

Michelle Butler  24:55 

Not surprisingly, the Jacquerie was quite a spur to the imagination throughout the 19th century and into the 20th century, actually.

Anne Brannen  25:05 

Oh, really?

Michelle Butler  25:07 

In French, in English, in Italian, and in Spanish.

Anne Brannen  25:12 

Oh, lovely.

Michelle Butler  25:14 

I have stuff in all four of those languages. There’s a novel from 1842, which I think is in three pieces. You can find it, like Volume One, Volume Two, Volume Three, but I was looking at it online–because it’s so far out of print, you know, it’s legal for it to be scanned and be online. So that’s where I was looking at it. The premise of this one–this one is called The Jacquerie, or The Lady and the Page: An Historical Romance by GPR James, and it’s from 1842. So that’s pretty early.

Anne Brannen  25:46 

I saw that, and the fact that it was an historical romance caused me to believe that I did not want to read it.

Michelle Butler  25:55 

It was interesting to me to look at the different ones and see where the sympathy of the book is.

Anne Brannen  26:01 

Is it ever with the Jacquerie?

Michelle Butler  26:03 

Yes, sometimes, but not this one. This one has a French soldier, who had been fighting as a mercenary in Germany, arrive back home in the middle of the Jacquerie, and his sympathy is immediately with the poor murdered nobles against the senseless brutality of the peasants.

Anne Brannen  26:21 

Were there atrocities? They wouldn’t be described. But they might be mentioned.

Michelle Butler  26:25 

Oh, yes.

Anne Brannen  26:26 

‘Done in ways that I cannot now speak of’–that kind of thing.

Michelle Butler  26:30 

Definitely atrocities. He’s in the inn, and the priest says to him, haven’t you heard? And he says, No. The priest says, well, here’s what’s going on. He says, holy cow, tell me who I need to kill. So that’s all the further I read in that.

Anne Brannen  26:50 

Yeah, I think I can miss this. Thank you for looking at it so that I don’t have to read it. What else did you find?

Michelle Butler  26:58 

There is one from 1888. This is in also in English, called Before the Dawn: A Story of Paris and the Jacquerie. kery. It was published under a pseudonym, but it’s by George Perkings. This one actually is sympathetic to the peasants. It has wonderful purple prose. Oh my gosh, I have to share this with you. Here we go. You ready?

Anne Brannen  27:30 

Lay it on me.

Michelle Butler  27:30 

This book starts with:  “Afort the distance of several leagues from Paris, on the edge of the forest of Errmonne, stood a cottage built of logs, turf, and clay, a miserable dwelling, the home of a peasant, that is to say, of a despised creature, a wretch derisively called Jacques Bonhomme. Let us enter. We see a rude table formed of slabs, two stools on which are seated a man and a woman, a heap of straw in one corner serving for a bed, and a hearth upon which smolders a feeble fire, whose smoke escapes as best it may through an open hole in the roof. On the clay floor are crouched three or four small children with wan, pinched faces for hunger is here, here within easy reach of the game that crowds the forest. What prevents the miserable wretch from taking his bow and shooting one of the deer that come fearlessly to his very door? From snaring the hares that frisk about in the neighboring thickets? What compels him to endure the sight of his famishing children who stretch out their hands and ask for food? This prevents him–Death or his right hand stricken off, if he is detected in the act of killing the game that belongs to the nobles.” So this one, this book is very sympathetic to the peasants. Now, it’s this very stereotypical 19th century understanding of what it means to be a medieval peasant. You can see this kind of Robin Hood-y understanding of the world, but this is actually William Callat–we find out in the next paragraph–who becomes a leader of it, and you have this justification. His children are starving. So what are you going to do?

Anne Brannen  29:18 

The idea that there was a justification is floating around that early.

Michelle Butler  29:23 

1888. That wasn’t as purpley when I was reading it out loud, but it’s pretty purpley.

Anne Brannen  29:28 

What is the name of this author?

Michelle Butler  29:30 

This is called Before the Dawn: A story of Paris and the Jacquerie. Let me go back a page. The book was published under the name George Dulac, but that was a pseudonym for George Perkings. It was published in New York and London by Putnam. This is probably my favorite of the ones I found because I like how he really wants to present this as sympathetic, but it’s kind of over the top about it. How do you not know how many children are crouching on the ground? Three or four? This is not an area in which there should be–

Anne Brannen  30:09 

The room is too small to lose them.

Michelle Butler  30:12 

What do you mean, three or four small children? This is a place you can be precise.

Anne Brannen  30:18 

I like the smoke going out the roof, ‘as best it may’ as if it has agency. ‘I’m going this way, guys.’

Michelle Butler  30:26 

Everything about this house is dreadful. It’s all dreadful.

Anne Brannen  30:29 

I wanted to know what else he wrote, but I’m not seeing it. All I’m seeing is Before the Dawn.

Michelle Butler  30:34 

The next one that I found was written in French originally and then was translated in 1906. It’s called The Iron Trevet; or, Jocelyn the champion, a Tale of the Jacquerie. This is the one that calls him Charles the wicked. This one is really interesting because it shows the emergence of the uprising and its sympathies are with the peasants, and one of the justifications given for it is droit de seigneur.

Anne Brannen  31:04 

Oh, no, no, no, no. That thing that doesn’t exist. God. So this thing that doesn’t exist has been just grafted on to this legendary story.

Michelle Butler  31:15 

Yes. This is fascinating because it has William Callet, the same guy who’s the rebel leader, who is also the protagonist of the previous one. This one has this whole made up story with William Callet’s daughter, having been droit de seigneur’ed.

Now you have to, just in case somebody who’s listening is not remembering or not catching what that is, you have to explain droit de seigneur.

I’ll just read you a little couple sentences because it’s clear in here. “She was affianced to a miller lad, a vassal like herself. By reason of the goodness of his disposition, he was called Maserek the Lambkin” –so her fiance is so gentle, he’s called Lambkin.

Anne Brannen  32:03 

Ohh!

Michelle Butler  32:05 

“The day of their marriage was set, but in these days, the wife’s first night belongs to her seigneur, the nobles call it the Night of First Fruits.” We talked about this in an April Fool’s Day episode, the idea that you have to sleep with the lord, you have to give your virginity to the lord. I was just flipping through this book and was like, wait a second, hold up. There it is. On page 121. Yes.

Anne Brannen  32:34 

So this is a French book. And it’s sympathetic to the jacques.

Michelle Butler  32:40 

Yeah. There’s a 1961 novel called A Walk with Love and Death that was made into a movie in 1968. The movie is really fascinating, because it’s trying to piggyback on the success of Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet.

Anne Brannen  32:58 

Oh. Oh.

Michelle Butler  33:00 

The novel is essentially a story of starcrossed lovers, so it doesn’t need to be set during the Jacquerie. That’s just a useful backdrop and providing an excuse for this nobleman’s daughter to meet up with a poor scholar on the run from the violence in Paris. John Houston is the director, and what’s really fascinating about this film, retrospectively, if you’re a fan of the Addams Family, is that one of the reasons he did this movie is that it was a vehicle for his daughter, Angelica. It was her first big screen role.

Anne Brannen  33:37 

It was her first big screen role.

Michelle Butler  33:39 

But it’s rough. It really is like Romeo and Juliet. They try to run away together, but everybody abandons them, there’s no protection from the lords, it’s very dangerous to be out and about. They take refuge in a monastery the the monks abandon them–they take off to go be safe somewhere else, and they leave them there.

Anne Brannen  34:05 

Well, you know, there’s been this whole theme of people getting abandoned by the nobles in battle, so I kind of like seeing that this theme of abandonment is going on through the 1961 movie. That’s good.

Michelle Butler  34:18 

After they get abandoned by the monks, they marry themselves in the church in the monaster and are waiting for…you can hear the mob coming.

Yes, the mob that’s full of atrocities-making.

And gonna kill them for no good reason.

Anne Brannen  34:41 

Because, you know, they’re alive.

Michelle Butler  34:45 

I would not say that one has sympathy with the peasants, but really, they’re just there to provide a threat.

Anne Brannen  34:53 

It doesn’t really examine the peasants either, because the peasants are just simply a kind of plot tool getting moved around.

Michelle Butler  35:02 

There’s two operas.

Anne Brannen  35:04 

I knew about one. I did not know about the other. When were these done?

Michelle Butler  35:08 

1894 and 1919. One is for sure in Italian, and I think the other one is in Spanish. There’s a play in Spanish, and that’s really early. I didn’t dig into this very far because I can’t find a translation of it, and my Spanish isn’t that fabulous. But there’s a book called The Plays of Clara Gazul, who was a Spanish comedian, and one of her plays is about theJacquerie.

Anne Brannen  35:44 

Okay. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Because the Jacquerie is hilarious.

Michelle Butler  35:51 

I have no idea, I’m telling you. I don’t even know for certain it’s about the French Jacquerie. So I’m giving you this one with a giant asterix.

Anne Brannen  36:00 

Oh, because it might be about any number of various jacqueries.

Michelle Butler  36:02 

I’m throwing it in here because it’s so early. It’s from 1825. Well, that book is from 1825. Anybody who wants to go figuring out what it is, be my guest because it’s entirely in Spanish and I was not able to locate a translation of it. But it’s fascinating. I said to you that all I needed now was a Finnish death metal song. I didn’t find that. But I did find that there is a German progressive rock band from 1965 that has a concept album called Power in the Passion, and it does take part of it in France in 1358, with the Jacquerie being important, so I feel like I scored the entire spectrum.

Anne Brannen  36:52 

I think, frankly, that a German experimental rock concept album is equal to a Finnish heavy metal album. What was his name? Christopher Lloyd? Who was it that did the heavy metal album that we were talking about?

Michelle Butler  37:06 

Oh, um, no, that’s not Christopher Lloyd…shoot, what is his name? He played Saruman…Christopher Lee.

Anne Brannen  37:19 

So Christopher Lee didn’t have an album about this?

Michelle Butler  37:23 

Not as far as I can tell. There probably is a bunch of artwork too. But I didn’t go and dig into that. I was, you know, looking at historical fiction, because it was really fascinating how different books have their sympathy either with the nobility or with the peasants. But the presentation of the peasants is so very stereotypically dreadful.

Anne Brannen  37:51 

Usually when we’re looking at these things, these events that were popular in the 19th century, there will be a whole lot of 19th century art also. Like the black dinner, got a bunch of that, but the imagery about the Jacquerie actually is mostly medieval.

Michelle Butler  38:10 

Huh. Fascinating.

Anne Brannen  38:12 

Yeah, I mean, there’s some stuff. You know, there’s some nice wood cuts and whatnot. But yeah, there is some later, it isn’t like artists didn’t touch it at all. But it isn’t that popular kind of thing as like, for instance, the siege of Constantinople or the Sicilian Vespers–you look up the images, and they go on and on and on and on. Oh, or that time that King John had his nephew murdered. There’s a lot of 19th century imagery about that. And the boys in the tower. But not about the Jacquerie.

Michelle Butler  38:46 

It’s such a perfect storm of all these things coming together. You have this uprising, which then comes down to us as this time of such horrific atrocities. As we go poking at it, we find, well, actually, they were relatively restrained, although it gets kicked off with that murder of nine noblemen. But then they’re basically property damage, but there’s pretty significant violence to put it down. It was interesting to me that the sorts of crimes that the peasants are accused of having done during this uprising are the same kinds of crimes that they’re accused of having done during the Great Famine. So we have all of these accusations of cannibalism and wanton violence and rape–it’s the same set of things that we saw people being accused of during the Great Famine that there weren’t evidence of then either. That’s just the toolbox of how to say that the non-nobles are expressing their discontent.

Anne Brannen  39:55 

The nobles are very scared of the peasants.

Michelle Butler  39:59 

I’m sure, since this is French, you have some reading it backwards through the lens of the French Revolution.

Anne Brannen  40:07 

Oh, yeah. Yeah. You often see people talking about it as being kind of pointing toward the French Revolution. I don’t think it really does. It’s different. But one of the things also that I find interesting about the Jacquerie is that… well, let me put it this way. What did they want? What did they want to happen?

Michelle Butler  40:26 

They wanted to…well, they say they want to be protected. They say they want to have the lord stop stealing everything from them.

Anne Brannen  40:38 

Did they say that? Because we don’t have their writings.

Michelle Butler  40:41 

That’s true. Yeah, that’s hard. Because we don’t have…

Anne Brannen  40:44 

Because we don’t know. We know how bad the circumstances were. We know that there were many, many pieces of the badness of the circumstances. They’re not like, shouting, give us bread. I don’t think they’re even shouting, death to all the nobles, although it looks like they’re trying to kill all the nobles. But that’s what the nobles think. What they are getting rid of is property. But what exactly? They’re pissed off the nobles have not been behaving. So we can extrapolate, well, maybe they want the nobles to behave, but we don’t really know. Whereas with the English peasants revolt, we have a list. Here’s what we want. They don’t get any of it. But we have a list of what they want.

That’s true. Either that never existed or it’s not been preserved.

I find that really interesting, because I’m like, what is it they want? It’s true, for something like Piers Plowman–a lovely example–it’s true that a lot of time in medieval rebellions, what is wanted is not an overthrow of the system– which actually the peasants revolt said they wanted, we want an end to serfdom–it isn’t that the system needs to go but that the people in the system need to do their parts. So, you know, the churchmen need to be good churchmen and the nobles need to be good noblemen, and the peasants need to be good peasants, and then everything will be okay. But it isn’t usually a reimagining of how things should be. I’m not seeing…if there’s a reimagining here, I don’t know what it is.

Yeah, yeah.

It was one of those horrible questions where it’s like, wait, wait a minute. We can extrapolate. But I don’t think we know.

Michelle Butler  42:35 

Yeah. Her book provides a really useful reminder that so much of our source material is not unbiased. Almost all kinds of chronicles have a perspective. But these ones in particular are from the point of view of the nobles who are paying the bills, and so of course, they’re saying, ‘Boy, this was dreadful. This was just appalling.’

Anne Brannen  42:59 

‘And there was no reason for it. There was no reason for it.’ If people are going around with a list of grievances–we want this and we want that–it’s really hard to say there’s no reason for it. Because here’s my list. There is no list. So the noblemen are able to say, there’s no reason, they all just went nuts. We don’t know why. The Jacquerie. So it becomes infamous. Yeah, it gets referred to in the French Revolution, but there’s not a lot…there’s just no a clear line running from one to the other. I mean, the French Revolution, they were pretty clear what they want. What do we want? We want no nobles, and you’re dead. We’re gonna restructure everything. That’s our plan. Give me a guillotine.

Michelle Butler  43:39 

Her discussion about how there’s uprisings both in the city and in the countryside, but not necessarily for the same reasons was a useful reminder.

Anne Brannen  43:51 

Yes, because the townspeople typically saw themselves as being better than the peasants because the commoners in the town are what will become the bourgeoisie. They do things like be goldsmiths and the grocers and whatnot. They’re not working the land. It’s interesting to see so early on that split between urban and rural that for instance here in America is a big big damn deal these days.

Michelle Butler  44:19 

They’re both up in arms but it’s not necessarily the same reasons and they’re not always working together. Sometimes they are and sometimes they’re not. The city piece of it kind of gets lost it becomes distilled down into ‘well, you know, the peasants. It’s just the countryside, it’s just the peasants. ‘The city part of it gets lost as it comes down as an ideological understanding.

Anne Brannen  44:45 

This is true, although Etienne Marcel himself–there’s statues of him–he comes down as a figure but exactly where it is he fits in is not as clear. There’s kind of a lionization of him but it’s not clear how it’s all connecting to the history that we’re talking about at the moment. If you’re having a coup, then what you want is pretty clear. We want you to not be in power and we will be in power instead. That’s what. They had a coup in Paris. It’s not what was going on with Jacquerie.

Michelle Butler  45:17 

There’s a lot of remittances handed out but not for the leaders of this. They get executed. The spice merchant, for example.

Anne Brannen  45:27 

Although not the noble leaders. They don’t get executed.

Yeah.

And well, y’all had already been murdered. Assassinated.

Michelle Butler  45:39 

It’s just fascinating to me that the reasons that get attributed to the peasants for the uprising were actually true during the Great Famine–everybody’s starving–and there isn’t an uprising then.

Anne Brannen  45:53 

I tell you, though, that one of the things about uprisings when you’re starving is that it’s really hard to do because you are not…you can’t do it. There wasn’t an uprising during the Irish famine, there wasn’t an uprising during the Holodomor, that’s not when you do these things. What you’re doing is lying around in the street dying. It’s just very, very hard to get a uprising.

Michelle Butler  46:14 

I found a really interesting article about the movie A Walk with Love and Death, by Kevin Hardy, who’s a medievalist–the article’s from 1999. One of the points he makes is that this is medievalism, that this kind of story being told in this way, is using the medieval as a place, but it’s even if it’s trying, as it may or may not be, to be historically accurate, you can’t actually do that. So you have is very much also a product of the 60s. The young people are embracing premarital sex in a way that is very much a product of the ideology of the 1960s.

Anne Brannen  46:59 

We know that people had premarital sex, but they talked about it differently. Well, that was our discussion of the Jacquerie and historical revision of the idea of the Jacquerie. The next time that you hear from us, we’re going to be talking about the pretenders who showed up after the boys in the tower disappeared. So they’re pretenders to the throne of England, supposedly one of the boys in the tower, though they weren’t. Spoiler alert. That will be fun.  We’re gonna go back to England.

Michelle Butler  47:35 

I’m reasonably certain that pretending to be the heir to the throne is a crime. I think we’re on totally safe ground there.

Anne Brannen  47:43 

There’s even some death involved. There’s not wholesale slaughter, if I remember correctly, but there’s some death in it. Right. So that’s what we’ll do. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. You can find us on any of the places where the podcasts hang out, Apple and Spotify, various places. You can also find us at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There are links to the podcast and show notes and transcripts. I usually find lovely pictures of whatever’s going on. So you can have those too. You can leave comments for us and you can reach us through there. If you know of any medieval crimes that you think that we should pay attention to that we haven’t talked about yet, let us know. They might be on our list or they might not. Got a long list. You can always use more material. Yeah, so that’s us. Bye.

Michelle Butler  48:38 

Bye.