True Crime Medieval

True Crime Medieval once again visits the Early Modern era, because we cannot keep away from the story of Alice Wolfe (born Alice Tankerville), who led a very successful life of thievery and murder with her common-law husband John Wolfe, in the time of Henry VIII, and, too bad for them, Thomas Cromwell. Too bad for them, because Cromwell, who had way too many brains for his own good, was able to think up a way to try and convict the Wolfe couple for some thievery and murder they had been up to, even though they were in sanctuary at Westminster, that method being to have Parliament try them and convict them! Ta da! Parliament had been outgrowing its britches for some time, so it didn’t mind. And, since the thievery and murder (the last bit, that being the bit they got caught for) had occurred on water, they were pirates! Yes! Yes they were, so they got executed as pirates, and really one would do better to just be executed for common thievery and murder. It’s a great story! Also! The Donner Party and some James Bond Bunnies! Because Michelle.

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Surely all of us can understand how infuriating it can be when a neighbor builds some damn thing or other that blocks our view. And then won’t take it down. And maybe even laughs. What to do? Take the case to court, obviously. But what if we lose the case, on account of our view-blocking neighbor is a lawyer? Well. We can resort to harassment. With maybe a machine we build that makes the neighbor and his guests think that a bad earthquake is happening, in a region constantly bothered by bad earthquakes. And, hey, let’s add in some storm effects. Our neighbor might be a lawyer, but we are one of the greatest architect/engineers of our day, and probably all of the days to come. Earthquake machine? Not a problem. Anne wants to talk about the history of earthquakes in Byzantium, and found an awesome cat poem written by the historian who gives us this story. Michelle explains to you just why it is that the engineering of Hagia Sophia is so extraordinary that it survives all those earthquakes. And is really big. Anthemius was a hell of an architect/engineer.

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In April, 1321, the lepers of Southern France found themselves accused of poisoning the community wells, with some sort of powder. They were, the theory went, attempting to spread leprosy to the rest of the population. They weren’t doing that, or anything like that, but they were tortured and executed, and the leprosaria, the houses where they lived, were taken over, and all of the goods and moneys belonging to either the lepers or the leprosaria were confiscated. Soon after the lepers started getting decimated (along with foreigners, just cause they were there), the focus moved to the Jews, who were also tortured and executed, the survivors mostly leaving the country. For a while, Southern France had few lepers and few Jews. Anne is really happy that she gets to explain leprosy and tout the Leprosy Museum in Bergen, Norway, and Michell adores the scholar she found who explains why the whole horrible debacle happened. It was money. Follow the money.

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It’s our April Fools’ Episode, in which we explain how it is we know that things purported to have existed in the Middle Ages did not actually exist! It’s late, for April Fools’ Day, by any known calendar, since it’s the end of June, and also the Bisley Boy, who did not exist, did his not existing after the Middle Ages, thereby qualifying this episode as a Special Episode. Anne explains the stupidity of the Bisley Boy Theory, which is, in short, that Queen Elizabeth I died at the age of 9 and got replaced by a little boy from Bisley, and Michelle, who found herself at the bottom of a rabbit hole consisting of Bram Stoker’s book Famous Imposters, from 1910, in which Bram Stoker reveals WAY more of his concerns about gender identity than he probably meant to, and gives Anne even more reason to dislike Stoker, has a great deal of enjoyment and gets to explain to us the  Chevalier d’Eon, who confuses Stoker even more than Queen Elizabeth.  

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In this episode, True Crime Medieval brings you two crimes, a father and son, both murdered in churches, though for different reasons altogether. Canute had enraged the peasants and nobility both, by enforcing the collection of tithes, while Charles had infuriated a badly behaved but powerful family which took it amiss when Charles attempted to make them stop gouging peasants during a famine. Michelle is both scandalized and gratified by getting to talk about Yet Another Sacrilegious Murder In A Church, and Anne is delighted by finding a hotel in Bruges that has a hard to find museum in its basement, the foundations of the cathedral that Charles the Good was murdered in. Because apparently the French revolution took down the church but missed the basement.

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Béla of Macsó was still in his twenties when he went to a meeting on Margaret Island (which is in the middle of the Danube, in Budapest), which wasn’t a meeting at all, but a trap. There had been fairly complicated struggles for power in Hungary among members of a strikingly dysfunctional family — Béla’s grandfather, the king, had caused problems, handing out lands to his children, and Béla of Macsó had fought for his mother against her brother, his uncle; then the uncle and the grandfather made a peace treaty; then the grandfather died, as one does, and the uncle was king,  but then he died, too, and his 10 year old son became king, and several bunches of nobles fought with each other, in the course of which Béla of Macsó entered the courtyard of the Dominican convent on Margaret Island, for a meeting which wasn’t there, and got brutally murdered. Really, this would all be, alas, just a regular Tuesday for a royal medieval family, except that Béla’s skeleton has been studied by bioarcheologists using several scientific methods, and Michell has had the time of her life, and she will tell you all about the things we’ve learned about poor Béla of Macsó. You’re welcome.

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In the medieval scriptoria, amongst all the holy books, and the hagiographies, and the books of philosophy, and the legal charters, not to mention the beautiful illuminated manuscripts, there were often, we are sorry to tell you, forgeries being created. Sometimes monasteries needed to codify some history that hadn’t gotten written down when it happened, or to provide documentation of some land sale that hadn’t gotten written down, or to provide evidence for things that didn’t happen at all, so that they could have more power or money — that sort of thing. Some of those scriptoria were so good at producing forgeries that they made them for other monasteries, running forgery rings. The scriptorium at Westminster Abbey, for instance, had several master forgers — one of them being Osbert of Clare, who produced several of the fake charters at not only Westminster Abbey, but also other abbeys, such as that at Ramsey, which didn’t have the wherewithal to produce these things themselves. Anne explains medieval forgery in general, of which there was a whole lot, and Michelle, though very sad that no popular works about Westminster are out there, was gratified to find some excellent scholars, along with a medieval method for providing two factor identification. Also, nobody dies.

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The Vikings impacted European history — west and east — for centuries, from 793, when they attacked Lindisfarne Abbey in England, up until 1066, when they attacked England and lost to Harold Godwinson (though Harold would lose the next battle, at Hastings, in his fight against the Normans or, “French Vikings,” as your hosts like to call them).  These dates aren’t really true, since the Vikings raided before and after them. They’re just nice clean dates to remember. But at any rate, centuries it was, and the Vikings were very scary, and very good at snatch-and-grab attacks, except sometimes they settled down in places like York, or of course, Normandy. And during all this time, they often attacked the island of Iona, targeting the Abbey, since that was where most of the stuff was. On Christmas Eve of 986, however, when they attacked Iona again, slaughtering the abbot and 15 monks, it wasn’t a raid for raiding’s sake. Times had shifted, and the Vikings were becoming church patrons. Iona was attacked in 986 as part of a struggle between secular powers and church powers. There was slaughter and raiding, to be sure, but those were the methods, not the point. In somewhat of a reversal of our usual roles, Michelle explains this all to you, and Anne gets really excited about the possibility of taking a retreat on Iona, with meditative tours and, of course, a tea room.

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As far as we are concerned, a book entitled “Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land,” is, obviously, a book to read. To our joy, that book is informed, and readable, and full of Things We Did Not Know. And to our further joy, the author, Steve Tibble, who came to talk to us for this episode, is engaging, deeply informed, and kind hearted, and, of course, full of Things We Did Not Know. In our conversation, we discuss, among other things, the mafia that the Frankish prisoners of war ran in Cairo; the Viking crusade, which involved killing lions in North Africa; the state of the Pilgrim Road that civilian Europeans were using to reach the Holy Land, which had so many slaughtered pilgrims lying on the side of the road that it lead to the Templars getting involved; and the European method of getting rid of outlaws, which was to make them into crusaders. There is yet another saintly pirate, as well, I think our third so far.  In our talk and in this book, Steve focuses on the violence that was the foundation of the Crusades — on all sides — but also gives his overarching view of the way the Crusades were a result not just of clashing religions, but of climate change and the conflicts between nomadic and sedentary societies.  Oh, and by the way, we all agree that it’s really a shame that Cormac McCarthy didn’t become an historian of the Crusades.  And that there are a lot of potential historical novels and movies wandering around in this book.  (Link to Steve’s website, and information on his books, are in the Show Notes.)

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To be fair, the Vikings attacked Paris several times, but it’s the major sieges that get remembered — the one in 845, when they invaded Paris on Easter Sunday, got bought off with a fairly large ransom, and then the one that started in 885 and ended in 886, after nearly a year of a siege wherein the Vikings,  branching out from their usual plundering, used catapults and battering rams and other such non-Viking military paraphernalia, in an attempt to invade the city again. They were doing this on and off, though, and finally the surviving Vikings that hadn’t gone off to sack other Frankish towns  dragged their longboats over to another river and went elsewhere. So the Franks had won, though the Vikings had managed to destroy one of the bridges and much of the surrounding countryside, and later one of their leaders, Rollo, would swear allegiance to Charles the Simple of France and become the first Norman, in what became Normandy. Michelle, naturally, found an epic poem written by a monk who was in Paris during that last siege, a poem modelled on Virgil, which contained so many difficult and impressive words that monks would pass it around for decades, to be consulted when they wanted to sound really intelligent. (Hint: Greek sounds fancier than Latin.)

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