89. Vasvilkas, Grand Duke of Lithuania, is Assassinated, Volodymyr, Ukraine 1267
Anne Brannen 0:25
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:36
And today we are talking about the time in 1267 when Vasvilkas, who was the Grand Duke of Lithuania, was assassinated by Leo the first of Galicia. And of course, we want to know why, don’t we? Vasvilkas was the son of Mindaugas the first Grand Duke of Lithuania, who was also sort of a Christian, who was assassinated and then followed as Grand Duke by Treniota, who also got assassinated by some of the Duke’s servants.
Michelle Butler 1:08
There was a lot of it going around.
Anne Brannen 1:12
It’s much like reading about Ireland or Scotland or Sicily or any other place in Europe. And people after Vasvilkas got assassinated also. So we could focus on any one of them, because those were all crimes. People got assassinated. We’re focusing on Vasvilkas not because he was extremely important because, no, but because Michelle thinks that the reason for his assassination was extremely stupid.
Michelle Butler 1:38
I agree.
Anne Brannen 1:40
You are Michelle, and that is–
Michelle Butler 1:42
Sorry. I misspoke. Yes, I think this is the dumbest assassination we have ever covered. Not that there was anything wrong with him, but the reason for killing him was super dumb.
Anne Brannen 1:57
It was super dumb. I have to say that I’m still convinced that the stupidest assassination that we’ve been in on was Darnley’s murder of Rizzio, since Darnley put together a bunch of people to go kill Queen Mary of Scots’ musician, Darnley put together a cadre of Scots noblemen to go and kill Rizzio, who was Mary Queen of Scots’ musician, because it was part of his plan to have him become king of Scots. There’s no way in hell that you become king of Scots by murdering musicians. That was really stupid. So we are divided on this as to the stupidest assassination so far, but I do agree this was pretty dumb. So we’ll get to that. Okay, but first, first, how did we get here? Well, Mindaugus, the father of our protagonist, was highly focused on trying to make Lithuania larger. Lithuania had become–after centuries of having to put up with Viking raids and giving tribute to Denmark and then on the other side of the country dealing with the Kievan Rus, giving tribute to the Kievan Rus–Lithuania had more or less become a war machine. They were going around, invading neighbors and taking slaves and goods, and in fact, were at that time called land Vikings. And so I’m kind of pleased by that. Did you find that, Michelle, did you come across the land vikings?
Michelle Butler 3:21
I don’t think I found that, no.
Anne Brannen 3:23
Land vikings, Lithuanians, yep. And so that had led to the formation of a political structure, because if you’re going to go around, you know, invading all your neighbors and whatnot, you really have to have some kind of core. So there was an alliance among the Lithuanians themselves. They’re different factions, which became a Lithuanian state, and Mindaugus was the first ruler who was crowned king of Lithuania. All right. So that was in 1253, and by that time, Mindaugus had also been baptized Roman Catholic. Now this had no effect on the rest of Lithuania, which remained pagan. More on that later. It’s kind of a theme. And over the course of his reign, Mindaugus dealt with internal power struggles, and he made an alliance with the Livonian order, which was a branch of the Teutonic Order, which had been taking Baltic territory so as to make everybody Christian, specifically Roman Catholic Christian. Just briefly. Here’s Lithuania. On one side, the Roman Catholics. On the other side, Eastern Orthodox. Okay, so these are the Roman Catholics, and they’ve been taking over territories and killing people and whatnot and making them be Christian. And so they established military occupation wherever they went and forcibly baptized people, because that was their mandate, and because of converting to Roman Catholicism, Mindaugas was then able to form an alliance with the Livonian order, and so they left Lithuania alone. At that time, he wasn’t able to bring western Lithuania into line. But he did stop the Tatars before they got to the Baltic Sea. So that’s something that he did. And the Tatars, by the way, were Turkic tribes that had become amalgamated into the Mongols, and they still exist in different places in Ukraine. They’re the Crimean Tatars, which the Russians spend a lot of time trying to get rid of. So he stopped the Tatars from getting to the Baltic Sea. So he was the first king/Grand Duke of Lithuania, and he had become Roman Catholic, which, as mentioned, was an asset in dealing with the Livonian order, and the Pope who ordered the bishop to crown Him, that’s why he got crowned, was the Pope, but really he didn’t mean it, as we know from his later history. And besides, under the alliance, he allowed the order to conquer that western part of Lithuania that had been giving him trouble. But the order was really bad at this, actually, because when the order took things over, they didn’t just establish a military state and convert people forcibly. They also had a bunch of rules you had to follow. Had to follow the religion, of course. But also there were rules about who you can marry or do business with, things like that, and really they were not liked. So there were several battles which they lost, and Mindaugus saw his chance to break the alliance. Mostly what he’d gotten from being Christian was the getting crowned ceremony, and that was over. And so then he returned to paganism, which he hadn’t actually really left, and he made sacrifices, and he participated in public pagan rituals, and the cathedral that he had built got turned into a pagan temple. And really all of his diplomacy got undone, and it was, you know, not good. And fighting with the order commenced again. And the western part of Lithuania, which had, you know, resisted him, resisted the order. And their leader, Treniota, fought his way to the Estonian coast, and was doing quite well. And then he made an alliance with Daumantas to kill Mindaugas. Now this Treniota Just wanted Mindaugas gone for political reasons, but Daumantas had a personal beef, which was that after Mindaugas’ wife Marta died, he had married her sister, but the sister was actually already married to Daumantas, who then did not take that well at all. So they killed him and two of his sons in 1263, and then Treniota got assassinated by some of Mindaugus’ servants. And also Mindaugus’ son in law got assassinated. And Lithuania, which he had been able to sort of hold together, fell into disorder. Okay, so the next year, in 1264 Vasvilkas became Grand Duke. Okay, this is his son, and he might have been able to be a ruler. We don’t really know. He’d already negotiated a treaty with Daniel, the king of Black Ruthenio, that’s now Western Ukraine, and he’d married his sister off to Daniel’s son, but he became baptized Christian, in this case, Greek Orthodox. And he was very much taken with the religious life, so he gave away his title and his lands, and he built a monastery, and he became a monk. And he also tried to go on pilgrimage, but there was all this the war going on in the Balkan states, and so he couldn’t get anywhere. And so that didn’t work out. He was going to go to Mount Athos in Greece, because, you know, he didn’t go to Rome. He didn’t want to go to Rome because he wasn’t a Roman Catholic. He was a Greek Orthodox. And so he wanted to go to Mount Athos, but he didn’t make it. And he escaped the assassination of his father and his two brothers, and he allied with his brother in law, Shvarn and took over Black Ruthenia. So that’s when he became Grand Duke. It was before he had become a monk. So he had left being a monk and been trying to help out his country. And so, once again, on account of his Christianity, there was a Lithuanian alliance with the Livonian order, and he attacked Poland because Poland had defeated a people who was allied with Lithuania. And all was well, except that in 1267, he decided that he wanted to go be a monk again, and so he gave the title of Grand Duke to his brother in law, Shvarn, who had, after all, been his ally after his father’s assassination, helping with like, going and getting Poland and whatnot. But the next year, Shvarn’s brother, Leo, or Lev of Halych, that’s on the Dniester River in Ukraine, assassinated him because, and here is the reason, the stupid reason, for assassinating anybody that Michelle dislikes, because he thought that Vasvilkas should have made him co ruler with his brother.
Michelle Butler 9:46
It’s dumb. It’s dumb because it doesn’t actually mean–it’s just petty, you know?
Anne Brannen 9:54
He doesn’t become co ruler or even ruler.
Michelle Butler 9:57
No. Most of the time these folks that are killing each other, there’s a payoff to it, you can kind of understand, but, like, it’s just petty.
Anne Brannen 10:07
There is also the whole pagan-Christian thing, because it’s not just that there’s Roman Catholicism and there’s Greek Orthodox. There’s also Baltic paganism, which is very strong in Lithuania. And so, you know, it’s really easy to annoy people. Lev, by the way, he had moved the capital of black Ruthenia to Lviv, which is named after him. That’s what Lviv is. It’s the city that Lev founded. What happened after this? There had been unrest after the assassination, as often happens, and Vasvilkas didn’t really help much. Shvarnas ruled for two or three years. Then after Vasvilkas was assassinated, all the struggles within Lithuania continued. And then he died, not from assassination. And Traidenis, who was from the northeastern part of Lithuania, Traidenis, by the way, was pagan, and he didn’t like the Germans who had been bringing stuff in, and he fought the Livonian order. And territory went back and forth, but he defeated that order in 1279 but he died in 1282. By the way, Lithuania was the last part of Europe to become Christianized. And how did that work? Early on, like in 1009 Chalcedonian missionaries–this is a whole another piece of Christianity–they had baptized some rulers of Yotvingians, but Lithuania had more contact with the Kievan Rus, who had been Eastern Orthodox at that time for 100 years. So the Chalcedonians didn’t have much of an effect. And as we saw, Mindaugus became Roman Catholic in a power move against the Livonian order and his nephew. So he and his family were baptized Roman Catholic, though Mindaugus didn’t give his gods up, and Lithuania didn’t give their gods up either. And there was Christian influence on Lithuanian literature and Lithuanian names. You can see Christian influence at that time, but Lithuania remained pagan. So there were some Eastern Orthodox people there, and there were some Roman Catholic people there. And there might even have been some Chalcedonians left there. I don’t know, but it was a pagan state. Baltic pagan. In 1349, the ruler then started negotiations with the Pope for the crown. He wanted to get crowned by the Pope, and so he was going to convert. He was going to convert. The rulers of Lithuania really saw conversion as a political tool, and not much more. So that fell through, but he did convert in 1351 as a bargaining chip with the Poles. He provided military aid to them, and he got to keep the crown, which he had gotten while, you know, being Christian. But this was all nonsense. He preferred pagan rituals, and he kept keeping all the rest of the Latvians happy. And he then absconded, and he wasn’t any military help at all to Poland. And so he just was not somebody that kept his agreements. After the fall of Kiev to the Mongols in 1240 its western areas were taken over by Lithuania. And in these regions, the populous was, as we said, already Eastern Orthodox, and the Lithuanian rulers often married into the ruling families of Eastern Europe, which were orthodox. So the Lithuanian rulers were mostly Christian, but not the Lithuanians. In 1385–we still haven’t gotten out of the Middle Ages–1385. This is so late to become Christian in Europe, you know. The Kievan Rus became Christian so early. It’s just amazing. But I have more on that later. In 1385, Grand Duke Jogaila agreed to be baptized in order to marry the Queen of Poland, and he’s actually going to keep this agreement, although this is not so great in a lot of ways for some people. So he became Wadislav the fifth. Jogaila and his court and his knights also converted. And after that, the Lithuanians, both noble and peasant got converted, and a cathedral was built at Vilnius in 1387, at the site of a previous pagan temple. And Jogalia destroyed the sacred groves and the altars and things that the Catholic Church considered cult objects. And what I’m most interested in, and therefore, I’m going to talk about a lot–did I have a rabbit hole? Oh, yes, I did. It’s a good one.
Michelle Butler 14:43
Well, it’s nice that it’s not just me.
Anne Brannen 14:46
It’s not just you. I’m on the ADHD meds now, and so now I like, I know where it is now. I’m most interested in this. He killed all the grass snakes. What? He killed the grass snakes. So, many of you who don’t know about Baltic paganism, are saying grass snakes, what the hell? Well, the grass snakes were household guardians. They were guardian spirits, and they got to live by the stove in your house and get fed. And if you came across them in the field, you fed them milk and tried to get them to come to your house, because if they came to your house, that was great, but it was very bad indeed to kill them and if they didn’t come to your house, it was sad. Now, this thing with the milk interests me, because they basically ate frogs. I mean, they’re an endangered species, but they eat frogs, and so I don’t know what the snakes want with milk, but it’s a magical sort of thing. In other pieces of Europe, the fairies eat milk. So I don’t know. But the grass snakes, you get them with milk. They’re sacred to the sun goddess. At special occasions, you would ask the grass snake to come eat at the table, and sometimes they would, and sometimes they wouldn’t. And it was sad if it refused, but it was great if it did. And they’re connected to the world tree. And you remember, not just Jogaila but Charlemagne cut down the sacred trees. That cutting down of sacred trees across Europe, across pagan Europe, that was rife, but the grass snakes are connected to that, and carvings of them were put into rooftop beams in Lithuania for happiness and good fortune, and they’re indigenous to Eastern Baltic countries, so that’s where they’re from. They don’t bite, they’re not poisonous. They are little snakes that won’t hurt you and will help your house. And really, really, really, are from that area and the Lithuanians, because they did become Christian, as I mentioned, they continued to honor the grass snakes. Yay. I love the Lithuanians. I am so I’m so pleased by this. They continue to honor the grass snakes despite Christianity and the grass snakes still, even though Christianity came through, and then science made big changes. The grass snakes are good omens. Pope Urban the sixth recognized Lithuania as Roman Catholic state in 1389, so that’s when Lithuania had finished becoming Christian. And then finally, the piece of Western Lithuania, which had for centuries been difficult to bring into line, that began to be converted in 1413. The first cathedral was built there in 1464. So Lithuania was declared Roman Catholic in 1389, but it wasn’t done becoming Roman Catholic as a complete state until 1464.
Michelle Butler 17:36
It’s so late. I mean, you’re almost out of the Middle Ages. I did not know that.
Anne Brannen 17:40
I had no idea, because I knew all about, you know, the Christians come through, they go through France, and they go through Germany, and they go through Spain, and they go through England, and I knew they’d gone to Ukraine, gone to Constantinople. And so obviously, obviously, the Baltic states would have been Christian. They weren’t, and Lithuania was the last to go. That was great, wasn’t it? So it’s great, yay. So now Lithuania is all Christian, except that you remember that the former Kievan Rus territories were Eastern Orthodox, so there were tensions, and the Orthodox population felt themselves more connected to Muscovy and the Roman Catholic population were connected to the west. Actually that’s the direction it all went. Lithuania really became part of Western Europe and allied with Poland in 1569. So I have more. I told you, grass snakes, but then I didn’t really I have more to say. Okay, so these days, 74% of the population in Lithuania is Roman Catholic, and 3.7% is Eastern Orthodox. They’re mostly Russian. And there’s Romuva. You don’t know, but I gotta tell you, Okay, Romuva is a neo-pagan revival that has been growing. By 2011 there were more than 5000 Romuvans in Lithuania. It’s a revival of Baltic customs. And so it started in the late 19th century, when many things did. Because it’s when everybody’s going, what are our ancient roots? We must go back to our ancient roots so that we can be a true nation. And so then they make stuff up, and some is true and some isn’t. So they’re going back. They’re reviving Baltic and really a lot of stuff had kind–a pagan customs had actually survived in Lithuania, so it wasn’t as hard as if you were in England. For instance, the pagan holy days were still celebrated, although, see, they kind of coincide with the Christian ones. And so you really, you can do them both, actually, very easily. And of course, you had to be nice to grass snakes. The Lithuanians never stopped being nice to grass snakes, and still they are nice to grass snakes. The Soviets, hello, suppressed what they could. They executed or deported the practitioners. Then the practitioners had clandestine Romuvan groups in the labor camps, and then the Romudans established public festivals after that era, when it was still the Soviet Union, even though the Soviets expelled practitioners from the universities and exiled leaders. But when the Soviet Union waned, Romuvan groups practiced openly. Now Lithuania became independent. Re-independent because it had been independent before it became part of the Soviet Union. Lithuania became independent, re-independent in 1990, and Romuva was recognized in 1992 as ancient Baltic religion in the category non-traditional. But they are now. They’re taking it to the European Court and everything. They are working on being declared a traditional religion, like of the same order as Christianity and Judaism and Muslim. So now, you know. Grass snakes and Romuva.
Anne Brannen 17:40
I’m really intrigued by that, by the keeping of the grass snakes, because, you know, Christianity has some built in issues with snakes.
Anne Brannen 18:29
But it was so crucial, there, it was so crucial in some way that even though it got watered down, it’s still there. Oh, and there’s columns carved like snakes, where you would have rituals. But the milk, I just don’t see how you can get a grass snake with milk. I really, I don’t know, but I think you should carry around frogs, and then if you saw it, you could feed them a frog, and they might really like you and come home.
Michelle Butler 21:44
I hadn’t really thought before about the folkloric importance of milk, but you’re absolutely right. You feed it to, you know, you give it to the fairies, and to keep them from doing things in your house. You’re basically paying protection money to the Fae.
Anne Brannen 22:02
My grandmother, she was the granddaughter of an Irishman who had survived the famine and come to Texas. My grandmother, who had never been to Ireland, and God knows where she got this, I guess, from her dad, but she didn’t know this dad very well. She put out milk for the fairies. In Texas.
Michelle Butler 22:22
I mean, the thing that makes sense to me about this is that milk is magic. You can do so many things with it.
Anne Brannen 22:29
You can make cheese.
Michelle Butler 22:30
Yeah, you can make cheese. You can make butter. And dairy is such an important part of ancient Irish culture that before they have coinage, you measure your wealth in how many cows you have. So it’s so central. I just hadn’t really thought about that before. That hasn’t really been one of my research areas, looking at folklore.
Anne Brannen 22:53
Now don’t you want to know? Also, how easy is it to get the grass snake to come live by your stove, if you’re having a wood burning stove, especially in a fairly north place on the globe. My stove is not warm right now, because if I want to bake anything, I’m going to turn it on. But stoves were warm. Stoves were the hearth, so it was a warm place. So I bet you could get snakes to–
Michelle Butler 23:20
I mean, did they eat mice? Because it could be–
Anne Brannen 23:24
I don’t know. What I read was that they mostly eat amphibians. So that’s frogs, right?
Michelle Butler 23:30
The reason that we have this symbiotic relationship with cats is that cats eat the vermin.
Anne Brannen 23:36
Or at they at least break their necks and come put them on your pillow, which means they’re not eating your wheat, so that’s good.
Michelle Butler 23:43
Cats do not have the genetic changes. My kid, a few years ago in high school, had to read a really interesting paper about the genetic changes in dogs over the course of domestication, as compared to cats, which really have no genetic difference at all. They hang out with us by choice. They’ve not been changed by it.
Anne Brannen 24:06
So the same thing with the snakes. Here, look, you can sit here and have some milk and be all warm, and I think there’s some frogs just on the other side of the door. Would you like to come to dinner because we’re having a birthday celebration? Oh, look, the snake. Where do they put the snake? Does the snake go on the table? Does it have a chair? Where is the snake? Is it just slithering around on the floor? Oh, hi guys, like it was a puppy begging? I don’t know. Don’t know. And I’m so fascinated by the grass snake, I can’t tell you. I want one now.
Michelle Butler 24:40
I just sort of assumed it had a basket by the stove. But again, I was thinking about cats.
Anne Brannen 24:46
I don’t know if it needs a basket. It might like some place to curl up. We could find out, I suppose. The Lithuanians really, really, really did not want to give up paganism. They just did not, and they didn’t for quite some time. And they still remember it, and they brought it back, and they’re gonna make it a real religion according to the European Union. I love them. I just love them. So we got to learn about Lithuania today, so it’s very exciting. And grass snakes. Now. Michelle, I know that this is a very difficult time for you, but I believe you found something interesting.
Michelle Butler 25:21
I focused primarily on an article called ‘The Lithuanian Prince-Monk: a study of competing legends.’
Anne Brannen 25:30
That there actually is an article about this guy, I’m just so pleased. Really he’s just not that important. There’s not much stuff written about him.
Michelle Butler 25:40
He’s not important historically, but he comes really important the further we get from because he becomes a figure, a contested figure, around which they have the religious and political struggles.
Anne Brannen 25:53
Uh huh. Well, tell us about this. I want to know.
Michelle Butler 25:56
The motif of the prince-monk as this idealized ruler gets into the chronicles and then develops as they go along. But what happens is, depending on the place of origin–so depending on if your writer is a Roman Catholic or is Orthodox, they handle it differently. Basically, the different chroniclers, whatever their camp is, they want to pull him in and claim him, which, you know, my author here, David Gold Frank, points out, is a tad tricky, right? Because this was a historical person, and we know that he was orthodox. So it’s tricky for the Roman Catholics to be like, well, not really.
Anne Brannen 26:42
Well, his dad was Catholic. I mean, it would not really,
Michelle Butler 26:47
He’s really one of ours.
Anne Brannen 26:49
How did they–? Do they just pretend he is, or do they actually have some kind of logical explanation?
Michelle Butler 26:55
What happens is, the further you get from the history, the more that stuff just gets made up.
Anne Brannen 27:03
So, oh, like, so it’s your basic medieval hagiography.
Michelle Butler 27:08
That’s exactly what it is. This is a paper that studies the development of the hagiography and the legend. In some versions of it, he actually gets split into two people, one who is the monk and one who is the prince,
Anne Brannen 27:23
So they’re supposed to be like brothers or something?
Michelle Butler 27:27
Exactly. That particular branch of the mythology has such a hard time with the motif of the prince-monk, they deal with it by splitting him into two people.
Anne Brannen 27:37
We had a prince-monk before this. Who was it? Oh, well, I’m not gonna remember.
Michelle Butler 27:41
This was a real interesting article.
Anne Brannen 27:43
So how he’s looked at depends on whether the writer is Roman Catholic or Orthodox. But I think you were telling me before that there’s also a shift through time.
Michelle Butler 27:54
Yes, and it hangs out for a very long time. I’m gonna scroll down here. This article is a very good article, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as a first step, because it’s a pretty academic article. I feel like I need to go read an introduction too because it just kind of says things like the L legend. And I’m like, what the hell is the L legend?
Anne Brannen 28:18
But this is not in the realm of historical scholarship? This is literary scholarship border? It’s the borderlands.
Michelle Butler 28:26
Yeah, right, because it does talk about the earliest treatments of it in the Chronicle, but then it follows it down into the 17th, 18th, 19th century. I’m actually going to scroll down here to the conclusion, because the conclusion is really interesting. This just sort of blew me away. “So long as the princely, military and monastic ideals flourished in Eastern Europe, the Vasvilkas legends retained vitality. Only in the 19th century did critical scholarship start seriously to separate fact from fancy.” So the Chronicles, you know, develop the hagiography of this prince, and it’s retold. It’s current–
Anne Brannen 29:15
Down into the 19th century. Why? What did the Lithuanians get out of the monk-prince trope?
Michelle Butler 29:23
He thinks that different people are getting different things.
Anne Brannen 29:30
Okay, I’ll buy that. That seems reasonable.
Michelle Butler 29:33
So this is becomes this really famous. It reminds me, in ways, of the King Arthur legend that keeps getting retold in Western Europe, and depending on where it goes, they change it for their purposes. He says that they have the figure–and then sometimes he’s two, because they’ve split it in some branches of it– have quasi Republican sentiments. So there’s this idea that, you know, he’s a good ruler. He listens to the people. But they passed as real historical entities into later Lithuanian, Belarusian and Polish writings. It’s as if we treated King Arthur as a historical personage into the 19th century.
Anne Brannen 30:17
Right, right.
Michelle Butler 30:19
And we know people are asking questions about King Arthur well earlier. Why isn’t it mentioned in any of the Roman sources? If this happened, why isn’t this–people are asking all kinds of good questions. I found this fascinating. I was really glad to find this article, but it is pretty technical and it’s a little bit of a slog. It’s not badly written. That’s not what I mean. It’s that for somebody who isn’t a specialist in this area, it was a struggle to get through it, because I don’t know any of the sources he’s talking about, but I’m glad he went off and read them all so that I don’t have to.
Anne Brannen 30:54
Apparently he did. That was very kind of him. It’s interesting to me that the legend becomes important not just to Lithuania, but to Poland. You said Belarus?
Michelle Butler 31:03
Yup. It becomes big all through the area, and it becomes a point of not just religious contention, but political contention. Because, of course, whichever side of the religious divide you are aligning yourself with, that has political implications as well.
Anne Brannen 31:19
Yeah, and there’ll be political ramifications forever. It was only just recently that the Pope apologized to the Eastern Orthodox Church for the sack of Constantinople.
Michelle Butler 31:31
One of the kind of frustrating footnotes in here is he mentions, oh, by the way, we think we have the church–his monastery, we think we know where it was. And I’m like, where? he doesn’t say, I’m just supposed to know. I’m gonna scroll up to that footnote. Here’s what he says: “to my knowledge, archeology in the Navahrudak/Neman region has not turned up any other late 13th century sites that could have been VojÅ¡alk’smonastery.” And then he gives us a whole bunch of sources, but he’s referring to the fact that he said the historical–he gives me a name of a monastery that I can’t find on the web. the Lavrousev Monastery. “There was a historical Lavrosev monastery, which was most probably the restored cloister of VojÅ¡alk.” The monk-prince we’re talking about, he gives us both the Russian name and the Lithuanian name. And you were using the Lithuanian name, and his article defaults to the Russian name.
Anne Brannen 32:45
I have my stance on this.
Michelle Butler 32:47
That’s fine. Yeah. I am frustrated about that. But he gives me a whole bunch of sources that are not in English. It appears to be somewhere near the village of Laurusava, given at the end of the footnote, and he says the monastery is there for a long time. It’s not suppressed until 1837.
Anne Brannen 33:06
Why does it get suppressed? That’s neither Henry the Eighth nor the French Revolution.
Michelle Butler 33:12
He doesn’t say, it’s probably somewhere in this giant footnote, there’s some more information about it, because he gives me a whole bunch of sources. He says the Lavrousev Monastery first appears in a source from 1386 as supported by this ruler, at around 1524 was sufficiently important for its Archimandrite to be appointed head of the Trinity monastery. But when I scroll through this, other than telling me it’s the Lavrousev monastery, which I cannot find on the web, I don’t know where it is, but apparently we know.
Anne Brannen 33:43
Apparently it’s there someplace.
Michelle Butler 33:53
So that’s exciting, but this is an example of why this article is hard, because he just drops that in there, and other specialists would know what he’s talking about. I’m not a specialist in this, and the web was not helping me. When I search for that monastery, what I find is this footnote.
Anne Brannen 34:15
So, is that your stuff? You
Michelle Butler 34:17
Yeah, that is what I know. That’s what I got.
Anne Brannen 34:20
Well, that’s our discussion about the monk-prince in Lithuania and grass snakes, because they’re important. And the next time that you hear from us, we’ll be a few 100 years later, over in France, we want to talk about the Jacquerie. So 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 I heart, wherever the podcasts are hanging out. And you can reach us at True Crime Medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word, and there you can find links to the podsast and show notes and transcripts and places where you can leave comments. We love to see your comments, and do please let us know if there’s a medieval crime you’d like us to think about. We’ve got through this year, the end of which is coming up fast, and so we’ll be putting the schedule together for next year. And we do make changes. We always make changes.
Michelle Butler 35:14
Yes, it’s been a rough few weeks here. I had to have two emergency eye surgeries. So it’s been tough.
Anne Brannen 35:30
Well, maybe the Jacquerie will cheer you up, but you mustn’t read about the Jacquerie while your eyes are hurting, because that’s just wrong.
Michelle Butler 35:36
I will try real hard. I mean, a good peasants revolt is always encouraging.
Anne Brannen 35:41
So, so yeah, that’s us for today. Bye.
Michelle Butler 35:44
Bye.
88. St. Scholastica Riot, Oxford England, February 10, 1355
Anne Brannen 0:25
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 0:35
And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:38
And we really enjoy doing this work for the podcast. We really enjoy that. That’s why we’re doing it. It’s not for money, it’s for fun. And we like it on the times when we get to learn a lot about something we didn’t really know about. We also like it on the times when we get to talk about something that really we we kind of know. This isn’t our bailiwick. We’re talking today about the St Scholastica Day riot, the 10th of February 1355, in Oxford, and they’re the town gown issues. Yeah, we got that. We love that. In short, this was a three day riot in the center of Oxford between students of Oxford and the townspeople. It has long, deep roots in university town history, and it’s got long lasting effects. And so that’s what it was, a terrible, horrible riot. Where, as Michelle puts it, 93 people die in a fight over bad alcohol.
Michelle Butler 1:36
We’re visiting the hallowed, dignified halls of 14th century Oxford.
Anne Brannen 1:42
Yeah, we’re in agreement. We don’t want to hear anything about how, you know, the university used to be so much more dignified. No, it wasn’t. It wasn’t that. It wasn’t in the 1950s even. So let’s just stop. Anyway, our background. The University of Oxford had been around since at least 1096, at least in terms of people teaching something, but became recognizable as a university in about the middle of the 12th century. Now there’s a story–and you’re gonna hear the story–there was a story that the university happened because English students got barred by the King of England, who was being Henry the second at that time, that English students got barred from attending the University of Paris. But there isn’t actually any real evidence about that, and so maybe that happened, but probably not. But at any rate, at the time that Oxford gets started, there’s the University of Bologna, there’s the University of Paris, and now there’s the University of Oxford. We talked about Paris, the University of Paris, which was started really about 1150, in the podcast that we did on the University of Paris strike, where there was a different riot that also lasted for quite some time. And the actual issue, the fundamental issue, is how it is that cities, that the city and the university would be organized. That is, that the townspeople are governed by secular law, and the university is governed by church law, like at that time. Not anymore. That’s over, but at any rate, it was at that time governed by church law because the university, all the scholars and teachers, are also clergymen, or at least they’re clerics, because the universities were formed out of the church schools, and that was where any formal education happened in medieval Europe. If you were male but not a clergyman, or if you were female, you could be educated. You could learn to read and write. You could learn all sorts of stuff, but it would be done through tutors and not through schools or university. Heloise being an example, and we refer you to our previous podcast on Heloise and Abelard. Abelard was a professor at the University of Paris, and he was tutoring Heloise, and then they ended up in well, different circumstances, which you can go hear about. So the problem for the townspeople, then, is that the students, who were in general, younger than university students today, tended to behave badly. I’m sure you’re really shocked by this. Are you shocked by this?
Anne Brannen 2:28
I have lived in university towns since I was 18 years old. This is my third one. The kind of tensions that existed in the 12th century are the same tension.
Anne Brannen 3:36
They really are. They’re exacerbated by the organization, and that the students do not are not governed by secular law. But basically it’s there, which is that the students are badly behaved and a little snooty. They’re a little snooty, Michelle, when it comes to the rest of the town. I don’t know. That’s just how it is. So back at this time, when the students behaved badly, the local constables could basically do nothing about it, because the students were clergymen and so therefore subject to church laws. So unless the monarch of the area got involved, the townspeople were essentially helpless. Now with the University of Paris strike, the royalty gets involved, and what they say causes the bailiffs to go kill students, because they seem to have misunderstood things. So it isn’t always great that the royalty gets involved, but that’s the only authority above. You can go to the bailiffs, or you can go to the church court. So besides that, there’s another thing too, which is that the universities grew. They became very, very rich, and they bought up all the property around themselves, and they got bigger and bigger. This is still going on. I mean, I used to live in Berkeley, and Berkeley has, like, eaten up more and more and more of the houses around it, they kind of like, they disappear, they get rolled over by the Berkeley Juggernaut and turned into university buildings, and the same thing is going on here in Albuquerque. We’ve got the big university. That’s where the law school is and the medical school is and there’s a whole new thing going on for the medical school. They ate up some more property, and I don’t know what they’re building, something or other, but I’m sure we’ll all be much more healthy after they do. So that was what was going on. I remember being in Cambridge, and like, walking down from high street, down to the river, going down Mill Street. Well, you can walk down Mill Street. There used to be a mill at the end of it, you can walk down Mill Street, and then you have to stop because there’s a university building in the way, and you have to walk and go around it, and then you’re on Mill Street again. That’s the kind of thing that universities did and still do. It pisses the townspeople off. Also, their rules overrode town rules quite often. In fact, usually, for instance, in Cambridge, a little later than this, Cambridge University made a rule that traveling players could not–not only could they not play in Cambridge, the town, but I think it’s about a five mile radius round, which means that if you lived in Cherry Hinton, you couldn’t have the traveling players come by, because Cambridge University said no. And this also pisses the town people off. So you might ask, why do towns put up with this at all? Why don’t they just get rid of all this? Well, they kind of did during the Paris strike, because then the university wasn’t there for–how many years was it? Do you remember? Was it was three years, Michelle? and so for three years, what happened was that the students, who do a lot of needing lodging and food and beer, the students weren’t there. Oh, and books. They also were buying books. The students weren’t there. So who do you sell this stuff to? The economics of the town not doing so well. So it’s one of those things–you depend for your living on the very people who annoy you deeply. The same thing happens in a different kind of way if you are living in a tourist town, because the tourists come through, don’t they? And so like–oh, let’s say, we love you, tourists, all of you who want to come visit Albuquerque and give us your money, we love you, love you, love you. Please do so but a while it’s the summer and you’re going to Old Town, or while it’s October and you’re coming to the balloon festival, the town’s kind of full of tourists. And things are very, very different. But we love you. We love you very much. It’s not just your money, really. I mean this. So it’s the same kind of tension. I’ve been told by people who live in Hawaii that it’s this kind of thing. Are you familiar with this, Michelle? Have you ever lived in a tourist town?
Michelle Butler 3:36
No, but my friends in Ireland say that it’s like that–there’s a real kind of tension between wanting the Irish Americans, you know, the Americans of Irish descent, to come there and spend money, which certainly helps, and feeling like their culture has become a theme park. I’ve been told this is called Paddy wackery.
Anne Brannen 3:36
Yeah, I don’t think we have a word for it in New Mexico, although, if I’m going by one of the little stores selling things tourists and I see dream catchers, I really want to poke something in my eyes. I mean, I don’t know whether you–Michelle knows this, I know–but you know that not all Native American tribes are the same thing?
Michelle Butler 3:36
I learned this as an adult, but I know it now.
Anne Brannen 3:36
Yes, because Michelle comes over to Albuquerque to visit things. So the town needs the university and and that’s beside the fact that the nobility and royalty were not only supporting the university colleges, but creating them, endowing them, that’s why they’re named things like King’s College or Queen’s College, or Pembroke or Merton or whatnot. So the university brought in money. The students needed lodging. They needed food and ale and books, and the town merchants relied on that. So, on to our story. The Paris strike that was so big was in 1229, but in Oxford, this strike in 1355, happened not long after the Black Death, which happened not long after the great famine. And so economic stability had more or less gone out the window because there had been massive population losses. That leads to a lot of social changes. There were fewer workers, of course, so work was more valued, but the town and the university were both suffering financially, so that didn’t help relations either. It just kind of doesn’t. I mean, you need more money. Money is a good lubricant, and lack of money is a very bad one. So there had been, over the centuries–even before the Great Famine and the Black Death–there had been, over the centuries, lots and lots of incidents which fed the dislike that the town and students had for each other. In 1209 Cambridge was founded, for instance–and the story is, and I think we actually do have some evidence for this–so in 1209, the town had lynched two scholars after a woman had been murdered, and a whole bunch of the scholars just up and left. They went to Cambridge and founded Cambridge, which is the other big old university in England. And periodically, students kill townspeople, or townspeople kill students, and those incidents might lead to excommunication and fines for the culprits. When they were townspeople, not so much when they were students. And town constables would get involved in these incidents very often. Rather than actually helping out, they would beat up students also. Oh, and the students were also rioting among themselves. You don’t want to think that the students of Oxford were only going and beating up townspeople. No, no, they also beat up each other and killed each other occasionally. So that had been going on for centuries, and now it’s 1355. So here’s what happened. There were some students in the center of town at the Swindlestock tavern, which was a regular student hangout. Michelle finds this a hilarious name.
Michelle Butler 3:36
What were you expecting?
Anne Brannen 3:36
So they were hanging out there. It’s not there anymore, but there’s a plaque. You could go see the plaque, and this is really the center of town.
Michelle Butler 3:36
That tavern is there from 1250 to 1709. It’s a long time.
Anne Brannen 3:36
Yeah, well, it gets a little beat up during this, I’ll tell you. So there’s a plaque. You can go see the plaque. And so these students were drinking, and they didn’t like the wine, which they considered inferior. And John de Croyden, John de Croyden, who had served them the wine, wouldn’t listen to Roger de Chesterfield and Walter de Springhouse, two of the scholars. Now I want to say here that I find this–this is another thing I find hilarious. You would think looking, at these names, if you weren’t examining, that these are like nobility of Anglo Norman stock. De Croyden, de Chesterfield, de Springhouse. But it’s pretty much a name like saying Anne de Albuquerque, it’s really it’s not a big time name. These are just some people. Roger de Chesterfield and Walter de Springhouse were a couple of clergymen. They were scholars and they were clergymen. And when they complained and asked for better wine, there were snappish words, we are told. Snappish words exchanged and then de Chesterfield threw his inferior wine into de Croyden’s face, apparently, because he got incensed with de Croyden, because de Croyden was, quote, ‘stubborn and saucy.’ So after he threw the wine in his face, he threw his wood–either he threw his wooden mug at croydon’s head, or he beat him over the head with the wooden mug. What exactly he did depends on whether you’re reading the students or the townspeople’s reports. The townspeople said he got beat up. And so then lots of people in the tavern got involved, as happens even today sometimes. And so. But the fight got so, so very riotous, that it went out into the street. And then the two factions went and rang bells. The townspeople rang the bell at St Martin’s Church, which was the official church for the town, and the students rang the bells at St Mary the Virgin, which was the university church. They’re about two blocks from each other, maybe three. They’re not that far from each other–they’re both on the high street. There’s one, there’s the other day. So they rang the bells. And I think I understand from this that you can tell the difference. Well, of course you would be able to, wouldn’t you, because the bells of the churches in Oxford are going to all ring, some of them at the same time, and you have to know when it is that you are being called to your church. Okay. So they rang the bells, and the chancellor, the university chancellor, came. He tried to try to calm everybody down. I envision this is like in those, you know, those western movies, when the sheriff comes out to try to keep people from lynching–he says, ‘Now, Martha, you remember that he helped you?’ I think it’s like that. It didn’t work, and people shot arrows at him. So he left. So much for that. Surprisingly, at the end of the fighting that night, nobody was dead or even wounded. So one day of fighting–so far so good. Except the chancellor, whose authority had been mightily vexed by having arrows shot at him. He tried to fix everything, and he did this by proclaiming at these churches, these two churches, that no one is allowed to carry weapons or disturb the peace. And the town magistrate supported him. So this is like an early form of weapon control didn’t work any more than gun control has been working lately for some of us. Okay, so they didn’t listen to him, even though the town magistrate and the Chancellor of the University were saying, put your weapons down. Everybody. Be polite. Be nice. Nobody listened. Maybe they would have, I don’t know, maybe they would have, but the town bailiffs were not only urging the townspeople to arm themselves, which was, of course, not their job. Bad bailiffs. They were also paying people from the towns nearby to come join the fight. Okay. The townspeople did arm themselves, didn’t they, and there was a church where they knew some scholars to be, and so they killed one of the students. They injured some more, and they shot at the master of theology, and they chased him all around. And the bells of the two churches got rung again, and the students barricaded the town gates, although, unfortunately, they didn’t barricade the west gate well enough to keep a couple of thousand locals from coming in. They had banners and they were yelling things. Now you might say to yourself, why? I think I covered this–why would local people who are not in the town be so upset at the university–and the answer is that the university has really big britches and has been making everybody behave, and so they all hate them. All right, there they were, and the students barricaded themselves into their various halls, and the citizens who were following the completely disorganized manners of all rioters everywhere, not only killed all the students they saw–you remember, they can be recognized, because they’re wearing clerical gowns. So they killed all the students they could find, and they also broke into local inns and hostels, and they drank and ate everything. It’s really bad. Anyway, some people are dead. It’s not funny, Anne, stop it. And then evening came, and it was the end of that day. And so the rioting died down, and both town and university authorities went around proclaiming that it was not okay to injure the scholars. Don’t do that. But then it was morning. So because the townspeople and the local citizens were just not done yet, they did not pay attention to the king. This was Edward the third, who was nearby issuing proclamations. I myself personally, if Edward the third told me to do anything, I would do it, but they didn’t pay attention. So instead of behaving, they continued to kill any students they could find and break into inns and university halls and scalp students. On the third day, they moved on to scalping students and also taking students’ corpses and throwing them into gutters and dunghills and privies and into the Thames. And then after that, it was evening again, the end of the third day, and the townspeople were a little tired, and the scholars had fled out of the city, and a whole bunch of the town was burnt down. One of these details, by the way, is that Merton college was pretty much left alone. And I’m like, why? Well, the students were so well behaved. I’m thinking that doesn’t make any sense, but also because it’s built out of stone. But at any rate, Merton college did not get trashed, so yay. Any rate, everything was over, and the numbers I’ve seen range from 75 to 100 people altogether were dead. Michelle says it’s 93 Why don’t we go with Michelle.
Michelle Butler 3:36
That seems to be the consensus of what I was looking at. But the likelihood that we know a precise number is not good.
Anne Brannen 3:45
But you can say 93 because, you know, it’s a good number, but isn’t one of those round numbers that make you think that maybe everything’s being made up. So the king took over, he put sent judges in, and the end of all that was that all of the scholars were pardoned and the university rights returned. But as for the town, the bailiffs, who really had been very bad–I mean, they had been monstrously bad–the bailiffs were put in prison along with the mayor. But I’m not sure about that, because I don’t know what the mayor was doing, but I don’t know. Maybe, you know, acting in cahoots with the bailiffs. The town got fined what amounts to about 330 pounds, and was under interdict. So they couldn’t have mass and they couldn’t have burials and marriages, newborn babies were allowed to be baptized. that was basically it. So they’re under interdict. And then after that, in June, because you remember this riot was in February, Edward gave the university even more rights. They got to tax the food and drink sold in the town, and they got to act like an annoying HOA and make everybody keep their property up to the university standards. Those of you who aren’t, perhaps in America, HOA would be the homeowners association where, in America, if you buy a home that is under the jurisdiction of a home owners association, they don’t let you do whatever they put into their rules you couldn’t do, like put plastic flamingos on the lawn, for instance, or you have to keep the grass a certain height, and can’t have art of. different sorts displayed that they don’t like. Any rate, the university was an HOA, really, and there were some other financially nice things, and the town, bless their hearts, was allowed to deal with any disputes and problems in Oxford that had to do with the citizens. But if there was a student involved, the university was in charge. And was that all? No, it was not. The bishop did lift the interdict. Okay, so people were allowed to go to Mass and get buried and married and things like that. But he imposed a penance on the town, which was every year on St Scholastica’s Day, 60 of the townspeople, along with, of course, the mayor and the bailiffs also had to attend mass for those killed in the riot and to pay an annual fine to the university of a penny for each student killed. And all the new mayors as time went on, had to swear to uphold whatever the damn university said. This did not end either the tension or the conflicts, but there was never another bloody riot like that. The University had become the dominant power in the town. It had much more power than it had before. That’s what happened in Paris too, after the strike, because there, the scholars and students left for three years, and things fell all the hell and gone financially. So in both cases, the townspeople were not actually helped by this, although I gather that they enjoyed killing the students. I gather they had some fun there, but it was short lived, and there were more fights. But nothing of this nature ever went on. The penance got dropped in 1825, which is one of the reasons that you can find Victorian postcards of the St Scholastica riot. I mean the St Scholastica riots stayed in the popular imagination. And one of the reasons is that it got pulled up every year because the because the town had to go pay the university.
Michelle Butler 21:59
Almost 500 years.
Anne Brannen 22:02
So it adds up, and they were paying interest, but every year it was only–and the pennies got worth, like, less and less, actually, as time went on. Anyway, the penance got dropped. And the reason it got dropped is that the mayor said no, and everybody said, Oh, okay. And so they dropped it. That had happened once before, but the mayor got fined. That was some years before that, but by 1825 everybody’s like, Oh, whatever. And this is important–on February the 10th, 1955, the 600th anniversary of the St Scholastica riots, the university gave the mayor of Oxford an honorary degree, and the town made the Vice Chancellor of the University a Freeman of the city. So this is very meaningful, but at that point, times was were different, and all of that was because although the university continued to be this major financial and political player in the city–this is true of all college towns where the universities are basically bigger than the town itself.–the university in the town no longer operated under different legal jurisdictions, and that, in large part, equalizes the playing field. Students continued to behave badly. They did then. They did for hundreds of years. They still do. Many students are well behaved. Let’s take a little moment where we remember that not all students get really, really drunk, and break all the windows on the main street after a football game. Some of them are actually studying. The university continued to buy local property. But the townspeople had recourse that they did not have before, because nowadays, if you are a badly behaved student, and if you do break a tavern’s window on the street after the football game, and if you are on the camera, the security footage, you get fined and perhaps put in jail. All right. So that’s new. Townspeople didn’t have that ability at the time of the riots, and for some time afterwards, in England. This is all going to change, certainly at the Reformation, because the universities then no longer belong to the churches.
Michelle Butler 24:13
That’s true. Yeah.
Anne Brannen 24:14
Is that when it changes in Paris? Do you remember? Because the church loses jurisdiction over the main universities. I mean, there’s still church schools, that’s different, but the students at any school that’s run by churches are still subject to regular law. Like, if you’re at Duquesne University, which is a religious school, and you do something very bad, as some people have done, it’s the local police that are after you, and you don’t like go to the Chancellor and get fined.
Michelle Butler 24:44
That’s true, but there is still–because universities have their own internal police force–there’s sometimes some gray areas about when you call the external cops. I remember when I was in college–that was 1990–94 so maybe things are different now–but at that time, there was a desire to handle things internally. So if you had a sexual assault, or if you had theft, or, you know, a student trying to die of alcohol poisoning on their 21st birthday at the fraternity, there was a reluctance to pick up the phone and call the local cops. There was a desire to handle it internally. There was pushback on that, but it seems like that’s still kind of–the first pass is well, called campus cops, and the fact that universities still have their own police force is, I think, a residual effect of having their own kind of law in the Middle Ages.
Anne Brannen 25:46
That would make sense.
Michelle Butler 25:47
Certainly huge pieces of the university are coming from how it was set up in the Middle Ages.
Anne Brannen 25:54
Those things that we wear when we’re going around on the stage, for instance, although they’re in polyester, not wool and so they’re not nearly as comfortable. But yeah, it’s still really true that if the university can, it would rather not get involved with the local police. But–
Anne Brannen 26:11
Technically–
Anne Brannen 26:12
Technically, everybody on the university campus is subject to the same law that you would be subject to if you were downtown. So that’s my story about St Scholastica. Oh, and by the way, you might think that St Scholastica was some kind of like person that did a lot of reading and studying. No, no, it’s just a nun whose name St Scholastica–doesn’t have anything to do with study. It just sounds–it’s really great though, that the Oxford riot was on St scholastica’s Day.
Michelle Butler 26:41
I think she was st Benedict’s sister, the one who wrote the Benedictine rule. I think that’s his sister.
Anne Brannen 26:48
So some reading would have been happening, even though she would not have been able to go to university. But no, this is not about, you know, this is not about the saint of the university. That’s not it. It was just a Saint’s Day, and it was Saint Scholastica. Michelle, I believe you also enjoyed this topic.
Michelle Butler 27:06
If I knew about this, I didn’t have enough context when I learned about it before to kind of understand exactly how big of a deal this is. Having this many people die in a town-gown riot is a big deal. And we talked a little bit about how in college towns, these same kind of tensions still exist. I’ve lived in college towns nearly my entire adult life. And, you know, the rent is higher in university towns. The rent is higher here than it would be in three towns over because of 40,000 undergraduates that are here.
Anne Brannen 27:39
Many of whom leave for three months in the summer. If you are relying a lot on that income, you’ve got to figure out how to make it through the summer without it.
Michelle Butler 27:50
A lot of the restaurants here actually on the Strip close for the summer.
Anne Brannen 27:54
Wow.
Michelle Butler 27:55
So every college I’ve ever lived in, there is this tension where the permanent residents, a significant, not all, but a significant percentage, is continuing the argument that we would be better off without them. When I lived in Pittsburgh, there were always people arguing that. College Park Maryland, where the University of Maryland was, and here in Tuscaloosa. It’s just kind of goes with the territory. If you have a university and you have a town around it, you have this established relationship of mutual profiteering.
Anne Brannen 28:25
Oh, that’s a good way to put it.
Michelle Butler 28:27
Attempting to take advantage of each other, you know, because this isn’t going one way. Everything gets overcharged for–
Anne Brannen 28:35
And sometimes people, sometimes students, do get given inferior wine. I actually have no doubt that the tavern was giving that table of students some bad wine. Why not?
Michelle Butler 28:45
It really is this kind of relationship about being aggrieved that the other person is trying to do to you what you’re doing to them.
Anne Brannen 28:53
Yeah, it is a little silly, actually.
Michelle Butler 28:56
But I enjoyed reading about this. The Internet is awesome. There is tons of stuff about the Saint Scholastica riot on the internet. There’s a delightful meme on Reddit with people talking about it that I will give you in the show notes.
Anne Brannen 29:11
Oh, good, good.
Michelle Butler 29:12
It’s great. And I just, I just love that. One of the nice things about the internet, is that more people know about random things.
Anne Brannen 29:21
That’s true, isn’t it? That’s true. This is really great if you have, like, ADHD, because you can find out all kinds of things about anything that’s comes into your head. I don’t remember how I survived without the internet, when I could look random things up at every moment and thereby get some dopamine. Woohoo. Yeah, you’re right.
Michelle Butler 29:41
So I’ve got this great meme about it that I will put in the show notes for you. But it says ‘college students these days are such snowflakes, lol.’ And then it has a picture of a post apocalyptic warrior who looks a lot like Keanu Reeves: ‘college students in 1355 when they get served bad wine. And what he’s saying is, we’ve got a city to burn.’ I adore the idea that this riot is known in internet culture enough that somebody made a meme about it, that a whole bunch of other people come in to comment about it, which is hilarious. There are a bunch of videos about it on YouTube. I put my favorite half dozen in the show notes, but there’s lots more.
Anne Brannen 30:28
Wait, wait, wait, what is a video about the saint Scholastica riot about? Is it one of those things where somebody with an English accent, on account of they’re being English, walks around looking at buildings and saying, here in 1355?
Speaker 1 30:44
There’s a whole spectrum. You have ones that are very scholarly.
Anne Brannen 30:49
Oh, you have to do those in a certain tone of voice. I know.
Michelle Butler 30:52
Yes, you have a couple with history professors explaining the things, all the way over to the one that is clearly this dude in his dorm room with wigs, and it’s pretty funny. I mean, he starts with ‘you may think you partied hard in your university days, but you didn’t party as hard as these Oxford students in 1355.’ So you have the whole gamut. But what’s interesting about them is that they’re basically okay. These aren’t like the St Olga ones, where you had a lot of inflammatory and kind of it was more about making a point than having–not every single one of these is awesome, and not every single one of them is interesting, but they’re basically providing the facts, it’s not inflammatory. And it could have been inflammatory, so I was pleasantly surprised.
Anne Brannen 31:46
Certainly could have, because there’s two sides to this, and both of them are in the wrong.
Michelle Butler 31:51
There is also a historical novel that uses the St Scholastica riot as the inciting incident for the plot.
Speaker 1 32:01
Unbelievable. Tell me about this. What is this?
Michelle Butler 32:04
So this is a called The Mark of a Murderer, and it is the 10th book in the Matthew Bartholomew series by Susanna Gregory. The first book in the series is actually called A Plague on Both their Houses, and it is with the Black Death coming to Cambridge. So Matthew Bartholomew is a physician who is in Cambridge. He’s a scholar at Michaelhouse College in Cambridge, which no longer exists. The author tells us on her website that she picked Michaelhouse because it doesn’t exist anymore, just to make her life easier. It actually was incorporated into Trinity College when Henry the Eighth wanted to found a college on the cheap.
Anne Brannen 32:54
Now that’s the way to do it, isn’t it. You take some others and you kind of like stick them together.
Michelle Butler 33:00
He wanted the cachet. Listen, man, I tell you, he wanted the cachet of founding a college, but he didn’t want to pay for building buildings, so he appropriated King’s Hall and Michaelhouse and some other buildings and made them into Trinity College. But none of Michaelhouse’s buildings still survive.
Anne Brannen 33:21
Henry the Eighth. He’s so awful.
Michelle Butler 33:29
He is dreadful. Not a whole lot is known about Michaelhouse in the 14th century. Certainly not as much as we would like. Because one of the things that happened in the Peasants Revolt 1381 is people around Cambridge were mad at the debts that they owed to the college, and they went into Cambridge and dragged out the chest of promissory notes, and ‘we sold our land to the college’ and and burned it.
Anne Brannen 34:00
That would contain not only just the accounts, but also some of the bursar’s chronicles.
Michelle Butler 34:05
Yes.
Anne Brannen 34:05
Oh well
Michelle Butler 34:06
Those records got burnt during the peasants revolt. But that also reminds us that part of the peasants revolt was a town gown issue. It wasn’t just about rebelling against the king and the nobles. The university was part of the ruling class that was being resisted.
Anne Brannen 34:24
You know, I had forgotten that–okay. Thank you.
Michelle Butler 34:26
So the premise of this book, I don’t want to spoil a plot, but what’s happening is, it’s set in June of 1355, and Oxford scholars, several of them have fled to Cambridge after the riot in February, they start getting killed one by one. And what our Matthew Bartholomew–I think it’s safe to say this because this is actually on the back of the book, so it’s not spoiling anything–what he figures out is that someone started the riot on purpose.
Anne Brannen 34:56
Oh, really. Oh, I love that. I’m gonna go read that.
Michelle Butler 34:58
Yeah, it takes the premise that the riot didn’t just happen, that it was prodded, that the people in the tavern were prodded into getting into this conflict. And the first scene of the book is actually us getting that scene in the tavern, and the person who was there as the provocateur. I actually really like this concept, because it helps explain why this blew up so fast. The premise is that this provocateur had weapons on hand that he’d hidden outside, and so as people were getting stirred up, he was just throwing gasoline on the fire. ‘Here, have an ax.’
Anne Brannen 35:35
Well, you know, since it’s true that the bailiffs of the town did indeed egg things on, there’s a nice little there’s a way in which it kind of makes sense.
Michelle Butler 35:46
It’s an interesting book. It’s the 10th book in the series. It reads okay as a standalone, but it also does make reference to some earlier things that happened. It’s not what I would call fast paced, if you’re used to you things–boom boom boom boom. Matthew Bartholomew, the main character is fictional, but his friend Michael, the proctor of Michaelhouse College, is based on a real person. And I will also say that there’s fat shaming of Michael that becomes tiresome. I’m just going to be honest.
Anne Brannen 36:20
Okay, well, that’s no fun.
Michelle Butler 36:22
I’m 75% of the way into the book, and a whole humongous piece of Michael’s character is the fact that he’s large. I could have done without that.
Anne Brannen 36:32
Even if there wasn’t, at the time it was written, as much consciousness of how it is that people talk to each other, still kind of the basic rules of how one talks–
Michelle Butler 36:47
I’s 2006 so I guess there was certainly less awareness. But I was a little startled by–really?
Anne Brannen 36:56
It’s cheap. You don’t need it. You just don’t need it. It’s cheap and it’s mean, therefore tacky. We don’t like tacky.
Michelle Butler 37:03
So I just wanted to, you know, give a little heads up, I am not endorsing the fat shaming.
Anne Brannen 37:08
Other than that, it’s reading pretty well?
Michelle Butler 37:11
Yeah.
Anne Brannen 37:11
All right then.
Michelle Butler 37:12
That is an ongoing series. She’s on about 25. I wanted to mention that, because when we talked about Ellis Peters and Margaret Frazier, those authors have both passed away. And also Sharon Newman, when we talked about A King’s Ransom, those authors have passed away.
Anne Brannen 37:31
This one’s still writing?
Michelle Butler 37:33
Yes, Susanna Gregory is still alive and still writing.
Anne Brannen 37:37
Well, what I would want to know is, does the fat shaming continue? Because if so, this needs to get addressed in a letter to the author. Otherwise, if she stops, one can just let it go.
Michelle Butler 37:47
I don’t know. There was a stage in my life where a series that has 25 books in it, I would be all like, yeah, I’m excited about this, I’ll blow through it. Now I’m like, oh gosh, that makes me tired.
Anne Brannen 37:56
I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time.
Michelle Butler 37:59
I’m really gonna have to think about whether I want to invest–I guess that is one of those pieces of turning 50 where you’re like, I have limited time here. Do I want to read 25 books?
Anne Brannen 38:10
It’s why it’s easier to throw stuff out. I’ve carried all this stuff with me. I’ve moved it around the country. I mean, I always throw some stuff out. But now I’m like, am I going to actually use this in the time I have left, and often the answer is, No, I am not, and then I get to get rid of it. I will not be making this thing that I thought I might make. That was fun.
Michelle Butler 38:28
I was delighted to find a book that used the Saint Scholastica riot as a springboard. And I think that the premise of having the–because we know scholars did leave Oxford and go elsewhere. So having them come to Cambridge, and–one of the pieces that I really like about the book is the mutual disdain that the Cambridge scholars and the Oxford scholars have for each other. The Oxford scholars are like, this is a backwater, and the Cambridge scholars like, you are a bunch of snobs. And anyway, somebody just burnt your town down, so how dare you?
Anne Brannen 39:02
What is that university that’s up northern Pennsylvania, where everything gets set on fire after the football games. What is that?
Michelle Butler 39:10
Penn State?
Anne Brannen 39:10
Penn State, yes. So they have the Penn State riots very often. And so far, since I have been around and listening to it, there’s been a lot of property damage, but nobody’s died.
Michelle Butler 39:24
It actually is hard to imagine a scenario in which a riot would break out in a university town now and 100 people end up dead. That would be, that would be a major, major thing. And this was a major major thing.
Anne Brannen 39:38
It was a big deal.
Michelle Butler 39:39
But there was kind of ongoing violence with–we had the thing where the two scholars got lynched earlier. And so you do actually have breakouts of violence. It’s just, this is a really big one that they remember for a long time. But it’s an isolated incident in terms of scope, but not in terms of concept.
Anne Brannen 39:59
Yeah. And it’s the same thing with the Paris strike. There had been violence and problems before, but that got big and the university shut down and said, To hell with you. So that was our discussion of the St Scholastica day riot, which the townspeople of Oxford are no longer having to pay for. That’s nice. That’s really nice. Because really, after 600 years, you’d think you could, like, stop paying for that. The next time that you hear from us, we’re going to be in Central Europe, because we’ve done st Olga in Kiev, and we talked about somebody that got killed in Novgorod. But we haven’t really ventured a lot into Central Europe, and we are feeling like it is important to do so. Because it’s important. That’s just how it is. It’s important. So the next time you hear from us, we’re going to be talking about that time in Ruthenia, which is doesn’t exist anymore, so don’t go looking for it, but it’s like Belarus and Ukraine. So you know Ruthenia, that time that Vasvilkas the Grand Duke of Lithuania, was murdered. That was in 1267, so it’ll be about the same time, further east on the continent. That’s where we’ll be. This has been True Crime, Medieval where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. We can be found on Apple podcast and Spotify and any of the places where the podcasts are hanging out. And you can find us at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word, and you can leave comments, and you can get a hold of us there, and you can also let us know if there’s any crime, medieval crimes that you think that we should look at, and we’ll probably put them on our list. How many pages have we got of things that we’re going to be doing? You told me earlier?
Michelle Butler 41:49
16.
Anne Brannen 41:51
Yeah, we’re not running out of crimes anytime soon. We got some. Because people behave very badly, and especially now that we’re really focusing on not just Western Europe, but Central Europe. There’s even more crimes, because that’s a lot of area, isn’t it? It’s got people in it. And you know what? People are, Michelle, people are badly behaved. I’m just telling you. Anyway you can find us, and you can leave comments, and that would be lovely. And yeah, so we’re True Crime medieval. We like to talk about things that happen in the Middle Ages, all over the Middle Ages. Bye.
Michelle Butler 42:28
Bye.
87. King Philip Augustus Fakes a Genealogy, Paris, France 1194
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 well, Tuscaloosa, but now, Northport which is the city across the river, in my house, which is very exciting.
Anne Brannen 0:44
So this is a suburb of Tuscaloosa?
Michelle Butler 0:48
It was its own city. It’s across the river.
Anne Brannen 0:55
Oh, so you have to go across the river to drive to the university.
Michelle Butler 1:00
As a former Pittsburgher I was very leery about being on the opposite side of the river from the university because Pittsburghers basically don’t believe in crossing rivers and I learned that from them. They’re very superstitious about it. Nobody lives on the south side and works at the University of Pittsburgh.
Anne Brannen 1:17
I was there for like 22 years, most of it living on the south side. I have a double second cousin on the north side. The only time that we saw each other was once when I had a family reunion, and she came to the south side.
Michelle Butler 1:30
So I had lots of reservations about it. But I got over that, after living here for a year and understanding that people actually do that here.
Anne Brannen 1:41
They go over rivers.
Michelle Butler 1:43
They do. There’s two bridges, and they go over them with impunity.
Anne Brannen 1:47
What is the thing about the bridges and not going over them in Pittsburgh? There’s one city in the world that has more bridges than Pittsburgh, and it’s Venice. There’s a lot of bridges. You could go over the bridges, but no no no. Well, you can go over one bridge and go from the south side to Point Park, or from the north side to Point Park, which can’t go over two bridges. No, no, no, no. Any rate. So, hi.
Michelle Butler 2:18
So we’re here. We’re unpacked, we’re moved in. It’s exciting.
Anne Brannen 2:25
Cool. So here we are. And today we are discussing–in 1193, in France, Philip the Second, who was at that time the King of France, got married. And then he repudiated his wife, like immediately. So that’s what we’re talking about. So yeah, and was it a crime? Well, yes. According to canon law things. Things were going very badly with Philip for a while there. But that’s our crime. We thought it was interesting. And so that’s why we’re doing it.
Michelle Butler 2:53
I actually do think there’s crimes involved here. For one thing, he forges a family tree to make it look like they’re very connected. So there’s legitimate crimes involved here. He is lying. He’s forging. His attempts to get rid of his wife–I thought that it was fairly criminal. But it also is bumping up against this cultural context of 200 years of noble men being able to get rid of their wives with impunity, especially in France.
Anne Brannen 3:24
Deciding he wants to get rid of his wife after one night. That’s just basically tacky. I don’t know if that’s criminal.
Michelle Butler 3:31
I enjoyed very much, though, reading people’s entirely fact free speculation as to what his objection was.
Anne Brannen 3:40
Oh my God, there’s so much speculation. It’s easy to make stuff up when you don’t really know what happened. So we’re talking about Philip the Second of France. He was the first king of France, because his predecessors had all been kings of the Franks. He was the first one to call himself that.
Michelle Butler 3:59
I didn’t know that.
Anne Brannen 4:00
I found so much stuff out, you’re gonna love this. So he’s the first of the kings of France. He was born in 1165. And he was crowned king while his father was still alive, because that’s what the Capetian kings were doing then. But his father was in very bad health and died in about a year. And so at that point, Philip was full king. And that’s when he began to call himself the King of France. France had existed–we’re gonna have a whole bunch of little segues while we go. It’s not just going to be context and historical context about this. I have segues. Here’s a segue. France had existed before he started calling himself the King of France. West frankia had been established in the eight hundreds when the Carolingian Empire fell apart. It fell into sections–there was a section that included Bavaria and Germany. And there was a section that was Aquataine, and there was a section that was Italy. And there were two sections that were lower and upper Burgundy. And then there was Francia, which was France, which would as you can see later down the road also include Aquataine and Burgundy but at this time no, not for a while. Okay. So Philip’s first marriage was made that year while he was co ruler. He was married when he was 15 to Isabel of Hainault who was 10. She was born in Valenciennes and she had been promised to the count of Champagne but that fell apart when her father figured out that he could marry her to the king of the Franks, as he was that year. And so when Isabel was 14, she had still not had a child. And we don’t know actually, if the marriage had even been consummated yet, there’s really no discussion of that. Philip decided he wanted to get rid of her because he wanted them, he wanted the marriage annulled because he needed an heir and he didn’t have one, where are the babies. She’s 14 already. What the hell. Anyway, she walked barefoot in her shift through the streets, from church to church, praying and weeping and the people loved her. It was very affecting. So Philip kept her and then Isabella began to have children, which did not go well. The first child was female, and either died soon after her birth or was stillborn. And then Isabella had a miscarriage. Her third pregnancy actually ended in living child–frail, but living child and they named him Louis. He would become king of France after his father died. Spoiler alert. So he’s gonna be the next king of France. Yay, everybody rejoiced. Yay. However, in 1190, when she was 20, she gave birth to twin boys. And one son was born dead. The next one died in a few hours, and Isabella died the next day. So that was 1190. Philip had tried to divorce her, but, you know, he then had children. He married again in 1193. You know, because he had a son who’s kind of frail, and he had to have more children, because there’s this thing about the damn throne and making sure that everything is well. So he would marry again in 1193. And by that time, what had Philip been doing? Little explanation–here is kind of a segue. He had expelled the Jews from France in 1180 and he confiscated all their property and their goods, although he let them back in in 1198. Yay, I guess. Why would you go back? But anyway, he had been at war with Philip of Flanders, that would be of course, his brother in law, starting in 1181, the year after he married Isabella–the sister of the guy he was at war with. Through that he won more land for France in 1185, at which point he began to be called Philip Augustus. So if you’re going to look for him, you can look under Philip the Second of France or just Philip Augustus, and he will show up. Philip Augustus on account of enlarging France rather than making it smaller, which some of his predecessors had been doing. He also had been having long fights with the Angevins. The English throne at that point, when he was getting married, was held by Henry the second who was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine. And there were quarrels over the dowry of Phillip’s Sister Margaret, who was the widow of Henry’s son Henry the young king, who had been co ruler of England when he died. Where does the dowry go? Henry kept it, by the way. And there were quarrels and actual war when another of Henry’s sons Geoffrey died. And because Geoffrey was the Duke of Brittany and Henry, his dad, wanted to keep Brittany, but Philip said that he should keep control of it until Geoffrey’s child was born, because Geoffrey’s wife was pregnant, and she would have a child and that would be Arthur. We’ve actually met these people before in this podcast because we refer you to our recent podcast about King John getting rid of Arthur. But there was wars about this. And also, besides the thing about Geoffrey of Brittany and Arthur and whatnot, how come Henry hadn’t let Phillip’s sister Alice get married to Henry’s son Richard Lionheart yet? So anyway, there were battles, and Henry had to fight Philip and also his sons, John and Richard, who were allied with Philip because that’s how that family rolled. And then Henry died. And by the way, news of the fall of Jerusalem came to France at about the same time and so all the French-English hostilities stopped for a while because, you know, why not? So Philip went on crusade. And that was the Third Crusade if you’re following the Victorian crusade numbering system, and so he was with Richard Lionheart, who was by then the king of England because Henry was dead, wasn’t he? So he was with Richard Lionheart and Frederick Barbarossa who was the Holy Roman Emperor and it didn’t go very well because Philip got very, very ill with dysentery at Acre. And then Richard was snooty to him. And also Philip of Flanders, you would remember this is his former brother in law that he’d been at war with, died, which meant that a very shaky treaty was in trouble. So Philip went back to France. Then Richard, who had been really close to Philip before getting all snooty with him at Acre, really close to him, like they ate from the same dish and they slept in the same bed and they loved each other passionately. We know from the Chronicle or Roger de Hoveden. And has there been a lot of scholarly ink written about there it’s, yes there has, because this particular description sounds very clearly to us like they were lovers, but this isn’t necessarily so given how things are said back at that time. They might just might be a political alliance. Oh, God, we don’t know. Anyway, they ate from the same dish. They slept in the same bed. They were passionately attached to each other. And then they had quite a falling out after Richard was all snooty at Acre. And what exactly the nature of this relationship was before the snootiness at Acre is not entirely clear. And there are many opinions as to what it is. Do you have any thoughts on that, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 11:24
I don’t. There’s actually tons of fiction about that.
Anne Brannen 11:30
Isn’t there just.
Michelle Butler 11:32
Oh, my gosh. But that was tangential. So that’s not what I looked at.
Anne Brannen 11:38
It wasn’t tangential for me, because I’m all about like, what is our context? So it was tangential to what you were looking at?
Michelle Butler 11:44
I was specifically trying to find any kind of historical fiction about the marriage with Ingeborg.
Anne Brannen 11:52
No, no, no, just about the affair with Richard. That’s all we got.
Michelle Butler 11:57
Nothing with that. But lots and lots about Richard and Philip.
Anne Brannen 12:03
And especially because Richard doesn’t seem to have cared very much about the company of women, much like his predecessor, William the second. William Rufus. Just not really a whole lot of ‘let’s get married several times and have babies.’ Any rate, so they’d been close, and they weren’t. And Richard broke off his engagement to Philip’s sister Alice, as I mentioned earlier, so again, also pissed off at Richard. And Richard didn’t give her dowry territories back. And Philip agreed to this, but then he didn’t. And he wasn’t he couldn’t like just attack Richard’s lands, he couldn’t just go to war with Richard, because they were both Crusaders. The thing is, if you were both Crusaders, you are not supposed to attack each other. Did people attack each other? Yes, yes, they did. How did they get around this? Either they got papal dispensations for attacking each other. Or they just did it anyway. The Pope wouldn’t release them. And so what Philip did was he spread really bad rumors about Richard, like things about treachery and murder. Like he had made a deal with Saladin the great general on the other side of Jerusalem, the wars in the Holy Land. Richard had never even met Saladin and there wasn’t any treachery and he hadn’t murdered this other guy. So he did that. And then while he was on his way home, Richard got kidnapped. We refer you to our previous podcast on the kidnapping of Richard Lionheart. And so at that point, Philip joined forces with John, Richard’s brother, and Baldwin, who was the father of Phillip’s wife, who was dead, that first wife who was dead, and they invaded Normandy. And he got some land, but then Richard got released. That was 1194. And Philip had married again, the year before the marriage that we’re going to be talking about, but I’m going to come back to that in a little bit because I want to fill this on out. And Richard went to war with Philip. That lasted about five years on and off, and then Richard got killed. Philip signed a treaty with John, who was king of England at that point. Now, we’re going to take a little break from the litany of Phillip’s many war activities and messing all around to return to our main subject. This would be the second marriage. Isabella, his first wife had died in 1190-childbirth, as I mentioned. He married three years later, and he married Ingeborg, the daughter of the king of Denmark. She brought this humongous dowry, which her brother Knut gave her. And he was at that point, the king of Denmark. Their father was dead. And why did he do this? Why? Because I was like, Denmark. Really? Why? Well, he wanted an heir, naturally because he only had Louie and you need like, you know, an heir and a spare, as we know from Prince Henry, and Denmark was an interesting choice for a political alliance because Denmark had historically been connected to England because of the Vikings, hello, and Knut the Great had been king of England, Denmark and Norway. That was the last king of Denmark who was also King of England. The throne passed from Knut to his son, Harthcnut and from Harthcnut to his cousin, Edward the Confessor, so entirely than just an English throne. At this point, it’s no longer the throne of Denmark, Harthcnut and Edward the Confessor were kings of England. One of Edward’s other Danish cousins wanted the English throne, and so therefore, there were Danish invasions and raids on England until 1086. After that, there were no more raids, but the Danes continued to say that they had a claim to England. So that’s where that claim to the English throne comes from. They haven’t actually been connected for a while, but they were, if you could win this land, it would be your land and therefore your claim obviously was good. Doesn’t this make sense? So when Philip married Ingeborg he received not only the giant dowry, but also an ally in the wars with England. However things did not go well. The day after the wedding, Philip sent Ingeborg away to a convent and he tried to get the marriage annulled. Do we know precisely why? We do not. Philip said that the marriage had not been consummated, perhaps on account of witchcraft on Ingeborg’s part– more on that later. This led to speculation. So you see much speculation about this that he was impotent that night and we don’t know. Ingeborg said that the marriage had been consummated, and that she was the rightful queen of France, reminding many of us of Henry the Eighth and Catherine of Aragon, same things going to be going on later, only with kind of a different result. So Philip asked the Pope to annul the marriage on the grounds of consanguity. In other words, that they were too closely related. He had a genealogy drawn up that proved that they were too closely related for a legal marriage. And the way that he was doing this was he put together a false genealogy that showed that Ingeborg was related to Isabel of Hainaut, his first wife up in the fourth degree–I’ll explain more on that later. Knut appealed to the Pope, her brother appealed to the Pope, and Knut had alternate genealogies drawn up, which you know, had more to do with reality. It had proof they were not too closely related. They were actually fourth cousins once removed. And the fourth degree includes first cousins once removed, but fourth cousins once removed is way out of the problems with consanguinity. They were not related closely. Now, I don’t know. Did that all make sense, that the fourth degree and the first degree and second or fourth removed and whatnot. Did that all make sense?
Michelle Butler 18:05
Kind of I guess, I don’t know. It wouldn’t hurt to go over it.
Anne Brannen 18:11
I’ll try to be a little clearer. Philip’s false genealogy showed that he was related to Isabel of Hainaut in the fourth degree, meaning that they were at least first cousins once removed, that being like–you have cousins, right, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 18:28
Can you maybe just back up and explain what being related in the first degree and related in the second degree?
Anne Brannen 18:34
No I cannot. I can tell you fourth degree because that’s what I looked up. Got ADHD. I had to keep it simple.
Michelle Butler 18:42
Yeah, okay. Gotcha.
Anne Brannen 18:44
So the fourth degree is first cousins once removed, that would be like, the child of your first cousin is your first so that’s removed. Okay. Fourth degree. And he was trying to show that she was related to Isabel of Hainaut that closely.
Michelle Butler 19:00
From which we can intuit that being the first degree must be being siblings. And the second must be like a niece or a nephew.
Anne Brannen 19:10
We could intuit that. But we didn’t look that up.
Michelle Butler 19:13
So people can Google it on their own.
Anne Brannen 19:15
I went to look it up. I went to Geni to try and figure out what they were. Were they actually fourth cousins once removed? They’re like not in there. They’re not anything close.
Michelle Butler 19:25
Particularly for the nobility. I mean, my God.
Anne Brannen 19:29
Yeah. Okay. For those who are confused, I’m sorry. The whole point was, were they related closely? And the answer is no, they were not.
Michelle Butler 19:39
Okay. I got it now.
Anne Brannen 19:41
During all this brouhaha, Philip got married again, in 1196, to Agnes of Mauritania. Perhaps you are asking as I did, where the hell is Mauritania? Well, it doesn’t exist anymore, which is why it’s hard to find. And we don’t exactly know where it was really, but it was in the Holy Roman Empire. It was part of Dalmatia, which has been part of Croatia, but then later was connected to Hungary. Anyway, it’s over there.
Michelle Butler 20:12
I didn’t wonder about that at all. I’m glad you looked that up because I didn’t. I just assumed somewhere in France.
Anne Brannen 20:20
No, it isn’t. This is the helpful part of ADHD–it’s called hyperfocus. What the hell is this? And then I had to go find out. All right. But I did not go into first and second degree, I was bored by that. So the pope declared that marriage invalid on account of it was bigamy because Philip was still married, and he said that Philip had to leave her and Philip wouldn’t leave her. So the pope put all of France under interdict, which means, of course, that the priests are not allowed to–you can’t have communion and you can’t be buried with holy stuff. I mean, you can’t go to your church and have all of the things done that you’re used to having done because you’re under interdict, because your ruler was naughty. So that was 1199. Agnes died in 1201 in childbirth, of course, why not? She had born two children, Maria and Philip, and they were illegitimate on account of they weren’t married, were they, because Philip was already married, but the Pope did make them legitimate later, even though conditions have not changed. Kind of like with the Beauforts and John of Gaunt.
Michelle Butler 21:30
I gotta be honest, I don’t understand Innocent’s rationale with, you know, I’m not going to give you the divorce. But I’m going to legitimate the children with the mistress.
Anne Brannen 21:51
Yeah, well, I know. But you have to promise not to try and be kings or queens or anything. But then we get Henry Tudor, who was the son of Margaret Beaufort. I know this annoys you.
Michelle Butler 21:59
It does.
Anne Brannen 22:01
During the interdict, by the way the French bishops obeyed the crown instead of a pope. And so actually, this interdict didn’t really do anything because all of France got to have everything they wanted. Anyway after Agnes is dead, Philip was still not allowed to divorce Ingeborg, because they were still married, because she was still not actually his first cousin once removed, or any damn thing like that. So Ingeborg was still queen of France. And Philip said that really, he really did need to be divorced because he was being forced into having illegitimate relations. Poor baby.
Michelle Butler 22:44
He has needs.
Anne Brannen 22:45
Besides that, King John of England and Frederick Barbarossa had both been allowed to separate from their wives. So why not? But see, one of the problems was that the false genealogy that had been given as proof was really a sticking point. Everybody knew it was a fake. So Philip went back to the non consummation argument. And then suddenly, he reconciled with Ingeborg in 1213. And she was referred to as queen, she got to be part of all the stuff. At that point, Louis had a son himself. So maybe the issue of succession wasn’t so much of a problem. But other than that, I do not know why did he reconcile? We don’t know. He just did. There’s an aftermath to this, which is that the fourth Lateran Council in 2015, changed the consanguity laws to prohibiting spouses, siblings, and first cousins, which made everything much more simple. Because you really don’t even need a genealogy chart to know who your wife, siblings and cousins are. They’re all kind of right there. You know, they’re not like back in time, and that was in large part because of Philip’s struggles with the papacy over the issue. After the reconciliation with Ingeborg, King John was in conflict with the papacy, and Philip saw his chance to strengthen his own bonds with the papacy. ‘Look, I’m back with my wife,’ and get the church’s support for an invasion of England because he was still down with an invasion of England. This is still going on. You remember, he’s been constantly warring with the Angevins. And what he was able to do was present as a religious war against naughty King John, who was having trouble with the Pope, and Philip was going to get a papal indulgence by doing this. It was really great. However, the papal legate told him that John was a vassal of the Pope, so he couldn’t attack John. John hadn’t been on crusade, so that wasn’t the point. You couldn’t do attacking would be a sin. So why didn’t he invade Flanders instead? And so okay, yeah. And John invaded France, but he got sent back and in 1214, sort of by accident, on account of not very brilliant military maneuvers on both sides, the two forces which would be the French side and the Holy Roman/Flanders side, they met at Bouvines. It was a Sunday, so they weren’t supposed to fight, but the Imperial troops attacked anyway, Philip nearly died but he didn’t die and the Holy Roman Emperor left the field and the count of Flanders was captured. And so that side fled. So the French won, and that was an extremely important victory for the French. At this point, John had to submit to his barons and sign the Magna Carta and the Angevin Empire was over. The Holy Roman Emperor got overthrown and replaced, and the count of Flanders stayed in prison. Philip would die later in 1223. He was the first of the Capetian kings not to have his son crowned as co-king before he died. So he started a new thing. He was king of France, and he was just king of France, and there was no king besides him. And that was it. And over the time that he had been king, he strengthened the monarchy, he had enlarged and strengthened France, he had cleaned up Paris and built a wall around Paris, he had built new towns, he kept the French clergy happy, despite all the problems with the papacy, he shut down the Angevins, and France became a great power. And so that is Philip Augustus. But he was very, very, very badly behaved to his second wife, the end. Michelle’s turn now.
Michelle Butler 26:20
So I put this on the list for a couple of reasons. But one is that this goes on forever. I mean, it’s so fast. He decides on their wedding night, he wants none of her. The next morning, he decides instantly that he wants none of her, which is really fascinating. And then the struggle goes on forever. It’s like 20 years.
Anne Brannen 26:47
Forever, and then he reconciles. Why?
Michelle Butler 26:50
It’s so strange and awesome. But also, one of the arguments he ends up making is that it wasn’t consummated, because she used witchcraft. Maleficium. And I went, what?
Anne Brannen 27:08
Also, why?
Michelle Butler 27:12
I went digging into that, to try to find out if for real, you can argue someone broke my dick with magic.
Anne Brannen 27:21
Yes, I think you could argue that somebody broke your dick with magic. This makes sense to me. But what was going on then?
Michelle Butler 27:26
It surprised me because I would not have expected an early 13th century King to be willing to stand up publicly and say, I was impotent, and therefore this marriage was not consummated, and therefore it’s not real. I wasn’t expecting that. The witchcraft argument apparently gives him a reason, or gives him a an out for that. It’s not my fault.
Anne Brannen 28:00
I’m usually very good at this.
Michelle Butler 28:03
I went digging into an article. Let me give you the title of the article, scroll back up to the top because I was at the conclusion. “Neither Bewitched nor Beguiled: Philip Augustus’ Alleged Impotence and Innocent the Third’s response. I spent quite a lot of time in this article, finding out what on earth was going on with the maleficium argument. And this was fascinating, because he doesn’t make this argument at first. First is the ‘we’re too closely related’ approach. And when he’s getting nowhere with that, not until about 1202, he comes up with the maleficium argument. And then after 1205, maleficium becomes his primary argument, because he’s getting nowhere with it.
Anne Brannen 28:56
Because nobody believes the fake genealogy.
Michelle Butler 28:58
So he’s not getting anywhere with that, so now he’s switched over to the magic-induced impotence. And what the author of that article who is Constance Rousseau, explains is that part of what was going on is that there were regional disagreements about the conditions under which a marriage could be dissolved.
Anne Brannen 29:28
Oh, so there would be the ones that have to do with the church, from the papacy, but the details of it aren’t the same across Europe.
Michelle Butler 29:39
Exactly. Exactly. So Innocent the third had a project of trying to create more consistent rules across the church. Because the French clergy had one approach and the Italian clergy had a different approach and German clergy had a different approach to the conditions under which marriage would be allowed to be dissolved. And the noblemen had been using the we’re too close related argument.
Anne Brannen 30:13
Consanguity.
Michelle Butler 30:15
For 200 years to rid themselves of wives who they should have known if it was a problem that they were too closely related to. It’s not like you’re gonna discover that afterwards.
Anne Brannen 30:25
No, because everybody knows who’s related to each other. That’s why you’re marrying each other.
Michelle Butler 30:31
It had been loopholes that they were using, you know, keeping in their back pocket in case they needed to get rid of her. And so he was trying to tighten that up. But also, he was specifically trying to tighten up the rules about impotence, because the French clergy had tended to allow dissolution of marriage based on impotence. But Rome, the papacy, favored indissolubility of marriage. And if–and I love this part–and their position was that if a couple couldn’t consummate the marriage, they should live together as brother and sister. So not separate, but just transition to a different relationship.
Anne Brannen 31:13
And not getting married to Agnes and have their babies.
Michelle Butler 31:17
The French approach had also been with the temporary impotence–the idea with the maleficium was that that specific woman caused impotence.
Anne Brannen 31:29
For a short time.
Michelle Butler 31:31
Yeah not other women.
Anne Brannen 31:32
So don’t think that this is like this for me all the time. No, no, it was just, you know, just the one night.
Michelle Butler 31:39
It’s her fault. Just her. If you have the temporary impotence, that would be enough to dissolve marriage and allow remarriage, but Innocent said no, no, if you move on to a new relationship and sexual function is recovered, then the first marriage is reinstated.
Anne Brannen 31:59
Well wait a minute, what happens to the second wife in that case?
Michelle Butler 32:07
So Philip also tried arguing–he locked her up in a monastery and then tried to argue that she had, quote, “freely entered religious life” and he should be allowed to–
Anne Brannen 32:23
You know, a different woman might have not fought this.
Michelle Butler 32:28
Yeah, she fought it for 20 years, and I’m so impressed with her. One of my favorite pieces of this is Innocent, pushes him and pushes him and pushes him and ends up getting Philip to acknowledge in a letter that he had, in fact, penetrated Ingeborg.
Anne Brannen 32:47
So he admitted that the marriage was–
Michelle Butler 32:50
Oh, no, he argues–I love this. This is hysterical–Philip argues in writing, because we have these letters back and forth between Innocent and Philip. He tells Innocent in the letter, well, you know, I did do this piece, but I didn’t ejaculate and leave any semen. So it was not intended as procreation, and therefore, it’s not a legitimate consummation, and therefore, I deserve an annullment. And Innocent was not at all buying this hair splitting argument, the difference between penetration and ejaculation.
Anne Brannen 33:33
Mr. Pope, I did not have sex with that woman.
Michelle Butler 33:40
Innocent was not buying it. I learned so much reading this article. Can you imagine being Philip’s secretary? Okay, here’s what I need you to write. Being Innocent’s secretary opening the letter and, you know, ‘well, read it.’ ‘Your Holiness, he says…’ I’m embarrassed for all of them.
Anne Brannen 34:11
It makes it very clear why Ingeborg thought that the marriage had been consummated. Because yeah. Oh, you know, hello.
Michelle Butler 34:19
Yeah. It’s wild. It’s utterly wild. So that was very interesting. But of course, he doesn’t get anywhere with this argument. He doesn’t get anywhere with this argument. The other thing that I found that I was fascinated by is she had a psalter. Ingeborg had a beautiful, amazing, gorgeous psalter.
Anne Brannen 34:43
Where is it now?
Michelle Butler 34:45
It is in the Chateau de Chantilly.
Anne Brannen 34:48
Oh it’s in Chantilly. Why is it in Chantilly? I wonder.
Michelle Butler 34:54
It was given to them.
Anne Brannen 34:57
Thank you. Because this ADHD hyperfocus–why, why why?
Michelle Butler 35:01
It was given to them by a nobleman in 1892, who had acquired it. It was given to them by the Duke of
Michelle Butler 35:12
Aumale, who had gotten it from the Count de Lignac. It had been a property of the French kings until certain unfortunate things happen.
Anne Brannen 35:28
Involving guillotines.
Michelle Butler 35:29
Yeah, those things, and their library gets dispersed–
Anne Brannen 35:33
Yes it did, along with a bunch of other stuff.
Michelle Butler 35:35
People start buying stuff. It is a spectacular, spectacular Psalter.
Anne Brannen 35:42
You’ll give us a link to the pictures of it.
Michelle Butler 35:44
Yes. And you can see all of it. It’s been scanned.
Anne Brannen 35:48
Oh, cool.
Michelle Butler 35:48
So you can flip through all of it. There’s not consensus about when it was made for her. Some people say it was probably Philip’s gift to her when they married in 1193. We just do not know. Other people say that it was made more towards 1200. It would make sense that it was a marriage gift. I wanted to remind everybody about Melasande’s psalter that we saw earlier, which is a generation or two before this, because it’s 1135, 1137. That was Fulk’s groveling gift.
Michelle Butler 36:11
Yes, after he after he attempted to have her cousin assassinated.
Michelle Butler 36:18
This is a really important book. The Ingeborg Psalter is a really important book because of its place in the transition between one kind of style and the next kind of style. It shows the transition into the high Gothic. It’s also influenced by the Byzantine, and it’s one of the first known books in Western Europe to have been made for a woman. Here’s a piece that I like a lot. There’s elements of it that have the feminine endings that show that it was made for a woman. And after Ingeborg’s death, it went to King Louie,and he had those changed. And he claimed the book–it says it belongs to Louie. So he appropriated her book, and it became his book and it stayed the property of the kings of France until there were no more kings of France. And that I think is an indication of what kind of book it is. It was never sold off. It was never given as a gift. It is a book they wanted to hold on to. So much burnished gold background. It’s amazing.
Anne Brannen 37:33
And the cover, does it still have the cover?
Michelle Butler 37:37
It does not.
Anne Brannen 37:38
Really?
Michelle Butler 37:39
It does not have the original cover. I will say that when I go over and look at the scanned edition, that does not look like an original cover to me. I’m gonna pull it up here and look at it. The cover is later it’s clearly later–it looks like 19th century velvet.
Anne Brannen 38:00
Yeah. So it’s been re-done.
Michelle Butler 38:04
The cover is so ugly that if you saw it in a used bookstore you might not even pick it up. Yeah, it’s been rebound at some point. It must have had a much nicer cover.
Anne Brannen 38:15
And it’s possible that the cover got stolen, possible the cover got damaged, either one.
Michelle Butler 38:23
None of the sources I was looking at say anything about the original cover, which is frustrating. But it has a has calendar in it, the Psalms, a litany and prayers in Latin. One of the reasons we know that it was made for her, like we did with the Melisande Psalter, is that the calendar records dates that are important to her. It has the deaths of her parents.
Anne Brannen 38:53
Oh, how wonderful.
Michelle Butler 38:55
And that’s similar to how we knew that about the Melisande psalter, that things that are mentioned in the calendar are dates of importance to her. The book is famous for its illuminations. Here’s a quote from the facsimile finder website. “It is especially known for its cycle of 27 full page miniatures that separate the calendar from the text.” It’s one of the earliest examples of a deluxe personal psalter made for a woman.
Anne Brannen 39:27
I hope she got to keep it in those all those years she was living like in the convent? Because that’s where she was the whole time, wasn’t she?
Michelle Butler 39:36
And I thought that piece of this was really fascinating because some of the sources that I was reading said that she was having to sell some of her belongings because Philip was not really providing appropriate support for her.
Anne Brannen 39:51
He wasn’t giving her enough food.
Michelle Butler 39:52
So the fact that she managed to hold on to this book. If it had been a wedding present, she may have felt like she had to hold on to it to keep her claim alive.
Anne Brannen 40:06
Or it may that be that she loved it dearly. And it was one of the last things that she would have to sell and she was reconciled before she had to sell it.
Michelle Butler 40:15
It is a just stunning book.
Anne Brannen 40:19
I’m glad she had that. That’s good. What an interesting woman. Because presumably she could have been free and gone about some other businesses if she just had agreed that she wasn’t the queen of France.
Michelle Butler 40:31
That happens sometimes, you know, you decide that it’s just not worth trying to fight this, but she fought it. Well, I have ordered a book about magic and impotence. So hopefully, I will find more cases in which people try to make the argument that someone broke them with magic, and that’s why it was a problem.
Anne Brannen 40:55
That’s great. We can use it for a Valentine episode.
Michelle Butler 40:58
I’m hoping to find more maleficium based crimes,
Anne Brannen 41:01
There you go. Horrible crimes of making people impotent with magic.
Michelle Butler 41:06
Of course if he could have proven that, that itself is a crime. It’s a crime to use witchcraft against people.
Anne Brannen 41:13
Very naughty of her to do that. I don’t see why she would have done it, since it would only cause troubles. Why would you do that? I know. I’ll make the king really unhappy. And maybe he’ll repudiate me and I’m gonna live in a convent for 20 years. Have we come to the end of our things to say?
Michelle Butler 41:30
I don’t really have anything else. That was the two things that I had. I will provide you with a link to both some information about the Psalter and also the scan of the entire book, because it’s definitely worth looking through it.
Anne Brannen 41:48
That’s our discussion of the very admirable queen of France, Ingeborg, and how she managed to stay alive until her annoying husband took her back. And so she was the queen of France, and she remained the queen of France. And then she was the queen of France. And that’s what she has to say. And so do we. The next time that you hear from us, we’re going to be going ahead in time to 1355 and we’re going to go to Oxford. We want to talk about the St Scholastica Town-Gown riot. Yeah, and since you know, schools are starting up, it’s a good time for that. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. You can find us at Apple or Spotify or any of the other places where you find podcasts. They’re all hanging out in various places. And you can also find us at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. And you can find the transcripts and show notes there and links to the podcast, and little blurbs with pictures. And you can leave comments which we are very grateful for. We especially like it when you give us suggestions for medieval crimes that we might not have come across. We’re about to be at our fourth anniversary, aren’t we?
Michelle Butler 43:10
Yeah. Coming up in October.
Anne Brannen 43:15
I did not know when we started this that we do been doing it for four years and still have more to talk about. There’s so many bad people. And so yeah, so you can get a hold of us there. And that’s all today.
86. Henry VI, Holy Roman Emperor, Does Various Bad Things, Germany, Italy, and Sicily, 1169-1197
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, recording for the last time from my apartment. We’re gonna move into our house on Friday. It’s exciting. Yay
Anne Brannen 0:49
So today we are talking about Henry the sixth, Holy Roman Emperor, who’s called the cruel, why not? I think that will work. Often when we are doing these, usually we have a crime. Or like in the case of Hugh Despenser’s, like sheer dreadfulness–we just go through his whole life. Henry the sixth, Holy Roman Emperor. If you look up Henry the sixth what you’re gonna get on Google, if you’re, you know, Googling in English is the English kings. So you have to say, Holy Roman Emperor. He was indeed cruel. But he wasn’t like sheerly dreadful his entire life like Hugh Despenser or King John. King John, we’ve divided up into several podcasts. But anyway, today we are talking about Henry the sixth Holy Roman Emperor, who was born in 1165. He’s going to die in 1197, more stuff about that, but his father was Frederick Barbarossa. And that is a really big deal. Because, you know, legends in your own time–Frederick Barbarossa one of them. He’d been on the Second Crusade. He was Holy Roman Emperor, the Duke of Swabia, the king of Germany, the king of Italy, the king of Burgundy. And finally, in 1190, he drowned when he was going on the Third Crusade, crossing a river. We know he either he tried to swim it, and the current carried him away, or his horse threw them off, and his armor pulled him down. Or he was just having a little wash up, and was only in the water to his waist, and then God killed him. Or he was having a bath in the river and God killed him. But at any rate, he was dead in the water. And he was apparently– and to general agreement still was–a hell of a damn guy. He was 67 when he died. Let’s have a little moment.
Michelle Butler 2:53
I just could not, I could not believe that. When I ran across that he was 67 years old when he said to himself, you know what? I need to do I need to go on crusade again.
Anne Brannen 3:04
It didn’t so well, because he didn’t actually make it anywhere. He just like fell in the river. But up until he was a renowned warrior. He had political clout, he had skills. He did many dramatic things, and he naturally became the subject of legends, good and bad. He managed to bring Germany, which was fragmented and full of infighting, under some kind of control, sort of. He several times went into Italy. He never really managed to conquer and control it. But you know, he did a bunch of stuff. He revived the Justinian code, thereby becoming Holy Roman Emperor. That was Henry the sixth’s dad. You know, it’s a hard act to follow. Sometimes this happens. Like Edward the second.
Michelle Butler 3:55
Exactly, that’s exactly who I was gonna mention. Edward the first and Frederick Barbarossa are really similar personality.
Anne Brannen 4:03
They really are. Yeah, it’s very hard to follow. I think that actually Henry the sixth Holy Roman Emperor did better at it than Edward the second king of England.
Michelle Butler 4:13
He didn’t get deposed.
Anne Brannen 4:15
He didn’t get deposed. Certainly. Yeah. So there’s that. So he died. Barbarossa died and his son Henry, the sixth, our protagonist today. He was well educated. His father wasn’t. His father couldn’t read and write, but Henry the sixth was educated. He was a poet. He loved poetry and singers and whatnot. He’d accompanied his father on a campaign against the Lombard League in Italy. He’d been crowned king of the Romans, his father crowned him king of the Romans when he was four, and he inherited lands and ties that Barbarossa had merged. Sometimes more or less. So He was able to hold them together. But the various pieces of Italy and the various pieces of Germany were very antagonistic toward each other. He was too late. Henry the sixth was too late to grab Thuriginia before its rightful ruler got there. He tried that. He wanted Sicily–a lot of what I’m going to talk about today myself is Sicily. He wanted Sicily.The Sicilian nobility didn’t want him. They wanted Tancred to be the ruler. His wife got captured and used as a pawn by Tancred. And then his son deserted the Imperial Army and lost Saxony and had to negotiate it away–Henry the sixth lost Saxony and had to negotiate it away. But one of the best things that happened to him was that Leopold the fifth of Austria captured Richard Lionheart as he was coming back home after the Third Crusade, and he handed him over to Henry the sixth who got a giant ransom for him and also made Richard swear allegiance to him. So that was a nice deal. That was big. After Tancred died, Henry the sixth did take Sicily and he Tancred’s son very badly–this is one of the cruel things he did. It was said that he castrated and blinded him, but it is probable that he sent him into exile. Although he could have done both.
Michelle Butler 4:15
I found no fewer than three late medieval, so like 14th and 15th century, illuminations that show the blinding and castration of William.
Anne Brannen 4:15
Well, that must be a pretty picture.
Michelle Butler 5:01
The belief by the 14th and 15th century was that that’s something he did.
Anne Brannen 5:01
And he was the kind of person that you could hang that on. Some people would be harder to if you were–if it was just a rumor. There were some people that would be harder to hang that on.
Anne Brannen 6:10
Nobody would believe that Henry the sixth of England had somebody blinded and castrated.
Anne Brannen 6:51
No. That’d interfere with his prayers. Yeah, so that was very bad of him. And he became very powerful, despite some of the problems along the way and managed to get his son crowned king of the Romans, and was very, very powerful when he died. But he died young. He was 31. He died in Messina while preparing for a crusade. He was hunting and he did not die in a hunting accident. He didn’t fall from his horse, and he didn’t get shot. I’m just like, amazed by this. He had the chills. He got chills and he went on home and he died of some kind of illness. Malaria? Dysentry? Some people said is the Empress poisoned him–probably not. But he was dead. And I’ll just say what happens next. His son, like Frederick Barbarossa, became legendary. He’s in the middle of two legendary kings–again, like Edward the second. Henry did not become legendary. He wasn’t a horrible ruler, and had he not died died so early, he might well have held things together. But it’s especially his ruthlessness in Sicily that caused him to be called cruel. And it affected the attitude of the Sicilians later toward the Germans like for a long time. After this, the Pope would put the French Prince Charles in as ruler of Sicily. To be fair, the Sicilians didn’t like the French anymore than they liked the Germans and this was going to lead to the Massacre at the Sicilian Vespers in 1282–we refer you to our previous podcast on the Sicilian Vespers. But I wanted to talk some about Sicily. This okay with you, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 8:41
Yep.
Anne Brannen 8:43
Sicily is so interesting to me. Because the Arabs had conquered Sicily in the ninth century, and the French Vikings, the Normans, conquered it in the 11th century. The Germans conquered Sicily in 1194, so pretty close to what we’ve been talking about. Under the Normans, the kingdom had not been entirely peaceful. That would be like stupid, but it was very multicultural. But the Germans–though there was some toleration of Arabic and Norman customs–were responsible for some atrocities and massacres. And contemporary chroniclers considered Henry the sixth to be especially cruel. There’s an incident that– it’s not a massacre of humans, but I think it’s really indicative of, ‘Germans come to Sicily and find some stuff that the Arabs built.’ Okay. Because there was at Palermo–which was loyal to Tancred and so not good when Henry the sixth came through because he did not like that–there was an especially impressive menagerie which had numerous rare breeds, it was in this beautifully constructed garden. Henry ordered his soldiers to smash the enclosures and slaughter the animals and feed them to the soldiers. That’s what they did with that. Had you come across that, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 10:16
No.
Anne Brannen 10:15
This reminds me so much of the Russians. As a picture of one culture annihilating another–for really is there really any good reason to you smash the beautiful gardens up there,the Arabic gardens, you know, built on the idea of paradise–I don’t think that can be really beat. Because it’s not just the religion of the Arab rulers and or the political power that had to be smashed. It was the culture. The Normans had not smashed this menagerie. And you know what–it was mean, it was just mean. Plus those animals, they were beautiful, rare animals. I cannot I’m sorry, enumerate them for you, or you know, I would. Was there an elephant? Was there a tiger? Was there a lion? I’m thinking so but I don’t know. Before Henry got to Sicily, having managed to control most of Italy, he and his German forces were already seen as barbaric, being, they were seen as having no sympathy or religious scruples or reason even–again, reminding me very much of the Russians. I’m not going to put that part in. There was a lot of concern about this in Siciliy because the trope of German barbarism and tyranny shows up also in the French writings of the time. So that’s how they were considered before they got there. And Henry was violent–he was a poet and well educated–but he was violent. He used violence to achieve his ends, not just diplomacy. The worst atrocities he committed in Sicily, way beyond the smashing of the menagerie. He’d gone back to Germany but he was in Sicily. He was getting ready to go on a crusade. Salerno was had resisted his invasion and so he had to Salerno sacked and pillaged, and you have to go to pretty specific sources to find out what he did. If you just go and you’re just searching this on the internet–doo doo doo doo doo– what you’re going to find out is goes that he treated people very badly at the sacking of Salerno. All right. Yeah, he tortured people really, really badly. So you might want to take a little break here for a few seconds while I say what it was. He impaled some people alive on stakes. What else was it, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 10:16
Some prisoners were sawn in pieces.
Anne Brannen 10:16
He disremembered them. So they would be alive when he sawed them in pieces, yeah.
Michelle Butler 10:16
Yeah. Others covered with pitch and ignited.
Anne Brannen 10:16
Yes, the human torches I forgotten is
Michelle Butler 10:16
‘The principal conspirator, the governor of the fortress of San Giovanni, whom had been intended to make king, was crowned with a red hot crown, which was fastened to his head with nails.’
Anne Brannen 10:16
Going like one up from the Game of Thrones, you know. Okay, we’re back now, and we’re not gonna say any of those things. He’s just horrible, just horrible. And again, that’s just mean. I can sack and pillage a place and kill people and steal all the stuff without actually doing that. But you know, it’s part of getting a reputation as someone that people don’t want to be in front of and do bad things. The crusade that he was about to go out on was the Emperor’s crusade, which falls between the third and fourth crusades–he didn’t make it to the crusade, by the way, he died before he got there. Okay. I don’t usually go on a rabbit hole. I’m usually I just have some stuff I want to say. I’m the person like sitting and lwriting, although I’m not the chronicler writing things down. And Michelle is like the hunter and gatherer and she goes out and she falls down and rabbit holes and she brings us stuff. I have a rabbit hole, which I’m going to share with you. Michelle doesn’t know this stuff either. Because like he went out on the Emperor’s crusade, and it was between the third and fourth, and I said to myself, how? what is it, the third and a half? How many of these things are there? So I went to find out. It’s a public service. I’m now going to tell you the list of the Crusades from Europe to the Holy Land, and then I’ll add some other stuff. So you’re all welcome. Here you are. The first crusade to 1095 to 1099. People’s Crusade, which we have covered in a podcast, 1096. The Crusade of 1101 was also called the crusade of the faint hearted and it was led by people who had left the First Crusade without actually getting to the Holy Land. The Norwegian crusade from 1107 to 1110, in which the king got to the Holy Land–he was the King of Norway, the first European King to get to the Holy Land. There was the Venetian crusade of 1122 to 1124 when the Venetians captured Tyre. There was the crusade of 1129, the Damascus crusade led by Baldwin of Jerusalem–we refer you to our previous podcast–and there was a Second Crusade–oh, here’s the Second Crusade, after all those other crusades. Okay. 1147 to 1150, the Frankish kingdom had lost Edessa, so there was another crusade, but it didn’t get much done. There was a crusader invasion of Egypt to 1154 to 1169 from the Frankish kingdom because the Europeans were in the Holy Land. So they also had crusades. There was a crusade to the east, of Philip of Flanders, that was 1177, where he tried to get into Egypt, but that didn’t go far. The Third crusade, 1189 to 1192. Saladin had taken Jerusalem and so this upset the Europeans and so that’s the one Richard Lionheart was on. There was the Emperor’s crusade of 1197 to 1198. This was the one that Henry was supposed to go on, but he didn’t show up on account of dying of getting sick in the forest. There was a Fourth Crusade, 1202 to 1204. This was called the unholy crusade and that’s the sack of Constantinople. There was a fifth crusade, 1217 to 1221, more not conquering Jerusalem. There was a sixth crusade of 1228 to 1229–not much fighting, but they got Jerusalem back by negotiation. There was the Barons crusade, 1239 to 1241. It was partly sort of about succession. The barons who are in on this are Tybalt of Navarre and Richard of Cornwall and that’s sometimes called two different crusades, the crusade of Tybalt from 1239 to 1240 and the crusade of Richard from 1240 to 1241. At any rate, a couple of barons go off crusade. The crusade against the Mongols in 1241. The Mongols had invaded Hungary. The seventh crusade–another number–1248 to 1254. That’s Louie the ninth of France. That’s his first crusade. There’s the crusade of Odo of Burgundy, 1265 to 1266. They’re trying to protect Acre. The crusade of 1267 was against specifically Baibars, another one of the great Muslim warriors so yeah, whatever. Crusade of Charles of Anjou, 1268. It was an attack on Lucera. The crusade of James the first of Aragon, 1269 to 1270, didn’t do much. There was an eighth crusade, an eighth crusade, 1270. Also it was another Louis the ninth Crusade. Lord Edward’s crusade from 1271 to 1272, future king of England. Also called the Ninth Crusade, also called the Last Crusade. But it’s not. Crusade of Henry of Mecklenburg 1275–he was really on a pilgrimage and he got captured. The siege of Acre, 1291. The emperors lose the Holy Land. So that’s the end, right? No, there are later crusades because you know, deprived of the Holy Land, the Europeans turned on each other and, you know, citizens and whatnot for political reasons, mostly. This goes on and on. And there was also a series of crusades against the Byzantine Empire even before the sack of Constantinople–which wasn’t in that list was it? These weren’t in that list–starting after the First Crusade in 1107 and continuing to 1320. And besides the People’s Crusade of 1096, which I mentioned, there was the Children’s Crusade of 1212, the first shepherd’s crusade of 1251, the crusade of the poor, 1309. The second shepherd’s crusade of 1320. It’s kind of like the plays–you know the Wakefield second shepherd’s. Was that all? No. There were crusades against other Christians like the Albigensians and the Hussites. There were a bunch of planned crusades that didn’t ever actually get off the ground. There were these things that were called crusades that really weren’t where powerful people had arguments with each other. And there were Baltic crusades that happened at the same time as the Holy Land crusades, wherein the Europeans, mostly Scandinavians, and the Friesians and the Germans attempted to make all the Slavic tribes be Christian. Ah ha, did you know about this? I didn’t.
Michelle Butler 11:48
I don’t think I did actually.
Anne Brannen 11:02
These are what are now called Baltic states. It’s not–you know, if you go further east, the Kievan Rus had been pretty much Christian after St. Olga’s son, grandson, Vladimir had the population of Kiev baptized in 988. And before that the Greeks had brought Christianity to Crimea, in the Black Sea colonies, as early as the first century. So these are the places kind of in between Western Europe, and it’s now Central Europe, you know, before you get to Ukraine. By the way, I just want to say this, because I’m just gonna–I just want to say Moscow was this tiny little town at a crossroads in 1117, which is the first we hear of it, I’m just saying. So back to the Crusades. Because, are we done? No. There was the reconquest, when the Moors were defeated in Spain. And there were more crusades, which amounted to the Italians fighting each other. And all in all, there’s nearly 150 of them.
Anne Brannen 12:57
Gracious sakes. So this must be another 19th century thing because the Victorians loved naming medieval stuff.
Anne Brannen 14:48
Yeah, We have Crusades, 1, 2, 3 and 4, and then sometimes they mention the People’s Crusade.
Anne Brannen 15:06
Someone has clearly decided which ones are the major ones.
Anne Brannen 14:01
And they get numbers. And that was what was in my head, because I haven’t been a real scholar of crusades. It was in my head, that you get these, you know, these giant crusades, and there’s some time in between them. There’s basically no point in time for hundreds of years when the Europeans aren’t in some way molesting the Holy Land, or the Baltic states, or Constantinople.
Michelle Butler 16:20
That piece has been a real shock to me. I knew of course about a sack of Constantinople, but it felt like an an aberrant moment, but no, not really.
Anne Brannen 16:45
‘Look, somebody has money. And they are saying some things a little different than we are. Let us kill them.’ Or ‘somebody has money and they live next door. Let us kill them.’ I mean, money. Look for the money, just track the money.
Anne Brannen 17:51
I did not know that there was like 150.
Anne Brannen 19:45
About 150. And, you know, that includes some which were planned, but didn’t get off the ground. The Victorians are counting only the ones that are headed for the holy land because it’s holy. I remember reading this stuff as a child, you know, reading literature of things like–the Little Colonel series had some volume, I think it was two little knights of Kentucky or some damn thing like that. And they were playing it being Crusaders and saving–because it was all about being Christian and noble. Yes, the noble Christians blah, blah, blah. So that’s the only thing you hear about–it’s the Holy Land. Oh, my God, they’re all over Europe. They’re all over Europe, you know, with crusading force. Did you like my rabbit hole?
Michelle Butler 23:37
That’s awesome.
Anne Brannen 23:41
I wondered if you had heard that because I had never known the context. I knew the context in terms of, of European history but not the context of Europeans going off on what they’re thinking of as crusades. Yeah. So that was my rabbit hole. What do you got today?
Michelle Butler 24:01
I’m so excited that you found a rabbit hole that you wanted to go down. It cracks me up, actually, that I’m the one who’s constantly finding rabbit holes. But you know, you’re the one with the actual ADHD.
Speaker 1 24:13
I have ADHD. And it took me down to the Crusades.
Michelle Butler 24:17
You usually do a great job of staying on task. And I’m like, Oh, here’s my thing.
Anne Brannen 24:25
Well, I think of it, you know, we need to like set things up. So here’s our context and our crime and whatnot. But no. Because it occurred to me I’m like, a crusade in between the third and fourth, what the hell? So yeah, so I went and googled, list of crusades.
Michelle Butler 24:45
The whole reason I put Henry on the list is when I was researching the holding Richard for ransom, I was pretty disgusted about that, because theoretically, the crusading thing is like the one thing that the Europeans agree on.
Anne Brannen 24:59
Uh huh. Yeah, that was a violation of Crusader law.
Michelle Butler 25:02
Yeah, what the hell, you know? And he doesn’t actually care that the Pope is threatening him with excommunication. He’s doing it anyway. And then when I was reading about that, I just kind of ran across an offhanded comment that he had had a prospective Archbishop candidate who he wasn’t his preferred candidate, he had him murdered. And it was just like, so Oh, by the way, you know, it just gets my attention. And I thought, what kind of person are we dealing with that the murder of an archbishop is a footnote?
Speaker 1 25:38
Yeah, it’s a footnote to the torture of the Sicilians.
Michelle Butler 25:41
I wanted to go back and take a look at him and find out what else was he up to. So that’s one of them. The murder of Alfred of Louvain, threatening the Byzantine Empire, basically extorting them that he’s gonna invade–this old school Viking thing–we’re gonna come and invade if you don’t pay us off.
Anne Brannen 26:04
Yep, yep.
Michelle Butler 26:06
So he does that. There’s quite a list. He tries to turn the Holy Roman Empire into a hereditary monarchy, which it wasn’t. They’re selected by a group of electors much like–I found it fascinating because it’s clearly one of those things that’s in the brains of the writers of the Constitution when they come up with the electoral college. It’s even the same name. You have this group of electors, who picked the Holy Roman Emperor emperor.
Anne Brannen 26:38
We’ve had something else where that was happening–it was Scandinavia, when we were talking about Snorri.
Michelle Butler 26:45
Yes, yes. The, the Scandinavians and the Germanic tribes, which then carries over to the Anglo Saxons, that version of kingship has to do with choosing among–they’re not going to pick some random shepherd. But there’s a group of noble families. It’s different than what happens with the Normans, because the Normans develop this idea of primageniture, where it’s going to go down in a single bloodline. And so you don’t have any kind of confusion about who’s next in line.
Anne Brannen 27:19
Yes, unless there isn’t anyone in the normal line and then you have to, like murder each other and have a war.
Michelle Butler 27:26
So there’s pros and cons to both approaches. The elective version of things, you have all of this jockeying for power, but you’re never going to have a child king. The big, the really, really big advantage of it is that you’re never going to have a child King.
Anne Brannen 27:43
Yeah, the child kings are problematic, because they either get abducted and probably killed–boys in the tower–or they have to have regents and so then the regions are fighting all amongst each other.
Michelle Butler 27:56
Exactly. That’s that is a huge drawback of the primogeniture system. And in practice, you don’t really end up with child kings because they disappear.
Anne Brannen 28:06
You also often end up with no one who’s actually the next male in line, hence you get a war–Stephen and Matilda.
Michelle Butler 28:16
One of the things that I found fascinating about Henry, looking at him some more is he has this reputation for cruelty. But there’s a lot of fighting among the scholars about how we should approach him and how we should think of him.
Anne Brannen 28:33
When did the fighting start?
Michelle Butler 28:34
It’s been going on. Chronicles in the Middle Ages are generally thinking about him as being pretty effective, even when they’re acknowledging his cruelty, because, you know, that’s just the price of doing business. But at least by the 19th century, there’s a real argument among scholars about whether he deserves to be singled out as particularly cruel, which I think is a fair question, actually. But it is interesting, how strong worded–so let me give you a couple examples. Horst Furhmann’s book is the most recent one I found. It’s from 1986. These are these books literally all called Germany in the Middle Ages.
Anne Brannen 29:26
So Henri is a only piece of them.
Michelle Butler 29:31
Yes, yes, that well–we can talk about that in a second. But there as far as I know, there is no scholarly book available in English or anything else that is just about Henry the sixth, which I don’t think is fair. I think he deserves a book. There are scads of books about Frederick Barbarossa, both both scholarly and historical fiction.
Anne Brannen 29:55
Yes. Really big in the fiction field.
Michelle Butler 29:57
The same is true about Frederick the second.
Anne Brannen 30:01
Yep.
Michelle Butler 30:02
I have two books sitting right, here big thick books sitting right here. I went to the library, the university library Saturday night, because that’s what you do on Saturday night, you go looking for books for the podcast. Two of which are just about Frederick the second, but I brought them because they have a first chapter about Henry, setting up his father Henry the sixth and setting the table for Frederick the second. And there is historical fiction about Frederick the second.
Anne Brannen 30:35
I didn’t know there was historical fiction about Frederick the second. I just knew Barbarossa’s there–
Michelle Butler 30:41
So he’s sandwiched in between them. And he’s just not getting attention. I mean, this is a way that he’s different than Edward the second. Edward the second actually gets a fair amount of scholarly attention because compared to the others, he’s doing so poorly. Now, I actually don’t think that’s an entirely fair assessment of Edward the second, but it does mean that he doesn’t become this like footnote King.
Anne Brannen 31:02
Yeah, he’s not a footnote king.
Michelle Butler 31:04
Henry the sixth gets treated as–
Anne Brannen 31:07
And he dies young. I mean, he’s like 31 when he dies. He’s in the middle of these two giant, legendary figures and he’s not there very long. Maybe if he lived longer he would also become legendary, but he didn’t.
Michelle Butler 31:24
So we have different assessments of Henry the sixth. If you go to Wikipedia, which is always a good place to start, what we get told is, quote, “When Henry died, he was the most powerful monarch in Christendom, being Holy Roman Emperor, king of Germany, Burgundy, Italy, Sicily, feudal overlord of the kings of England, lesser Armenia, and Cyprus, and tributary Lord of North African princes.” So that’s a pretty strong statement of you know, no matter what you think, he was good at his job. So it’s interesting to go on and read some other sources. For example, Horst Furhmann’s 1986 book, quote, “he was a failure as a warrior, but a politician and planner of high quality with a bad reputation for being merciless when it suited his purposes.”
Anne Brannen 32:20
That’s much more ambivalent.
Michelle Butler 32:22
Much more ambivalent. But then there’s this one. William Stubbs, 1969, quote, “all that is known of Henry the sixth leads to the conclusion that he was the degenerate son of a noble father.”
Anne Brannen 32:36
Whoa.
Michelle Butler 32:37
“–he was cruel, arbitrary and faithless, avarice and tyrannical–“and then I love the pivot “–still under him, Germany had good peace.”
Anne Brannen 32:50
‘I will now could contradict myself without explaining why.’
Michelle Butler 32:53
So he’s like, this guy was a thoroughgoing tyrant. He was terrible. Still, people were scared enough to not cross him.
Anne Brannen 33:03
Like that’s why Germany was behaving. Okay.
Michelle Butler 33:07
So that one’s fairly entertaining. The most detailed book I found is actually was written originally in 1894. It’s by Ernest Henderson. But the edition that I have was published in 1968. So it was still in print quite a long time after it was written, which generally is an indication that a book is pretty good and also that it has become kind of the standard one that other people are responding to.
Anne Brannen 33:35
Yeah, it’s really interesting that it’s remains in use.
Michelle Butler 33:38
It far and away had the most detail about Henry the sixth, but I enjoy his perspective on him because his chapter about Henry–he has two chapters, which is one more than practically everybody else, if not two, more than usual. Frequently he gets a page in between.
Anne Brannen 33:56
‘And then there was another guy.’
Michelle Butler 33:58
‘There was a dude in between.’ He starts his section about Henry the sixth with this: “Henry the sixth, although small of frame and delicate of constitution was in every other way one of the strongest of the Hohenstaufen–” I’m positive I’m saying that wrong, the family, the dynasty “–his were the proudest ideals, his the clearest political insight, his the most fiery courage. He bade defiance if need be to all precedent and occasionally indeed, to all scruple.”
Anne Brannen 34:37
That is so different–these are two different people we’re talking about.
Michelle Butler 34:45
This scholar is fascinating because he starts with this really kind of–his evaluation of Henry is pretty clear-eyed. You know, he says he was really successful and then he keeps acknowledging ‘well, there was that murder.’ So he says this: “Albert–” the one who got killed, “was visited by three German knights who after a friendly reception,seize a favorable opportunity to attack, and thrust him through with their swords. No one doubted then, and but few can doubt now, that Lothar of Hockenstad’s party–” this is somebody who works for Henry, “–had instigated the murder and that Henry was privy to it. Even the latter supporters fail to justify the fact of that three murderers, when later the nobles insisted on their expulsion from Germany, were invested by the Emperor with rich fiefs.” So I was shocked to read that because you read other people who say, ‘Well, you know, Henry, we’re not really sure, it was rumored he was involved, but we’re not really sure.’ If you’re paying off the murderers. Not even Fulk did that.
Anne Brannen 36:06
Yeah, not even Henry. When Thomas Beckett got killed by three soldiers, they didn’t get given a whole bunch of stuff. They had to go into exile.
Michelle Butler 36:19
He’s hilarious. This particular scholar elsewhere, he says, “Henry the sixth character, as has been seen often enough, was none too gentle.”
Anne Brannen 36:32
Fair enough. So when he’s talking about–you know, I know this wasn’t what you were like looking at. But I now wondering, I mean, if he’s so fulsome about Henry the sixth, I want to know what he says about Frederick Barbarossa. It is like, ‘he was the most majestic person ever on the planet.’ I mean, how bigger is it? I want to know anyway. But it wasn’t part of what we were doing. We should find out if Barbarossa did something God awful, then we can talk about him. Surely he did.
Michelle Butler 37:05
If we do, I will want to come back and check out this particular book again, because this is really, really the most detailed.
Anne Brannen 37:17
This sounds like something to have on the shelf. ‘What happened in Germany?’, and then you just check.
Michelle Butler 37:22
It probably would be easy to pick up a copy of it used to I would think.
Anne Brannen 37:27
I bet so. Abebooks.com and there it’ll be.
Michelle Butler 37:31
I didn’t even find this one before. “A harsh judgment passed on the count of Accera at Christmas 1196 did not mend matters.” So whatever the count of Accera did, Henry had the count “dawn from the tail of a horse, and then hung downwards from a gallows while the court fool put a stone in the mouth of the dying man to amuse the emperor who was looking on.” So believed firmly in the deterrent power of public punishment.
Anne Brannen 38:08
Not just public punishment, because you can like hang people. This is public torture.
Michelle Butler 38:14
Yeah, that was definitely part of his belief system, that you publicly torture people. Which to be fair, the Romans did, too.
Anne Brannen 38:25
And Vlad Tapes.
Michelle Butler 38:26
I guess you’re just taking your Holy Roman Emperor position very, very clearly. So my rabbit hole to share with you is hilarious because I’m a 12 year old boy in my heart.
Anne Brannen 38:42
I know where we’re going with this. Yes. This was a surprise to us, by the way. We hadn’t known about this.
Michelle Butler 38:49
I had never heard of it. This was a funny moment for me, because my husband had heard of this.
Anne Brannen 38:55
Really?
Michelle Butler 38:56
I had not, but Brian had run across it somewhere else.
Anne Brannen 39:00
What was he doing?
Michelle Butler 39:01
It was one of these geek moments. I was like, Have you ever heard of this? And he’s like, Yeah. Itwas weird.
Anne Brannen 39:10
So maybe it’s 12 year old boy stuff. It might have been in a some kind of compilation of things
Michelle Butler 39:16
Might have been in some book for boys that was not given to me or you.
Anne Brannen 39:23
I had Elsie Dinsmore and you know.
Michelle Butler 39:27
This is the Erfurt latrine disaster and I spent way too much time making sure this was real because it sounds like something that should be made up. In fact, I regret to tell you that I still in fact am 12 in my heart. And Brian and I have been referring to this as the white shit disaster.
Anne Brannen 39:53
Reference y’all to the White Ship to disaster–we refer you to our previous podcast.
Michelle Butler 40:00
So what happened? Poor Henry, his first big job that he gets given by his dad in 1184.
Anne Brannen 40:08
He’s the king of Germany, but he is not Holy Roman Emperor, his his dad is still alive.
Michelle Butler 40:13
Exactly. So there were two pieces of Germany squabbling. It’s Thuringia and somewhere else, it actually doesn’t really matter. They’re squabbling. It’s goes on forever. It was going on before this, it was going on afterwards. But Henry as the equivalent of the Prince of Wales gets sent to bring them together and not let anybody leave until they talk it out.
Anne Brannen 40:37
Well, that didn’t work out so well.
Michelle Butler 40:40
Not even a little bit. So they meet in Erfurt.
Anne Brannen 40:45
At the church, the church of St. Paul.
Michelle Butler 40:50
In the course of the meaning, the floor collapses and it takes everybody in the room except for the two squabbling lords and Henry–there’s disagreement about why they survived this. Some sources will say that it’s because he had dragged the two of them off into a room to talk privately. Other sources say that they were sitting up in a windowsill basically doing the same thing, having a private conversation away from everybody else. But the upshot is that the floor collapses, it takes out the floor below it on the way down. So you have two wooden floors collapsing into the sewer, the cesspit, that was underneath the building. So some untold number, but an extremely high percentage–you will find sources that say it’s 60. But the the most detailed account I found, doesn’t believe those numbers. That don’t have good numbers for the actual number of nobles. But, you know, it’s not unfair to compare it to the white ship because it was a lot of nobles really fast. And their hangers on and their retainers. It’s dreadful, right. Some people drown in the poo, and some people die–the lucky ones probably got smacked on the head on the way down. And some people apparently die from the fumes. So it’s actually quite terrible. And I shouldn’t find it hilarious, but I do find it hilarious.
Anne Brannen 42:33
It’s a horrible tragedy. I’ve seen the detail that Henry and the two people, you know, the two nobles who survived, were hanging on to, they had to hang on to the iron bars at the window and get saved with ladders. Is that a later addition?
Michelle Butler 42:52
I saw that also. But I don’t know whether that’s true. I mean, one of the things that happens is that this becomes legendary instantaneously. There are 25 references to it in contemporary German sources.
Anne Brannen 43:09
Oh yeah. I mean–and you couldn’t help but tell the story with more stuff. There were 60 of them and they died from the fumes. You know, you have to add stuff. Though I believe that they died from the fumes.
Michelle Butler 43:26
It is a measure of how popular this was that there is a near contemporary satirical poem about it in Latin from the Monastery of St. Peter in Erfurt. It’s in their Chronicles. It’s in their animals.
Anne Brannen 43:45
So this is the monastery attached to the church?
Michelle Butler 43:51
Yep.
Anne Brannen 43:52
This is their cesspool.
Michelle Butler 43:55
St. Peter’s Church is still there. You can go see it. It was part of the monastery of the same name.
Anne Brannen 44:01
It probably smells better now.
Michelle Butler 44:03
I pulled up their tourism site.
Anne Brannen 44:07
Do they mention this disaster?
Michelle Butler 44:09
They do not mention it in their tourism site, which you would really think they would.
Anne Brannen 44:16
iYes, because if you’re trying to drag children around, or apparently you and me and Brian, you would want to have that in there because it would be a draw. And then you can all go to the tea shop.
Michelle Butler 44:28
So the church is still there, although it has had a rough time. It was–
Anne Brannen 44:33
Did it get bombed?
Michelle Butler 44:34
It says no, it didn’t get bombed but it was really important. It’s a Romanesque Basilica. At 75 meters long. It was one of the first large scale churches built in Thuringia. But in the 19th century, Erfurt was occupied by the Prussians tried to recapture the town. The church was severely damaged by I’m quoting from that tourism site at this point, “damaged by guns shots and set on fire. Afterwards, the monastery building was completely destroyed. And the Church lost both its towers and was later converted into a warehouse. The nave was divided into three levels and a new roof framework was built” and so it says “despite the destruction, the redesign, the alternate uses, the church remains in good condition. Today it houses an art museum.”
Anne Brannen 45:21
I like this. ‘Besides being destroyed and burnt and everything, it’s in good condition.’ It’s kind of like hearing about Henry the sixth. Besides, you know, killing people and being all mean, he was a great ruler. Everything’s fine.
Michelle Butler 45:33
So would you like to hear a little bit of the Latin poem?
Anne Brannen 45:37
Of course.
Michelle Butler 45:38
A scholar found out about this and crowdsourced a translation of it on Reddit.
Anne Brannen 45:45
Oh no, wait, wait, wait. I love that.
Michelle Butler 45:49
Isn’t that adorable? I’m so pleased. I spent some time looking at this. Because Reddit, first of all, did a really good job. This guy did a good job of telling me where this was all from. So kudos for giving me better footnotes on Reddit than I found in several supposedly scholarly books trying to research the shame flute.”
Anne Brannen 46:11
Oh the shame flute. That was not–yeah, that was bad scholarship.
Michelle Butler 46:14
He and his buddies got together on a Twitter thread, and then–
Anne Brannen 46:20
So not a Reddit thread?
Michelle Butler 46:21
So they worked on it on Twitter, and he pulled it all together and posted it on Reddit. I’m looking on Reddit because it’s easier. \
Anne Brannen 46:31
Yeah, yeah, it is.
Michelle Butler 46:34
So for each stanza, he gives us the Latin and then he gives us a translation. So well done. Well done, internet.
Anne Brannen 46:41
And what’s his name?
Michelle Butler 46:43
His name is Dan Conroy.
Anne Brannen 46:45
Dan Conroy. Kudos to Dan Conroy. Good work. Good work. All right. Read us the English because the Latin is going to annoy people who aren’t me.
Michelle Butler 46:55
“There is news of foul fall, which expediency demands that we relate in rhyme to posterity. A kinglet. An Archbishop. His companions and passles of nobles gathered in a place. I omit the names, I erased the name of the place on account of the more mournful omen it conveys, a sorrowful omen of death–” so they’re not slandering their own city because everybody knew where it was “–I supply with my pen, a filthy type of fate for this renown nobility, that is scarcely to be believed. This was the cause and the predetermined day of the cause. And the place. The end draws near, a meeting of the nobles is here, they settled on a house, that old house, which has a latrine pit below and age, weakening the floorboards–“
Anne Brannen 47:43
Oh, that’s where–I’ve seen all this stuff about the wood being rotten, and that’s where they got it. They got it from that poem. So we’re told early on that the wood was problematic, okay.
Michelle Butler 47:55
“An expedient plan is proposed among the nobles concerning a peace treaty. They agree, they disagree on account of the time, on account of the matter, which some reject and others support and repeatedly the decision goes and comes, considered by the lofty minds of these important men. I approve such a forum. And now, since the place commands it, in a sequestered part of the house, a place for the purpose of the conversation is chosen. Should I speak this plainly? Or should I stay silent. I would prefer to pass over in silence, what it is. Now it is time for you to know just how great is the nether pit of divine judgment. Behold, the companions fall, for the beams have fallen. The dark chasm of the latrine pit receives and extinguishes the exalted splendor of the kingdom. Titled nobles, oh king, the thrones of the alcove, honorably saved you with your bishop, from that bottomless seat. It is not a disgrace for you not to have sat upon the ground. Blessed are those who did not deserve to die thus.”
Anne Brannen 49:15
Nobody’s deserves to die thus.
Michelle Butler 49:17
“For those whose tomb has been filled, let heaven be their home. Oh, God redeem these souls from their torment.”
Anne Brannen 49:29
That’s really sweet.
Michelle Butler 49:29
This poem is written but during Henry’s–because it’s addressing him as the king–so it’s really really contemporary with it. Yeah, that was a delightful thing to find. And it’s from St. Peters. There is a really lovely YouTube video about it that I will share with you there. Actually are several YouTube videos fo rthat matter but I will share with you the one that has the best detail and not surprisingly, it’s difficult for YouTube to do this without chortling. I’m with them. Well, you know, it’s just one of those moments of, if you’re a peasant, in the 12th century, this would be one of those moments of YEAAH.
Anne Brannen 49:54
Oh, that would be so nice. All the nobles fell on the shit. That would be so nice. Yeah. So you sent me the link and I read all this and what were interested me–why the hell is the cesspool under the building? Because that’s not where they put it. That’s really not normal. The cesspits were outside of a building, in the courtyard. You don’t put them under a building. Because for one thing, they don’t smell good. So there’s wooden floors. And then there’s a cesspool.
Michelle Butler 50:45
I thought it was weird.
Anne Brannen 50:47
I mean, I believe that this happened. But I had not come across this particular architectural being of latrines. If you can, you have everything going into a river–that’s nice, it goes away. You can have a cesspit and collect it. Somebody has to get rid of the stuff occasionally. But if you do collect it, it can be used as fertilizer. Okay, great. That’s fine. But you do it in the courtyard, or you put it away from–you know, it’s by the building. It’s not under the building. That makes no sense to me. And I also wonder if all this chemical formation of all this contributed to the wood rotting?
Michelle Butler 51:29
Oh, I’m sure. Yeah, absolutely. I suspect that that did not help matters. But we know that medieval engineers do things by trial and error. So somebody probably thought this was a great idea.
Anne Brannen 51:43
It may be that it was the only place where there was actual room or something. But my understanding is this town is on a hill. I mean, surely–
Michelle Butler 51:53
You don’t do this, because it’s a terrible idea. But somebody must have thought it was a good idea at one point and learned why.
Anne Brannen 52:01
I really wonder what the reason was, because it’s not the usual construction,
Michelle Butler 52:05
I was surprised to learn, looking at this, that this isn’t even the only time that a bunch of nobles get together and a building collapses and kills them.
Anne Brannen 52:14
So there’s no more latrines. But there is the like, the floor going. Okay. What you got. Tell me.
Michelle Butler 52:20
So there’s other ones. Sorry, I don’t have a ton more about this. There’s other ones where either the floor falls, or there’s one where the staircase falls–as everybody’s going upstairs to the place where they’re going to meet up, the staircase collapses and kills a bunch of them. I think that’s interesting. Because it kind of points to one of the ways that medieval engineering was done. Where you don’t necessarily test–people know what they’re doing–but you don’t necessarily test for what is the extreme use of this going to be? You test for, what is the general use going to be?
Anne Brannen 52:54
Yes, you don’t say to yourself, how many nobleman can this stair actually fit?
Michelle Butler 53:01
What are the chances that 75 nobles are going to get together and have a conference in this room?
Anne Brannen 53:05
Clearly, whether or not the wood was rotten–I’m sure it was–but clearly, it had been actually staying up for a while. You know, this was more people than it was used to. It wasn’t the nave, by the way, if anybody’s wondering. It wasn’t within the church proper where the services are, it was a room off–Well, so Henry the sixth, so that was nice. We had crusades and we had a toilet disaster. That and a bunch of torturing prisoners. That’s what we did today.
Michelle Butler 53:41
It was a wild ride.
Anne Brannen 53:45
We have had Henry the sixth, now you know a bunch about that. And the next time that you hear from us, we are going to be about the same time period, just a just a few little years later, but we’ll go to France and Philip. This is the king.
Michelle Butler 54:04
Yeah, Philip Augustus.
Anne Brannen 54:05
Philip Augustus, the king, renounces his wife on their wedding night, so we’ll have lots to talk about. It’ll be fun.
Michelle Butler 54:14
It’s one of those stupid crimes. Like, what is wrong with you? You want to annoy the Danes?
Anne Brannen 54:21
No, don’t don’t annoy the Danes. Don’t annoy the Danes or the Persians. This is really the rule of history. This has been True Crime Medieval where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. You can find us on Spotify and Apple podcast and anywhere where the podcast are hanging out. And we can be found at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word and there you can find links to the podcast and show notes and transcripts and various blurbs with pictures and whatnot. And you can also leave comments which we love. Especially if you have any medieval crimes that you would like us to pay attention to, do let us know. And usually we put them on the list if we haven’t done them already, and you can also get a hold of us there. You can write to us. So, yeah, that’s what you can do. Yeah, so the Middle Ages. That’s all for today.
85. Eorpwald of East Anglia is Murdered, East Anglia c. 627
Anne Brannen 0:25
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:37
And we are going backwards in time–what were we doing last time?
Michelle Butler 0:41
We were talking about Melisande of Jerusalem.
Anne Brannen 0:45
Yes, we were in Jerusalem last time. We’re going back to England. And we’re going back in time. We’re talking about the time that Eorpwald of East Anglia was assassinated, sometime after 627. Maybe as long after that as 632. East Anglia in England, that’s what we’re talking about. Eorpwald was the king of the East Angles. This is the same people who might have been the Geats that are show up in Beowulf– might have been, we think, we’re not really sure. He was one of the Wulfingas who theoretically had been descended from Wulfa, who probably didn’t exist. He might have–he was like an ancestral figure. And he might have been the first ruler in East Anglia, but maybe not, but it could, because all of this– there’s different lines and different manuscripts and different writers. And at any rate they’re the Wulfingas, in other words, little wolves, and they’re in East Anglia. They were from originally from the area where now Denmark meets Germany and they established kingdoms in East Anglia and Northumbria, which is now Northern England and southern Scotland, and Mercia, which is now the Midlands. Anyway. So East Anglia. Eorpwald was king from about 624, when his father Raedwall died. We’ll be hearing some more about him later from Michelle. And he wasn’t King very long, because he converted to Christianity in 627 and he got assassinated pretty soon after that. So what’s our background? What’s the context? Christianity–we’re going to talk about religion–Christianity had come to Britain certainly by the early third century, that’s when it first shows up in writings although it would have been there earlier. We just don’t know how much earlier. And the other religions on the island at that time, besides Christianity, which was just arriving, were Roman, such as, for instance, Mithraism, and the devotees of Cybele. There were several things going on with the Romans and the local native religion, which was polytheistic. And because we have the writings from them, we have the writings from them. We have evidence and archaeology. We have things that the Romans wrote down and things that the Christians wrote down later. We know some stuff about what is Celtic paganism. The Druids were the priests but actually, we know very, very little about them, because all of the writings were done by people who were trying to get rid of them. So though the Gauls on the continent, converted to a sort of mixed Roman Celtic religion, the Celts of Britain didn’t so much, though once the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes took over much of the island, you know, except for Wales and Cornwall in the Isle of Man and a bunch of Scotland above Northumbria, they started converting to the religion that the Germanic tribes were practicing and their brand of paganism was also polytheistic. And much as with the Celts, our knowledge of it comes from Christians such as Bede and Aldhelm and Norse writings. What we do know –because we do have some of the Norse writings–but what we do know is that the gods and goddesses are versions of the Norse deities. Woden, the god of wisdom and death and whatnot is from Odin, we get Wednesday from that. Thunor, for instance, they’ve got strength and storms and whatnot is Thor and we get Thursday from that. Tiw was Tyr and we get Tuesday from that. That’s one of the war gods. The Romans thought it was the same as Mars–it wouldn’t be. And Friga was from Friday, she’s the goddess of motherhood and things like that. And so we know that they had versions of the Norse gods and goddesses. We think they had sacred trees. They had some wooden temples. They buried and cremated their dead with grave goods. And we’re going to have more on that later because Michelle is going to tell us all about Sutton Hoo, but mostly we kind of guess and suppose except that they did use a rune system for their alphabet, with symbols. Each of the runes was a symbol for a sound in their language. They had inherited the rune system from the Scandinavian runes, the elder Futhark. But they had to add several newer ones for sounds that were in Old English that were not in the Scandinavian. There’s a poem in Old English that gives a little stanza for each of them, because each of them was not just a sound and a letter in the alphabet, but also had some kind of meaning. The sounds shifted, you know–the sounds weren’t exactly the same from locale to locale, but in general, they were recognizable, they had a meaning. So that the rune which meant the sound of W, also was wyn or joy, and the one which was the sound of G, also meant to gifuor gift. And the old English runes are found in seven manuscripts and on 30 objects. So it’s not like we only have one or two of them. We’ve got a bunch of objects such as the Ruthwell cross, St. Cuthbert’s coffin, some coins, some jewelry, a comb and my favorite, a spindle. I don’t know what it says. I should have looked that up. I didn’t. But I like that because ‘there’s runes on my spindle.’ And we know that the Scandinavians use runes not only for writing, but also for magic. There’s an Old Norse poem Hávamál, which has a verse–the Hávamál has a bunch of stanzas. They’re all supposedly written by Odin. So this is Odin speaking. Here’s one of the stanzas: “I know a 12th one, if I see up in–” this is a kind of magic “–If I see up in a tree, a dangling corpse in a noose, I can so carve and color the runes that the man walks and talks with me.” That’s very powerful magic. And we do have some evidence that the early English also used runes for magic. We don’t have as strong of evidence as is in that poem. But Bede tells us of, and Michelle is going to talk about Bede too, that’s coming up–Bede tells us of a man who keeps escaping his fetters. And his captors asked him if he is using loosening letters, or runes that could be used for loosening to get free. And in the Old English translation of the Latin of Bede, he’s asked if he’s using rune stones, magic, and we have some of these. We have some other pieces of evidence but that’s more ambiguous. But it makes sense. So the old English runes are a very rare example of surviving evidence of Old English pagan activities before Christianity.
Michelle Butler 7:55
I’m really glad you talked about that, because I didn’t know anything about that. It definitely was not something that was discussed–when I was an undergraduate, the discussion was basically ‘well, none of that stuff survives. So we’re not going to try to talk about it.’
Anne Brannen 8:14
30 objects and seven manuscripts. Hello? And that’s just the old English runes. That’s not the Scandinavian. The Scandinavian runes, they go on forever.
Michelle Butler 8:24
I mean, I would always talk with my students about the–how it survives even into modern English, the connection between literacy and magic, because you use the same word for both–spelling.
Anne Brannen 8:39
Uh, huh. Spelling. Making spells. Yeah, this association of magic and the sound of language. It’s quite an interesting one. It really is. And this alphabet is wonderful, because it totally makes sense. Our alphabet– now we are speaking modern English, using this wonderful alphabet that we got from the Romans, because we had some of the old English stuff, but we kind of lost it. There’s no thorns anymore. It sort of fits the sounds, but not always. And sometimes it means several kinds of sounds, depending and it’s one of the things that makes English difficult to learn for non native speakers. But yeah, it was very clear in Scandinavia and amongst the Old English, that letters meant a sound, whatever the sound was where you were hanging out. So it’s easier I would think in some ways to use. You just write down the sound. And you have made a spell. Nowadays, people use runes for divination. There’s a lot of methods of using them and we don’t have real evidence as to that happening. But it’s certainly a reasonable supposition of how you might use them, to put a few out on a cloth and see which ones they are and talk about them. And I was interested, I was studying the Old English runes recently that you know, there’s very few concepts. Joy is in there. But they’re mostly really concrete. Gift. Horse. A torch. Oak. It’s not even like any kind of tree. Oak, Birch, Ash, very concrete, so that the things around you have meaning beyond their existence, if you see what I mean. Anyway, yeah, so that’s what Eorpwald was. His father had converted to Christianity, but Eorpwald hadn’t. So that’s what he was. That’s what he was practicing when he converted. He was practicing Old English paganism. That’s so Eorpwald. Edwin, so at that time, Edwin was the Darien king, and he had had a dream that if he converted to Christianity, he would be greater than all the kings before him. This sounds very familiar, I guess I’m thinking of Constantine–his mother’s the one who had the dream. He didn’t. But he believed her. But he had a vision too. Didn’t he?
Michelle Butler 11:09
Of the Chi-Rho?
Anne Brannen 11:13
Anyway, so he had this dream. And so he converted in 627. And he started to convert everybody, everybody in Northumbria and East Anglia, as well as Lindsey, which was soon going to be part of Northumbria and so you don’t hear about it very much. And he converted Eorpwald. Why is not clear. We just have the information that he did that. Why is not clear in terms of religion. If Eorpwald had a dream, we don’t know about it. But if what Eorpwald was doing was being an ally of Edwin, it makes sense, because after his conversion, all of the eastern coast of England with the exception of Essex was either Edwin’s or his Christian allies, the whole east coast. Because if your king converts, then the priest can be sent forth to convert the people, which you maybe do or you maybe don’t, or maybe you kind of do but half heartedly, but a nominally shared religion was then, as it still can be, a powerful force politically. Let’s have a little moment where we think about religions that are a political force, perhaps in our own country. Oh, yes. Not just across the globe. Okay. So anyway, Edwin had put together quite some power. Was everybody happy about this? No. Everybody was not happy. So Eorpwald was killed soon after this by what Bede calls a viro gentili, a heathen, whose name was Ricbert. And then after that, Eorpwald’s kingdom was maybe ruled by Ricbert, but we don’t really know that for sure. And it was heathen for three years. Okay, so the priests stopped converting everybody to Christianity, if they were in East Anglia, and that lasted about three years, at which point, Sigebert whom I have not mentioned, but he’s either a brother or a stepbrother of Eorpwald. He’s called a brother, but that name doesn’t show up in this particular family and it comes from a different piece of England and so we think he might have been stepbrother. At any rate, Sigebert came back from Gaul because he had been there for reasons we don’t know–exiled and we don’t know why. But he was already a Christian because he converted in Gaul, and he reestablished Christianity in East Anglia. Edwin was in on all this, don’t you think? And then they brought in Felix of Burgundy as a missionary bishop with the help of the Archbishop of Canterbury, so they established a bishopric. And Sigebert established a school for teaching boys to read and write on the model of the schools that he had been really impressed with in Gaul. These were church schools, you remember, because that’s the only kind that existed. We refer you to our previous podcast on the student strike at Paris wherein we explain the early school system and the rise of the universities. Sigebert also established monasteries. And eventually, he abdicated to Eadric, who was a member of the family. We don’t know how–a cousin? We don’t know. He was somebody in the family and he had been co ruling. So Sigebert just gave the whole thing to him and he went off to a monastery that he had built to lead a religious life. And we think also, it was at Bury St. Edmunds. I love that. I hadn’t known that when I went to Bury St. Edmunds and wish I had. Okay, and then so what happens after this? Because I always like to tell you. In the early 640s, Mercia attacked East Anglia. Mercia got really, you know, kind of big for its britches for a while, Mercia attacked East Anglia and the East angles wanted Sigebertto leave the monastery and come fight, but he wouldn’t. So they dragged him to the battlefield. And he refused to fight. He just stood there with his staff. And so not surprisingly, he got killed, as did Eadric and most of the army and so Sigebert became a martyr. He is a saint and we have no idea really when his feast day is because so many Catholics saints calendars give different days. We have no idea. You can just have your own St Sigebert feast pretty much whatever you want, is what I think. And by the way, Eorpwald is also a saint obviously because he’s a martyr, he got killed for being Christian, and although also for political reasons, but okay, he was Christian. And we don’t know what his feast day is either. Because it’s not written down any place, we have no idea. So you also can have his feast day be whenever you want. You can even do them together, as St Sigebert and Eorpwald, why not, they were either brothers or step brothers. And they had a cousin. All right. A bit more of what happened next. Mercia went on to have a golden age, having subdued East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. And this went on for about 300 years. But then it was over because, guess what happened? You have an idea, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 16:37
Oh, this is the Vikings showing up.
Anne Brannen 16:38
You are absolutely correct. The Vikinga showed up. And so that’s the end of Mercia. In 879 their King Caelwulf the second died, And so no more Mercia. The Vikings were really quite formidable. East Anglia got weaker and weaker after Mercia defeated it. And then the Vikings took over it in 869 and Edward the elder defeated a lot of the Vikings and by 918, East Anglia was under English rule rather than Viking again. And then what else with East Anglia? I want to talk about it because the thing is, this is where I was doing my research. So I just really love East Anglia. In the 17th century, England brought Dutch engineers over and they drained the Fens, which really had been a large piece of East Anglia, up in Norfolk, and they drained the Fens, which was really kind of sad for all the eel farmers. They drained the fens and also it’s from that country that the Puritans left for New England. So there were a bunch of East Anglians there. Then later East Anglia lost its prominence as a very rich textile and wool and farming area because there was an industrial revolution. So the Midlands and the North took over–its Mercia and Northumbria–they come back in as industrial centers and then later after that the English and American Air Force is built a bunch of air bases during World War Two because the land was so flat. The Norwich International Airport was one of them. They’re not all gone. And in general, the shore especially the North Shore of Norfolk, was a pirating area and the haven for smugglers all around the East Anglian coast because the lowland made it really easy for quick landings and getaways and there were caves and stuff. And if you go to East Anglia, you can visit King’s Lynn, where Marjorie Kemp came from and you can go to Norwich where Julian of Norwich was an anchoress. The church that–she was at St Julian’s. We don’t actually know what her name was. We just call her Julian of Norwich. But we don’t know her name. She wasn’t Julian. Anyway, St. Julian’s got bombed in World War Two and destroyed. It’s been rebuilt. And so the cell that she was living in was gone. So they rebuilt it, but they rebuild it sort of big because it’s a tourist attraction. It’s a saintly tourist attraction and you can pray in Julian of Norwich’s cell which is bigger than it was. And you know what, one of the things that impressed me about this is that it’s like really right up from the harbor and we still have some of the merchants houses, like they’re humongous things. She wasn’t anywhere near the cathedral. She’s in the shipping area. She’s right where all the money’s being made. Hmm.
Michelle Butler 16:38
I didn’t know that.
Anne Brannen 18:33
Yes. So you could go talk to her, anybody could go talk to her. Marjorie Kempe did, didn’t she? I like to think about the day that Marjorie Kemp visited Julian of Norwich. Marjorie Kemp said that Julian of Norwich said that she was doing really really well and she was great. I like to think that Julian Norwich was an enormously polite person with great patience. And then she said her prayers, because I personally would not have been patient with Marjorie Kemp. Not at all. But yeah, you could go and talk to her and get spiritual guidance and she’s right in the center not of the religious community but the people who are focusing on money.
Anne Brannen 16:38
Hmm. That makes the idea of having her be somebody who solves crimes, because people come and talk to her, even more interesting.
Anne Brannen 20:17
Are you totally gonna write this book?
Anne Brannen 20:33
I feel like it needs to exist. The Miss Marple-esque stories of Julian of Norwich.
Anne Brannen 17:47
Solving crimes from her little–oh, yeah, it really does need to exist. I know what, one of us has to do this. We love Julian of Norwich. And of course, you can visit Bury St. Edmunds. The Abbey is in ruins. They’re really picturesque ruins and famous Victorians write poems about them. It’s in ruins because there was a Henry the Eighth coming, wasn’t there. And he was gonna smash that all down, but the cathedral still works. And it’s still there. And it’s very lovely. You can also go to the Norfolk lavender farm. I love the Norfolk lavender farm. You can learn all about lavender and how they grow lavender and how they harvest lavender. And you could buy lavender plants, which if you’re my mother, you then smuggled into the United States. I can tell you this because she’s dead. And so you can’t arrest her now, governments. But there was some lavender that she’d never seen. And so she put it in her garden in Albuquerque. Please don’t smuggle the lavender out. The reason that we have rules for not taking things over borders is that we’re trying to keep various kinds of infestations down. I mean, it is lavender, it’s probably just fine. But I’m just saying you can buy lavender plants and you can buy a bunch of other nice things, little embroideries and stuff. And you can have tea at the Lavender Tea Room, where they also have full breakfast and lunch. You can sign up for afternoon tea tea, but you have to do it 24 hours beforehand so they can make everything fresh. And you can have lavender cake–
Anne Brannen 18:56
Obviously at some point we’re gonna have to go to England and just do the tea room tour.
Anne Brannen 20:56
Oh, yes. Because doing the tea room tour, besides the Norfolk lavender place, also involves a great many lovely houses and cathedrals. Tea rooms every place. Yeah. Did we find out that there was–what is that island that we want to go to, that said it was–
Michelle Butler 19:57
Lundy.
Anne Brannen 19:58
The isle of Lundy. Was there a tea room that we know of?
Anne Brannen 20:10
That’s a good question. I know there’s a pub. If there isn’t, somebody’s missing out. Surely with all of the National Trust stuff, there’s a tea room down there.
Anne Brannen 22:52
So you get lavender cake. I myself make a very fine lavender cake. And it always impresses the hell out of everybody. Because nobody is like, Oh, really, you can eat lavender? Yes, you can. But you don’t want to put too much in whatever you’re making, because then it starts reminding people of soap, so don’t do that. But you can have lavender cake all the time, really. And you can also buy lavender jam, and lavender tea and lavender sugar and lavender fudge in the shop. So anyway. St. Eorpwald. East Anglia. Your turn, Michelle.
Michelle Butler 23:28
I put Eorpwald on the list for a couple reasons. He’s the first known King in England, not King of England–
Anne Brannen 23:37
No, there’s a bunch of kings in England.
Michelle Butler 23:41
The first known English King to have been killed because of being a convert to Christianity. So that seemed worth looking at. But there’s a couple other reasons. Also, he is a good entry point into some really important things are pieces of Anglo Saxon England. One is that we know about him because of Bede.
Anne Brannen 24:04
Bede. The Venerable Bede. Is he still venerable or did they–
Michelle Butler 24:09
No, no, he’s venerable. But he was being called that. That’s not a modern thing. He was being called that by the ninth century.
Anne Brannen 24:18
Wow.
Michelle Butler 24:20
It’s a big deal. He picked that name up very, very quickly. And it’s because he is the scholarly colossus of early medieval Europe, not just of England. He writes a ton. He was sent to the monastery to become an oblate at the age of seven. So his education starts as a child. He and Abbot Cealfrith were two of only a handful of survivors–a plague hit Jarrow in 686 and it killed the vast majority of the monks. Jarrow had an excellent library, 200 books. So Bede was really, really well educated and highly literate. He obviously knew Latin, of course, as well as English. He knew Greek. He studied Hebrew. He didn’t master Hebrew as much he wanted, to read the Bible in the original language.
Anne Brannen 25:20
Oh, what an interesting thing that early. I didn’t know that he knew Greek.
Michelle Butler 25:25
It’s really hard to overstate the importance of Bede in early medieval Europe. And then, as the Middle Ages continue–there are 160 manuscripts of an Ecclesiastical History of the English people that survive.
Anne Brannen 25:38
That’s amazing. That’s an enormously important and popular work then because that means that there were way more manuscripts than that that were written.
Michelle Butler 25:50
And a one measure of Bede’s influence is that he–one of his early works is about the computation of time. Bead wrote about 60 books, he’s spectacularly prolific. He wrote so much, and one of the things he became obsessed with was the calculation of time. How do you calculate Easter? How on earth are we keeping track of time? How old is the world? He got accused of heresy at one point because he calculated that the world was 3500 years old and not 5000. It was a scandal, a scandal I tell you.
Anne Brannen 26:37
Well, and he was wrong, but lot of respect for doing the computations.
Michelle Butler 26:42
One of the measures of the influence of Bede is he settled on Anno Domini as a way of measuring time. He didn’t invent this concept. But he adopted it as very useful, that you count time from Christ’s birth. And because he was using it, and because he was so influential, it became the standard.
Anne Brannen 27:07
Until very recently.
Michelle Butler 27:09
Well, now we do the same thing. We just call it different. We call it common era. He’s a huge influence on the Carolingian Renaissance. Bede’s work helps set the stage for the Carolingian Renaissance. He was made a doctor of the church in 1899. He’s the only Englishman to receive that distinction from the Catholic church. His tomb and shrine in Durham Cathedral were destroyed in the Reformation. I have some not nice things to say about the Reformation today. I apologize to the protestants in advance, but today was not a good day for things that happened on account of the Reformation.
Anne Brannen 27:44
There was a lot of smashing of stuff.
Michelle Butler 27:47
Yep. So, Bede had a shrine and a tomb. He was buried elsewhere, but then eventually his remains were translated to Durham Cathedral. And in the Reformation, they were destroyed and in 1831 his bones were found and re buried in a new tomb. So there is now a tomb again in Durham Cathedral that a person can go see. There is a museum at Jarrow now–Jarrow Hal–there’s a whole complex now. There’s a rebuilt Anglo Saxon village and there is a museum dedicated to Bede so today is a good Tourism Day.
Anne Brannen 28:21
You can go to Durham and Norfolk.
Michelle Butler 28:24
And you could go to Jarrow. They have a coffee house rather than tea house.
Anne Brannen 28:30
Really.
Michelle Butler 28:32
Yeah, they do. They have a coffee house.
Anne Brannen 28:35
I can’t drink anything there because I need tea.
Michelle Butler 28:41
So Bede is the only way we know about Eorpwald. He records it in his most famous book, The Ecclesiastical History of the English people, where he’s telling how the the pagan Anglo Saxons came to be converted to Christianity. That’s the story he’s telling in the book.
Anne Brannen 29:04
That’s why it’s important to him.
Michelle Butler 29:06
It’s not what we would consider to be a objective history. That’s not his interest. His interest is to tell the story of how the English people went from being these pagan immigrants to begin being Christians. But Bede is so much a source for this time period that it’s only fairly recently that we started to ask ourselves questions about what that lens means. Until fairly recently Bede was just treated as straightforward objective history and you know, he’s careful but there is this filter.
Anne Brannen 29:48
We’re not talking about Geoffrey of Monmouth here. We’re talking a whole different level.
Michelle Butler 29:54
He’s much more reliable than Geoffrey of Monmouth, who as far as we can tell, just makes things up.
Anne Brannen 30:00
I hope so.
Michelle Butler 30:01
And we know some of Bede’s sources. We know what he had available to him. It’s interesting that we just talked about Matthew Paris because I think Bede and Matthew Paris have a lot in common. They’re both these amazing polymaths. They’re interested in everything. They’re spectacularly prolific. They have access to important people and important books. And then they write and write and write. I think they’re interesting writers to put alongside each other. They have a lot in common, but I will admit that I spent the vast majority of my research time on Sutton Hoo. I’m not gonna lie.
Anne Brannen 30:39
I was hoping that this would be true.
Michelle Butler 30:41
All over Sutton Hoo.
Anne Brannen 30:44
I am not surprised.
Michelle Butler 30:48
Well, okay, let me back up. Sutton Hoo, if anyone’s listening who doesn’t know what it is, Sutton Hoo is a phenomenally important discovery that was made in 1939 of an Anglo Saxon ship burial.
Anne Brannen 31:03
How was it found? Is it one of those things where somebody was like plowing or going on a walk?
Michelle Butler 31:08
No, the landowner, her name was Edith Pretty. And these are mounds. So there was suspicion that they probably had archeological significance. And she hired a–I don’t like to call him amateur but self taught, not university educated, but incredibly experienced and deeply self educated. Like he spoke more than one language, interested in everything, archaeologist named Basil Brown, and they found it. And what happened was when the scope of what they were discovering got out, that’s when the professionals showed up, and elbowed Basil Brown.
Anne Brannen 31:50
Of course they did.
Michelle Butler 31:52
Out of the way.
Anne Brannen 31:52
He couldn’t possibly–he was gonna mess everything up, wasn’t he? He wasn’t gonna do it right. You had to do it right and steal all the stuff. I’m sorry that–
Michelle Butler 32:02
There is some disagreement about how rude it actually was. The book that I would recommend, if anybody wants to read about Sutton Hoo, the book I would recommend is Marvin Carver’s 2017–so it’s real recent–book called The Sutton Hoo Story: Encounters with Early England. It is an excellent place to start. It’s written for anybody to be able to read. So it’s very accessible. Martin Carver was the archaeologist who was in charge of the Sutton Hoo dig in the 80s. And so he’s incredibly well informed about what was happening both in the site originally, and then the work they were doing, because there there have been three digs at Sutton Hoo. The original dig in 1939 was complicated by the fact that war was about the breakout. The dig was up against a time deadline, because if they didn’t get the work done before war broke out, they were going to lose the manpower.
Anne Brannen 33:10
Because everybody had to go fight the war, instead of digging nice things up.
Michelle Butler 33:14
And East Anglia was seen and became a frontline because of where it is.
Anne Brannen 33:20
Yes. And all of those air bases, which I mentioned earlier. Yes.
Michelle Butler 33:24
That’s why they’re there. Indeed, the Sutton Hoo site in 1942 gets–this is actually hard to believe. It got requisitioned as a training ground by the army. The mounds, I’m very sorry to tell you that the burial mounds got used as target practice.
Anne Brannen 33:46
Oh no, no, no, no.
Michelle Butler 33:48
Worse, they got used for tank training.
Anne Brannen 33:52
No, no, no, no.
Michelle Butler 33:55
Finally, somebody higher up in the army who had come in, but was an archaeologist, got wind of what was going on. And he was like, stop. Stop, you can’t be doing that. But when they went back in the 60s and did the second dig, they could tell that–you know, they found all kinds–they could tell that the tanks had been driven over the burial mounds and also there was a crap ton of cartridges. The treasure was discovered in July of 1939. Germany invaded Poland on September 1.
Anne Brannen 34:28
That is not long at all. That is not long.
Michelle Butler 34:31
I think it was July 21 that the first piece of gold was found, and they had one month–it was August 25 that they wrapped up. It’s not like war appeared out of nowhere.
Anne Brannen 34:41
People knew it was coming.
Michelle Butler 34:43
They knew it was coming. You know, this is one of the things that I really appreciate historical fiction for. There’s a 2007 book written by John Preston, who is the nephew of one of the archaeologists who worked on the site. It’s called The Dig and it’s a fictionalization of the discovery.
Anne Brannen 35:00
It might be that if you were not interested in these things, you might say to yourself, a novel about people digging things up? I want to do something else. You might not think it was interesting.
Michelle Butler 35:15
One of the things it does–both it and the 2021 Netflix film based on it–highly recommend the Netflix film. I’m going to create my own little heresy here and tell you to don’t bother to read the book and just go watch the movie. It does a really amazing job of contextualizing the find in this threat, the looming threat of the war that everybody knows is coming. And the film is–it’s a made for Netflix film, but there are big stars in it. Carey Mulligan plays Edith Pretty. Ralph Fiennes plays Basil Brown. So kind of a big deal.
Anne Brannen 35:57
Thank you, I will go find that. That sounds like something I’d like.
Michelle Butler 36:00
I am going to tell you that I had a visceral thrill watching them brush the dirt away as they found the treasures. It was so exciting. I’ve seen pictures of the dig. And the people who did the film did a bang up job. There’s actually really interesting blog posts from the British Museum, where they talk about the actors and the producers, the prop people coming to talk to them and see archival footage, archival pictures, to see the objects. They hire specialists to create replicas of the objects that they want to show being discovered. And the curator had the same kind of reaction I did have–this is the closest I’m ever getting to being present. They invited him to come and see the set. And he said it was like the archival pictures had come to life. The actors were dressed in what the people they were portraying were wearing. So very exciting. It’s a fictionalization. A lot of the fictionalization pieces are more about the interpersonal relationships. So there’s some interpersonal conflicts that get enhanced. There’s kind of some hints of romance and in one case, an actual romance. That didn’t happen. But you know, that’s what historical fiction does.
Anne Brannen 37:22
Yes, you have to put the romance in.
Michelle Butler 37:25
Watching it for the recreation of the discovery is well worth the hour and 50 minutes that I spent.
Anne Brannen 37:37
So it isn’t a movie about digging things up. It’s a movie about finding wonderful things in the dirt, which you have to do really quickly because war is coming.
Michelle Butler 37:47
And what the film does that is that it’s very good at that–the novel hints at these kinds of themes that the movie then makes more explicit. So there’s a hint, for example, in the film, of the irony of the discovery of this burial that shows how civilized and advanced seventh century Anglo Saxons were, in the context of this modern, supposedly more advanced society, about the blow itself to smithereens.
Anne Brannen 38:18
I like that. I like that a lot.
Michelle Butler 38:21
There’s a lot of things like that, where the movie takes a theme that the book had been sort of hinting at and says, No, let me just let me just make this a little clearer for you. One thing the film does really well is a comparison with the Sutton Hoo discovery and King Tut which apparently was actually a thing that was happening in 1939, that Sutton Hoo gets called England’s Valley of the Kings.
Anne Brannen 38:51
Okay.
Michelle Butler 38:54
But that is also a reminder that, you know, we’re not actually all that far from the discovery of King Tut. And so when you have this on pillaged, burial, of course, it gets compared to King Tut.
Anne Brannen 39:06
What was in that dig? Why is this such a big deal?
Michelle Butler 39:11
It is a big deal for a number of reasons. One is that the ship was enormous. The ship is 90 feet long. So can we all just have a moment where we stop and think about the logistics of digging and then burying after you’ve dragged it up from the river, a 90 foot long ship? This is a big deal for a number of reasons. There was a lot of argument about whether the Anglo Saxon sailed and if so, how sophisticated it was. So finding a 90 foot ship from probably 625 ish was a big hairy deal. We still to this day, we do not know whether they used sails they probably did. We just don’t have any evidence of it.
Anne Brannen 40:05
There’s no evidence of masts?
Michelle Butler 40:07
Apparently not. There’s evidence of oars. There’s definitely oars but we don’t know whether they used sails. I would guess that they did, because it seems blatantly obvious that you would but you know, we like to have evidence for things before we write assert that they probably–
Anne Brannen 40:25
If you can build a 90 foot ship and sail it around, you probably have figured out how to use some cloth, especially when some other people that you would have run into are using cloth.
Michelle Butler 40:36
The 1939 dig finds the mound, one the undiscovered ship burial. This is a big hairy deal because of the 18 mounds that are at Sutton Hoo, only two are un-robbed. And this was one of them. The others have all been pillaged. This is the other moment where we’re going to cast aspersions on the Reformation. Because one of the things that happened in the 16th century after the Reformation is that a whole bunch of cultural and perceived superstitious psychological barriers about grave robbing, that something bad will happen to you if you go over and disturb that grave–that gets thrown aside in the Reformation as superstition. And so consequently, you have a whole bunch of looting that happens. At Sutton Hoo, mound 2 one of the things that the 1980s dig, one of the things that they showed for sure is that the other mound, mount 1, the other big one, had been a ship burial. And it’s entirely gone. It’s all the way looted, but here is what they found. They did chemical analysis of the soil there and they can tell that there was a body and they can tell that bronze was here because you can detect whatever atoms are in bronze. We’re getting pretty far afield. But Martin Carver, the archaeologist says the chemical analysis of the soil proved that mound 2 had also been an extensive ship burial, but it was entirely looted.
Anne Brannen 42:11
There were 18 mounds. And we don’t know how many of those 18 mounds might well have been ship burials?
Michelle Butler 42:19
We know at least two were, because we found mount one. Mount one is the Sutton Hoo, the big one with the gold buckle and the awesome amazing shoulder clasps, and the sword and the shield and the mail coat and the helmet, the famous famous helmet, and the scepter with a stag on top, just all of the stuff that we’ve seen from Sutton Hoo, that’s the big one. They excavated the other one, mound 17 in the 80s, the only other one that was found intact. And in there, that was good stuff, too. It wasn’t treasure exactly. It was a lesser burial. But there was a horse. And they found the first complete Anglo Saxon horse harness ever found. They found some weird stuff, too, in the 80s. I’ll tell you about that in a second. I would recommend if anyone hasn’t seen pictures of the Sutton Hoo treasure go right now, just pause and go look at it, pull up the British Museum’s website and take a look at it. It’s phenomenal. It changes– and one of the things that the movie does really well is show how this is a game changer for how we understood Anglo Saxon England. They have Charles Phillips say ‘the dark ages are no longer dark,’ that you can’t believe that these people are a bunch of savage barbarians, if they can make stuff like this. Also there were things in it from all over the world. So it establishes that they’re trading. It establishes these amazing trading relationships. There were things in there from Byzantium, there were Merovingian coins. So you have all of this international trading. And this is connected to our dude Eorpwald’s world. For a couple reasons, but one of the big ones–this is probably why I would say that, as scholars we’re 88% certain that this is the grave of his father Raedwald. There are some people who want to say it’s Eorpwald. But I personally tend to agree with the people who would say, No, he didn’t reign for long enough.
Anne Brannen 44:34
Four years.
Michelle Butler 44:36
One of the big pieces of evidence is that Raedwall has an unusually long reign for this time period. He reigns from 599 until his death in 624. We know from the many times we’ve looked at early medieval kingship, that’s an unusually long reign. It’s a long period of stability. Bede has glowing things to say about Raewald.
Anne Brannen 45:05
Really? So his idea was not just that he had a long reign, but that it was a good one.
Michelle Butler 45:12
Yes, yes. And Bede talks about the amount of influence that Raedwaldred has, that he doesn’t just have this little bitty area, he’s got this big area that he has influence over. The argument is that you have to be somebody who is worth getting this kind of monument because this is a big deal. And you have to be somebody whose kingdom could have afforded it. You have to be somebody who is leaving a kingdom that has the resources and the will to remember you in this way.
Anne Brannen 45:47
Eorpwald is killed because he’s just converted to Christianity. There’s this whole thing going on with alliance with Edwin. He hasn’t been there long and it’s problematic.
Michelle Butler 45:58
It seems unlikely to me that if you assassinated your predecessor, that you’re going to then give him this kind of burial.
Anne Brannen 46:05
Yeah. We think that the guy that assassinated him probably was the next king. We don’t know for sure. Even if he wasn’t, no.
Michelle Butler 46:15
Raedwald also was a little bit infamous for wanting to have a foot in both camps of the pagan and the Christianity, and the things in the Sutton Hoo burial are a mix. He’s got some of both. Raedwald was proposed really early on–they brought in–oh man, Martin Carver talks about the incredible scholar they brought in and he told them immediately, this is Raedwald, and everybody kind of went, Well, maybe but then it turned out Yeah, most people went okay, probably.
Anne Brannen 46:47
He could tell the time that precisely.
Michelle Butler 46:49
Yeah. “Among the visitors who were lucky enough to see the ship at the time of its excavation was the great Anglo Saxon scholar Hector Monroe Chadwick of Clare College, Cambridge, who had been tracked to his Herefordshire hideaway and told of the discovery. Driven by his wife at his preferred speed of 20 miles per hour, he made his way to Sutton Hoo, arriving on August 18.” So he got there before the dig was even over.
Anne Brannen 47:14
This is sort of like dragging Sigebert out of his monastery–you have to come.
Michelle Butler 47:23
“Chadwick’s knowledge was and arguably remains unrivaled. And he is said to have immediately identified the ship burial as that of Raedwald, who was king of East Anglia from 599 to his death in about 625.” So they brought in the expert, he said, It’s Raedwald and everybody went, Meh, okay. And then over the next 50 years as people publish, they went, Yeah, yeah, probably is.
Anne Brannen 47:49
So it’s a humongous long ship and what’s the stuff in it?
Michelle Butler 47:56
He has amazing grave goods. Just amazing. There’s his arms and armament. So you know, the sword. The mail shirt, the mail shirt is a big deal because it’s a complete mail shirt, and it actually, interestingly, has alternating rings of riveted and the other kind where you just bought the rings up against each other, which is fascinating that the mail is made that way. The helmet of course, is huge, because you only have like three helmets. Anglo Saxon helmets are spectacularly rare. They’re way rarer, even then, swords. And this is true for the Vikings too. We have very, very few of these helmets. The helmet got smashed to bits, because the the roof of the burial chamber collapsed eventually under the weight of the mound. And also the soil in East Anglia is very, very acidic. And so the ship is actually not even there. The wood is entirely gone. The body is entirely gone because of how acidic the soil is. The ship is detectable because the rivets were in situ.
Anne Brannen 49:12
Oh, got it. And of the sword, the hilt survived, right? Which is which is all fancy.
Michelle Butler 49:22
I have cool stuff to tell you about the the sword pommel actually.
Anne Brannen 49:26
Does the blade survive?
Michelle Butler 49:28
Some of it.
Anne Brannen 49:29
So the reason that we have more swords than helmets from this time period is that helmets were more fragile. I mean, if you dropped a bunch of stuff on them, apparently they smash.
Michelle Butler 49:43
They smashed into a bazillion pieces. One conservator spent an entire year reassembling it. And then later on, they did it over again because having learned more stuff from comparison, they decided they’d better look at it because the belief had been that these little kingdoms didn’t really cross the sea.
Anne Brannen 50:07
Why would you believe that? I’m sorry.
Michelle Butler 50:09
Well, the belief was that they would sail but up and down the coast but going across the water would have been scary, scary. And they didn’t do it in the seventh century.
Anne Brannen 50:18
Because it was the dark ages, and they couldn’t see anything. There were no lights.
Michelle Butler 50:22
The belief was that nobody did that until the Vikings.
Anne Brannen 50:26
Only the Vikings could sail and they were Vikings. They had a different temperament altogether and way of living. Okay.
Michelle Butler 50:34
There are some fascinating videos on YouTube from the British Museum. Oh, and we really should mention this because I think Edith Pretty should get her due. Edith Pretty was designated–the inquest determined that she was the owner of the treasures. Incalculable wealth. She donated the finds to the British Museum. It was the largest donation ever made to the British Museum in the donor’s lifetime. It was spectacularly generous.
Anne Brannen 51:13
So this was before the ruling that you had to give stuff up when you found it?
Michelle Butler 51:18
This is 1939. And the rules at that point was that if it was buried, and there was reason to believe that the person intending to come back for it, it belonged to the government. And the rationale for that was that the government believed that you would bury something if you were trying to avoid getting taxed on it. So they believed that burying was a tax avoidance strategy.
Anne Brannen 51:45
Whoa, got it.
Michelle Butler 51:47
But if it had been put in the ground, and the owner was never intended to come back to it, it was a grave or something, then it belonged to the property owner. And of course, the rules are different now.
Anne Brannen 52:00
Yes they are. So when people discovered the Book of Kells without the cover, not so long after it was buried, if they had been having these rules, whose ever farm it was that the Book of Kells was under a sod, that would have been theirs, even though it had been stolen from the monastery?
Michelle Butler 52:18
The government could have argued in that case that well, that had been stolen, and they were ditching it. The question would have been whether they intended to come back for it.
Anne Brannen 52:27
They weren’t because they wanted the fancy cover and they didn’t care about the book.
Michelle Butler 52:32
Then probably yes. That would have belonged to the landowner.
Anne Brannen 52:35
The whole subject of finding things now with the different rules. Have you seen the Detectorists?
Michelle Butler 52:44
I have seen the first season. Yeah.
Anne Brannen 52:46
It’s a wonderful show.
Michelle Butler 52:49
And it’s worth comparing it to the Staffordshire Hoard, the fairly recent discovery where the metal detectorist found the other really enormous anglo-saxon–I mean, there’s nine pounds of gold in there.
Anne Brannen 53:01
Wow. And the detectorists had to give that one up, didn’t they?
Michelle Butler 53:07
Yes, because of the rules at that point, but they were compensated for it. They each got a million pounds because they found it and so they had some rights, but they weren’t allowed to just keep it. They got compensation as the finders, both the land owner and the actual discoverer of the Staffordshire Hoard were compensated.
Anne Brannen 53:28
The current rules are that if you find something, you have to give it to the British, but you get some money. Okay.
Michelle Butler 53:38
You get money based on its value. And so when it was sold, they got part of that. They were compensated. The idea, I think, is that you want to discourage people from taking it and selling it on the black market. So you don’t just tell people you have to turn it over with no compensation.
Anne Brannen 53:58
Although they do.
Michelle Butler 54:00
Of course, they do. The Pretty family actually–Edith Pretty died in 1942. Her son was only 12 at that point. Edith Pretty is an interesting person who deserves a lot of conversation just on her own. Her son was born when she was 47. And her husband had been a few years older than her and when their son was four, her husband died of stomach cancer. He was only maybe 57. At that point, their son was about four. So when she died in 1942, the trustees for her son sold the house, but the Pretty family maintained rights to the mounds. They wrote into the land covenant that they were the only ones who could decide whether the mounds would get any further excavation. And they maintained that those rights up until Sutton Hoo became a national trust site in 1992. They specifically maintained those rights because they didn’t want the land to be sold to somebody who was going to go in a treasure hunt.
Anne Brannen 55:08
Or somebody who might use it to drive tanks over and blow things up, either.
Michelle Butler 55:12
Yeah, it’s not an accident that all that the tank thing happened after she had already died. Because there’s no way Edith Pretty would have put up with that.
Anne Brannen 55:21
No. So tell me again, when did the National Trust to take it over?
Michelle Butler 55:28
1992.
Anne Brannen 55:30
And why was that? Was there some kind of thing about new laws, and they had to give it up or what?
Michelle Butler 55:37
What happened was–so there was the original dig in 1939, there was another dig in the 60s. And then in the 1980s, Martin Carver, the author of this book here, gets tapped to go and do more work at Sutton Hoo and the site at that point was in bad shape. It was still privately owned and it was scheduled–it was listed as a historic site. But that does not require the land owners to do any kind of maintenance on it. So it was being overrun and destroyed by rabbits and bracken.
Anne Brannen 56:20
Wait.
Michelle Butler 56:20
Apparently the root system.
Anne Brannen 56:22
I just want to take a little moment where I think about rabbits and bracken. Rabbits live in holes.
Michelle Butler 56:34
They were doing bad, bad things to the mounds. The mounds have been plowed over. They’re much shorter than they used to be. They’re meters shorter than they used to be.
Anne Brannen 56:46
But there would have been–so the mounds are shorter than they used to be. But the treasures are still some way down.
Michelle Butler 57:00
Yeah. The plowing didn’t–the burial chambers are so far down that the plowing did not uncover any of the burial chambers. That was the 16th century treasure hunters who did a lot of that.
Anne Brannen 57:13
Uh huh. And they knew what was there because mounds, okay.
Michelle Butler 57:19
The dig in the 1980s was really about establishing the range of the site. So not just about treasure hunting. About establishing the range of the site. How long it had been used as a burial site. And what the context was for this within East Anglia. So is this a backwater site, is this towards the center of civilization? How does this feature within the wider context of the kingdom and also about going in there and trying to do some conservation because the mounds were just–they were saying about how much damage the root system of the bracken was doing to the mounds and of course the rabbits are in there digging inside and burrowing.
Anne Brannen 58:12
So bracken has really long roots.
Michelle Butler 58:14
According to Martin Carver, I didn’t know this, but I’m willing to believe it. Weeds tend to have spectacular root systems.
Anne Brannen 58:23
Hardy hardy plants. Yeah, okay.
Michelle Butler 58:26
They found some weird shit in this.
Anne Brannen 58:31
Really, what did they find?
Michelle Butler 58:34
They found a whole nother burial ground on the edge of the mounds with bodies that have survived kind of like they’re from Pompeii only made out of sand. So they have this whole section of graves that they called the sand men. It is wild.
Anne Brannen 59:02
So instead of the acid eating the bodies away, something else happened.
Michelle Butler 59:08
Yeah, these ones are later. So the sand filled in as the body is disintegrated and left body shaped sand.
Anne Brannen 59:21
So how much later?
Michelle Butler 59:23
Oh my Lord. Well, that’s one of the things they were trying to work out. The other thing about it is that the bodies–this part of the burial is odd. Let me just go over to read from Carver. “It became increasingly clear that most of these bodies were buried in positions that were odd. One was kneeling, head to the floor of the grave, one stretched out hand above the head, another folded forward, another folded back and other sideways and strangest of all one splayed out in a hurdling position accompanied by an object that vaguely resembled a primitive type of plow.” So they were like, What the heck is going on with this?
Anne Brannen 1:00:10
You don’t usually find bodies done like this.
Michelle Butler 1:00:14
That opened up a whole nother can of worms. For a while there was a theory that Sutton Hoo was a persisting pagan enclave, and there’s reasons to think that, which of course, also ties us back to Eorpwald. And actually, there are people who still think this is true. The area around Sutton, apparently the absence of churches is apparently very interesting. There are not any ancient churches in the area of Sutton Hoo. There’s good archaeological reasons to think that this is a site in which paganism persisted much later in East Anglian history than elsewhere. But this probably is not–at first glance, they thought this is probably sacrifices. But then they kind of pivoted from that and decided they’re probably executions.
Anne Brannen 1:01:20
Which is very different. Yes. I mean, the people end up just as dead, but the whole purpose is different.
Michelle Butler 1:01:27
So these are not later as in like, 18th century, but they’re not seventh century. They’re more like, you know, ninth and 10th century. So they’re later early medieval, if that makes sense.
Anne Brannen 1:01:41
Why would you execute people and then bury them close to where your forefathers had buried royal royalty?
Michelle Butler 1:01:50
That is a question that they have been asking and do not have an answer to.
Anne Brannen 1:01:55
I got no answer.
Michelle Butler 1:01:56
I have no answer to it, either.
Anne Brannen 1:01:58
Unless the meaning of the mounds had disappeared by that point. You know, they knew there were dead people there but they didn’t know they were important.
Michelle Butler 1:02:07
These burials are not mounds, they’re regular flat burials. Satellite burials they ‘re calling them. On YouTube, there is a thing called Curators Corner, videos from the current curator of early medieval artifacts at the British Museum. And her two videos about the Sutton Hoo sword and helmet were just amazing. Highly recommended. Go watch them.
Anne Brannen 1:02:41
You put these things in the show notes, right?
Michelle Butler 1:02:43
Yeah, for sure. The helmet. She talks about how it was in pieces and how they reconstructed it and how they had to do it twice because the first one, they came to realize probably was not actually how it was. The one about the sword was just absolutely mind blowing, because she has done some real careful work on it and determined that we almost certainly know that the wearer of the sword was left handed.
Anne Brannen 1:03:13
Really?
Michelle Butler 1:03:14
Yes. My mind is blown in a couple of ways. Because first of all, I was taught that everything in Sutton Hoo was ceremonial and wouldn’t have been worn, but she can tell that there is wear pattern on the sword pommel cap. And what she can tell specifically is where, you know, if you’re wearing a sword, you often rest the heel of your hand on the pommel. That’s what she can see, is the wear from that. And the pommel of a fancy sword has the really fancy side and the less fancy side and the less fancy side would be what’s against your hip. And the really fancy side is what’s facing out. So she can tell from the alignment of the fancy side and where the wear is where the twisted gold of the pommel, the wire that has been twisted to look like gold beads is worn, it’s smooth on that side, so the person’s right. That’s how she knows, because the heel of the right hand was resting there. And of course if you’re wearing the sword on the right hand side, that means you’re left handed.
Anne Brannen 1:04:32
Right. Goodness there’s a bunch of stuff going on, way more than I had known. I mean I know Sutton who but I did not know all these things. You had fun, didn’t you?
Michelle Butler 1:04:45
I had so much. There is so much stuff about Sutton Hoo on YouTube. And it’s really really cool to go see it but the thing I would recommend if you’re only going to watch one thing is to watch Sue Brenning, the curator’s video about the sword where she explains how she knows that was worn enough to have this wear pattern on it, which is mind blowing, but makes a certain amount of sense that if you were the king and you’d been king for 25 years, you probably would have ceremonial parade armor. But by that point it would have seen enough wear–he probably didn’t wear it into battle. Okay. But her analysis of the helmet was that he could have. The helmet is functional, which blew my mind too. I would recommend those. I had the biggest blast going off and reading about Sutton Hoo. There was so much of this. I thought I knew Sutton Hoo pretty well. It’s a big deal.
Anne Brannen 1:05:55
Yeah, yeah.
Michelle Butler 1:05:57
It’s a big deal. And I learned so much new stuff that I did not know. So Eorpwald, he gets like two sentences in Bede. But he is part of this way of understanding early, early medieval England that–thank goodness, we have Bede, but thank goodness, we have archeology. And thank goodness the grave robbers missed one.
Anne Brannen 1:06:26
Yes. And it’s not just the grave robbers that were getting rid of things. And one of the reasons you–we were talking about earlier, off the recording, is one of the reasons we don’t have a lot of information about the Old English is that the Vikings burned the manuscripts.
Michelle Butler 1:06:49
Yep, they burned to the monasteries. The dissolution of the monasteries didn’t help, either, because that increased the treasure hunting. So all of these properties that had been owned by the church, they got turned over into private hands. There was a run on digging and trying to find things. I did not know there was a 16th and 17th century fad for digging up the past. But I suppose that makes some sense. When you have all this property changing hands, and you know, all you need is one person to make a spectacular discovery and now everybody’s digging.
Anne Brannen 1:07:34
Yeah, yeah. And it’s like the Vikings taking the Book of Kells, not for what was in it, but because of the jeweled cover. It’s not like you were looking for religious artifacts, because the religion was clearly superstition to the people who were digging stuff up. You were digging things up, because they might be worth something. Who knows what got thrown away at that point.
Michelle Butler 1:07:57
When they went back and re excavated mount two, the one that has the ship burial that was entirely gone–and one of the ways they can tell that is that the ship rivets are all scattered on the outside of the mound. So it got dug into.
Anne Brannen 1:08:15
Yeah, got it.
Michelle Butler 1:08:15
They actually found little pieces of things that had gotten smashed, including some 16th century pottery from the lamps that they were using when they were digging in there.
Anne Brannen 1:08:27
They can even date the thieves there.
Michelle Butler 1:08:31
They can date the thieves. But they found little pieces of broken objects that had gotten, you know, smashed during the robbery and then just sort of left. So we’re fortunate to have Sutton Hoo, we’re fortunate that the 16th century–I feel viscerally ill at the idea of the gold belt clasp being melted down.
Anne Brannen 1:08:58
Well, yeah, okay. No, no, no, let’s not go there. Yeah, that’s not good. But that’s what they would do. Because it wasn’t worth anything except as money to them.
Michelle Butler 1:09:12
And I think I did mention that we know for sure that there was a body in in mound one. There was an argument for a long time because they didn’t find a body that maybe it was a cenotaph. But we do know now from chemical analysis of the soil shows potassium where the body would have been.
Anne Brannen 1:09:37
Okay. Yeah. Got it.
Michelle Butler 1:09:39
So, yeah, science and archaeology is helping us out a lot because they’re able to analyze what’s gone from what it left, the little atomic bits of that left in the soil.
Anne Brannen 1:09:53
Just lovely. Okay, now I have a feeling that you could talk about Sutton Hoo for like, you know, another day and a half.
Michelle Butler 1:10:03
Probably. Oh my gosh. Highly recommend Martin Carver’s book The Sutton Hoo story. Go watch the Netflix movie The Dig, go watch Sue Brunning and they have given her the hashtag Sutton Sue, which I think is adorable.
Anne Brannen 1:10:28
That is nice. Okay, I’m going to do these things myself. Shall we say farewell to our beloved Sutton Hoo. And I got to talk about the runes and the lavender farm. So it was very good. So that was our discussion of the assassination of Eorpwald, the king of East Anglia, and some other stuff that we really wanted to talk about. And so we did that. The next time you’ll hear from us we’re going to be discussing the sheer dreadfulness of Henry the sixth Holy Roman Emperor who did many, many bad things. And so we’ll focus just on him and we’ll probably be talking about the Holy Roman Empire, why not and his-
Michelle Butler 1:11:14
Multitudinous crimes.
Anne Brannen 1:11:18
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 everyplace where the podcasts are hanging out, and you can find us on truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. And if you go there, you can read the show notes and the transcriptions and we’ve got links to the podcasts there. And you can leave comments which we love to read the comments. And let us know if you can think of any medieval crimes that we ought to pay attention to, you know, and if we haven’t got them on our list, we’ll probably put them on our list. And you can send us messages also through there. Bye.
Michelle Butler 1:12:05
Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
84. Melisende, Frankish Queen of Jerusalem, is Falsely Accused of Adultery, Jerusalem 1134
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:39
Our special episodes are when we–so far they’ve been when we go outside of the Middle Ages, because actually we go down into the early modern era, because we want to talk about people like Kit Marlowe, but this is sort of a special episode because we’re not actually in Europe. But in other ways. It’s not a special episode, because it’s when Europe took its little self on over to the Holy Land and took some things over for a while and made a kingdom of Jerusalem which did not last forever. Yay. But that’s where we are because we want to talk about the time that Queen Melisande of Jerusalem was accused of adultery in 1134. So first, our context, how did we get here. And so that’s me. In 1099–we’re going backwards,in 1099–the First Crusade, see our previous podcast on the First Crusade, that is the princes crusade, because the peasants crusade also was that year, but it left earlier because the peasants didn’t have the wherewithal to get any resources. So instead of being an actual crusade, they were basically an unruly mob that slaughtered the Jews of Europe, and then ended up getting slaughtered by the Turks themselves just a few months later, and so they never made it to the Holy Land. But the princes’ crusade. This would be the crusade. I don’t want to say crusade proper since it’s a godawful thing, but at any rate, that crusade that actually got to the holy land that was made up of people who could get the money and resources together to put together an actual military force in order to go over a very large piece of the world to get someplace else entirely. The princes’ crusade consisted of four main armies. They were led by Raymond of Toulouse, Godfrey of Bouillon, Beaumont of Tarrant, and Robert Curthose, and they fought their way through Anatolia, and they ended up getting to Jerusalem, which was, you know, where they were headed. They got to Jerusalem in June of 1099. They took Jerusalem and slaughtered the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants of Jerusalem because they were a holy force, which is often a very bad thing. And so they had Jerusalem. Later, most of the Crusaders were going to be going home. That’s after they had repulsed a counter attack at Ascelon. That was the end of the First Crusade, but enough crusaders to establish four Crusader States. The most important of them was the Kingdom of Jerusalem. And Godfrey of Bouillon won the election for the leadership of that state. His knights had been the first to actually break into Jerusalem and Raymond de Toulouse, who was the oldest and the richest of the crusade leaders, refused the crown of Jerusalem because he didn’t want to rule the city where Jesus died. That’s what he said. But we think there were actually really political reasons for this. But anyway, he didn’t want to do it. He refused. Godfrey agreed to rule the Christian state of Jerusalem, though he wouldn’t call himself king. He called himself the advocate of the Holy Sepulchre, because he didn’t want to wear a crown of gold in the city that because Jesus wore a crown of thorns. All right, so he is not the King of the Kingdom of Jerusalem. He is a prince, and the advocate of the Holy Sepulchre. The other three states by the way, were Edessa–Baldwin of Bouillon became the count of Edessa; and Antioch–Beaumont of Tarrant was the prince of Antioch; and Tripoli, and Raymond of Toulouse, same guy who refused the rulership of Jerusalem, he became the count of Tripoli. Okay, so the Crusader state of Jerusalem. Godfrey was the advocate of the Holy Sepulchre and Prince of Jerusalem. And he died the next year. So his brother Baldwin, this is the same guy who had been the count of Edessa, Baldwin became the ruler. And he did not mind wearing a gold crown in the city where Jesus had worn thorns. So he was crowned the King of Jerusalem. He’s the first king of the kingdom of Jerusalem. He was crowned in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which he wasn’t the advocate of, he was the king of. Okay. The kingship was sort of elective and sort of hereditary. It was a new construction. And so traditions and rules for transferring power hadn’t been created. It was really sort of a mix of choppy and fluid sort of power dynamic going through the Kingdom of Jerusalem. So the next king was Baldwin the second. He wasn’t Baldwin’s son, he was actually a cousin of Baldwin. He was the son of Hugh and Melisande of Montlhéry, who was French. Then Baldwin the second, their child, married Morphia. She was an Armenian princess. She was Christian. She was Greek Orthodox, but she was Armenian. And they were the parents of Melisande, our protagonist, and so we come to our story proper. She was 13 when her father was elected King of Jerusalem. Baldwin and Morphia had only daughters. But despite the fact that their marriage had been a political alliance, Baldwin was really devoted to Morphia. And so he would not divorce her. Although he was advised to get rid of her, he would not get rid of her to get another wife and a chance to have sons. So he had his daughters. That was it. And he raised Melisande as his heir, taught her, and told everybody she was his heir. She cosigned documents with her father, and she was supported by the Royal Council. And so when she herself was put into a marriage, as a political alliance, there were some problems. Baldwin asked Louie the King of France, to suggest a Frankish noble because it was really important to keep the Crusader state of Jerusalem connected to France and to the rest of Europe, because it was really small little bunch of people and they were by themselves out in this land. They needed to have support, manpower, and connections. They needed them from Europe. Anyway, Louie, wanted Fulk, who was the count Anjou and Maine, to be married to Melisande because Fulk was rich, and he was powerful. And it would be great to get him out of France, where he was kind of problematic for Louie. By the way, there’s another connection here. Fulk had been married before, and his son Geoffrey, from that marriage, was married to Matilda, the daughter of Henry the first king of England, and she had previously been married to the Holy Roman Emperor, and later she was going to enter into a civil war with her cousin, Stephen of Blois, for the throne of England because she was the heir of Henry the first. Since he also had no sons, no legitimate sons, to inherit the throne.
Michelle Butler 8:28
On account of the white ship, which we covered.
Anne Brannen 8:31
We refer you to our previous podcast–well, two of them, the white ship, where Henry’s heir died, and Stephen of Blois, who said that he would go along with the agreement for Matilda to be the queen of England, broke his oath. We have two of them. I think it’s only two of them on that one.
Michelle Butler 8:51
Yeah, I think so.
Anne Brannen 8:53
So Fulk was great, and he’s powerful. And he was maybe going to be connected to the throne of England, you know, that was going to be great. Everything was wonderful, except that during the negotiations, Fulk demanded that he would be the only ruler of Jerusalem. He did not want Melisande to be the ruler of Jerusalem and he didn’t even want to share the rulership of Jerusalem. Baldwin agreed to this because he wanted this marriage, but he thought there might be some problems, not only because Melisande wouldn’t be the queen of Jerusalem on her own, but also, he thought that there might well be some problems if Fulk would got rid of her later because, remember he had children from a previous marriage, and he might want another one of his sons who wasn’t Geoffrey and already very busy to become the King of Jerusalem and so he might get rid of Melisande. So they got married and then Melisande had a son This was great. She named him Baldwin, because it’s good to name everybody the same thing. You can have your people who are trying to explain history get into problems. And her dad named her the sole guardian of her son. Then her dad died. Fulk and Melisande became co rulers of Jerusalem, which remember Fulk did not want, and he wasn’t good at sharing power. He wouldn’t let Melisande do any of the royal duties and he told everybody that she didn’t have any authority. The Royal Council–you remember, they supported Melisande–did not like him. And they didn’t like his rulership. Things were not good. In 1134 Fulk accused Melisande of adultery with Hugh of Jaffa, who was one of her father’s cousins, and one of her supporters, because it was going to be a way to get rid of Melisandre. And Hugh also. I believe that Michelle is going to tell us more about this later, but at any rate, sources at the time say that the accusation was unfounded, and the church and the Royal Council and the nobles all continued to support her. So we don’t think that Melisande had an affair with Hugh of Jaffa. We think that Fulk was just falsely accusing her to get rid of her. Hugh fled to Ascelon. And it was a Muslim city. He held off Fulk’s forces, and there was a negotiated peace and he got exiled for three years. And there was an assassination attempt against him, and Hugh was blamed for that. Then there was a palace coup, and Melisande’s supporters took over and Fulk became not very powerful at all. His supporters were terrified into submission. And Melisande was the boss–do do do–they did reconcile, and they had another son. Melisande was actually in grief when Fulk died, which I find hilarious. He died in a hunting accident, by the way. You always want to know, was he poisoned? Did he fall out of a window? No, no, no, it was hunting accident,
Michelle Butler 12:01
Apparently was a bad hunting accident. The descriptions are bad. They were out together and a hare started up out of the bushes and he took off after the hare. The horse stumbled. Fulk went off his horse landed on his head.
Anne Brannen 12:19
Oh, Jesus.
Michelle Butler 12:20
The saddle came off too–his cinch broke–and the saddle also clipped him on the head. And I mean, he’s just–it’s described as he has blood and brains coming out of his nose. So there was no chance. There’s no chance he was ever coming back from it. It was bad. And she was there with him. She saw this whole thing happen.
Anne Brannen 12:46
Well, that’s traumatic. I don’t like Fulk and I think he’s an idiot, but I am sorry that he died in that horrible fashion because it sounds very bad. Although it was probably pretty quick for him.
Michelle Butler 12:57
He doesn’t die for like three days.
Anne Brannen 12:59
Did he suffer?
Michelle Butler 13:01
Ah, no, I don’t think so. Because I think he was brain dead. I mean, his heart doesn’t stop beating. He never regains consciousness.
Anne Brannen 13:09
Oh, well, that’s good. Okay, that’s good for him. All right.
Michelle Butler 13:12
But yeah, I mean, poor Melisande. She was right there with him and saw this whole thing happen?
Anne Brannen 13:20
But he wasn’t assassinated. He actually died in a hunting accident.
Michelle Butler 13:25
There’s so many of these hunting accidents, though.
Anne Brannen 13:29
We refer you to our previous podcast on William Rufus, the King of England, who died in a hunting accident in the New Forest. I like it that we’ve gone so far into this. We’re almost at our fourth anniversary. It’ll be coming up in a couple of months. We’ve gotten so far into this that really we have lots of podcasts to refer to. And so as usual, I want to put the rest of the story in context, because I like that part. So Melisande was the queen of Jerusalem all by herself, and she gave money and riches to religious houses. She had a school of bookmakers and manuscript illuminators. Before he died, Fulk had commissioned for what we call the Melisande Psalter–he was being all nicey nicey and, you know, getting reconciled at that point. It still exist. It’s held by the British Library in London, and it’s gorgeous. It’s still got its carved ivory covers, and the illustrations in it–at least some of these illustrations–are made by Basilius, who actually signed the last illustration. This is the only name that we know of, of scribes and illustrators for that manuscript. He actually signed one, which is unusual. By the early 19th century, it was owned by a monastery in France and then it was owned by the head of the fine arts museum at Lyon, and it shows up next, owned by this Italian who is renowned for stealing medieval manuscripts from French libraries, and he sold it to–
Michelle Butler 15:03
Oh, I did not know–I didn’t look any of this up.
Anne Brannen 15:06
I like to know provenance.
Michelle Butler 15:08
I didn’t. I’m glad you did. Because I did not. I just, you know, it’s a thing from the Middle East showing up in the British Museum, I just sort of assumed theft.
Anne Brannen 15:19
Colonialism is the usual answer. But in this case, it’s a different thing. When the Crusaders left, obviously it got taken back to France. Most of them were actually more or less French. And it’s that guy, the thief, who sold it to the British Museum in 1845. I had wondered myself, especially because I’m used to things showing up in the British Museum because British people found them and took them back from, how is this ending up in England? So I wanted to know, why England, because the English are not hanging out here, if you see what I mean.
Michelle Butler 15:59
Right, right.
Anne Brannen 16:00
Melisande was instrumental in bringing about the Second Crusade in 1144. Because she asked the pope for help when Edessa fell, and the Crusaders of the Second Crusade talked Melisande’s son–this would be Baldwin the third, as you remember, at he was 18 at the time–to attack Damascus, which was a Muslim city that had been on good terms with Jerusalem. It’s like, what? No, take Edessa, but he went and attacked Damascus. And so then Damascus never trusted the Crusaders again, and that was a lot less support for the Frankish kings of Jerusalem, where Baldwin the third was around was crowned co ruler in 1145 with Melisande. He got better at governance, but he fell out with his mother and he wanted to be crowned a sole ruler. The patriarch refused to do that. And so he paraded around in the streets wearing a laurel wreath. The Royal Council ended up dividing the kingdom between them. Melisande kept Jerusalem, and he got the north of the territory. Baldwin attacked Jerusalem and took it, and Melisande fled. Negotiations held by the church at that time resulted in her losing Jerusalem but being given some lands to rule. She and Baldwin got along after that, because she was an excellent counselor. She died in 1161. She had a stroke and she died. She had ruled Jerusalem for 30 years. The Crusaders, by the way, would lose Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187. Yay. The Third Crusade reestablished the kingdom but not in Jerusalem, they established in Acre. The sixth crusade got some of Jerusalem back, then they realize in 1244 it was all over. There were no more Francs and descendants of Francs in Jerusalem. Except, you know, if they were doing one of those tourist pilgrimage things where you go and the Franciscan friars drag you around and show you stuff. That was it. But Melisande rules the roost. So she was Queen Melisande. She did not commit adultery with her cousin Hugh. And she was quite powerful and educated and interesting. And I believe Michelle, you have a lot of things you want to say.
Michelle Butler 18:37
I really enjoyed this research. I had not heard of Melisande before. But when I ran across this–accusing a queen of adultery is treason–committing the adultery would be a crime. So that’s why I put it on the list.
Anne Brannen 18:54
I do have to remind us that it isn’t treason everywhere. It wasn’t treason in Wales. The reason Fluellen hung William de Braose–it wasn’t Welsh law at all that William de Braose was going to die for having an affair with the queen. Flewyllyn was just having a fit. Yeah, but yeah, these are the Franks and so yeah.
Michelle Butler 19:22
I agree. I don’t think there’s any chance that Melisande, who we have every reason to believe was a level headed, logical sort of person–would have risked everything. Her father raised her to be his heir. She was in training from the time she was 13. She spoke four languages. She was literate. She was a huge patron of–Fulk, when he needed to get by his way back into her good graces, picked a good bribe. She had established a scriptorium at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. She had established a monastery– not a monastery, a convent for her younger sister became a nun. Melisdande didn’t think it was okay for the youngest sister to just be a plain nun in a different monastery. So she established a convent with the understanding that the old abbess who she put in place first, would teach Yvette and then Yvette would become the abbess after her, which is what happened.
Anne Brannen 20:25
It’s brilliant because she didn’t just stick Yvette into in the position as abbess. She had her train. That’s really smart. Well,
Michelle Butler 20:33
Of course, the other nuns know the score. They know to elect her as the next abbess. But yeah, she had some on the job training from this older woman who obviously was experienced and was not going to, like, live forever. Melisande is really important page on the arts. But to circle back to Hugh for a second. Hugh and Millicent knew each other as children. They were almost raised together as brother and sister. I just don’t believe that…you know, ewwww, right? He was orphaned. His parents, the dad and the mom, were on their way from France to participate in the crusade, and the mom was pregnant. So they stopped and she had the baby. And then the dad was like, we’re gonna leave the baby here, because we’ll travel better without a newborn. They left the baby, which turned out to be the only reason he survived because they came to the Holy Land and promptly both got sick and died.
Michelle Butler 21:20
So they didn’t–I was waiting to hear that the ship foundered. But no.
Michelle Butler 21:32
They both got sick. So Baldwin sent for the orphaned child, who is now a lord. So he was raised in his household. They knew each other. They were, they were friends, certainly. I mean, they were cousins. But they were more like siblings. It’s weird. But also Millicent is just way too savvy. Way too savvy. There is no way she’s gonna put Baldwin–her son’s legitimacy–at risk.
Anne Brannen 22:17
Yeah. And that’s not even counting her religious nature. She’s got a kind of solid Christianity to her.
Michelle Butler 22:26
She’s actually–she’s just wonderful. I enjoyed reading about her so much. And I never heard of her which–I’m troubled by the idea that I’ve spent decades as a medievalist and not have heard of Melisande of Jerusalem.
Anne Brannen 22:41
It turns out, though, that sometimes you and I run across these things like, I’ve never heard of this and we really ought to have, but there’s an enormous amount of material. Okay, fine. But if we hadn’t heard of her, it’s because she wasn’t getting talked about.
Michelle Butler 22:58
I find it interesting that I learned as an undergraduate about women in the Middle Ages who failed to rule, not the ones who successfully ruled. There was a narrative that the Middle Ages was this time period in which women just couldn’t cut it. But then there’s Queen Elizabeth, who was part of this conversation about the transition between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, and Elizabeth the first was always being held up as well. She was able to do it, but you know, oh, well, [asterix] Eleanor of Aquitaine. But what are you going to do? It’s Eleanor of Aquitaine. She’s definitely the outlier. The rest of them all failed So there was a lot of conversation about Maude–I’d heard of Empress Maude. The narrative was, in the 12th century, England just wasn’t ready to have a queen regnant. But by the 16th century, Queen Elizabeth was able to pull it off. That was the narrative. I think that’s questionable.
Anne Brannen 23:53
So the idea is very much that the humans got smarter than they were in the horrible Dark Ages. And were able to actually occasionally listen to women.
Michelle Butler 24:04
Yes. It’s part of the conversation about the backwardness of the Middle Ages. But of course, you can’t have people like Melisande and her sister Yvette and all these other women who are ruling in their own right, as part of that because it disrupts the narrative.
Anne Brannen 24:22
Yeah, yeah.
Michelle Butler 24:24
So one of the lovely things about this, since we’re dealing with the early 12th century and the Normans love, love, love writing history, we have lots of primary sources. The big one is William of Tyre. Who has nice things to say about Melisande. He thinks she did a good job. Our friend Orderic Vitalis is back, who has not-nice things to say about Fulk.
Anne Brannen 24:48
Please share the not-nice things about Fulk because I’ve gotten over the sadness that I had briefly when he had the bad accident. Now I’m back to despising him.
Michelle Butler 24:58
Orderic says is that the reason Fulk got in trouble is that quote “he acted without the foresight and shrewdness he should have shown and changed governors and other dignitaries too quickly and thoughtlessly.”
Anne Brannen 25:08
So he was an idiot.
Michelle Butler 25:09
He showed up with a bunch of Angevin hangers-on, his retainers. And the people who had already been in Jerusalem resented getting sidelined. Quite reasonably, they resented getting sidelined.
Anne Brannen 25:23
Also, although we completely disapprove of the Crusades, I can note that these were people who had done a lot of work to get there, as opposed to just being sent over by the King of France.
Michelle Butler 25:37
Bernard of Clairvaux, who normally I would not have a kind word to say for, has nice things to say about Melisande too.
Anne Brannen 25:45
All righty, so Bernard of Clairvaux–we’re talking about the guy whose skull you can still go see over in the reliquary.
Michelle Butler 25:53
He normally is kind of priggish.
Anne Brannen 25:57
Yeah. He was–we refer you to our previous podcast about Abelard.
Michelle Butler 26:03
But he writes to her and–I don’t remember which scholar I was reading, because I read a whole bunch– one of them made the point that Bernard does not write to her and say, ‘You need to marry again, right away, you need to defer to your son, you need to defer to your counsel.’ He doesn’t say any of that to her. What he says to her is, quote, “with the king, your husband, dead, and the young king not yet ready to bear the business of the kingdom and carry out the whole office of king, the eyes of all look to you. And on you alone, the whole weight of the kingdom falls. You must put your hand to strong things, and show a man in a woman, doing what is done in the spirit of counsel and fortitude. You must dispose all things so prudently and moderately, that all who see them will think you a king, rather than a queen from your acts, lest perhaps the people might say ‘where’s the King of Jerusalem?'” I was astonished to read that Bernard wrote to her and said, You need to act like a king.
Anne Brannen 27:02
I would not have expected this from Bernard of Clairvaux,
Michelle Butler 27:05
I’m utterly astonished that he wrote that to her. Like you mentioned, we’ve got the charters from Melisande and Fulk. We’ve got Melisande’s letters. It’s pretty exciting to have all these sources. You talked about the Psalter, which is wonderful.
Anne Brannen 27:24
The Psalter is beautiful. It really is.
Michelle Butler 27:27
It’s a blending of the styles of Western Europe with the styles of Byzantium, with the Armenian heritage. It’s such an interesting work.
Anne Brannen 27:39
So in the scriptorium, where the illustrations were happening, that pretty clearly had artists from the different cultures around.
Michelle Butler 27:47
Yeah, yeah. I think we could say she’s at the forefront of developing a style that is a fusion of the pieces that are coming in there, that is going to emerge as unique to the Kingdom of Jerusalem. I think that one of the reasons we have not heard of her is that there is a deliberate downplaying of Melisande by scholars in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Anne Brannen 28:17
It seems to me that if you’re a scholar of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, it would be very hard to not talk about 30 years of a reign in a rather not very long lived kingdom.
Michelle Butler 28:29
I have a couple of quotes about this. This one is from Sharon Newman’s, this is the only full length biography, it was written 2014.
Anne Brannen 28:41
Less than 10 years ago, this was published.
Michelle Butler 28:44
“Melisande had fought many battles in her life. What she had no way to fight was the blackening of her reputation by later historians. In the 20th century alone, she has been called a quote, ‘power hungry Queen Dowager’.
Anne Brannen 28:59
Whoa.
Michelle Butler 29:00
Quote, ‘an authoritarian, even, vindictive woman.’ And those are two different scholars, by the way. Now we’re going on to a third history–
Anne Brannen 29:09
Where’s the vindictiveness coming from? One of the things I noticed about her was that she reconciled with her godawful husband, she reconciled with her son, who was very badly behaved as a son. She was kind of the opposite of vindictive.
Michelle Butler 29:23
The third scholar–this guy in particular goes out of his way to badmouth her. “Eminent crusade historian Hans Eberhardt Mayer, in the only serious monograph written on Melisande’s rule persists in calling her the queen mother,” so he refuses to acknowledge that she was Queen regnant. “While he admits that Baldwin’s military career had been a series of defeats, he still sees Melisande as a woman who plotted to keep her son from power.” There’s another scholar, Danielle Park, who is supposed to have a book coming out about Fulk and Melisande, but I think it has been pushed back because it was supposed to come out this year, but I’m not finding a listing for it from the publisher that it’s supposed to be coming out from. So I think perhaps the book isn’t done yet. Anyway, she’s a scholar of Melisande. But her book has not come out yet. She has a different quote in an article about Melisande from that same scholar, Hans Eberhardt Meyer: “her thirst for power was greater than her wisdom.”
Anne Brannen 29:26
Whoa, that’s amazing.
Michelle Butler 30:34
And then this: “she spread her own tentacles toward Acre.”
Michelle Butler 30:40
That doesn’t make any sense.
Michelle Butler 30:43
I mean, right?
Anne Brannen 30:45
Yeah, the whole tentacle–even if somebody actually is power hungry and trying to get some kind of place, to use the word ‘tentacles’ really is a particular flavor, which is not charming.
Michelle Butler 31:00
He was writing in 1972. So he kind of sets this tone. Park, in her article, talks about how the people who follow William of Tyre–so there’s a continuation of his chronicle by Sigebert, who accuses an anonymous queen but he means Melisande of complicity in the murder of Count Alphonse of Toulouse. So there are people who want to insinuate that she had somebody killed without a shred of evidence. Not a piece.
Anne Brannen 31:33
So this is right after the earlier Chronicles?
Michelle Butler 31:36
Yes. The things that are contemporary, like William of Tyre, speak well of her, and then you have these later ones that are like, I don’t know. So you have William of Nangis, another chronicler, who was convinced that Melisande was not awesome. But the biggest thing that happens is that in the 19th and 20th century, you have scholars who just cannot wrap their brains around the idea that she ruled all by herself, and that she resisted handing power over to her son when he came of age. But what Newman says about this is, “I have read the same Chronicles and charters as other historians, and come to a different conclusion” the conclusion about plotting to keep her son from power. “I believe that Melisande and a large part of the nobility of the kingdom did not think that Baldwin was ready to be the sole ruler.”
Anne Brannen 32:26
He had been tricked into attacking Damascus. That wasn’t so great.
Michelle Butler 32:30
That’s part of this that seems to get ignored–that she can’t decide that on her own. She has the council behind her. They’re also saying, ‘Oh, I don’t know, maybe this 20 year old dude is not quite ready to take over from his mom who has 22 years of experience doing this and a good track record. We’re not excited about doing this yet.’
Anne Brannen 32:53
‘Damacus won’t even talk to us anymore. We sent flowers.’
Michelle Butler 32:56
There is an outlier scholar, though, from 1978. Bernard Hamilton’s article, Women in the Crusader States: The Queens of Jerusalem” has very nice things to say about Melisande. He is this outlier. The article doesn’t focus just on her, it talks about several of the queens of Jerusalem, but he makes the point that– I’ll just give you this quote. “She was a truly remarkable woman who for over 30 years exercised considerable power in a kingdom where there was no previous tradition of any woman holding public office.” Then he quotes William of Tyre, which I think we’ve already quoted, “William of Tyre’s comment that ‘she was a very wise woman fully experienced in all spheres of state business, who completely triumphed over the handicap of her sex so she could take charge of important affairs’ has a patronizing ring to a 20th century ear. Few, however, would disagree with his judgment that striving to emulate the glory of the best princes, she ruled the kingdom with such ability that she was rightly considered to have equalled her predecessors in that regard.” So that’s Hamilton, quoting William of Tyre, and he doesn’t go after Meyer, who’s writing just a few years before him, but he clearly is creating a different narrative than what Meyer was. Melisande is getting a lot more attention in the last 20 years. It’s very exciting. We’ve got Sharon Newman’s full-length scholarly biography. It’s called Defending the city of God. It’s from 2014. There is a book that just came out by Katherine Pagonis called Queens of Jerusalem: the Women Who Dared to Rule, it was 2022. There is a play planned for spring of 2024–
Anne Brannen 34:43
No?! Where?
Michelle Butler 34:44
The venue has not been announced. All I can find about this is on the author’s website. Her name is Kate Mosse, and it’s called The Queen of Jerusalem. And what we’re getting told is that it is a major commission celebrating ‘Melisande, the extraordinary 12th century queen of Jerusalem, who ruled over the holy land during one of the most turbulent centuries in history with the support and sometimes the opposition of her sisters, this untold women’s history of the Crusader era.’ So that is still the way she’s getting described, as untold. Danielle Park makes the point that scholars know about her but there is no presence in the larger popular imagination for Melisande like there is say for Eleanor of Aquitaine. Most people have heard Eleanor of Aquitaine. But it just says ‘venue to be confirmed spring 2024.
Anne Brannen 35:36
Do we know who–
Michelle Butler 35:38
We do not know who commissioned it. She’s mostly a novelist.
Anne Brannen 35:43
Well, this is great.
Michelle Butler 35:45
So that’s pretty exciting. There is a historical novel about Melisande from 1997 by Judith Tarr, it’s called Queen of Swords. It is about Millicent, kind of. It’s not third person attached to Melisande. What you have is a young French noblewoman named Richildis, who comes to the Holy Land looking for the brother who is now the heir because the father and the older brothers have died. So she’s trying to find her brother to bring him back to take up his lordship back in France. He had participated in the crusade, and now he needs to go home. The novel is about what she experiences and her interactions with the queen. It is historical fiction about Melisande but it’s observing her, not really spending time in her head. It’s an enormous book, by the way. The audio book is 22 hours long. Judith Tarr is just a wonderful writer. This isn’t the first book she’s written that is historical fiction set during the Crusader era. She’s done several of those. It was totally bizarre to me to find this, because I was reading Judith Tarre–I mean, when I was 13 years old when I first started reading Judith Tarr. So first of all, I’m not even going to pretend to be objective about this. This is somebody I read as a kid. And indeed, I was reading some of her Crusader historical fiction as a child.
Anne Brannen 37:16
But you hadn’t come across this one.
Michelle Butler 37:16
I had not come across this one because this one came out in 1997. And I was in graduate school.
Anne Brannen 37:22
That’s right, you were
Michelle Butler 37:25
Not doing anything other than reading plays.
Anne Brannen 37:31
If she’d written it when you were a child, you would have known all about Melisande.
Michelle Butler 37:35
She had two other Crusader novels that are set slightly later that I have read. But those came out when I was in middle school. But this one came out a little bit later. And I was busy reading a crap ton of plays. So you have one scholarly biography, you have one historical novel, and the novel is way before–this is 1997–this is way before this current crop of new books. There’s another book that I don’t have because it’s out of print, and it’s like 40 bucks. But there’s this whole other book–let me pull it back up here–that is about her. It’s called ‘Millicent of Jerusalem, the world of a forgotten Crusader Queen’ and it’s from 2011. So it’s part of this rediscovery of her and it’s specifically about her context, about the artistic context. It’s not so much focused on her. It’s trying to explain what her role was. I would have liked to have had it but it’s quite expensive used so I didn’t get it. Also it wouldn’t have got here in time. So we have this new with this new interest in her. 2011, 2014, 2022, the play that’s coming out. So really in the last 10 years, but Judith Tarr’s book is from 1997. So our friend Steven Runciman is back–remember him? Her book is largely using Runciman, because there’s a bunch of stuff that isn’t available to her, that is this newer work. Mostly she’s working from Runciman. But it’s a very different sort of book, to show a historical figure being observed rather than trying to get inside their head and show us why they do what they do. I’m saying there’s still an opening here for somebody else to come in.
Anne Brannen 39:30
So once again, we need for somebody to write a historical fiction book focusing on Melisande from her point of view. We often have things we need people to write, you know, they never do, so far.
Michelle Butler 39:45
Danielle Parks chapter is–the one that it’ll be in our source list–is largely about Judith Tara’s book. I didn’t think it was going to be because the title is The Memorialization of Queen Millicent of Jerusalem from the Medieval to the Modern. I thought this was going to be something else entirely, but it has an introduction about how she got bad mouthed by a bunch of scholars. And then it talks largely about Judith Tarr’s Queen of Swords.
Anne Brannen 40:15
She’s kind of where things turn.
Michelle Butler 40:18
I think that’s probably true. I kind of feel bad for Hugh of Jaffa because he did not recover from that assassination attempt. He died.
Anne Brannen 40:32
Well, it wasn’t an assassination attempt then. It was an assassination.
Michelle Butler 40:37
He didn’t die instantaneously. But he died fairly soon thereafter. About three three months later in exile.
Anne Brannen 40:44
That is very–yeah, it’s a sad life.
Michelle Butler 40:48
Fulk makes so mistakes. If he sent the assassin after Hugh that was super dumb, because the sympathy shifted on a dime. This is still a world in which yes, we’re gonna murder each other, we’re gonna slaughter each other on the battlefield, but this kind of backdoor stabby-ness is not acceptable. So if he sent the killer–it’s not a real assassin. It’s a French knight who had no particular reason…he claimed that he was not sent by Fulk but he was hoping for a reward after he did this.
Anne Brannen 41:21
Ooh, like those who killed–
Michelle Butler 41:27
Thomas Becket, exactly like that. That’s what he claimed. But nobody believed him. Because he didn’t show up. They arranged this–there was a duel. When the accusation was made, because Fulk didn’t make the accusation directly, he started rumors, and then he got Hugh’s stepson, Walter, to actually make the accusation. But Walter is the size of the Mountain in Game of Thrones. He’s absolutely enormous. And Hugh was not a big dude. So when Walter says, ‘well, we’ll just have to have, you know, I challenge you to a duel, and then we’ll sort it out.’ Hugh, in the heat of the moment, agrees. But then he goes home and realizes this is a trap, so he doesn’t show up to the duel. And of course, that makes him look very guilty. So he has to flee and go into exile, which is when apparently Fulk, this dumb bunny, sends a killer after him. Which then changes everybody’s opinion back to ‘now we’re on Hugh’s side.’ So if he’d have just left well enough alone, and let Hugh go off in exile, he looks like a coward and like he’s guilty. But when they try to kill him in this backhanded way, it shifts the sympathies back to Hugh
Anne Brannen 42:47
And one of the problems is that pretty much they didn’t like Fulk anyway. And so that would grease the–
Michelle Butler 42:55
It made it easy to go back to the person they actually liked.
Anne Brannen 42:59
Fulk clearly was indeed the sort of person who would send an assassin in stupid fashion.
Michelle Butler 43:06
Yeah, a French knight. Wait, wait, who do we know who’s French?
Anne Brannen 43:11
I find it so interesting that Millicent and Fulk reconcile though. I just find that so interesting, because it would have made sense if basically you know she threw him out and never spoke to him again.
Michelle Butler 43:28
Well, you got to have the heir and the spare. And they did–they had both kids and they needed both of them. Baldwin only outlived her by a year.
Anne Brannen 43:39
That’s true.
Michelle Butler 43:40
And then Almaric becomes king. There’s a lot of speculation about why Baldwin doesn’t marry earlier and some of the people who don’t like Melisande want to argue that she wasn’t allowing him to get married because she didn’t want there to be another queen. Like she’s stunting his growth
Anne Brannen 43:59
Like another queen was actually going to get crowned by the patriarch. I don’t think so.
Michelle Butler 44:04
There’s again no reason to think that, there’s no evidence that she was trying to stand in his way. The evidence appears to be that Baldwin just wasn’t interested yet. He wanted to get out there and cut his teeth in battle, behaving exactly like you would expect a 20 year old to behave. ‘I don’t have time for girls, mom, I need to go kill some people.’
Anne Brannen 44:27
And wander around the streets of Jerusalem with laurel leaves on my head.
Michelle Butler 44:33
Fortunately, the second son was married by that point and already had a child so he was providing–although I think it’s his son, Baldwin the fourth, who is the leper King. I believe so, because the brother would have been Baldwin the third–I believe it’s Amalric’s son, Baldwin the fourth, although I didn’t look at that for this, so don’t don’t quote me.
Anne Brannen 45:04
Did he do any crimes? because then we’ll have to look them up later.
Michelle Butler 45:08
Poor soul, he caught leprosy as a young person and it didn’t live real long. So that’s what I have. I’m excited about having learned about her. And I’m glad that she’s finally getting her due.
Anne Brannen 45:21
I’m looking forward to hearing about the play. And also the new book.
Michelle Butler 45:26
I was happy to have some sources. That was cool. We’ve had a couple that were really hard to research. So it was nice to have some sources.
Anne Brannen 45:35
It’s really gonna take you a long time to get over the saffron, isn’t it? I loved the saffron. The saffron was great. So that was our discussion on Melisande, the queen of Jerusalem. She actually was the queen. She did rule. She did not have an affair. And we don’t think that you know, she was trying to thwart her son either. We think that she was waiting till he grew up and didn’t make stupid decisions.
Michelle Butler 45:36
And it’s highly likely her husband Fulk did in fact, commit a crime and attempt to have Hugh assassinated.
Anne Brannen 46:15
Yeah, and yeah. Fulk was an idiot. So that’s our stance on Melisande. 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 other places where the podcasts are hanging out. I’m laughing because I usually say Stitcher, but I’ve been informed that Stitcher is no more. You can find us at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There’s links to the podcasts there and also links to the show notes and the transcriptions and it’s always illustrated with lovely things I find with little burbs, and you can leave comments for us. We love comments. If you’ve got any medieval crimes that you think we should pay attention to, please let us know. We’ll stick them on the list if they look–you know, probably I think every one that’s we’ve gotten a suggestion for, we’ve been stuck on the list. And and you can contact us through there too. So yeah, so we’re reachable. Melisande. That’s us. She’s awesome. And Michelle has a new heroine. You often do get new heroines. It’s like every time we do one of the women you get a new–except for Mabel de Belleme. I don’t think she was a hero.
Michelle Butler 47:36
Not Elizabeth. Bathory either, but Joanna of Naples. Yeah and Melisande.
Anne Brannen 47:43
And Jeanne de Clisson–she was the pirate.
Michelle Butler 47:52
We’re not officially a women’s history podcast. But I do enjoy it when it pops up.
Anne Brannen 47:55
Yeah, we do pay attention. Melisande. She got a bad rap, as well as did Joanna the queen of Naples.
Michelle Butler 48:07
That’s true. They went out of their way to slander her too.
Anne Brannen 48:12
Anyway, that’s us. Next time you hear from us. We’ll be in East Anglia. Bye.
Michelle Butler 48:20
Bye.
83. Hugh de Lacy is Assassinated, Durrow, Ireland 1186.
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. I should have asked you this before we started recording, but what birds am I hearing in the background?
Anne Brannen 0:42
You’re hearing the parakeets because I am not in the room with the parrots because the parrots, if we are doing the podcast, scream continually, but the parakeets are simply making a sweet little noise, which I will probably leave in.
Michelle Butler 0:57
I think this is the first time they’ve shown up on the podcast.
Anne Brannen 1:00
Yeah this the first time I’ve recorded in here, but I’m recording in here because after the knee surgery, I need to be able to put my foot up and I can’t do it in the other room. So we’re with the parakeets. Parakeets are not obnoxious. Whereas Blanca, as you know, screams continually, and Lily says ‘hello, hello, hello’ continually and it’s really hard to have the podcast. Today on True Crime Medieval, where, you know, people are behaving badly, we are talking about the time that Hugh de Lacy was assassinated at Durrow Abbey in Ireland in July of 1186. That’s what we’re doing. Now I want to tell you quite frankly that the crime today is the assassination of Hugh de Lacy but the reason that the assassination of Hugh de Lacy is on our list is that it allows Michelle to talk about Trim Castle. That’s it.
Michelle Butler 2:01
I have been waiting for this for a long time because I adore Trim Castle.
Anne Brannen 2:08
Well, it kind of makes up for…you put saffron on the list, you know, the time that that guy got burned at the stake for adulterating saffron. You put that on the list and then it turned out to be one that made you sad because the research was not fun. So you put this on the list and it did not make you sad.
Michelle Butler 2:25
But I knew that getting to talk about saffron would make you happy so I put it on.
Anne Brannen 2:28
Oh my god, I was so happy to talk about saffron. I just loved it. Saffron. Hugh de Lacy–we now go into our our subject–Hugh de Lacy was from an Anglo-Norman family that had been established in the midlands of England after the conquest and then in the Welsh marches. So they’re part of the marcher lords. Hugh had become the head of the de Lacys after his older brother died. He was ruthless in acquiring power. He was really focused on taking everything that he possibly could. He disobeyed royal laws by clearing a royal forest when he didn’t have permission. He denied services and rights to religious houses and the bishop. He was constantly fighting the Welsh. Henry the second took him to Ireland in 1171, when Henry went there to try and settle things down. You remember the Anglo-Normans had invaded Ireland a few years earlier because they’d been invited by Diarmuit MacMurrough. We refer you to our earlier podcast on the crime of Diarmuit MacMurrough inviting the Normans into Ireland. Diarmuit MacMurrough had invited the Normans in to help because he was warring with other Irish kings. Henry was going on in just a few years later to try and curb the power of Richard de Clare, known as Strongbow, who had been the leader of the Anglo-Norman invasion and had married into one of the strongest of the royal families and was making great headway toward becoming one of the kings of Ireland himself. Henry was not interested in this happening. So Henry was successful in bringing Strongbow into line and he got the Irish kings to be agreeable for at least at the moment. At this point, no peace in Ireland lasted very long at all, but at any rate for a little bit. But then he had to go back to England on other business and so he what he did was, he gave Hugh de Lacy, who had gone with him, the governance of Dublin, which was the most important town the Anglo Normans had–the stronghold of the Anglo Normans–and the county of Meath, which was not a stronghold of the Anglo Normans, because they really did not have a foothold there at all. It was being fought over by the Irish and the Anglo Normans. So that was a lot of power. But it meant that de Lacy was really having to pay attention because he had to hold Dublin and also bring Meath into the Anglo Norman realm of control. Tiernan O’Rourke, who was currently ruling Meath, was formidable and untrustworthy. O’Rourke had changed allegiances amongst the Irish kings for 50 years and back and forth with the Anglo Normans since they got there. O’Rourke met with de Lacy because they needed to make an agreement. So they met, and they kind of fell out. It ended with O’Rourke getting beheaded. Okay. His body was displayed near Dublin and his head was displayed over the gate at Dublin Castle. So as, you know, to cause the Irish to to be careful, to think that maybe we better be careful of the Normans. Yeah, like that’s going to work with the Irish. The Irish were really, really angry about this, but de Lacy had gained control of Meath. He would have to keep it, but there you are. What happened then, instead of de Lacy being given a chance to kind of take care of all these things that he’d been given in this very war ridden country, he was called back to England and Normandy to administer his lands and serve the king and go into Normandy fighting, defending a town that was held by the Anglo Normans that the French king was attacking. He was busy for a while, so that was a good time for the Irish to devastate Meath. So they did that, and that was led by Rory O’Connor, the High King. De Clare–Strongbow–who was still around, couldn’t help Meath because he was busy fighting the Irish in the lands that he was holding. So the de Lacy steward in Meath–his name was Hugh Tyrrel–abandoned the castle and he fled to Dublin. The Irish razed the castle but that gave de Clare a chance to get to Dublin and defend it before O’Connor got there. So that was useful. At any rate, the castle of Trim sort of got sacrificed for Dublin at that point. But Michelle will tell us more about that later–
Michelle Butler 2:30
I totally will.
Anne Brannen 3:01
–when she focuses on the castle of Trim. One of her favorite topics. Okay. So de Lacy went back to Ireland because ‘oh no, oh, no.’ This is one of the problems with having lands in Normandy and England and Ireland.
Michelle Butler 7:39
Medieval lords spent a hell of a lot more time traveling than what we assume.
Anne Brannen 7:43
Yeah, the ones that were part of collections of people who were busy with colonialism, early colonialism. They had to keep going all these different places.
Michelle Butler 7:57
It would be like working for a company now that has headquarters in Canada, but then it also has holdings in China, and it also has holdings in Egypt, and you have to be going between those places.
Anne Brannen 8:14
Yes, yes. Yes. It’s much like this. So he’s busy. Anyway, he had to go back to Ireland to try and bring things back into I guess what passes for balance at this time. He rebuilt Trim Castle. Michelle will tell us more about that later. Then he left again to go take care of his holdings in England and Normandy. King Henry made a treaty with O’Connor in 1175. That’s the Treaty of Windsor if you want to take notes. The Irish left the Anglo Normans alone for a little bit, like a couple of years or something. But in 1177, Henry divided the Anglo Norman Irish holdings into three parts. Power was shifting at that point. He had to do something because Strongbow, de Clare, had died. There’s this movement, we get into various sorts of power. So he divided everything up into three parts. De lacy was to administer his third from Dublin, giving up some of his major English holdings. Basically he’s supposed to stay in Dublin. Okay. De Lacy, you stay there. After some pushing back and forth between O’Connor and de Lacy which I will not go into, Hugh married–and this was his second marriage, his first wife is dead at this point–Rose Ni Connor, O’Connor’s daughter. Yeah. So there’s the prospect then of de Lacy gaining the power of the one of the kings of Ireland, which is exactly what Henry had taken him there to keep Strongbow from getting, and de Lacy had married Rose without the king’s permission. The potential power was immense. Henry demoted him in 1181. He remained chief governor of Ireland, but there was someone there overseeing his activities and he was not the main dude. But de Lacy–and let’s not be surprised about this–de Lacy continued to gain power both through diplomacy and battle because, you know, he was de Lacy. Henry eventually sent his son John–who will later be King John–Henry sent his son John to be the Lord of Ireland in 1185. This did not go well. John offended the Irish. He offended the Anglo Normans. He lost most of his army in battle him. Then he headed back to England after only a year, blaming his failure at getting anything done at all on de Lacy, although really, as far as we could tell, de Lacy had not actually done anything to John. He had just kind of stepped back and let John ruin things himself. He was young at this point, but he wasn’t any better than he was going to be later. It was different for…like Henry the Eighth was actually nice, a great guy, and then he became a horrible psychopath. But John was just awful throughout his life. Who knows what de Lacy would have gotten up to next? We don’t, because in the next year, de Lacy was over at Durrow Abbey, where he was sacrilegiously building another castle, when a local young stonemason pulled out an axe that he apparently had hidden under his tunic–I’m unclear on how this works and why–but at any rate, he cut off de Lacy’s head while he–de Lacy–was bending over some stonework. Or another story: de Lacy was accidentally killed by a falling stone. History really favors the losing the head story. So that’s the one that we go with. Why was he assassinated? Well, perhaps “The Fox”–Ó Catharnaigh–who had lost lands to de Lacy had instigated it, or perhaps it was all about desecrating a religious site founded by St. Columba by building a military castle on the site. He was dead at any rate. Prince John was sent back over to take his lands. De lacy’s son Walter succeeded him. Walter had helped Hugh de Lacy–his father–build Trim Castle, and he was married to the daughter of William de Braose, King John’s trusted companion who became his mortal enemy. We refer you to two of our former podcasts. One where King John starves William de Braose’s wife and son to death in Corfe castle and the other in which William de Braose helps King John kill King John’s nephew Arthur. John invaded and took Walter’s lands and Meath along, with about 400 of Walter’s soldiers, but then in 1215, John would be besieged by his barons. Some of you will remember this date, because that’s when he’s going to be signing the Magna Carta. So he started working on getting de Lacy’s his lands back because he’s trying to get barons to not hate his guts. Later, de lacy was going to join Geoffrey de Marisco and Richard de Burgh against Rory O’Connor’s son who was king of Connacht. This was before the de Mariscos fell from their shaky sort of grace. We refer you to our previous podcast concerning Geoffrey de Marisco’s son, who became a pirate.
Michelle Butler 8:17
These people.
Anne Brannen 8:42
I know. We’re doing 1000 years of European history but–
We just keep ending up back at the Normans because on a crime per person ratio…
It’s the Anglo Normans. Yeah, it’s really the Anglo Normans all the time. Walter had a son, Gilbert, but Gilbert died before him, so when Walter died, his lands were divided between Gilbert’s daughters, Maude and Marjorie. Walter’s younger brother had had no male heirs. So that was the end of the de Lacy male line in Ireland. The de Lacys continued on in England. Normandy, I don’t actually know about, now that I’ve come to think of it. So that is about Hugh de Lacy, who built Trim Castle, which then got razed, and then he rebuilt, and our crime is that Hugh de Lacy got assassinated by some guy with an axe.
Michelle Butler 14:27
In some ways, he stands for a lot of these Anglo-Norman lords, who, shockingly enough, as hated colonizers were more than on average assassinated. I know that is a shocking sort of thing, but the Irish hated them and took every opportunity to sink an axe into their heads if they could possibly do so.
Anne Brannen 14:51
No, we’re not surprised that de Lacy got assassinated. At any given point along this little trajectory of his life which I have given you, he could have gotten assassinated, but that was when he did. So that’s our crime. But the real point of the podcast is that Michelle is now going to tell you all about Trim Castle, because Hugh de Lacy built it and he got assassinated.
Michelle Butler 15:13
He did. And the way that he lived is directly related to the castle he built.
Anne Brannen 15:20
Okay, so there really is a connection other than the fact that he built it.
Michelle Butler 15:28
The reason I wanted to talk about Trim is that Trim Castle is an Anglo Norman castle on steroids. I mean, Anglo-Norman castles are already defensive minded. If you go and look at the keep in the Tower of London or any of the other Anglo-Norman castles, they’re already defensive minded. But the ones that they built in Ireland are next level, because there’s active hostilities happening at all times.
Anne Brannen 16:05
Okay. Now, I need to ask something here, because I know that the preponderance of Anglo-Norman castles are concentrated in Wales, where there was also active hostility, but what you’re telling me is that it was worse in Ireland than it was in Wales.
Michelle Butler 16:22
I don’t know if I would say that. I just don’t know the Welsh castles as well. I’m thinking about them in comparison to the ones that William built in England. He was wanting to hold England, but he had so successfully killed the English nobility at the Battle of Hastings that there was much less resistance.
Anne Brannen 16:46
Okay.
Michelle Butler 16:47
It is true that in Wales, the colonisation, the conquest they were trying to do there did not go well either.
Anne Brannen 16:55
No, it did not.
Michelle Butler 16:56
So it would be interesting to look at the Welsh Anglo-Norman castles in comparison to the Irish ones.
Anne Brannen 17:05
Surely somebody has done this.
Michelle Butler 17:08
I personally don’t know Wales as well as I should. I know that Wales has more castles per square mile than any other place on earth, which tells you a hell of a lot about how difficult the conquest was there. I think, though, that one of the reasons that the Anglo Norman castles in Ireland are so so defensive minded is that there was not going to be reinforcements coming from anywhere if you got attacked. If you got attacked, you had to hold out on your own.
Anne Brannen 17:39
Okay, that actually really does make sense. There were places where it was hard to get into Wales, but it was certainly easier to get into Wales than it was to get into Ireland. From England. Yeah, okay. One of the things going on with subjugating the Welsh is that the same kind of issues with the people who are there, the Irish or the Welsh, being at war amongst themselves was going you…it’s the same both places.
Michelle Butler 18:08
Yeah. They had originally built this wooden ringwork castle, which is essentially a motte and bailey castle only they don’t have the motte. Not a moat. A motte. The inner piece is not built on a raised… that’s really the difference between a ringwork and a motte and bailey castle. Archaeology has discovered the remnants of the wooden castle. The castle is actually mentioned…there’s a 13th century Norman French poem called The Song of Dermot and the Earl, which tells the story about the Norman invasion of Ireland. I can’t imagine why I didn’t find this until now. How did this happen?
Anne Brannen 18:50
How did this happen, yeah.
Michelle Butler 18:50
The earl of the title is Strongbow. So here’s a little quote from it. “Hugh de Lacy fortified a house at Trim and dug a ditch around it and enclosed it within a stockade. Within the house, he then placed great knights and barons.” So the building of Trim is in the poem. I didn’t actually go read the whole poem, but it sounds awesome. It’s not contemporary, but it’s within 100 years of the invasion because it’s early 13th century.
Anne Brannen 19:19
So Trim is the Anglo-Norman castle that was built in Meath, which was so problematic and there’s so much fighting there. Okay. It was really big because it had to be heavily fortified because it’s not like it’s way out in the boonies, but it’s a little like east/northeast of Dublin.
Michelle Butler 19:41
It is the largest Anglo-Norman castle in Ireland. After Rory O’Connor burnt the wooden stockade, they rebuilt in stone. They rebuilt first the keep, in the middle, which is kind of standard. It’s both for residents and for defense. So it’s a very nice example of the kind of cutting edge technology that’s going on in Anglo-Norman castle building at that time. This is slightly later than the Tower of London and the design is slightly different. This is a Greek cross shaped keep, rather than the Tower of London, which is a box.
Anne Brannen 20:23
It is so square.
Michelle Butler 20:25
This is much more intricately designed. But the design has to do with a balance of it being a residence where you actually want to live. Because it’s not just a barracks–you’re going to be living there. But defense is first.
Anne Brannen 20:42
A cross shape would mean that you had more angles from which to shoot arrows, right?
Michelle Butler 20:48
Mm-hm. But the cruciform pieces don’t stick out real far. When you look at it, it looks like a keep but it does have more angles, and those angles would have had…what are those things called? It’s called defensive hoarding. In those corners you would have wooden platforms that hang outside, that you can get into from the castle and that extends your range so that you can shoot arrows even further.
Anne Brannen 21:24
Okay, got it.
Michelle Butler 21:25
And you can drop things on people.
Anne Brannen 21:27
Yes, dropping is also sometimes useful. Although you’re kinda out there, aren’t you? Because they also are shooting things.
Michelle Butler 21:34
Well, they’re enclosed. They look like little rooms that are like attached outside. Little wooden…they almost look like little cabins attached to the outside. It’s just another way to take the battle to them.
Anne Brannen 21:49
Right. So unless you’re getting hit with fire, you’re protected.
Michelle Butler 21:53
Yes. They’ve got massive cellars to have lots of stores because siege warfare is the thing. Once you have castles, you have siege warfare. They’ve got cisterns and a rainwater collection system, which you wouldn’t think you would need since you’re right beside the river Boyne, but who wants to be the one having to go out and collect water from the river? You need to collect the rainwater. You would enter the keep on the second floor via wooden stairs that could be burnt away. If you got attacked, the very first thing you do is burn the stairs. Now your life sucks if you’re the attacker, because you have to figure out how to get up to the second floor.
Anne Brannen 21:53
You’d have ladders inside for getting down later.
Michelle Butler 22:40
Yep. Later, they replaced those with stone stairs that have a drawbridge at the top to control entry. Another thing about this castle is that it’s used for so long. We looked at a different castle earlier when we were talking about the guy who became the pirate–de Marisco. His castle was kind of a snapshot in time of Anglo-Norman castle technology at that particular moment but then it was abandoned, so it’s a really nice frozen-in-moment time. Trim shows the change over time because it’s used for so long.
Anne Brannen 23:16
Oh, I love that. I really love buildings that show change over time.
Michelle Butler 23:21
King John’s castle in Limerick is like this. King John’s castle in Limerick actually ended up being used for significant battles during the 17th century.
Anne Brannen 23:32
Wow.
Michelle Butler 23:34
Cannons and stuff. Trim was actually occupied by Cromwell but it was in disrepair enough by that point that it wasn’t a fabulous place to actually set up shop. So from the time it’s built in the late 12, early 13th century and then into the 17th century, it is in use. That’s a long time for a building to be in use.
Anne Brannen 24:05
Who did it belong to? Did it belong to the de Lacys? It belonged to the de Lacys, and then did it go to either Maud or Margery–did it keep going on through?
Michelle Butler 24:15
It is owned by the de Lacys and then it’s owned by the granddaughters. The granddaughter marries a man whose last name is de Grenville. Then it goes to the Mortimers, which is very interesting. The Mortimers have it for a long time.
Anne Brannen 24:31
The Mortimers have everything for a long time.
Michelle Butler 24:33
Yeah. It’s really fascinating. Let me get to that piece of the book.
Anne Brannen 24:38
You have books on Trim Castle?
Michelle Butler 24:40
I have a book on Trim that I bought at Trim.
Anne Brannen 24:43
Oh my goodness. Lucky girl.
Michelle Butler 24:46
So the Mortimers have Trim for 120 years. Matilda and Geoffrey de Grenville have a son named Peter de Grenville, and his daughter Joan marries Roger Mortimer, who becomes the Earl of March. The Mortimers is one of these places where we see Trim…there’s a recurring theme with Trim as being this place that English lords…It’s used for the administration of their domain. It’s a feudal administrative center. But it also is this bolthole that English lords keep well stocked and defensive for when they get in trouble in England and need to leave for a little while because the heat is on.
Anne Brannen 25:38
Right. Which often happens.
Michelle Butler 25:40
It happens a lot in the history of Trim. William de Braose has to flee after he gets on the wrong side of John. Guess where he comes. Roger Mortimer ends up having to really make the castle defensive because there’s a whole extended family of de Lacys still in the area who are kind of cheesed that the castle has come to him. He’s seen as an interloper. So he has to keep it in good repair. He ends up needing to go there for a little while as a bolt hole because he’s on the wrong side of…I don’t know. He’s on the wrong side of an invading Scot. The Bruces bring the Scots to Ireland, you know, this is the brother of Robert the Bruce. Anyway, he ends up in trouble. This is the one who works with Isabella to assassinate Edward the second. So he has to spend some time in Trim. He ends up being captured but he had to spend some time in trim. One of the next ones was Richard the second, he ends up having to come to Trim. It’s just fascinating that it has this dual role as it’s really important for Ireland and the administration of English government in Ireland, but it’s also this’ just in case’ plan for these English lords.
Anne Brannen 27:08
That is actually very interesting.
Michelle Butler 27:12
As the castle grows, you have the keep in the middle, they built that first, and then you have the two lines of walls. Every time it grows, how you get into the castle becomes more and more complicated. I’m gonna read to you from the little guide book that describes how it works once you have the two layers of curtain walls. “Entry to the castle was a progress through a series of controlled compartments. An elaborate system of bridges, gates, overhead traps, and observation loops was designed to allow the garrison total control over access. At the end of a steep ramp, the obstacles of the outer tower were encountered. While being watched from the upper floor of this tower, those seeking entrance crossed a pit before reaching the drawbridge. Beyond the bridge was the tall gatetower, strongly defended by a portcullis with a heavy wooden gate blocking entrance to the central passage. In turn, flanking guard houses protected the passage and there was another wooden gate before entry to the castle yard.” So.
Anne Brannen 28:25
Wow.
Michelle Butler 28:26
To the best of my knowledge, Trim was never taken from the outside. The original wooden castle was burned, and Oliver Cromwell was able to occupy the site because the defenders had left they had actually done damage to the castle. They had torn the battlements down before they left to make it so that it was not useful to him because by that point, after the Mortimers die out in the 15th century, Trim goes into royal hands, which is how it ends up being, in the 17th century, part of this fight between the royalists and the parliamentarians. The defenders abandoned the castle before Cromwell got there and they did a bunch of damage to it. So it wasn’t useful to him as a defensive site. But as far as I know, Trim was never taken from the outside.
Anne Brannen 29:16
It’s got to be one of the few castles that has never been taken.
Michelle Butler 29:21
They were not fooling around. Everything you learn from a tour guide at a place, you have to kind of ‘asterix’ because sometimes they tell you colorful fibs.
Anne Brannen 29:33
Oh, I have heard so many. Yes.
Michelle Butler 29:35
But according to according to the tour guides at Trim, Trim was designed so that in a worst case scenario, you could defend it with two people. But according to them, they never got below eight.
Anne Brannen 29:51
Basically you really could do it with just however many people you needed to take care of that last door
Michelle Butler 29:58
You’ve got the arrows slits. You’ve got the spiral staircases that are in the opposing corners. They’re nowhere near the door you come in. When you first come into the keep, you’ve got this room that is kind of pleasantly called a vestibule, but what it really is, is that room we’re going to murder you in if you’ve somehow gotten here and we didn’t want you here. The doors are catty-corner from each other. They’re very hard to open from that point–they’re barred on the other side. Even if you get in there, the door that you need to go through is barred on the other side. So they have to decide to let you in it. It was a life changing experience to tour Trim. It was similar when I toured the Tower of London for the first time and took my little Midwestern self and got an idea of what it means for acres and acres to be behind walls. But Trim is so much about, ‘We’re surrounded by people who want to kill us and we are taking that seriously.’ The Tower of London was continuously occupied. So it got to move into that 18th century and 19th century splendor. But Trim, after Cromwell, falls into a picturesque ruin. It’s owned by the Wellesley family for a while, so the Duke of Wellington’s family owned it. For a while it’s owned by his brother, for a while it passes through a couple of other lordly hands. Then in 1993, it’s purchased by the Irish government.
Anne Brannen 31:37
So it was owned by various families, but nobody was living there.
Michelle Butler 31:41
Right, exactly. They’re just sort of finding it amusing, I guess. So when we visited in 2005, one of the reasons that the tourism piece of it was so underdeveloped is that it hadn’t been open to the public for very long.
Anne Brannen 31:56
Oh.
Michelle Butler 31:57
Because it was only purchased by the Irish government in 1993, and then there was conservation work that needed to happen. We came to see it in 2005, and it’s this amazing, awesome, life changing castle, and we’re in the gift shop, and there’s like nothing here.
Anne Brannen 32:17
That is just so not usual. And also very wrong.
Michelle Butler 32:20
There’s no postcards. There’s no tea shop. There are very kind of standard kitschy little Irish things in the gift shop, but there’s absolutely nothing that is specific to Trim. I’m sure it’s different now but at that point, there was very, very little. We were in the gift shop and they just kind of casually mentioned “Oh, yeah, Trim was used in Braveheart.” It showed up in Braveheart. Were there any pictures or postcards about how it was used at as a body double for York castle in Braveheart? Because of course York castle isn’t there anymore? No, there was not.
Anne Brannen 33:00
But they had your book.
Michelle Butler 33:01
They did. They had the awesome guidebook, about the castle with many, many wonderful…there are there lots of diagrams in here. There’s floor by floor room layouts of the keep. There’s an artist’s rendering of what it looked like as the wooden castle. There’s lots of artistic renderings of what it looked like at different times.
Anne Brannen 33:28
How many stories did it go up?
Michelle Butler 33:30
It changed because it was built higher. So it ends up being four but it didn’t start out as four. The keep was built higher by a later de Lacy. Trim in general is a very rewarding sort of place to tourist because you not only have the castle, you have a couple of wonderful priories. It’s all in ruins, but you can go see it. There’s just a lot there to see. Of course, it’s on the Boyne–that was their supply line from Drogheda. The Norman’s supply line. It’s not easy to use the Boyne for that, because it’s not a super deep river. So that ends up not being a thing that works really well in the long term. But that’s how they were trying to use it. I’m trying to behave myself here because it was such a thing. I have so many pictures, so many pictures of Trim.
Anne Brannen 34:21
Who did the Irish government buy it from?
Michelle Butler 34:23
Oh, let me look in my little book. There’s the four levels, there’s a basement level and then there’s three levels. It was owned by the Wellesley’s until the older brother of the Duke of Wellington sold his Irish estates in 1816. Then it was purchased by Colonel Leslie of Glaslough in County Monaghan, and then it was sold by that family in 1859 to some relatives, the Plunketts of Dunsany Castle. It was purchased from Lord Dunsany in 1993.
Anne Brannen 35:02
So are the Plunketts related to Oliver Plunkett? Blessed Oliver Plunkett?
Michelle Butler 35:05
Oh, that’s a good question.
Anne Brannen 35:06
Is he a saint yet? So?
Michelle Butler 35:08
I don’t know.
Anne Brannen 35:09
I don’t know, either.
Michelle Butler 35:11
It is maintained as a preserved ruin. So they’re not doing repair work. I think we talked about this when we talked about the tower in York, that you have to decide, are you going to try to restore it? Or are you going to keep it from deteriorating any further? That’s what is being done in Trim. It’s a preserved ruin. They’re making sure that it’s not going to fall apart, but they’re not trying to put it back together.
Anne Brannen 35:42
It’s pretty much what the English do with the abbeys and monasteries that still survive in ruins from Henry the Eighth, like Bury St. Edmunds. It’s there. They don’t rebuild. But you can see it.
Michelle Butler 35:57
We’re kind of fortunate it’s still there. I guess nobody wants to rob the Wellesleys because in the 18th and early 19th centuries it was just being a picturesque ruin. But there are other Anglo-Norman castles…there’s one over by Dundalk that is called Clanmore Castle and all that survives is one spiral staircase. It’s actually sort of interesting. The archaeologists can tell you where the stone has gone to.
Anne Brannen 36:29
Oh, really?
Michelle Butler 36:29
‘The castle is gone, but over here is a 14th century church. Oh, look at that stone. Over here is a 16th century church. Oh, look at that stone.’ It was used as a quarry.
Anne Brannen 36:42
It just makes so much sense. You got a building nobody’s using, it’s got materials that are useful and that would be costing a lot more if you went and got them new. Yeah, it makes so much sense.
Michelle Butler 36:58
That did happen at Trim, but not to the point where it’s wiped off the face of the earth. If you have a building sitting empty and you need to build something, you’re gonna have people coming in and using it. That’s just logical.
Anne Brannen 37:15
If you leave one now, you get squatters, and you lose the copper pipes. And you know, any nice trimmings. I’m glad you got to talk about Trim.
Michelle Butler 37:30
I just adore Trim. If we ever end up in a situation where my husband is doing a visiting position in Ireland, it would be a dream to go and tour guide at Trim. It’d be awesome.
Anne Brannen 37:48
Now I want to go. So are we done with our presentation of the crime of assassinating Hugh de Lacy and the wonderful thing that he built?
Michelle Butler 38:01
He possibly deserved splitting up his head with an axe. What do you expect when you’re the colonizer?
Anne Brannen 38:08
You love the idea of this. This guy hiding this axe under his tunic just really, really well. I guess that would be a better idea than hiding it under a bench so you could get to it. You would think, really, a knife might be easier to use, is what I’m thinking.
Michelle Butler 38:27
I actually hadn’t run across that specific story of how he was assassinated. I just read that he was assassinated.
Anne Brannen 38:34
Yeah, I had to do some tracking stuff down because there’s various things. I like the one where a stone just falls on his head.
Michelle Butler 38:40
I adore visiting castles. There was a little payback in my life. I went with my kid, the one that’s studying clock repair, to a clock museum last week, and had a moment of pity for everybody I’ve gone through a medieval castle with. We were looking at every clock in so much detail. Glog. And I was like, This is awesome. I’m so glad for your obsession, but my feet hurt.
Anne Brannen 39:13
Fairly clearly Alex got this from you.
Michelle Butler 39:17
We did see many, many clocks. He would stand there and kind of stare at the innards. What is this one? What kind of engine is this one? How does it work?
Anne Brannen 39:28
Okay, so more than just reading placards?
Michelle Butler 39:30
He’s having to really look at them. But they’re not all the same. You know, like each castle has its own story. Trim, the height of its power is the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, where as King John’s Castle in Limerick becomes a very important site during the Civil War and so it was retrofitted to make it a place they could defend against cannons, which is hard to do. Castles were not designed to be defensive against 17th century cannons. So there’s some interesting retrofitting that happened in Limerick. You read about them on paper and you think they’re going to be very similar because they’re both Anglo-Norman castles, but not really, because the one in Limerick, the height of its construction is so much later. It has barracks in a way that Trim doesn’t. It’s much more of a place we come and defend, not a place where a family lives.
Anne Brannen 40:33
And the Tower of London is so different because it’s got hundreds of years of people living there. It’s been a prison. It’s been a zoo. It’s been residences. And so it got built on and built on and built on.
Michelle Butler 40:50
And it has that history of being a royal castle, which is different.
Anne Brannen 40:56
A royal castle, and a royal castle within a place which is fairly safe. So it’s not the same thing as being out in Meath.
Michelle Butler 41:07
I know that we’re indulging my particular obsession because I love castles in general and I really love Trim in particular, but they are really connected to crime. So many of these crimes that these royal guys do to each other happen in castles. One of the things that happens in Trim is during the war that makes Henry the fourth king. You know, he deposes Richard the second. Richard the second captures and leaves Henry the fourth’s son Hal a prisoner in Trim.
Anne Brannen 41:43
That’s true. I’d forgotten that. I’m very glad we got to do castles. So I got saffron. You got castles. It’s very nice. Oh, what are we doing next? I forgot to look.
Michelle Butler 41:52
That’s a good question. Let me look. Oh, this is gonna be awesome. I don’t know anything about this. This is Jerusalem, 1134. So more Normans. The queen of Jerusalem is accused of infidelity by her husband, leading to trial by combat and a palace coup. So more Normans behaving badly. They’re behaving badly in the Holy Land.
Anne Brannen 42:20
We won’t be in Europe, so this will be a special, but we will be with Normans. So there’s that.
Michelle Butler 42:27
And trial by combat which is always fun.
Anne Brannen 42:29
That’s always fun. Since we did the Templars, we haven’t been able to talk much about the Franks and the Holy Land. We’ve done a bunch of crusades though.
Michelle Butler 42:37
I think this is why I put this on this list. We have not done much yet with the intrigue that happened among the Europeans once they got there and established a toehold. They immediately started stabbing each other in the back.
Anne Brannen 42:54
What a surprise. What a surprise.
Michelle Butler 42:57
I know. Much like they were behaving at home. They just made themselves at home.
Anne Brannen 43:02
So that’s what we’re doing. The next time we show up, we’re going to be talking about the Normans misbehaving in Jerusalem. We’ve been in Ireland with the Normans today. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. We can be found at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. The podcast is on Spotify and Apple podcast and other places where podcasts are hanging out. If you go to truecrimemedieval.com, there’s links to the podcast there along with show notes and transcripts and little illustrations and things that I write, little burbs I write. You can leave us comments and we really appreciate it. Also you can leave us medieval crimes that you think we should pay attention to. We always take that into account. We’d love to hear from you. And I believe that’s it for today. Bye.
Michelle Butler 43:59
Bye.
82. Arthur of Brittany Disappears, Rouen, France c. 1203
Anne Brannen 0:24
Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.
Michelle Butler 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:37
Today we are discussing the time that Arthur, the first Duke of Brittany, disappeared in Rouen, France in April of 1203. He disappeared and everybody believes he was murdered, that he didn’t like, go for a walk and not come back or run away to Belgium or anything. No, Arthur got murdered. We just don’t really know exactly who did it. But we certainly know why. So Arthur of Brittany was the son of Geoffrey and Constance, the Duke and Duchess of Brittany. He was born in March of 1187. Geoffrey died before he was born, so when he was a baby, Arthur was the second in line for the throne of England after Richard, who was Geoffrey’s older brother. We go backwards, because you always need some context. Henry the second was the king of England from 1154 to 1189. He was married to Eleanor of Aquitaine and had inherited the throne of England from Stephen of Blois when he died. Stephen had gotten the throne at the end of an English Civil War that was between Matilda, who was the daughter of Henry the first and Henry the first’s named heir, and also the mother of Henry the second, and Stephen, who was her cousin. The war ended with Stephen as king. But the deal was that Matilda’s son Henry was his successor, instead of Stephen’s own son, who really wanted nothing to do with any English nonsense. Do you remember what Stephen’s son did? He said, ‘No, I don’t want this and he–‘
Michelle Butler 2:19
The one son, Eustace, died just before Stephen and then the other one took himself back to Blois and said, ‘You know what, I’m happy here. I’ll just be count of Blois, leave me out of it.’
Anne Brannen 2:32
‘Forget this. Why should I go and be King of England?’
Michelle Butler 2:36
‘I literally have not seen you for 17 years. I hate every piece of this.’
Anne Brannen 2:40
‘I’ve never been to England. I don’t want England. Go away.’ Okay, so Henry was king of England. And Eleanor was his queen, and they had eight children altogether. The oldest was Henry, the young king, who was crowned co-king with his father, but he died before his father did so he never really got to be actually king all by himself. He died in 1183. The next child was Matilda. She got married to Henry the Lion, who was the Duke of Saxony, and she became the mother of Otto the fourth, one of the Holy Roman emperors, of which there were many. The next was Richard, who we know is Richard the Lionheart and he did become king of England in 1189 after the death of his father. The next child was Geoffrey of Brittany, who’s Arthur’s dad. Because Richard had no children, Geoffrey would have been the next in line to the throne, except he was dead. So that was no good because they only accept the living people, as people to wear the crown. So his son Arthur, who was 12 when Richard died, would be–according to some laws, I’ll get to that later–the next in line, but Richard thought that he was too young. So theoretically, on his deathbed, he declared his brother John as his successor. The next child after Richard of Henry and Eleanor was Eleanor, who married King Alfonso the eighth of Castile. The next after that was Joan who married Raymond the sixth, the count of Toulouse. The youngest child was John, who with three brothers before him, would have been unlikely to become king, because that’s a lot of older brothers and their sons. During Henry the second’s life, the young king Henry rebelled against Him. This is sort of a theme of the family. He rebelled against him, because he apparently wanted more power and money than he was getting because he was, after all, co-king. Where was his stuff? He was joined by Richard and Geoffrey, and their mother, Eleanor. Henry the second squashed the rebellion, and the young king and Geoffrey had another rebellion in 1183 during which young Henry died of dysentery, which is what a lot of soldiers die of. Or at least at that time they did. There was another rebellion later led by Richard after the young king and Geoffrey were both dead. Henry the second lost that one, but he died soon after. Okay, so, at the time of his brothers’ first rebellion, John was 13. At the time that Richard took the throne, John was 23. He had been at his father’s side during his brothers’ rebellion, and he was his father’s favorite. He was given much of the Angevin Empire because of this loyalty. He was called Lackland because it did not seem in his early years that he was going to inherit much of anything after Henry died, but besides the lands in Angevin Henry also gave him lands that he took from the nobles so that John did end up with some land, even before he was king. After the death of the young king, Henry backed up Richard’s right of succession. So Richard is next in line. He let Geoffrey keep Brittany. So Geoffrey was still Duke of Brittany. He named John the Duke of Aquitaine in place of Richard, who was after all going to be king someday, but Richard wouldn’t give up Aquitaine. So Geoffrey and John attacked him. But nothing ever happened from that. Theoretically, the family made up around about Christmas of 1184. Right. I would love to have been at that dinner, only not actually at the table, you know, like someplace kind of far away. Now, as we’ve noted, Geoffrey died, either by being trampled to death in a tournament or from a sudden chest pain. We have different accounts of this. But anyway, he was dead. So Arthur was next in line, again according to some pieces of law. John declared that Richard was dead while Richard was not dead, because he was off on crusade and then being kidnapped by Duke Leopold the second of Austria. We have a previous podcast about the kidnapping of Richard, so we go into detail about that there. At any rate, John had a little rebellion, and Richard forgave him. There’s a whole lot of rebelling against each other in this family and then putting each other in prison and then, like, forgiving each other and then rebelling again. It’s a very dysfunctional family, quite frankly. Richard died in April of 1199. Now, here’s the complexity. Besides just, you know, the characters of all the people involved. According to Norman law, John, as the surviving son of Henry, should have the throne. According to Angevin law, Arthur, who was the son of the elder son, was the heir. There’s also the Anglo-Norman throne in England and the Angevin throne to consider. There’s no, you know, international medieval law about this, and quite frankly, if there had been, I don’t think this family would have been paying attention to it. So we get to the Arthur and John part. Arthur was 12, you remember, and he was strongly connected to Philip, the King of France, and he had declared himself the vassal of Philip the king. The French, therefore, wanted Arthur to inherit because they were connected to him. Arthur was able to put together an army and march to Anjou, but John was able to talk to the seneschal of Anjou into taking Arthur and his mother, Constance, prisoners. Arthur’s 12. His mother Constance is with him on this march. Okay, anyway, they’re prisoners. Philip recognizes John as King of England and John turned Anjou over to Philip. So Arthur was free, but he no longer trusted the French who had just, you know, handed John the throne and also taken Anjou. So he fled to John but then he became suspicious of John–John being John–and he fled back to Angers. He got the support to Philip again, why not? He went on campaign against Normandy in 1202. He besieged his grandmother Eleanor at the castle of Mirabeau. That July, John captured Arthur with a surprise attack and imprisoned him in the Château de Falaise, which still exists and is in pretty good shape. It’s a historical monument, and has a nice little gift shop, and it hosts events such as–if I reading this correctly–a little reenactment of the Battle of Hastings, which didn’t happen there, but was a big day in Norman history. So that’s where Arthur was in 1202. Now Ralph of Coggeshall and an English chronicler says that John ordered him to be blinded and castrated. But the seneschal there could not do it. This was Hubert de Burgh. He didn’t do that, but he did put out the rumor that Arthur had died of natural causes, which made Brittany unhappy. Arthur wasn’t dead at that time. Meanwhile, John was trying to hold Normandy and this was not going well. The locals hated him. For one thing, he had put, like, 22 of the rebel leaders into prison, and then he let them just die, apparently from starvation. Please see our previous podcast concerning John starving Matilda de Braose and her son to death in Corfe castle. This was a method he was familiar with. Brittany revolted. That was just enough for them. Arthur was apparently dead. There was these 22 dead nobles. By 1203, the situation had gotten worse. Arthur–by that time, they’ve moved him to Rouen–Arthur was a problem. John had been declared king but France wasn’t happy with him, obviously, and France might well decide to resurrect Arthur’s claim to the throne. So although Arthur was not trying to be king, he was still a problem. So we believe that John decided that Arthur had to go, but exactly what happened, we don’t know. The Annals of Margam Abbey, which was in Wales, state that John killed Arthur himself while he was drunk, and then threw his body into the river tied to a stone, but there was also a rumor that William de Braose–that would be the husband of Matilda, who’s going to be dying later in Corfe Castle–that William de Braose murdered Arthur on John’s orders. De Braose was one of John’s favorites at court. He was a Marcher Lord from an Anglo Norman family. Very powerful in Wales. Really hated in Wales. He had by that time already been the holder of the Abergavenny massacre. Please see our earlier podcast on the Abergavenny massacre, where he invited Sytsylt ap Dyferwald and some other Welsh leaders to a reconciliation dinner at Christmas, and then locked the doors and had them all murdered. So he supported John’s claim to the throne and he got given lands for it. He had captured Arthur at Mirabeau, and he was with John in Normandy when Arthur disappeared. There’s no real evidence that he murdered Arthur. It just seems reasonable, given his previous proof of treachery and murder, and he received many more lands after Arthur’s disappearance. Later, his wife Matilda, after William had quarreled with John over money, accused John of having murdered his nephew, for which she and her adult son William were starved to death in Corfe Castle, as aforementioned. So it’s clear that William at the very least knew what had happened to Arthur, and that John was the cause of it. Maybe he murdered Arthur himself. Maybe he just knew what John had done. We don’t know. The upshot of all this was that Arthur was gone and had no successor. John already had the throne of England, but Arthur’s governance of Brittany needed to be handed over to somebody and his sister Eleanor couldn’t do it because John had put her in prison. You know, in fact, she never got out. She just lived there forever, and then finally died. She was theoretically Duchess of Brittany. But she, in reality, couldn’t do anything about it, because as I said, she was in prison. So Arthur’s half sister, Alix took over. She was a younger daughter of Arthur’s mother, Constance. Her father was Regent until 1206, when the King of France became regent, and then in 1213, she married Peter of Dreux, who was one of the French king’s cousins. So she became the Duchess of Brittany proper, and Eleanor, the imprisoned, being like completely out of the picture at that point, and she and Peter became the Earl and Countess of Richmond in 1218. She never really had any power, and she was going to die a few years later, in 1221. So that’s what happened to Arthur. He disappeared, and we don’t really actually know anything about him. He gets moved around Normandy as a kind of pawn, doing various things, but we don’t have any description of him. He’s very popular nonetheless, as one of the aesthetic sad victims of King John, who really has been in many of our podcasts so far, on account of his enormously bad behavior, which sort of went on and on and on and on and on. But Michelle, I believe that you are going to tell us some of how Arthur has come down to us in present day. Also I think you want to talk about Matthew of Paris. Do I remember this correctly?
Michelle Butler 14:55
Yes. So that’s what I went to look at. How Arthur comes down to us in popular culture. This also was a good moment to remind everybody that the Angevins had this legend that they were descended from a liaison between the Duke of Anjou and a daughter of the devil, and encouraged their nickname of ‘the devil’s brood,’ which tells you a lot about them.
Anne Brannen 15:34
They embraced their badness. They believed it to be their birthright.
Michelle Butler 15:43
Yes. It isn’t hurt by the kinds of things they’re willing to do. They encourage it as a reflection of their ferocity in battle. But John, in particular, is quite, quite terrible. If you Google ‘the devil’s brood,’ you will find all the stuff about the Plantagenets. So there are stories about Arthur. There are stories about John with Arthur. For example, ‘King Johan’ by John Bale in 1538. John Bale is an early Protestant. He is attempting to recreate King John as a proto-Protestant in his conflict with the Pope.
Why would you want him as one of your heroes?
He’s trying to reclaim King John as a hero for the Protestants. I think it’s very interesting that for a tiny sliver of history, Richard becomes the avatar for the Catholic past and John becomes the avatar for the Protestant present.
Anne Brannen 16:59
The implications of that are sort of startling, really.
Michelle Butler 17:02
It’s wild that what actually was going on with either one of them doesn’t matter. You just create them as the heroes we need to have existed in the past. Not surprisingly, given what John Bale was wanting to do in this play, there is not a peep about Arthur.
Anne Brannen 17:23
Right. Or any of the de Braose relatives, I would think.
Michelle Butler 17:28
Not a thing. It’s very narrowly focused on King John’s tussle with the Pope. I think that would really be required in order to recreate him as the proto Protestant hero that you need him to be if you’re John Bale.
Anne Brannen 17:47
Because you couldn’t use Henry the Eighth. He had a tussle with the Pope too, much bigger, but you couldn’t use him because he was too recent.
Michelle Butler 17:55
Yeah, it’s too early. That’s how you get yourself in trouble.
Anne Brannen 18:01
But John’s far enough away from the Reformation that you could pretend he was a nice guy. Wow.
Michelle Butler 18:11
It is a weird and wild play. John Bale’s plays are weird and wild in general.
Anne Brannen 18:16
They are. But I didn’t know this one.
Michelle Butler 18:18
Shakespeare, of course, has a play about King John that is based on an earlier anonymous, but maybe by Green, play called The Troublesome Reign of King John. I’m not dealing with them separately, because their approach is very similar. Arthur is portrayed as a child, younger than what he actually was. The thing to remember about Arthur is that 12 sounds like a child to us, and 16 still sounds like a child. But Arthur is old enough that had the dice fallen differently, he could have pulled this off. You can go out and lead your own troops and seize control.
Anne Brannen 19:03
Especially if you’ve got a good regent.
Michelle Butler 19:05
Yes, exactly. This isn’t that much younger than what Edward the third was when he swept Isabella and Mortimer aside and said, ‘I’m going to be in charge now.’ So portraying Arthur as younger puts the thumb on the scale of the pathos. That John is really quite terrible because he’s ordering Hubert to go kill a child.
Anne Brannen 19:34
I don’t remember this, because Hubert was ordered to castrate and blind him. Does that not show up in this?
Michelle Butler 19:41
So what happens here is, King John does this little ‘will no one rid me of this meddlesome prince’ thing. What he says is “Good Hubert. Hubert. Hubert, throw thine eye on young boy. I’ll tell thee what, my friend. He is a very serpent in my way. And whereso ev’r this foot of mind doth tread, he lies before me. Dost thou understand me? Thou art his keeper.” Hubert doesn’t get it at first. He says, “and I’ll keep him so that he shall not offend your Majesty.” King John gets a little bit more precise: “Death.” Hubert goes, “My lord?” King John keeps going: “A grave.” Hubert finally goes ‘oh,’ and he says, “He shall not live.” So in Shakespeare, Hubert promises to kill him, but he doesn’t. There’s this whole scene where Hubert’s like ‘I can’t do it. He’s just a cute little child.’
Anne Brannen 20:53
How old is he? Can you tell?
Michelle Butler 20:55
No. He’s a kid. You know, he’s old enough to speak blank verse.
Anne Brannen 21:02
Yeah, well, everybody did in England, obviously. You learned at the cradle.
Michelle Butler 21:07
He appeals to Hubert, ‘love me like your son. Take care of me. Is it my fault I was Geoffrey’s son?’ Hubert’s like ‘I can’t do it.’
Anne Brannen 21:16
So in reality, Hubert really wasn’t able to do what he had been ordered to do. But it wasn’t kill him. It was blind and castrate him. The whole killing thing came later. But yay, Hubert. ‘No, I’m gonna give him grilled cheese sandwiches, I’m not gonna kill him. He’s like hanging out in my castle.’
Michelle Butler 21:32
Then he hides Arthur, but he goes and tells John that he killed him, that he did what he wanted. The lords find out and now they’re mad at John, like, ‘what the hell happened to Arthur, you need to cough him up, we want to know that he’s okay.’ John goes back to Hubert and says, ‘You were supposed to understand that I didn’t mean that.’ He totally throws Hubert under the bus. He was like, ‘I have good news. Guess what. As it happens, I can produce him for you, still alive.’ John, of course, is mad: ‘nobody ever does what I say.’ Hubert can’t win. John’s mad no matter what. But interestingly, and this is how rumors get started, Shakespeare does not follow that chronicle, which is practically contemporary with the event. It’s within like five or 10 years of the event. And a Welsh chronicle, which is really interesting, since the de Braoses of course had a huge presence in Wales and possibly spilling their guts to that chronicler. Shakespeare does not have John kill Arthur directly, which is interesting that he makes that choice. What he has is Arthur either is trying to escape over the battlements and falls, or more likely, he throws himself off the battlements because he’s in despair.
Anne Brannen 22:54
So there’s no murder at all. It’s just like Arthur dies. It’s sad.
Michelle Butler 22:59
It’s Arthur dies, but John still is getting blamed for it. I’ve seen people describing this as either that he is trying to escape and he slips, but I don’t feel like the play is ambiguous. Arthur says ‘the wall is high, and yet I will leap down. Good ground, be pitiful and hurt me not. There’s few or none that do know me.’ So maybe he’s trying to escape. I don’t know. Actually, now that I read it, it looks like maybe that he’s wanting to have both. So Shakespeare, like he often does, threads the needle with this, where John gets blamed, and he absolutely deserves the blame. But he didn’t do this particular thing. Now it’s possible that…because Shakespeare is always being cautious about what he can show on stage without getting his ass arrested, and having a king–even one with a bad reputation–murdering another royal onstage could be one of those things that you would get in trouble for.
Anne Brannen 24:02
Right.
Michelle Butler 24:05
You’re really supposed to be cautious about the violence that you show that your kings are willing to participate in. And that would really be a big thing. It’s one thing to show your basic hired thugs coming in and drowning Clarence in a barrel and it’s a different thing to show the actual crowned king coming in and killing a child.
Anne Brannen 24:25
Even if it was so far away in time and blood from the Tudors.
Michelle Butler 24:31
I’m not a Shakespearean but my guess is that this is one of these places where Shakespeare is like, ‘Do I really want a visit from the Master of the Revel? No, I don’t think I do.’
Anne Brannen 24:41
‘Arthur, jump off the wall. That’ll do you.’
Michelle Butler 24:44
‘Try to escape and die. It’ll be even better because John’s still responsible, but he didn’t actually murder him. Only he’s guilty, but not really. This will be great.’
Anne Brannen 24:55
I’ll accept this.
Michelle Butler 24:56
What I was surprised by is the absolute plethora of French plays and poems. They are obsessed with Arthur, starting in the late 18th and on through the 19th century. I’m not going to deal with these in detail, but there’s a play from 1791, there’s a poem from 1822, there’s a poem from 1826. There are three plays in a row called Arthur de Bretagne. 1824, 1885, 1887. So the French, and I think we see this as well in Victorian art, that Arthur’s story really brings their bells. Of course, the Victorians are also interested in the Princes in the Tower. Really anything that sad and wan.
Anne Brannen 25:47
Anything that involves children being mercilessly done in by their relatives so that people can get power. Arthur and the Princes in the Tower have some things in common.
Michelle Butler 26:00
There’s a Breton folk band who have an album from 1995 that has a story about Arthur. Isn’t that wild?
Anne Brannen 26:11
Can I find it on Spotify?
Michelle Butler 26:13
I don’t know. The Breton folk band is called Triyan.
Anne Brannen 26:19
I have heard them. Yeah, I liked them. Okay.
Michelle Butler 26:22
They have a song about Arthur. I really did not expect to find this much pop culture about Arthur. I expected to find a lot about John because John, I already knew, has a big…he becomes this presence in the Robin Hood legend, so he already has, and also as an a corollary to Richard. I wasn’t really expecting to Arthur to become a waif-y mascot of the Victorians. Arthur story appears to attract weirdness. There’s a novel of Phillip Lindsey, who was born Australian but moved to England and he did most of his writing in England. So is he an Australian writer? Is he an English writer? I don’t know. In 1943 novel called The Devil and King John, Arthur is a mouthy teen who eventually taunted John too much, who loses his temper and kills him. So he’s not a waif-y child. But the piece that’s weird is that John is a secret pagan.
Anne Brannen 27:26
Of course he is. What the hell does this have to do with anything? Even if it were true? Which, no.
Michelle Butler 27:33
Who’s being encouraged by his wife, who’s actually a real witch, to sacrifice himself on a tree like William Rufus, and you’re like, what?
Anne Brannen 27:43
Which also didn’t happen.
Michelle Butler 27:45
It did not happen.
Anne Brannen 27:47
Oh, my God. Okay.
Michelle Butler 27:52
Thomas Costain also has a weird novel about John and Arthur called–it’s from 1957–called Below the Salt. It’s weird because it’s a time-slip story, it’s got reincarnation in it, and part of it is stuff that’s happening in its contemporary time, 1957, and then stuff that’s happening in the past with Arthur and, you know, they’re gonna find each other again. The review is brutal. The review says–at least the one I read from Kirkus says–‘this is an excellent historical fiction that should have stayed that. It does not need the modern sections, which make it weird.’
Anne Brannen 28:38
Oh, my God.
Michelle Butler 28:40
Costain wrote fiction, but he also wrote history. We ran across him before when we were in an earlier version of looking at the various plantagenets because he has a book called The Conquering Family.
Anne Brannen 28:55
Right.
Michelle Butler 28:56
The reviews of Below the Salt are pretty wild.
Anne Brannen 28:59
All right. So he does fiction and nonfiction. Got it.
Michelle Butler 29:03
Arthur and his mom, Constance, show up in Richard Green’s–1955 to 1957–Robin Hood. They are characters in that. Interestingly, that’s the only version of Robin Hood that I found where Arthur shows up, which surprised me a little bit because John’s present in the Robin Hood legend a lot. Why isn’t Arthur? That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It’s just the only one I found. The thing I would really, really have liked to have found but couldn’t…there was a BBC series miniseries in 1978 called The Devil’s Crown that tells about the Plantagenets and it has an all star cast. Brian Cox. Derek Jacobi. Zoe Wanamaker is Beregaria. Michael Byrne.
Anne Brannen 30:05
We can’t even find it on YouTube?
Michelle Butler 30:08
There is one episode and a trailer on YouTube.
Anne Brannen 30:12
Damn.
Michelle Butler 30:13
Richard Barber, you know, Richard Barber, the eminent medievalist, wrote up a companion piece, a book called The Devil’s Crown: A History of Henry the Second and His Sons to go with this miniseries. In fact, the blog post I found is called ‘The Devil’s Crown: the mystery and majesty of a lost BBC series.’ It’s gone. It’s not available.
Anne Brannen 30:37
It’s like some of those early episodes of Doctor Who. It’s gone. We have no idea where these things are.
Michelle Butler 30:46
I really spent too much time trying to find that.
Anne Brannen 30:49
Yeah, I want that.
Michelle Butler 30:51
It would have been really interesting to get to see it. Alas.
Anne Brannen 30:56
Who was Jacobi playing? Do you remember?
Michelle Butler 30:58
Let me see if it tells me in this list. Is he in this or is he mentioned because they’re comparing it to I Claudius? I am not clear about that. His name is in here, but it’s possible that it’s just because they’re comparing this mini series to I Claudius.
Anne Brannen 31:21
Okay.
Michelle Butler 31:21
So that’s the thing I did not find that would have been interesting to see.
Anne Brannen 31:29
Thinking about the Robin Hood and Arthur only showing up in one of the extant versions is like…the Robin Hood legends are really English and Arthur doesn’t have a presence in England.
Michelle Butler 31:45
Yeah. Sharon Kay Penman has three books about these guys, Devil’s Brood, Lionheart, and then A King’s Ransom. I have read A King’s Ransom because I read it for when we did Richard being kidnapped. I could not cope with the idea of reading two more 800 page books to try to find the little bits and pieces where Arthur shows up. But I did go look at her blog. What she says is that one of the reasons that Eleanor backed John over Arthur is that she raised John and she was pretty sure she could control him, and she had no leverage over Arthur. As bad as she knew John to be, she thought that she could help him or curb his excesses, and she had absolutely no idea what… but she knew she wouldn’t be in Arthur’s inner circle because she hadn’t been involved in his appraising.
Anne Brannen 32:41
He was from Brittany. He was born to the Duke and Duchess of Brittany.
Michelle Butler 32:46
So here’s what my man Matthew Paris has to say. Here is Matthew Paris’ epitaph for King John, written a few years after John’s death: “Foul as it is, hell itself is made fouler by the presence of King John.” Matthew Paris did not believe in…not until the end of his life where he was dying and then he thought better of it. He told you what he thought.
Anne Brannen 33:18
Is this in the later version of the Chronicles or only in the first one which he then took stuff out of?
Michelle Butler 33:25
I didn’t look that up but I’m betting that’s exactly the sort of thing he would have scratched out.
Anne Brannen 33:31
I think so. Too close. Are there more bad King John stories coming up that I’m just not remembering or is this like the last of the King John podcasts?
Michelle Butler 33:43
I have two or three others on the list because he’s so terrible. John is just really good at taking a decent situation and making it bad. He makes problems for no reason. There’s that time he stole his retainer’s fiance. What is your problem?
Anne Brannen 34:07
So there’s that. Alright. So we’ll have some more King John.
Michelle Butler 34:10
Shear dreadfulness of King John.
Anne Brannen 34:14
Yes, yes.
Michelle Butler 34:16
First for short as the reign was, he gets into it with everybody.
Anne Brannen 34:20
He also wasn’t really that good at being a king.
Michelle Butler 34:23
Good God. I mean, it’s not a it’s not a crime, exactly, but he loses the crown jewels in the swamp.
Anne Brannen 34:30
Losing the crown jewels in the wash. This is one of my favorite, favorite things. Now we have to explain this wonderful pun in case, you know, our American compatriots do not know it. He was fleeing, he and his retinue. They were in the fens. I love the fens. It was before the Dutch drained them and so it’s very marshy and it’s called the wash. The crown jewels fell and they got lost in the Wash. Okay, that’s the best of the King John stories. Losing the jewels in the wash.
Michelle Butler 35:06
When you first start reading about King John, you think surely all of these things associated with him cannot possibly all be true. How did one person accomplish this much damage? You think well, he’s part of the Robin Hood legend. Maybe they’re punching up his badness because you need the contrast between good King Richard and bad King John. No, no.
Anne Brannen 35:35
No you don’t really. Richard wasn’t that great a king either. He was mostly gone but at least he was not appallingly godawful at every moment.
Michelle Butler 35:45
John is actively terrible.
Anne Brannen 35:53
By all the percentages he should not have become king at all, Arthur or no.
Michelle Butler 36:01
He’s like Edward the second that way. Edward the second is the youngest child of…Edward the first and Eleanor had a bunch of kids.
Anne Brannen 36:12
They liked each other a lot.
Michelle Butler 36:13
13, 14. They had a bunch of kids. Edward Carnavon was one of the youngest. So he clearly had a bunch of older siblings die too.
Anne Brannen 36:25
He didn’t think that he was going to be king. John didn’t either. But then there was the chance.
Michelle Butler 36:32
Stuff happens. One of the things that I didn’t go look at, because it’s really alternate history rather than historical fiction, but there is an interesting alternate history set of books in which Richard doesn’t die of the arrow, Arthur becomes his heir, and so John never becomes king and there is no Magna Carta. I haven’t I haven’t gone off and read this, but I saw it in the list.
Anne Brannen 37:01
So then when the English descendants decide to cut themselves off and make a Constitution, they haven’t got a Magna Carta to think about. So American laws look different too then. Lots of stuff there.
Michelle Butler 37:22
There is. I didn’t spend as much time maybe as I should have looking at all the Victorian pictures, but my goodness, is there a ton of Victorian extremely pathetic etchings and engravings and paintings of John killing Arthur. They’re very fond of it. Which is interesting. Because that really famous picture of the little princes in the tower does not show anybody murdering them. It shows them being scared. But this image is nearly always the actual murder of Arthur.
Anne Brannen 37:52
The Victorians didn’t see John as a Protestant hero. The Victorians despised him. One of the few things I agree with the Victorians on.
Michelle Butler 38:07
Yeah, this was fun. It’s always nice to circle back to John and get reminded, yep, he deserves every bit of calumny that comes at him. And usually I try to look for the good in people, even our historic kings.
Anne Brannen 38:21
Well, he was nice to his illegitimate children. He made Joan, for instance, Queen of Wales. So there’s that. Okay. That’s one thing.
Michelle Butler 38:32
We have talked about Joan before. She’s the one with the lover who gets hung by Llewelyn the Great.
Anne Brannen 38:43
Yes. We refer you to our former podcast wherein Llewelyn the Great hangs one of the de Braoses. Yeah, it’s another one of the de Braoses. I think it’s another William. At any rate, he hangs him on account of he had an affair with Joan. The de Braoses…they really got around.
Michelle Butler 39:00
They just can’t help themselves. They’re all so bad.
Anne Brannen 39:03
Well, have we come to the end of our recounting of the story of poor Arthur, that we don’t know anything about except probably his uncle killed him.
Michelle Butler 39:11
One of my favorite pieces of trivia about Arthur is that there were two times that I know of in English history where they had the opportunity to have a real King Arthur and both of them die. This is one and the other is Henry the eighth’s son.
Anne Brannen 39:24
Henry the seventh’s son. Henry the eighth’s older brother.
Michelle Butler 39:26
Oh, yes, you’re right. Sorry. My bad. Yes. Henry the eighth’s older brother. Yes. I remember that. Because that’s Henry the seventh, who never missed an opportunity to say no, really, I deserve this throne, dammit. So he named him Arthur.
Anne Brannen 39:40
Yeah, England has not had a King Arthur since the one that wasn’t there anyway. There’s never ever ever been a King Arthur. There was not one to begin with and there is not one in history. Well, I’m sorry for the young would-be King Arthur who something happened to and it wasn’t good. Do you have anything else?
Michelle Butler 40:04
I do not. Nope.
Anne Brannen 40:05
Do you have our list? What’s next up?
Michelle Butler 40:08
Oh, yes, I do have the list. Let me flip the thing over. If we’re staying with our schedule, we are going to the assassination of Hugh de Lacy, builder of Trim Castle, 1186, In Ireland, so we’re just a wee bit earlier and we’re still with the Normans.
Anne Brannen 40:25
Okay. Hugh De Lacy. So the next time that you hear from us, we will be in Ireland.
Michelle Butler 40:30
Yay. We’re gonna talk about Trim castle. I love Trim castle.
Anne Brannen 40:33
Yes, I believe you put this on.
Michelle Butler 40:35
I know. Just to have an opportunity to talk about Trim Castle. I adore Trim castle.
Anne Brannen 40:42
Can we go visit? And is there a tea room?
Michelle Butler 40:45
There wasn’t but there might be by now. I felt very American visiting Trim Castle because we’re in their sad little gift shop, and I’m like, I have been in here for seven minutes and I can tell you three dozen products you need to add. I didn’t know that, as an American I understand marketing as a birthright. But you people. You people need to step it up.
Anne Brannen 41:08
And they’re your people, hereditarily. My people are not doing things right. All right. So we’ll do that. We’ll go to Ireland, and not King John for a while. 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 Stitcher and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts hang out. You can find us particularly at True Crime Medieval.com.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There’s links to the podcast. You can find the show notes and the transcripts, and you can leave comments which we love. We’d like to see what you have to say and sometimes we actually get suggestions. You might not hear us address the suggestions soon after you give them to us because we actually we have a list. We have still have a lot more to go, don’t we?
Michelle Butler 42:01
There’s lots of crime.
Anne Brannen 42:02
We don’t have an end to coming to this as far as we know. But we do like to know about crimes that we might not otherwise be thinking of. We stay in the European Middle Ages, that 1000 years. But sometimes we have a special episode where we go to the Early Modern Age. Kit Marlowe, for instance, or Guy Fawkes. We have one that’s coming up that is Jerusalem. I think it’s Jerusalem.
Michelle Butler 42:31
Yes.
Anne Brannen 42:32
Is it the Franks misbehaving in Jerusalem? So there’s still this European connection?
Michelle Butler 42:37
Yes, that’s exactly what it is.
Anne Brannen 42:39
The Franks being there in the first place was a big crime. We refer you to our earlier podcasts about the Crusades. There’s several of them. Thank you for coming by and listening to the terrible tragic tale of young Arthur, Duke of Britain. Bye.
81. Johannes Ryneken is Executed for Adulterating Saffron, Nuremberg Germany, 1444
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:38
Today we’re in the 15th century in Germany, where some spice trader got burnt alive because he adulterated the saffron. So, saffron context. I will say that usually Michelle comes to these recordings really, really happy because she got to find very many things about the thing we were working with and she has incredibly lovely rabbit holes. This time, I’m the one who’s incredibly happy because I get to talk about saffron. Michelle found a lot of stuff that was in German or required money. But you got a book on spices at Kalamazoo, so there’s that.
Michelle Butler 1:20
This was one of the times where my impulse purchase at Kalamazoo paid off.
Anne Brannen 1:26
Yay. I get to talk about saffron. Okay, so saffron. Saffron is the most expensive spice that you could go buy anywhere. It’s extremely expensive. It didn’t used to be. The thing is, we people have wages now. You have to give them money when they do things. That used to not actually be an issue. So it’s really expensive, because it’s so labor intensive. Saffron is the stigmas of this particular crocus– the saffron crocus. The stigmas–they’re called threads, which they actually really look like–and they have to be picked by hand. It cannot be mechanized. You pick the crocuses by hand, and then you have these baskets of them, and then you sit with the crocuses and you pull the little threads out and you put them in a tray. That is what you do. There’s no way you can use tractors or hoes or plows or rakes or anything. You’re just doing it by hand. Saffron is very important. It’s not just that it’s expensive. It has been, especially before we got to nowadays, where we were importing a lot of spices, it’s been extremely important. It’s used in medicine and dyes and perfume, which sounds weird to me. Do you like the smell of saffron, Michelle? I mean, I can smell it and go like, ‘oh, saffron is in here.’ But I never say gee, ‘I wish I smelled like this’. Do you?
Michelle Butler 3:01
I don’t like really strongly scented perfume.
Anne Brannen 3:03
Well, with saffron, the better the saffron, the more the scent. More on that later, because I get to talk about saffron. Anyway, it’s really important. So dyes, perfumes. And sacred purposes. It’s used a lot in rituals in lots of places. But mostly we eat it. It’s what makes the rice in paella and biryan yellow. I hadn’t known about this, but I found this–there’s a thing called a golden ham that’s made in Tuscany, which is a dry cured ham, made with saffron. I can’t imagine what that tastes like. Can’t imagine. We know that we’ve been growing saffron–we meaning humans–for more than 3500 years, but we don’t know exactly where we first started cultivating it. Probably it was Iran or Greece or Mesopotamia. The name saffron derives from the Persian ‘sar-paran’ meaning ‘golden leaves.’ So it’s got a Persian name and it was grown in Persia and it might even have been found in Persia first. In the frescoes in the palace of Knossos in Crete, there’s some saffron. There’s a saffron harvest, and there’s somebody’s using saffron as a medicine. In the Greek legend of Crocus, there’s a young man, Crocus, who gets turned into a flower by the nymph Smilax when he will not leave her alone. There’s a lot of Greek stories like that. ‘He would not leave me alone. I turned him into a tree.’ So he got turned into a flower and the flower is the saffron crocus. So he became useful. The Greeks and the Romans use saffron extensively in baths and in medicine, and they used it as perfume. Again, we don’t understand that. But hey. The Phoenicians traded it throughout the Mediterranean. We have prehistoric cave paintings with pigments made of saffron. So we know it was being used that early. There are saffron threads woven into some of the ancient Persian rugs that we have. Alexander the Great–I am very fond of Alexander the great. I don’t know why really, but I am–Alexander the Great, he discovered saffron when he conquered Persia and whatnot, and he loved it. He and his soldiers put it to lots of use. They made tea with it, and they put it in rice. Alexander liked to have baths with it, because he had a lot of battle wounds and it was a very healing thing. He thought all his soldiers should be having saffron baths. I really love Alexander the Great. He’s so extravagant. ‘I want everything, and give me the saffron.’ The Persians and the Phoenicians took saffron to India by about five years Before Common Era. They got to China by the third century Common Era. The Romans took it throughout the empire. Of course, doesn’t that just make sense. But after the fall of Rome, there was very little saffron grown or used in Europe. It was a Roman thing. It didn’t become a Scottish thing. You know, the Welsh didn’t say, ‘where’s our damn saffron?’ They did not. At that time. More on that later. That was true until contact with the Moors. When the Moors conquered some of the Iberian Peninsula, they brought saffron in. Then pilgrims and Crusaders went to the Middle East, ‘oh, saffron,’ that came back. So it started becoming popular in Europe. Then the Black Death…there was real emphasis on saffron in the Black Death. You needed a lot of it. Because, again, medicine, but the European supply was drying up because of all the dead saffron growers, because Black Death. The irony of this. ‘We need saffron.’ ‘I’m so sorry, I’m dead.’ So Europe had to import it. They couldn’t get it from the Middle East, because they were having wars. So they brought it in from Rhodes. But it was such a highly valuable commodity that the ships that carried it to Europe were highly desirable piracy targets. What happened in Germany is the town of Basel got tired of losing the saffron shipments to the pirates, so they started growing it themselves. They got really prosperous. They had to do a lot of policing. They had guards and whatnot. There was adulteration of the saffron that had to be policed. But the growth of the saffron there lessened. So that kind of fell away. Nuremberg became not important for saffron growing, but it became the nexus for saffron imports. Because by that time, you could import again. So saffron was getting imported in to Nuremberg, and sent out to the rest of Europe. Nuremberg…the prosperity.There was lots of prosperity–and crime, because there was a wave of the practice of adulterating saffron, because saffron was so valuable. It was by that time beginning to become more expensive. Not as expensive as it is now. But still. Because it’s so valuable, it’s really tempting to cut it. And you don’t have to just cut it. You can just store it in damp places and then it gets a lot of water in it. So then you sell less of it because it’s got water. Oh, naughty, naughty. There’s this wave of adulterating saffron, so as to get more money for selling less, and Nuremberg made laws. That’s what Michelle will be talking about later. Nuremberg made laws. You could actually be burnt to death for adulterating saffron.
Michelle Butler 9:13
Which is why I put it on the list because when I first ran across it I went ‘what?’
Anne Brannen 9:21
‘This is a death thing?’ Yeah, it was a death thing. Well, you could be imprisoned and fined also. Mostly you were probably fined and imprisoned, but you could be put to death. At least one person was. More on that later. So after the Nuremberg trade kind of lessened, one of the places where saffron began being a big commodity was England. England. Now this was the chalk hills that face south and so this is Essex and Sussex, for instance, and now I get to talk about one of my favorite places. The town of Saffron Walden was originally Chipping Walden. But then it became Saffron Walden after it became one of the places where there was a great deal of saffron grown. The saffron there is gone. I mean, they’re not growing saffron there anymore. If they are, they’re certainly not known for it and you wouldn’t be buying it. But the town is worth visiting for the turf maze, which you can still walk. You can walk the turf maze. Not so many towns have a turf maze. And the pargeting? Do you know pargeting, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 9:27
Oh, I don’t. What is it?
Anne Brannen 10:08
Oh, honey. Go and look it up. It’s P-a-r-g-e-t-ing and Henry the Eighth really liked it. It came in with the Italian plasterers. It’s raised work done in plaster, really intricate raised work. It’s mostly on the outside of houses. So you can go walk down the old streets of Saffron Walden and see these Tudor era houses. They’re all white with these beautiful raised designs. Oh, God, I love Saffron Walden.
Michelle Butler 11:01
Huh.
Anne Brannen 11:02
So look up the pargeting. Anyway, so that’s Saffron Walden. But what happened in England was the Commonwealth, because the Puritans thought that spiced food was sort of evil. So then the English stopped eating saffron. I think that this must be about the time that the French started making fun of English food. So saffron usage declined in England. At that time, also, the intense labor was beginning to be an issue because wage labor had been growing since the Black Death, when there were fewer laborers and so they could actually get money and they weren’t as tied to the land as they had been. Also at that time, Europeans were importing a lot of different spices. Saffron wasn’t as important because you could have all kinds of other things. You could have nutmeg and cinnamon and more pepper, and God knows what. So except in Spain and the south of France, and I think there’s a place in Italy, where saffron continued to be cultivated–it was really part of the culture–it became unimportant in Europe for a while, but now it is because we are eating all these different foods, and we just kind of have to have stuff. Okay, So at this point in time, where we are today, most saffron is being grown in Iran, which was what Persia used to be, Afghanistan, Spain, and India, and you can buy it. You maybe want to put it in your bath. I myself would not because it would be a very expensive bath. Very expensive, indeed. Alexander could do it, not just because he was, you know, the ruler of the entire world, but because it was so cheap. But you can buy it. You can go actually get it in the grocery stores. In the spice section, there’ll be a bottle with like just a few little threads, there’ll be some threads of saffron, and it’ll cost you about 15 bucks. I don’t know where it comes from, that you can buy it there. You can buy a few threads–a few thread is like a 10th of an ounce–for what amounts to, if you add it on up in your head, which you never do because you’re in the grocery store, and you just kind of buy it–would be about $200 an ounce. There are very wide variations in quality. Now, there are three places where the best saffron in the world comes from. And every single one of these places says that it is the best saffron in the world. I’m not sure that any of them is actually the best saffron. I think they’re probably the three best places to get saffron in the world. I’m sure it’s probably like with wine. You know, there’s people that can tell all kinds of different things. I used to be able–I can’t do it anymore–when I grew up here in New Mexico, I used to be able to eat green chili and I could tell you what county it had been grown in. I have lost that. I can’t do that anymore. Although I can tell the difference between North New Mexico and South New Mexico. But I’m sure there are people–and they’ve been hired by the saffron importers and sellers–who can tell the difference between these three kinds of saffron which I’m now going to explain to you. All right. Are you bored yet with this, Michelle? Because I’m having so much fun.
Michelle Butler 14:30
No. I did run across a lot of articles, though, about contemporary efforts to prevent adulteration in saffron supplies.
Anne Brannen 14:40
Yes, yes. It’s like really expensive drugs. It’s not like people at some point said ‘we should just only sell the pure stuff on the street for that is noble.’ No, no, no, no, people are still adulterating saffron. Well, it costs a lot of money. Okay. So first, let’s talk about LaMancha saffron. This is from Spain, obviously. Spain produces a lot of saffron. If you buy saffron that says it’s from Spain, it is not necessarily LaMancha. Probably it isn’t LaMancha or it would say so. This is the LaMancha region where, as we all know, Don Quixote used to live. It’s a deep red, it’s very aromatic, it’s strongly flavored. If you want to buy LaMancha saffron, you need to make sure that it’s got the LaMancha saffron certification on it, because a lot of things get sold as LaMancha saffron that might even be Spanish saffron, but they are not actually LaMancha. You want the official logo produced by the people who live where Don Quixote used to hang out. Okay. Iran is the largest producer of saffron, which is interesting to me, because, you know…Persia was the main saffron place, and it’s still the largest producer. It produces about 45% of the saffron sold in the world. The Persian saffron is very, very high quality. Same thing. It is dark in color? Is it aromatic? Does it have a great deal of flavor? Yes, it does all those things. The third of the best saffrons in the world is from Kashmir from India. And it’s dark, dark, dark, dark red. It’s really, really, really, really red. The pictures are very distinctive. Saffron was brought to India by Sufi mystics sometime around the 11th century Common Era. And it’s the best in the world. Oh, and I wanted to explain to you, if you want to buy these things, the LaMancha saffron is going to cost like $757 an ounce to about $1000. But you could just get plain Spanish saffron for about $158 an ounce. Now you never actually pay that much money, unless you’re dealing it, because you’re buying such little quantities. But I’m doing it all out to the ounce because I find this so hilarious. The Kashmir saffron runs about $213 to $344. and the Persian runs about $158. I looked this all up if I was going to buy it on Amazon. So if you go to Amazon and you buy these things, that’s how much it is. Then there’s the question of adulteration. Once upon a time, in a certain place, you could be burnt to death for adulterating saffron. No one is burnt to death for adulterating saffron anymore, but there are people adulterating saffron, so you have to be very careful. You want to know you’re really getting what you think you’re getting for your, you know, $1,000 a damn ounce. Throughout the centuries, saffron has been adulterated with beets and pomegranates, and silk and horsehair and paper, or just cut with the crocus stems that are yellow and not red because they aren’t saffron. They’re just the other piece of the crocus. The other thing you can do is mix inferior saffron into the highly desirable high end saffron, so you’ve cut it with a less potent thing. Yeah. So you can do that. You can still adulterate saffron. Do you have any questions about saffron now that I have told you all those things, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 18:38
No, except I’m reasonably certain that the saffron I bought–the supposed saffron I bought, it’s probably been 20 years ago–at the ‘dent and the things that are about to go bad’ store. They had they had something that they were calling saffron and it was like 15 bucks, which probably was marigolds.
Anne Brannen 19:19
Did it not have an intense smell and you know, deep rich color?
Michelle Butler 19:23
No.
Anne Brannen 19:25
After all this, I get my saffron by buying it in the grocery store in a little bottle, the little threads of it. I’ve got some in my cabinet right now and I spurn it with my foot because obviously–obviously–I need some different saffron. I might not necessarily need LaMancha saffron, though I really would like the Don Quixote saffron. But obviously, obviously I have not been getting the right saffron. I’ve been getting inferior saffron, which I know because I bought it at the grocery store and I don’t know where it came from. Hello! At any rate, I got to talk about saffron. So I’m really, really happy. Thank you, Michelle, for finding some poor guy burnt to death in Germany so that I could talk about saffron.
Michelle Butler 20:18
I’m glad that you enjoyed this because this was a source of frustration to me from start to finish.
Anne Brannen 20:25
And you put it on the list, which is slightly ironic.
Michelle Butler 20:28
I know. I should not be allowed to put things on the list anymore because I keep…but the shame flute went so well.
Anne Brannen 20:36
Yeah, the shame flute was good.
Michelle Butler 20:38
That was so much fun to dig into. And this was the story of continually…okay, I’ll back up. This is Michelle’s story of finding people who don’t do research the way I was taught to do it in graduate school and being continually annoyed.
Anne Brannen 20:59
You and me both, kid.
Michelle Butler 21:00
The end. Okay, so here’s what happened. If you go and you search on the internet, you will find a whole bunch of articles that claim very confidently that in 1358, the authorities in Nuremberg put in place a set of laws called the Safranschou code that was intended to protect the quality of the saffron that they were importing and then distributing, and that really terrible things could happen to you if you adulterated saffron. Okay. There’s truth in that. But I cannot find a source to back up the 1358 date.
Anne Brannen 21:52
And it’s so specific. It’s not like somebody would make it up and just say, ‘oh, in the twelth century…’
Michelle Butler 21:58
That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. I’m just saying I can’t find a source for it. None of the copious things I looked at gave a source either. When they do cite a source, they cite a source from 2002. Let me pull up the title of this book. The author’s last name is Willard. It’s called Secrets of Saffron: The Vagabond Life of the World’s Most Seductive Spice.
Anne Brannen 22:26
Yeah, I ran across that.
Michelle Butler 22:29
The people who do cite a source cite this one, but I went and looked at that, and he doesn’t–he or she–doesn’t provide a source for that date. So that’s a source of frustration in my life.
Anne Brannen 22:42
Because you would assume that it’s there in Nuremberg in the archives they’ve got. You know, the place where they got the law document.
Michelle Butler 22:52
I what I do, for sure, have documentation of–because I’m a source girl, you know–I know for sure that there was at least one person and probably two who are actually punished with the death penalty in Nuremberg.
Anne Brannen 23:11
And it was immolation. It was burning alive. That is a very bad death. I mean, that’s serious.
Michelle Butler 23:23
The most reputable thing I ran across…well, didn’t run across, I apparently thought ahead. I was at Kalamazoo several years ago, and I bought a book called Out of the East: Spices and the Medieval Imagination, which I bought just because I wanted to read it.
Anne Brannen 23:41
Ah. Yeah, cuz at that time, you had no idea that you might find it actually useful. No, just for fun.
Michelle Butler 23:48
This was a fortuitous acquisition. It’s a book from Yale University Press. And I’m like, thank God, because I’m finding all these other things that just say, as if the angel Gabriel came and said to them, ‘Nuremberg put a law in place in 1358. Don’t worry, you don’t need to provide a source for that. I told you, it’s fine.”
Anne Brannen 24:13
Well, he is the messenger. Maybe that’s what he’s going around telling people. Fair enough.
Michelle Butler 24:19
So the author of this book, Paul Friedman, does, in fact provide sources for his statement that there was a person condemned to death by burning in 1444.
Anne Brannen 24:32
1444. Do we know his name?
Michelle Butler 24:34
I think we do. I went and looked at the source he cites, which is in German, but I can struggle through it enough to recognize names. What it is is a set of records from Nuremberg. It’s title is Quellen zur Geschuuchte des Kolner Handels und Verkehrs im Mittelalter. Just trust me that it’s a set of records. What we get told is that his name is Johannes Ryneken.
Anne Brannen 25:17
Poor guy.
Michelle Butler 25:18
Yeah.
Anne Brannen 25:18
Do we know what he stuck in the saffron?
Michelle Butler 25:22
You know, what if it says it in here, my German is not good enough to go through it. Friedman just tells us that “a falsifier was himself condemned to death by burning in 1444.” More commonly, the saffron is burnt publicly.
Anne Brannen 25:42
Ooooooh.
Michelle Butler 25:44
So there are lots more instances of your crappy product being hauled out and burnt in public.
Anne Brannen 25:53
Right, right. Where presumably you have to stand nearby, you know, being humiliated, and also watching, because there would have been some real saffron in there. Theoretically, it wasn’t all marigold. So that’s a bunch of money that you’re losing. You wanted more money, but you lost that. That seems fair. I like that as a punishment.
Michelle Butler 26:13
What Friedman says about this is “quantities of false and adulterated saffron were publicly burned in Nuremberg in 1441, 1447, and 1449.” So I’m guessing the dude who–again, it’s in German–but I’m suspecting there were mitigating circumstances that resulted in the death penalty, like this isn’t your first offense, or you kicked a puppy or something. There has to be something else going on.
Anne Brannen 26:42
Like the kind of thing that America has–the death penalty is warranted when you don’t just murder somebody, but do it with really bad circumstances.
Michelle Butler 26:50
Yeah. So something else must be going on.
Anne Brannen 26:53
Probably doing it a lot. Because it’s hard to think of how you could have aggravating circumstances with saffron adulteration that required the death penalty that would have anything to do with hurting other humans. You would be being burned to death for the hurting other humans, not for the saffron.
Michelle Butler 27:13
Right, right. So something else is going on and I think it’s likely that one of the reasons there’s confusion, when I go and look at these sources, like there’s a Cracked article about this and lots of other sources who talk about it. I suspect part of the confusion is not just that the original sources are in German and we’re all struggling. But there’s confusion between the burning of people and the burning of the product.
Anne Brannen 27:43
Right, right.
Michelle Butler 27:44
Because there’s lots more instances of it being of the product being burnt. But we have an instance from France, which is also 15th century…oh, I beg your pardon. It’s mid 14th century. It’s from Montpelier, and it’s 14th century, in which the merchant Johannes Andree gets in trouble for selling adulterated saffron. He claims that he didn’t do it, so he drags it out for years in the court, but is eventually found guilty. His punishment is he’s no longer allowed to be licensed as a spice merchant. So that’s another punishment that can happen to you.
Anne Brannen 28:23
And that’s a good punishment, because it’s a very lucrative job. It’s a good position. All right. Well, yeah. So don’t adulterate saffron. These things happen to you.
Michelle Butler 28:35
There is a lovely book from 1642 that I had lots of hopes will be useful to me. Alas. It’s called Crocologia: A Detailed Study of Saffron, the King of Plants. It was just two years ago translated for the first time into English. I had such high hopes. This was a really interesting book to look at, because I thought maybe it was far enough back that it would tell me the things I needed to know. It was well into the 19th century still being consulted as the book about saffron.
Anne Brannen 29:06
Wow.
Michelle Butler 29:07
But it’s not about the history. It’s about how to grow it. What it’s useful for. So it’s got all this stuff about, you know, here’s how we use it for food. Here’s how we use it for medicine, but it’s got a great title. Saffron: the King of Plants.
Anne Brannen 29:23
And it was still useful till fairly recently.
Michelle Butler 29:25
Yeah.
Anne Brannen 29:26
Well, you know, what I was seeing is that it’s only very, very recently that we’ve made some changes in what we know about saffron and how we use it. This shows up because one of the new ways to cut saffron is with gardenia, and that is because it has some of the same chemical properties, but that’s something that they didn’t know in the 17th century or the 19th. You wouldn’t think, ‘I know, let’s get gardenia.’ I mean, it doesn’t seem like a plant you could…marigold, that makes sense. Turmeric, sure.
Michelle Butler 30:04
I did run across a brand new discovery of a medieval spice cupboard.
Anne Brannen 30:11
Really? Where?
Michelle Butler 30:13
Just found. In 1495, the King of Denmark and Norway was traveling and his ship sank. The shipwreck was just recently found and on board is a very nice and really well preserved royal spice cupboard.
Anne Brannen 30:34
God Almighty.
Michelle Butler 30:34
He wasn’t on it. It sank off the coast of Sweden in 1495. He was there for, I don’t know, some kind of discussion.
Anne Brannen 30:43
Yeah. When we did the Snorri episode, it just went on and on. Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Iceland. It just went on and on.
Michelle Butler 30:52
He was hoping to be chosen King of Sweden and bring the three countries together under a single monarch. That did not happen. But saffron is one of the things that was in his…in fact, I’m sure that somebody was crying tears when this went down because his spice rack had 13 ounces of saffron in it.
Anne Brannen 31:14
Oh! Even at that time…
Michelle Butler 31:16
That’s so much money.
Anne Brannen 31:20
It had begun to be expensive by then.
Michelle Butler 31:23
They had all kinds of good stuff in the spice rack and water is so cold off of the coast of Sweden that it’s really, really well preserved.
Anne Brannen 31:31
What else did they have? Do you remember any?
Michelle Butler 31:34
I’m looking at the article right now. They’ve got peppercorns…
Anne Brannen 31:41
I remember being told at some point that in the Middle Ages, you bought peppercorn singly–like I would like a peppercorn. I don’t know.
Michelle Butler 31:52
This is, you know, obviously the king so it’s a high end…so they had ginger in his royal floating spice rack, the traveling one in the ship.
Anne Brannen 32:05
Might not even the big one. He had a whole pound of the damn, pound and a half, of the damn saffron back home.
Michelle Butler 32:12
Ginger, cloves, peppercorns, dill, mustard, and caraway. Almonds, hazelnuts, cucumbers, grapes, raspberries, and blackberries.
Anne Brannen 32:22
Okay. So some of them we don’t think of spices, but that’s what they were being used for. Did you know, mustard is the only spice that’s native to England.
Michelle Butler 32:32
I didn’t know that.
Anne Brannen 32:33
Lots of herbs but spices…
Michelle Butler 32:35
I didn’t know until we were doing this research that saffron came to the United States and was grown here for a while.
Anne Brannen 32:42
Pennsylvania.
Michelle Butler 32:43
Yep.
Anne Brannen 32:43
Near Lancaster. I tried to grow it outside of Pittsburgh, and I didn’t do very well. Oh well.
Michelle Butler 32:50
There’s a couple of historical novels.
Anne Brannen 32:53
Oh, you found things.
Michelle Butler 32:56
I did. One is called City of Liars. One of the main characters in it is a converso spice merchant. It is set in 15th century Barcelona.
Anne Brannen 33:10
I was gonna say this has got to be in Spain. Okay.
Michelle Butler 33:13
The other one is set in 16th century England. It’s called the Secrets of Saffron Hall and it’s about the English saffron.
Anne Brannen 33:24
I want to read that.
Michelle Butler 33:25
It’s set in Norfolk.
Anne Brannen 33:27
Do they have pargeting on their damn…is what I want to know.
Michelle Butler 33:30
I didn’t…I spent an inordinate amount of time being angry with people and trying to track down sources.
Anne Brannen 33:39
Well, I’m glad you found something where it comes into popular… but they’re no operas, I take it? The saffron opera?
Michelle Butler 33:48
That would be really interesting, but I didn’t find one. Nor did I find heavy metal but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. It just means I didn’t find. If we’ve learned a single thing through the course of doing this, it’s that if you dig hard enough you will find a Finnish grunge band that has written a song about it.
Anne Brannen 34:12
You will. You will. Somebody Yeah, saffron gets used more than it certainly was for a long time. You know, I don’t think Americans were using saffron much in 1950.
Michelle Butler 34:28
But George Washington’s house was.
Anne Brannen 34:31
Oh, really?
Michelle Butler 34:32
Yeah. Let me Google that back up. I ran across that.
Anne Brannen 34:35
What was he making? Because saffron became more popular in America when we started eating things from other countries which had a lot to do with the World Wars. George Washington. Interesting. He wasn’t growing it, was he?
Michelle Butler 34:49
No, no. No, they were cooking with it. Dammit, I ran across this ‘Christmas with the Washingtons’…I ran across it and then I’m like, I’m putting it aside because this isn’t what I’m talking about right now.
Anne Brannen 35:02
Right. Although we always like…it was a rabbit hole and you didn’t go down the rabbit hole.
Michelle Butler 35:07
I didn’t.
Anne Brannen 35:07
You would have had more fun if you’d gone down all the rabbit holes. You were too busy being angry.
Michelle Butler 35:13
I was so irritated. Like, you gotta be kidding me, you all are citing this one book from 2002 and as far as I can tell…
Anne Brannen 35:23
1358…what the hell happened? Maybe it’s in the Nuremberg records. Our first law about ‘don’t mess with the damn saffron. 1358. But we don’t know.
Michelle Butler 35:32
Maybe it’s in there. I don’t know.
Anne Brannen 35:34
We don’t know. I want to know what George Washington was cooking with saffron.
Michelle Butler 35:38
Oh, there it is. It is the blogpost about Christmas with the Washingtons.
Anne Brannen 35:45
So it was a special occasion.
Michelle Butler 35:48
Let me use the little feature here to hunt for saffron in this webpage. There it is. Okay. “A dessert pyramid towers over the table. Made of three stacked glass salvors of graduated size, the pyramid holds jelly glasses filled with translucent sweet jellies in a variety of colors. They made sweet jellies from the bones of calf’s feet, nutmeg, mace, sugar and various fruit powders. Colors were added to the mixture. Red was made with cochineal. Green was spinach juice and yellow was saffron. It was being used to make yellow jello.
Anne Brannen 36:24
Yes. Saffron was being used to make a spiced jello dessert pyramid. Got it.
Michelle Butler 36:30
Oh, and there’s pictures of it. Oh, that’s cool. It actually looks really cool.
Anne Brannen 36:34
Victorians would have liked that. That would have continued to be popular, because it would be extravagant and very eye catching. It would be gorgeous. Merry Christmas. But I don’t think saffron jello is going to be great. I don’t think so. Sweet saffron jello. Yeah, I don’t know of it. Could you put it in rice pudding and make rice pudding? I don’t know.
Michelle Butler 36:57
I don’t know. I know that I’ve read enough about the Washingtons now to know that if it was fancy, they ate it.
Anne Brannen 37:04
Yeah. ‘Look, we brought this from France. And it’s fancy. Yay.’ So saffron. Anything else on saffron, and why you should not put things that aren’t saffron in it?
Michelle Butler 37:16
No. But I just want to remind everybody that when you’re doing your research, you have an obligation to go cite things properly. And citing somebody else who makes claims without providing a footnote is not helpful.
Anne Brannen 37:32
Thank you, Michelle.
Michelle Butler 37:33
Even if the original sources are in German, which is causing problems for all of us. Yes, it is.
Anne Brannen 37:38
Well, you sent me a page to look at and I can struggle through German, but I can’t really do it when it’s the old lettering. And that’s what it was.
Michelle Butler 37:47
Yeah, I think I found the same…maybe…here, I’ll send it to you. The one that I’ve currently just found, the one that is what Friedman cites is actually in Times New Roman so it’s not so bad. The one where Johannes Ryneken’s name shows up, but I have never actually studied German. So I’m struggling through here on Old English, basically, which isn’t working so great.
Anne Brannen 38:15
Right. There are some similarities, but they aren’t reall.
Michelle Butler 38:18
I can recognize the word saffron.
Anne Brannen 38:22
Saffron, that’s all we need. Saffron. And saffron…it’s so old that we actually get it from the Persian. What is this? It’s saffron. All right. That’s what it is. There you go.
Michelle Butler 38:35
So we know for sure somebody was actually…I’m starting to suspect Nuremberg as a general principle. Because this was where the shame flute was.
Anne Brannen 38:46
That’s right. The same flute that didn’t exist is from Nuremberg. But they did burn somebody at the stake. Okay. All right. They really did.
Michelle Butler 38:53
At least once. Possibly twice.
Anne Brannen 38:55
The French guy just wasn’t allowed to ply his trade anymore. And they burned a great deal of saffron, apparently.
Michelle Butler 39:01
That seems like an effective sort of punishment, that your product would get burned. Because, like you say, there’d have to be some real saffron in there. So you found out. You messed around. You found out.
Anne Brannen 39:16
Yeah, yeah, you did. Yeah. So my advice is for everybody to go on over to Amazon and type in saffron into the search bar, because it’s quite fascinating. It’s quite fascinating the kinds of things you get and now you’ll know why the prices are varying so much and what’s going on. They sell some LaMancha. You could get LaMancha. It’s about $700. I mean, an ounce. It isn’t $700 itself.
Michelle Butler 39:46
There is nothing I want to cook that’s that fancy.
Anne Brannen 39:50
Well, you know, it’s only gonna cost 25 bucks or so. And then you have a little jar. Yeah, there it is. You need it for paella. You really do. You gotta have it.
Michelle Butler 39:58
Well, I was happy to have this one because it is a different kind of crime.
Anne Brannen 40:05
It was. I was gonna say nobody died. But that turned out to be untrue. I had thought that nobody died. I didn’t understand they were burning people at the stake over in Nuremberg. Oh, well. But it was a different sort of thing. That was different. Now, the next time that people hear from us, we will actually be doing the kind of thing we often do, with one of the people we often talk about. King John murdered his nephew. You love to talk about King John because he’s so bad.
Michelle Butler 40:36
He’s so terrible.
Anne Brannen 40:37
He’s really awful. What have we had, like two or three episodes of the badness of King John already? We have another one coming up. Yay.
Michelle Butler 40:46
I used to feel a little bad for him because he’s always the bad guy in the Robin Hood legends. No, he deserves it.
Anne Brannen 40:52 King John was not a good man. He had his little ways. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. And the punishments are not so bad, if you’re doing this same thing with saffron. We can be found at truecrimemedieval.com, where you can find our show notes and the transcripts and little things that I write and whatnot, and you can get in touch with us. You can leave comments. We love it. We’d love to hear from you. Also we like it when you give us a hints about medieval crimes that you know that we might be interested in. You can find us on Spotify and Stitcher and all of the places where the podcasts are hanging out. Actually if you go to our web page, you can link directly to the podcast from there. That was saffron and we’ll discuss King John next. Bye.
80. William de Marisco is Executed for Treason, London England 1242
Anne Brannen 0:25
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:37
We’re going to be in 13th century England in a minute. But before we do that, we want to say something about issues related to a former podcast. We had a podcast wherein we discussed the time that Edward the first stole the Stone of Scone from Scotland. Then there was this whole thing about Scotland eventually getting it back. There was a promise that they would get it but they didn’t get it. So then some Scottish engineering students from–it was the University of Edinburgh, wasn’t it?
Michelle Butler 1:09
Uh-huh.
Anne Brannen 1:09
From the University of Edinburgh went down and stole it in this small car, which is really sort of quite impressive, because it’s over 300 pounds, this rock, and they took it back to Scotland. There was a hoo-hah. Eventually, England got it back, but it belongs to Scotland and Scotland agreed that they would allow England to have it back for coronations. Well, I said on that podcast that I did not believe that Scotland would be handing it over. I thought they’d say, Oh, you know, we don’t know where it is. Or, you know, even better yet, come and fight us for it. But they didn’t. They sent the damn stone down so that Charles the third could get crowned on it. There you go. I guess they’re getting it back. So first of all, first thing we wanted to say, I was wrong. I was wrong. Scotland did indeed send the stone down to London, proving that they’re better behaved than the English were in the Middle Ages when they wouldn’t let Scotland have the stone back even though they had agreed to give it back and whatnot. So that was one thing. But the next thing was news about one of the students from Edinburgh University. Michelle, your turn.
Michelle Butler 2:24
So Ian Hamilton, when we recorded the podcast about the Stone of Destiny, he was the last surviving member of the group of four that stole the stone in 1951. I learned when I was working on some coronation research that he passed away in October of 2022.
Anne Brannen 2:47
So yes. So he’s gone. Frankly, we’re both glad that he wasn’t around to see Scotland send that stone back down to London for the crowning of the monarch of the British Isles. Especially since it’s the sort of family that might, for instance, throw their son to the wolves, because they just sort of did. They didn’t like who he married and he was just not…anyway, they’re safe. They’re not in England, but the Stone of Scone is.
Michelle Butler 3:21
Obviously, Ian Hamilton, he was 96. He lived to a ripe old age and he just was an absolute hoot through his entire life.
Anne Brannen 3:30
He was an activist, wasn’t he? He remained an activist for Scottish independence.
Michelle Butler 3:35
He was a lawyer. He was, you remember, notorious for refusing to take an oath to Queen Elizabeth the Second because she wasn’t Queen Elizabeth the Second of Scotland.
Anne Brannen 3:45
No, no, she was Queen Elizabeth the First of Scotland.
Michelle Butler 3:50
He was a firecracker the entire time.
Anne Brannen 3:53
So respect, respect. Ian Hamilton, gone. Alright. Stone of Scone. English coronation. There you go. Today we are discussing that time on July 25, 1242, Coventry, England, when William de Marisco was hung, drawn, and quartered for treason against Henry the third. This is one of the cases where really, de Marisco actually was guilty. I’m pretty sure about this. Maybe not. He said he wasn’t. But I think probably he was even if some of the evidence was acquired by torture, but nevertheless. It was kind of hard times for treason. Really, things didn’t go well. How had de Marisco ended up in this dreadful situation? So we go back to 1234 when William’s father Geoffrey, who had been made Justitiar of Ireland by King John in 1215, joined a conspiracy against Richard Marshal who was the Earl of Pembroke and the former Marshal of England, who had been sent to inspect his lands and caused him to be murdered, according to English chroniclers, at least. But Geoffrey de Marisco had been a powerful and problematic vassal. He made alliances with Anglo Irish nobles, which included William Marshal, Richard’s elder brother, and Walter de Lacy, who would later oppose Richard Marshal against Meiler Fitzhenry, the son of Henry the first’s illegitimate son. I know you’re not following all this, everybody. This is the Anglo Normans fighting against each other and making alliances and going all around. So I’m telling you these names because they were true, but I swear to God. Of course, they’re all related. Anyway, the son of Henry the first’s illegitimate son whose mother was Nest ferch Rhys ap Tewdwr, who was the king of Deheubarth, Wales. Any rate, FitzHenry, who had been appointed Justiciar of Ireland in 1198 by King John had a really hard time of it. There was continual contention with the Anglo Norman rulers of Ireland, changing alliances on the part of the king. They were fighting with each other and the king was backing one and then another. This was King John, by the way. How many podcasts about horrible behavior in the Middle Ages have included King John so far, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 6:25
We’re probably at half a dozen. At least. He’s the gift that keeps on giving.
Anne Brannen 6:33
Yes. Plus, he’s got a lot of descendants because he had so many children, many of them illegitimate. At one point in 1207, William Marshal arrived in Ireland, where lands are granted to him and those lands were ordered to be seized by FitzHenry. So the king summons them both and ordered settlement. Fair enough. In 1234 when Richard Marshal went to Ireland, he had been declared a traitor by Henry the third. You know, you go through you’re a friend, you’re a traitor. After he allied with Llywelyn ap Iorwerth, which was Llywelyn the Great, and Marshal’s lands in Ireland had been attacked by Peter de Roche, who had writs from the king granting Marshal’s lands to anybody who captured and killed him. Geoffrey de Marisco was one of Richard’s vassals and therefore supposedly trustworthy if you were Richard, but he’s suspected of having engineered a battle over a supposedly violated truce where Richard was wounded and captured and then died very soon after that in captivity. Okay. Henry pardoned Geoffrey de Marisco and restored his lands. It’s the next year that William de Marisco, our protagonist, who was Geoffrey’s son–oh, look, we’ve come back to him. I never go off too far without coming back–Geoffrey’s son and the subject of our current podcast, continued the contentious trajectory of the de Mariscos. The de Mariscos are like…who was it? Matilda de…who was the Matilda that was part of that Norman family that was so bad? Was she a de Braose?
Michelle Butler 8:14
Oh, oh. De Belleme.
Anne Brannen 8:17
Matilda de Belleme. The de Bellemes just fought everybody all the time. The de Mariscos were like that. Although now I come to think of it, the de Braoses were too. Any rate, he continued this by murdering Henry Clement, who was a messenger from Henry the third, at the gates of Westminster. This is really not a thing you’re supposed to do. The messengers are, like, sacrosanct; you don’t kill messengers, but he did. According to Henry “to our no small dishonor and scandal of the realm.” The reason William killed this messenger, when you’re not supposed to kill messengers, was apparently avenging the death of Richard Marshal. Because Henry Clement had been boasting about having been part of the killing of Richard Marshal, the person that Geoffrey’s father was suspected of having killed. Michelle, did you follow this? Because I find this a little confusing.
Michelle Butler 9:15
What I figured out is that the Moriscos we’re always skating close to the edge. The grandfather, also named William, had thrown in his lot with our friend Eustace the monk.
Anne Brannen 9:32
Who will be mentioned later. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 9:33
Yhey’re just always…they’re far away from London and they just kind of do what they want.
Anne Brannen 9:34
Yeah, and what they want shifts continually. You would think that this was evidence that Geoffrey de Marisco had not actually engineered Richard’s death, since William de Marisco was avenging Richard’s death, but I don’t know that it is, because I don’t know that we really trust the de Mariscos any further than we can throw them.
Michelle Butler 10:02
But I’m really happy about how much peace and prosperity the Anglo Norman lords brought to Ireland.
Anne Brannen 10:09
Yes, yes. We talked about this at great length in our podcast about that time that Diarmait Mac Murchada invited them in and then they inaugurated have a whole long time of little wars in between each other. Yes, the Anglo Normans did not get…they did not get along. They didn’t. They just didn’t. To talk about them as people who brought law and peace and prosperity is ridiculous. At any rate, William de Marisco was outlawed for that murder. He fled to Lundy Island. Now Lundy Island is an island off Devon in the Bristol Channel. Lundy means ‘island of the puffins’ in Old Norse, by the way, and you can go there and still see puffins unless we’ve actually exterminated them all by this point.
Michelle Butler 10:57
The Landmark Trust owns it. So there probably are still puffins.
Anne Brannen 11:01
Yeah, there’s still puffins there, and I’m going to…I have a bunch of stuff about the history of it. So we’ll get to who owns it now.
Michelle Butler 11:09
Lundy Island sounds like a thing out of a novel.
Anne Brannen 11:14
I know. I so want to go.
Michelle Butler 11:16
It’s just unbelievable that it’s a real place.
Anne Brannen 11:19
It’s actually a real place. And now I get to talk about it because I’m the context girl. All right, the Anglo Norman family of de Numarche had owned the island by 1100. Who knows who owned it before then. Probably people that weren’t Anglo Normans. Let’s all have a moment of silence for them. Okay, they’re gone now, but the Anglo Normans came in and they leased the island to the de Mariscos in 1150. Henry the second granted the island to the Knights Templar at 1155. But the de Mariscos weren’t down with this and so, you know, the Knights Templar never used this island. Theoretically, it has been leased to them at this point. It’s not really something they have, because the de Mariscos were using the island at that point as a base for piracy. When William retreated to Lundy in 1235, having been declared outlaw, he established himself as a renowned and notorious pirate and King of Lundy. This was a really good island for piracy.
Michelle Butler 12:29
Can we throw in here that the island is only three miles long and half a mile wide? It’s not a huge place.
Anne Brannen 12:40
No, no. You don’t need a whole lot of people living there. You really can have, you know, a pirate band, or as it happens, a couple of pirate bands. You can do that. So yeah, the Bristol Channel. This was a main shipping road. So Matthew Paris describes William de Marisco’s activities thusly: ” William de Marisco, son of Geoffrey, took up his quarters on an island near Bristol called Lundy, a place impregnable by the nature of its situation, where he lived like a pirate with a number of prescribed and wicked men, indulging in plunder and rapine, and attended by his companions, traversed the places on the neighboring coast, despoiling the inhabitants of their property, especially wine and other provisions. By sudden incursions, he frequently carried off vast booty from the country lying near the island, and in many ways, injured the Kingdom of England by both land and sea, and caused great loss to the native and foreign merchants.” So that was what de Marisco was doing after having been declared outlaw, and this continued until September of 1238 when Henry the third escaped being stabbed to death in his bed. He fortuitously escaped this by being in bed with his queen, Queen Eleanor. She had a different room. The man who had climbed in Henry’s window intending to stab him was caught because one of the ladies in waiting was saying her prayers and she heard him. The man was then tortured, and he said that he had been sent by William de Marisco. William denied this. Henry put a BOLO out. Geoffrey was suspected of being complicit and so he fled to Scotland. William was on Lundy, which was supposedly impregnable. But in 1242 Richard of Chilham, who was one of King John’s illegitimate sons. I’ve mentioned them before–there was so many of them. One of the illegitimate children is the queen of Wales, married to Llewellyn the Great but at any rate. Along with William Bardolph, they led a force which scaled the island’s cliff and captured William and 16 fellow pirates. Here’s a sidebar. We have met Richard of Chilham before when he captured another pirate, Eustace the monk, at the Battle of sandwich in 1217.
Michelle Butler 15:00
Oh, wow.
Anne Brannen 15:02
I hoped you had not found that. Did you not know?
Michelle Butler 15:05
No.
Anne Brannen 15:05
Ah ha.
Michelle Butler 15:06
Ah ha.
Anne Brannen 15:08
Yes, scaling the cliff of Lundy and capturing William happened 25 years later, so he would have been in his 50s.
Michelle Butler 15:16
Wow. Boy, that guy deserves his own historical novel. Really, you wouldn’t think that the king would require a designated pirate hunter but…
Anne Brannen 15:30
Apparently so. Well, he did other things besides that, but you know.
Michelle Butler 15:33
What’s your specialty? Pirate hunting.
Anne Brannen 15:36
Oh, yeah. Any rate, you can go to our podcast on Eustace the Monk who was also known as Eustace the pirate or Eustace the admiral. He had quite a little time of until Richard of Chilham caught him and cut his head of, as it happened. So, back to William. He was taken to London. After a trial at which everybody was found guilty, William’s accomplices were dragged by horses’ tails from Westminster to the Tower of London. That’s an hour’s walk if you cross the bridges and go through Southwark. But they wouldn’t have done that. That’s three miles. That’s three miles from Westminster to the Tower of London, because you would go along the Thames. You wouldn’t cross it. When they got to the Tower, they were hung. William was likewise dragged behind a horse to the Tower and hung. He was allowed to die on the gallows before being cut down, dismembered, having his entrails burnt and his body divided into four parts and sent out to four major cities. So though he had a humiliating death, he was spared the worst of the sentence. Michelle, you have something to say about this particular execution and how it’s not what it’s sometimes called?
Michelle Butler 16:47
This was why I put this on the list, because William de Marisco gets talked about as being the first person to be given the Traitors Death, that threefold death of hanging, drawing, and quartering, but when I poked at it further, there’s ambiguity about that because some some people will claim yes, it’s William. In fact, some people will go so far as to say this was invented for him. He annoyed Henry the third so much that this was invented for him. But other people will say that it’s not, it’s 100 years later, and it’s a Welsh prince who really, really gets up somebody’s nose by trying to make Wales, you know, independent again.
Anne Brannen 17:34
That’s Dafydd ap Gruffydd.
Michelle Butler 17:35
Yeah. I wanted the answer to that, which is why I put it on the list. The answer is that because William was dead when they did the next two pieces–when they did the drawing and the quartering–it’s not actually the Traitor’s Death. raders Dad, Poor Dad gets the full version 100 years later. So this is the
Anne Brannen 17:56
So this is the milder, gentler form.
Michelle Butler 17:58
Yeah, they up their game in the next century.
Anne Brannen 18:03
Yeah, you definitely want to be dead on the gallows first before the rest of it, for sure, for sure. But he was being executed as a traitor as it happened at that time. So as for Lundy, because I have some stuff to say. Now I want to talk about Lundy.
Michelle Butler 18:16
Yes, please.
Anne Brannen 18:17
Henry the third had a castle constructed there, but the one that’s there now is not that one. The one that’s there now was built in the English Civil War. He installed a constable and 40 sergeants and four mariners. A later generation of de Mariscos were allowed to live there again, which they did until 1321. Okay, after that, pirates took over again. This included some of the de Mariscos because it was like, they did well with that particular trade. It’s like sometimes you’re a goldsmith and you teach your kids how to be a goldsmith. Sometimes you’re a pirate. It was an awesome place for piracy, because as has been noted, It was nearly impregnable. It’s also close to the shipping routes, and the shipping routes that go by had to sail close by to the island of Lundy because of the shingle banks in the southern end of the Bristol Channel. So you couldn’t sail around it or or keep away from it? No, no. In 1627 Barbary pirates took the island and they kept it for five years, using it as before. They used it for piracy, and also for slaving raids. They were selling Europeans in Algiers, and other pirates also used the island as well. This all continued until the late 1700s. Though the piracy ended, lawlessness continued. Lundy. Thomas Benson, who was a member of parliament, and he was supposed to be deporting convicts. What he did instead was he kept many of them him on Lundry as his personal slaves.
Michelle Butler 20:04
I didn’t find that.
Anne Brannen 20:06
I know. I was like Lundy, tell me about Lundy.
Michelle Butler 20:13
I thought I had run across every weirdo associated with Lundy.
Anne Brannen 20:16
No, no, no, there’s so many. This continued through much of the 18th century. In the early 19th century, Sir Vere Hunt, the first Baronet of Currah, established an Irish colony with its own laws and stamps and constitution. In 1834, William Hudson Heaven purchased the island and declared it a free Island. Martin Coles Harman bought the island in 1924, and became king of the island, according to him, and got arrested in 1929 for making his own coins. By the way, this isn’t actually a free Island. It’s Devon. It’s part of Devonshire. But residents continue to pay no taxes to the United Kingdom. They had their own customs that you had to go through if you were going to and from Lundy. So you’re in Devon, and you want to go to Lundy, which is in Devonshire, but you have to go through customs. In 1969, though, all this nonsense stopped because a British millionaire bought the island and donated it to the Landmark Trust. So now, you can go there for holidays and you were at cottages and you go on day trips and see the puffins. You do not have to go through customs. And there are no pirates. Ta-da. Michelle, what do you got?
Michelle Butler 20:27
I love Lundy.
Anne Brannen 21:38
I so want to go to Lundy. It looks great.
Michelle Butler 21:44
It’s great. There’s places to stay on it. There’s little cabins where you can actually stay on Lundy. It just sounds awesome. I mean, honestly, it’s one of these things that if you made it up and put it in a book, people would think you were totally stretching things.
Anne Brannen 22:05
I hadn’t ever heard of it. I could not believe it. I mean, you know, because it kept going. First of all, the pirates used it for hundreds of years. Okay, fine. Then many people came through, ‘I’m the king of Lundy and I’ve made my own coinage.’
Michelle Butler 22:21
More than one. That family that owned it from 1834 to 1917, it was called the kingdom of heaven, because that was their name. Oh, my Lord.
Anne Brannen 22:36
It’s just…’we are not part of the United Kingdom.
Michelle Butler 22:40
I mean, it just cracks me up. Because it’s not that big. There’s a walking path. It’s three miles long. If you’re even moderately…like, I could do this. You can take the path where you start at the bottom of the island, and you go to the top, and then you come back down, you do the circuit, it’s six miles, you could do that.
Anne Brannen 23:02
There’s places to stay. You can see the historical sites, and you can see the puffins and there’s things to eat. I’m pretty sure there’s a great gift shop because that always happens. There’ll be a wonderful tea shop because that happens too, and I totally want to go to Lundy. I’m only just sorry that I don’t have to go through another customs to get there if I’ve already been through Heathrow.
Michelle Butler 23:20
So what I have is Matthew Paris. Oh, I do have William’s castle in Ireland. This one’s fascinating because it’s on land in eastern Limerick that was seized from our old friend William de Braose. William de Marisco built this castle. It’s called Coulbaun Castle. The site came in his possession as a result of his marriage. It was given to his bride by her relation Henry of London, and they built this castle there, which is just in ruins now. But it’s an important castle because it was built and then they lost it in 1234 when when they got in trouble with the whole Richard Marshal situation. But the castle then ends up being an important snapshot of Anglo Norman architecture at that time. So even though it’s in ruins, it’s an important piece of architecture. But mostly what I have for you is Matthew Paris.
Anne Brannen 24:34
We haven’t actually talked about Matthew Paris, but we have often been using his illustrations on the website for various podcasts because he’s one of the chroniclers that has a lot to say. He tells a lot of stories we need. Yep. So Matthew Paris.
Michelle Butler 24:52
Matthew Paris was a monk at St. Albans from 1217 until 1259, which, of course, was the time of his death. St. Albans began as a Benedictine monastery in the eighth century. It was rebuilt after the Norman Conquest and the church there was the largest built during the life of William the first. St. Albans was not a monastery out in the middle of nowhere, where the monks were cloistered and never interacted with anybody. I have a quote for you from Richard Vaughn, who is the foremost historian working on Matthew Paris. “St. Albans was even more in the center of affairs than most abbeys. It was one day’s journey north of London, the first halting place on the Great North Road. The stabling facilities for guests could take care of 300 horses. In Matthew’s own time, King Henry the third visited the abbey at least nine times. He and other guests were an important source of information for the assiduous monk-chronicler.” In a different book, his Life of Matthew Paris, Richard Vaughn provides an extensive list–it goes like eight pages long–of people who visited the monastery who Matthew Paris gets to know. They provide him information and what they told him. So Richard Vaughn has worked through the Chronicles and knows who told him what, which is really cool. So Matthew Paris is an important source of information. He’s how we know…I mean, we have some of the trial records of William de Marisco, so we would know about this anyway, but Matthew Paris’s account and also that really striking image of Marisco being dragged by the horse draws attention to this case. We used to think that ‘Paris’ meant that he was from Paris or he was educated in Paris, but recent scholarship has decided against both of those. The family may have historically been French, hence Paris, but Matthew’s writing shows that English is his first language, and he thinks of himself as English, although like most educated people of his time he wrote and spoke several languages. For Matthew, he knew at least English, French and Latin because we know for sure he’s written in all of those.
Anne Brannen 27:29
Okay.
Michelle Butler 27:30
Matthew wrote a lot. It’s a ton. He has six Chronicles. He has four saints lives. There’s a whole lot of minor works. The Chronicle that he talks about William de Maresco is the Chronica Majora. But he’s got an abridged version of it. He’s stunningly prolific, because most of his work is being done between when Roger Wendover, who is his predecessor as the abbey’s chronicler dies in 1238. So this is about 21 years worth of work. It is a stunning amount of output. He’s, of course, an artist. He has all these beautiful illustrations in his own hands, including maps. His work as a cartographer is really important and interesting. He has an interesting connection to Snorri.
Anne Brannen 28:33
Oh, really?
Michelle Butler 28:34
We’re at the same time period. Snorri’s assassinated in 1241. In 1246, the King of Norway who had Snorri assassinated, gets in touch with St. Albans asking for help for a monastery in Norway, because the monastery is in serious trouble. The Norwegian monastery Nidarholm is in serious trouble because they have borrowed money from the Cahorsins, who are a London…well, they have an office in London, but they’re a French lending house out of out of Cahors. The abbot of that monastery took off with the conven’t seal. So he’s just disappeared with their official way of stamping that they’re agreeing to something. King Haaken has written and Matthew Paris ends up getting this job. Probably he was in the wrong place at the wrong time to go sort this out. To help, he negotiates an agreement with the moneylenders and King Haaken is so impressed with his work that he ends up inviting him two years later to come to Norway and work with that monastery to get themselves back on the straight and narrow. He went to Norway in 1248. In fact, there is a portrait of St Peter in a museum in Oslo that is Matthew Paris’s work. He either brought it with him as a gift or he did it while he was there. Matthew is a hoot and a half. He is not what you’d call circumspect in his opinions. He’s pretty clear in his work of his critiques of the Pope and his critiques of King Henry the third, which is fairly gutsy for somebody who was interacting all the time with King Henry the third and the king would go to him and tell him his version of events because he knew he was writing a chronicle and he wanted to make sure that his version ended up in the Chronicle. That’s not what happened. King Henry the third is fussing with his nobles all the time. This is Edward the first’s father. This is where Edward the first learns to be ruthless, because Henry the third isn’t always ruthless and gets himself in trouble because of it. But Matthew thinks better of his candor towards the end of his life and begins expurgating his work. Fortunately, a copy of the Chronica Majora had already been made and was elsewhere. So we know from comparison what he toned down or removed entirely, such as the case in 1250 of the Archbishop of Canterbury losing his temper and beating the crap out of a sub prior. Which is hilarious. There’s a story there, but I may well put that particular crime on our list so we can deal with it separately.
Anne Brannen 31:38
Yes, let’s do, because Matthew Paris does tell us.
Michelle Butler 31:41
But then he thinks better a bit later, and he just rips that whole page out. The only reason we still have that story is it was in the copy that had already been sent elsewhere.
Anne Brannen 31:51
Right. Right.
Michelle Butler 31:53
Richard Vaughn, I want to mention, was the foremost expert on Matthew Paris. His books are the place to go to learn more about Matthew Paris. He wrote what is now the definitive biography of Matthew Paris. He has several books about him. He is an interesting dude in and of himself. He lived from 1927 to 2014. He spoke 13 languages.
Anne Brannen 32:16
Oh, really? So I want to know..do you happen to have a list of them? Do you know what they were?
Michelle Butler 32:22
The languages? No, I’m sorry. I was looking at his obituary. I was actually trying to work out whether he was still alive. I knew he was born in 1927, so possibly. I was checking to see if he was still alive and ran across his obituary.
Anne Brannen 32:39
The reason I asked the question was that I wanted to know how closely related they were.
Michelle Butler 32:47
I know for sure that Italian is one of them. He’s just fascinating. He was–it’s weird to even try to say this out loud–an ornithological prodigy, as a teenager.
Anne Brannen 33:03
Uh huh.
Michelle Butler 33:05
He’s not a birdwatcher. He is both an ornithologist and a medievalist, and discoveries that he made as a teenager while he was evacuated during the war ended up being cited by experts in their work. Then he was invited by them to go on field work. He’s published in both fields. He has extensive publications in both ornithology and the Middle Ages. The obituary says they’re pretty sure this is not true, but there was a story told about him that he proposed to his wife only after she correctly identified all the birds on the pond that they were standing by.
Anne Brannen 33:49
Let’s hope it’s not true. But it’s pretty funny.
Michelle Butler 33:52
Yes, I hope it’s not true. But it’s a story that tells you something about how he was perceived. I am sad to tell you that there as far as I can tell, is no pop culture presence for Matthew Paris. I feel like there should be because he’s such a fascinating person.
Anne Brannen 34:11
He’s a fascinating person, but is there enough drama to really kind of…I mean, it’s not like he killed anybody. I mean it would be a meditative kind of story, you know, and then he goes to Norway.
Michelle Butler 34:27
I expected him to show up as a character in other kind of stories that are taking place in the Middle Ages. I expected to kind of bump up against Matthew Paris because St. Albans is this central place where guests show up all the time, and that’s how Matthew finds out about stuff to put it in the Chronicle, but I’m holding out for somebody to write me a set of Miss Marple-like novels about Julian where she’s in her anchorhold, and people come with their problems and she solves them.
Anne Brannen 35:05
Yes, that would work. That would work. She never leaves.
Michelle Butler 35:09
She never leaves. But it’s like Miss Marple. There is pop culture presence for William de Marisco.
Anne Brannen 35:15
Yes. I’m not surprised. There’s songs.
Michelle Butler 35:23
There’s songs. There is a whole album called, ‘Oh, Lundy Island.’ It has a song about William de Marisco. There’s historical fiction.
Anne Brannen 35:34
Oh, really? What is it? What is it? I mean, like, is he a major character or someone who just kind of peripherally shows up?
Michelle Butler 35:42
There’s two. There’s a historical romance about William’s descendants looking for a treasure that he hid on the island. That’s called the Sea Rover’s Curse. That’s actually a really recent book. That came out in 2021. There’s a different book that is more about William de Marisco, about his trial called The Secret Report of Friar Otto. That is out of print. It came out in 2010. It’s not available as an ebook. So all I know about it is from the author’s website. But Lundy Island shows up in manga. I had to go consult with my kid about this to find out what it was. It shows up in manga as kind of a character called Hitalia where the island’s kind of self aware.Anyway, my kid tried to explain this to me, and it went in one ear and out the other but he confirmed for me that it’s manga. Then there’s the New Zealand vinters.
Anne Brannen 36:45
Okay, what?
Michelle Butler 36:46
There’s a New Zealand family of winemakers who claim descent from William. Though they are for sure descended from William, the part that is sketchy is that they claim that he is an illegitimate child–that the grandfather was an illegitimate child–of Henry the first.
Anne Brannen 37:04
No, no. The de Mariscos have a pretty clear genealogy going back to the Norman Conquest. Also, you and I were discussing this, we don’t believe that Henry the first had any illegitimate children that he didn’t acknowledge because he really loved all his children. They all grew up together. And he was really upset when they died on the White Ship disaster. And, you know, he gave them jobs and everything.
Michelle Butler 37:35
Henry had two dozen or three dozen. I mean, it’s really hard to count illegitimate children, but he claimed them and he brought them in and he set them up. I guess if you’re gonna be sowing your wild oats everywhere, that’s at least the way to do it.
Anne Brannen 37:52
Yeah, I’m quite impressed. Not everybody gets that done.
Michelle Butler 37:58
But the wine shop in New Zealand is running with this as far as they can go. They’ve got a whole series of products called the King series. The king’s bastard Chardonnay. They’re going with this. They’re running with it.
Anne Brannen 38:18
So they’re using the king instead of the pirate?
Michelle Butler 38:21
Well, both. They’re all over this. Yeah, this was fascinating. It’s been a little while since we recorded so I went and dug and, you know, just kept digging and finding more stuff. But it was just unending. I understand why there’s only one person who is the leading expert on Matthew Paris because it’s a lot. He has so much surviving. Most of his work survives in his own autographed copy.
Anne Brannen 39:00
That is so unusual.
Michelle Butler 39:01
I mean, we have other copies, but we have his autograph copies for a lot of these works. He wrote a life of St. Edward the Confessor, a life of Thomas a Becket, a life of St. Edmund. Just so much. He wrote so much stuff that one of his works gets accidentally attributed to a fictional person, because they don’t believe that all these things can be written by the same person. So one of his works has in the past been erroneously assigned to a Matthew of Winchester who does not exist.
Anne Brannen 39:45
He couldn’t possibly have done it. It had to have been Kit Marlowe. Yeah, when you put this on the list, I was like I did not even know who this is. So then I found out about him and he was very interesting. I love all the Anglo Normans fighting each other in Ireland and it kind of like spilling on over into Westminster. I dearly loved finding out about the Isle of Lundy.
Michelle Butler 40:11
The Isle of Lundy is the land of fiction. It is made for story. Do you have a little island where the ships have to come close because of the shoals? Oh, look, we can steal from it.
Anne Brannen 40:27
So that is our discussion of William de Marisco of the very interesting isle of Lundy and the very interesting Matthew Paris. The next time that you hear from us, we’re going to be discussing a case in Germany concerning the adulteration of saffron, very bad to do that. I’m excited about this because I get to talk about saffron and that is quite enjoyable. 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 Stitcher and Apple podcast, and all of the places where the podcasts hang out. We ourselves are at True Crime medieval.com. You can find the show notes and the transcriptions and there’s links to the podcasts there. You can leave comments, which we like very much. We love it when you leave comments. You can also suggest crimes for us to think about doing. We have been doing this… it’ll be what? four years in October?
Michelle Butler 41:30
Yes, it will. Wow.
Anne Brannen 41:33
We have not run out of medieval crimes because it’s 1000 years of people waiting badly, you know, and so there you go. But we are always glad to hear about more because we would like not to run out before we get tired of doing this. It would be great if that was like all concurrent. You know, we have no more crimes. We’re sick of doing it anyway. All right, there you go. That will work. And so let us know. Thanks for stopping by. Bye.
79. Snorri Sturluson Is Assassinated, Reykholt, Iceland 1241
Anne Brannen 0:23
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 0:32
And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:35
Today we are discussing the time that an eminent poet and historian and fairly mediocre politician was assassinated in Reykjavik, Iceland in 1241. Snorri Sturluson was assassinated, and this was very bad and, Michelle is going to explain all about this. As we were noting, this is our second writer who gets assassinated, Kit Marlowe having been the first one. We have another writer who’s kind of like this, but he manages to survive. That’s Thomas Malory. But today we’re on Snorri Sturluson. We’re going back into Iceland.
Michelle Butler 1:15
Yay. But first we need to do the correction.
Anne Brannen 1:18
Oh, oh, I forgot. Yes. Michelle has an announcement.
Michelle Butler 1:22
We had an astute listener, Abby, write in to let us know that I erroneously assumed that the room named, at the Florida university, for an Eleanor Searle was our Eleanor Searle, the eminent Anglo-Norman historian who did all the things that I was citing, I think in the episode about Battle Abbey, but I’m sure her work will come up again. Anyway, it turns out that there is a different Eleanor Searle that that room is named for, and it is named for her on account of having studied music there and then married well.
Anne Brannen 2:08
Okay. So she wasn’t a scholar, but she had studied there.
Michelle Butler 2:12
Yeah. She was married first to Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney.
Anne Brannen 2:18
Oh my god, the Vanderbilt is kind of a clue that something big is going on.
Michelle Butler 2:22
Yeah. And then Leonard Franklin McCollum. She’s got a Wikipedia page. She is who that room is named for. I did sort of wonder, why on earth is there a room named for her in Florida. No. That’s not what’s going on.
Anne Brannen 2:42
I remember you saying that this is sort of making no sense. Like what the hell.
Michelle Butler 2:46
But it’s kind of an unusual name, so it never occurred to me it might be a different totally human being.
Anne Brannen 2:53
Thank you. Thank you, astute listener. Who was this?
Michelle Butler 2:57
Abby.
Anne Brannen 2:59
Thank you, astute listener Abby. Kudos to you. Yay.
Michelle Butler 3:04
I appreciated having her write in and let me know this. Because I would rather know that I had made a mistake than to have somebody think, ‘Oh, well, I won’t tell them, it’ll hurt their feelings.’ No. It won’t hurt my feelings. Let me know.
Anne Brannen 3:18
We kind of actually like to know what’s happening.
Michelle Butler 3:21
I’m strongly in favor of facts.
Anne Brannen 3:26
We are in favor of facts and logic and evidence. Yes. That’s what we stand for. We stand for many things. No genocide, no colonialism. Please use facts and evidence. That’s where we’re at. Yep.
Michelle Butler 3:38
Apparently one of the lessons is marry well if you want to have a room named for you, rather than just being an awesome scholar. Although she does have that postdoctoral–the scholar, Eleanor Searle–has that postdoctoral fellowship named for her. That really is.
Anne Brannen 3:55
That is good. All right. So that’s good. All right.
Michelle Butler 3:58
But it was sort of random because that one’s at a university in California, where she worked. What the hell is this one in Florida? It’s good to know. Two different people.
Anne Brannen 4:08
I’m glad to have that cleared up. Thank you.
Michelle Butler 4:11
But this is the sort of thing that leads to mistakes on Ancestry and Geni.
Anne Brannen 4:17
Yes, it does. Oh, yes, it does. I must be related to this person because they have the same name.
Michelle Butler 4:25
So Snorri.
Anne Brannen 4:27
Snorri.
Michelle Butler 4:28
Now we can go to Snorri.
Anne Brannen 4:29
Snorri Sturluson was born in Iceland in 1179. He was an Icelandic poet of great importance and a historian of great importance. His works–at least what we believe to be his works–such as the Prose Edda, which is an extremely important source for Norse mythology and the Helmskringla, which is a history of the Norse kings, they’ve been integral parts of the construction of Norse history and mythology. I believe Michelle is going to be talking about that later.
Michelle Butler 5:04
Yeah, that’s what I looked at.
Anne Brannen 5:05
Though the assessment of his works change with times and politics, they’re crucial works nonetheless, from a piece of history where documentation can be kind of scant on the ground. So that’s great. He’s great. All right. So how did this poet and historian end up getting assassinated in his own home, n orders of the King of Norway?
Michelle Butler 5:27
Honest to God, that is the reason why I put it on the list because I’m like, what?
Anne Brannen 5:34
Well, I’m gonna explain this. Although I think you found out while you were doing your research.
Michelle Butler 5:40
I actually ran across this when we were doing the Olaf episode, because one of the sources for Olaf is Snorri’s section about Olaf in the Helmskringla and it mentioned at that point, you know, ‘Snorri, who was assassinated in 1241.’ Wait, what?
Anne Brannen 5:58
And you’re like, wait, wait. I was glad to know about it too, because I know Snorri through his works, but not so much through the politics. So I was glad to get the politics down. He was also a politician. That’s the context. Snorri was really well educated. This was the result of a lawsuit settlement whereby Snorri’s father was being compensated for having been wounded by the wife of a guy that he was in a lawsuit with. So it’s sort of a lawsuit from a lawsuit, settlement from a settlement. At any rate, Snorri got educated. He became a lawyer. It’s not just that he could write history and poems. He was a lawyer. He married well–I think this was a theme earlier in this particular podcast–he married well, a woman who brought lands and power into the marriage. So he was a poet and a lawyer and a historian, and he went into public office. He was one of the law givers in the althing.
It’s the gathering where they all come together, and a third of the law has to be recited at every al thing, because that’s how you remember it.
Yeah, because not everybody got all the education and was writing. So he’s wonderful. He’s one of the lawyers there. He’s put in public office. And he got invited to Norway, which is where he met the king, that’s Hákon Hákonarson. He made him into a knight, he got to become a Norwegian knight–
Michelle Butler 7:25
I didn’t know that part.
Anne Brannen 7:28
But you knew that he was made–
Michelle Butler 7:30
I knew that he’d gone to Norway and made friends with the king and the king’s advisor and all that stuff. But I didn’t know about him being made a knight. That’s hilarious.
Anne Brannen 7:41
Well, not just that, but also he’s a vassal of the king now.
Michelle Butler 7:44
Oooh.
Anne Brannen 7:45
Yeah,. So he’s an Icelandic lawgiver and he’s a vassal of the King of Norway. Let’s think about this. Could this be a problem? Let’s find out.
Michelle Butler 7:56
Conflict of interest perhaps.
Anne Brannen 7:57
So he went back to Iceland and became a law speaker in the althing again, so he’s one of the people that speaks out the law that you have to do, you know, a third of, because he can read it. Okay. Fair enough. He became a law speaker in the althing again. He was pushing for the union of Iceland and Norway. Okay, we got to go back to some further context, because like, What the hell. Iceland was settled first in the ninth century by Norwegians and it was governed by the althing from almost the very beginning. That’s still one of the oldest Parliaments in the world because it’s not gone. So it was independent, though of course it had ties with Norway. The althing had been established on purpose as a way of avoiding the kind of centralized authority of the monarchy, which was what Norway had, but also keeping the Norwegian kind of structure of laws. So you could have them both by having a kind of communal structure. This is the Commonwealth. The Commonwealth worked really well for a while. During all that time, where we’ve got the Irish kings killing each other and the Welsh kings killing each other and the English kings killing each other, the Commonwealth was working pretty well. Up till the 13th century, when the chieftains–there had been nearly 40 of them at that point, and they’ve been working communally. It metamorphosed and became a smaller group of people fighting for power. You know, like the Irish kings fighting and the Welsh kings fightings–that’s what they became. Well, when did that start? It started with Snorri. It started in 1220 when Snorri Sturluson became a vassal of the King of Norway, and he told the king that he would help Norway become the boss of Iceland. That’s the beginning of the Sturling era, about 43 years where the Icelandic chieftains were fighting. It’s Snorri. Let’s have a little moment where we’re really sad that sometimes poets do not stay in their own lane. You got anything there?
Michelle Butler 10:16
I’m just so frustrated.
Anne Brannen 10:19
I know. I know.
Michelle Butler 10:21
‘What are you doing?’
Anne Brannen 10:22
Oh, Snorri. Oh, no,
Michelle Butler 10:24
Don’t break it. It’s working.
Anne Brannen 10:26
It was working. And then it stopped working. Yeah, kind of spectacularly. After Snorri had gone to Norway and come back, his nephew Sturla also became a vassal of the King of Norway. So this is the Sturluson era. This is the family that brings in Norway and–
Michelle Butler 10:48
Oh, I hadn’t thought about this connection with Diamuit before. But it’s like Diarmuit bringing in the Normans.
Anne Brannen 10:55
It kind of is. I hadn’t thought about that either. I will say, and I don’t think it’s just because of my ties to Norway, I will say that I think that probably the Norwegians were better behaved than the Normans. I’m just saying.
Michelle Butler 11:10
That’s a low bar.
Anne Brannen 11:11
Okay, so low bar, but I’m saying nonetheless. Okay, so Sturla is a vassal of the King of Norway and he went to war with the Icelandic chieftains who didn’t want to be Norwegian. Sturla lost a really big battle at Örlygsstaðir. Really big battle. In fact he died, is one of the things that happened. Snorri was back in Norway. The king no longer trusted him. After that battle, at which Snorri had lost like a brother, nephews, all these relatives killed, the king denied Snorri permission to go back to Iceland. I made an absolute ‘you may not go back.’ But the regent, who was also a friend of Snorri, he got him out. The Sturlinga saga says that Snorri said ‘út vil ek’ “I want out” and he went home. The Norwegian King had to fight the regent for a while, the regent having behaved very badly in allowing Snorri to go back to Iceland. But the regent got killed in 1240 and the king then sent agents to get Snorri. Now I haven’t mentioned Gissur, but he’s the guy that won the battle that Snorri’s nephew lost. He sent agents to Gissur with orders to neutralize Snorri. Death or capture, either one. That would of course mean submitting to Norway, even though there had been this whole big fight and the battle that Gissur won. Let’s take a moment while we try to make sense of this in our heads. Okay, that didn’t work. Let’s move on. So Gissur chose to assassinate Snorri. By the way, I have to mention this, Snorri had been sent a letter warning him about this. But it was in runes, and Snorri could not read it. But we think that Snorri could read read runes and so we think this was some form of cryptic rune that he couldn’t read, but that the person who sent it thought he could read. I do not know how to explain this because I know the Futhark but I do not know cryptic runes. I don’t know what the hell they might be. At any rate, he was warned. But it wasn’t a very good warning, was it? No. Anyway, Gissur took about 70 men–I find this hilarious. How big a force do you need to go to somebody’s house and kill him in the basement? I mean, this happens all the time in America without 70 people, I’m just saying. Anyway, he takes 70 and he attacks Snorri in his house at Reykholt. There’s pieces of that. Are you gonna say anything about tourism?
Michelle Butler 13:54
I can. Yeah.
Anne Brannen 13:55
Okay, because you can go visit this place. Anyway, so that was September 22, 1241. They chased Snorri into the cellar, and they killed him. His last words, I’m sorry to tell you, were ‘do not strike’ but they did. So that was bad. Nobody really was happy about it. Because the great poet and historian and mediocre politician was dead, and the King of Norway continued to take on the Icelandic chieftains, and there were more battles. Snorri’s brother Thórthur won several battles. He and Gissur, both being vassals of the King of Norway, did not fight each other. No, no. He sort of became a vassal of the King of Norway after he had killed Snorri’s other brother, who was being a vassal of the King of Norway. Anyway, now he’s a vassal of Norway. They’re not fighting. At any rate, the King of Norway named Thorthur the ruler of Iceland. Ah, little rest here for a minute. Okay, Finally in 1262, the Icelandic chieftains signed a covenant which brought Iceland into union with Norway, meaning that they moved from a chieftain-led commonwealth to a monarchy. By the way, I’m going to go a little further and explain what happens later. In 1380, this led to union with Denmark because Norway, Denmark, and Sweden were all united in the Kalmar Union. This had to do with the royal families of those countries marrying each other because they were trying to counteract the Hanseatic League, which had gotten awfully high and mighty for a trade union. So that’s all later. Norway, by the way, would remain in union with Denmark until 1814, at which point Denmark ceded Norway to Sweden, because Denmark was on the wrong side in the Napoleonic Wars. That didn’t go very well for them. So Norway went to war with Sweden. Sweden won, but in 1905, Sweden granted independence to Norway. The problem was that there were no Norwegian noble families who could provide a monarch that descended from medieval times. So Prince Carl of Denmark, who was a distant relative of some of the medieval Norwegian kings became King of Norway by parliamentary election, and that meant that the Queen was the Princess of Wales, who was the daughter of Edward the seventh. I’m just telling you, it’s hard to follow these things. At any rate, so Norway was independent. Monarchy again, but, you know, with a Danish king, okay, but the Danish king is now Norwegian, let’s just say that’s just how it goes. Back to Iceland. Iceland, when we last mentioned them, was in union with Norway and Denmark. When Denmark lost in the Napoleonic Wars, Iceland remained with Denmark while Norway broke loose. So that’s 1814. The Icelandic independence movement, along with movements across Europe, started in the 1850s. In 1874, Denmark granted Iceland home rule and a Constitution. In 1918, the Act of Union made Iceland fully independent, but in a personal union with Denmark, which means that they have the same monarch, but they’re different countries, like Canada, for instance. That agreement expired in 1944. When that agreement expired, Iceland voted–it was 97% of the population voted–to end the union. They became a republic. They elected a president. That’s where we are today. Okay, back to Snorri. So Snorri was dead, and things were in chaos and everything evolved, as I’ve laid out. But his legacy has been literary, historical, political…all of the realms that he was working in, he made a big impact on. I finish my section, before we move on to Michelle, with a quote from Snorri’s Prose Edda, which seems to me kind of useful. Here it is. “Men will know misery. Adulteries be multiplied. An axe age. A sword age. Shields will be broken. A wind age. A wolf age. Before the world’s ruin.” So tell me what you got. You want to talk about all the writings?
Michelle Butler 18:36
I want to try to explain why Snorri is so important.
Anne Brannen 18:41
Yay. Please do so.
Michelle Butler 18:45
He was–this is a direct quote from one of the books I’m working with–“Snorri was the first Icelandic prose writer whose background is known who was not a cleric.”
Anne Brannen 18:57
Oh, that’s interesting. I hadn’t thought of that at all.
Michelle Butler 19:02
“Though his ecclesiastical predecessors had been by no means uninterested in secular learning, and he and his lay contemporaries were deeply imbued with Christian learning. But his outlook, though Christian, was predominantly secular. He seems to have belonged to a group of writers with interest in poetry and history, although there’s no evidence that he presided over a school of poets and scholars.” So even if his writing was bad, he would be really important as the first known Icelandic prose writer who is a secular person, not a cleric.
Anne Brannen 19:38
Interesting.
Michelle Butler 19:39
The Prose Edda has three pieces. One is a poem of praise to that Norwegian king, that he wrote when he first went there. The other two…Gylfaginning is the piece that has all the mythology in it. It has a framing narrative. A Swedish king Gylfa has some questions, so he goes to Asgard to get some answers. He particularly has some questions because he feels like he’s been badly treated in the world. He has some land that’s been taken from him, and he wants answers from the gods. That, just because we have to mention Tolkien at every opportunity, is a really interesting piece of information for anybody who has read the History of Middle Earth, because the original versions of the Silmarillion have exactly that kind of framing narrative.
Anne Brannen 20:34
Well, Tolkien knows Snorri.
Michelle Butler 20:37
For sure. He knows him very well, as well as the poetic Edda. All of the names, of course, of the dwarves and Gandalf come from the poetic Edda. We get a description of the mythology, the set of gods that the Scandinavian pagans believed in. This is one of only two sources. So it’s incredibly important. Without Snorri…our knowledge of Norse Mythology always carries that asterix that this is being written down in the 13th century about things that people were believing in the 9th and 10th and 11th centuries. It’s also been written down by somebody who is a convert to Christianity. So his framing, his discussion of the gods, takes the stance that these were people who have become treated as gods. Interestingly, they are people who are descendants of survivors of the Trojan War.
Anne Brannen 21:42
Yeah.
Michelle Butler 21:44
What is it with the Trojan War? Because we see that same exact thing at the beginning of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.
Anne Brannen 21:53
Yep.
Michelle Butler 21:54
That Britain is called that because it was settled by Brutus and his descendants? Not Rome. No. It’s Troy.
Anne Brannen 22:05
It’s Troy.
Michelle Butler 22:06
What is the thing with Troy? Somebody tell me what the book is to explain what the thing is with Troy. So this is a really important source for the mythology. It has these pieces to it that make it acceptable to both the Christian who is writing it and a Christian who is reading it. But the actual information itself appears to be preserved fairly well. So that piece by itself…if that was all we had, he would be an important writer. But wait, there’s more. The third piece of the Prose Edda, Skáldskaparmál, is a writer’s guide book. It’s so important for our understanding of how they thought about poetry and how they put poetry together. It is lists of kennings organized by the nouns you would use them as substitutes for. So you would have, you know, a listing for boat, and underneath it, it would have all the things that you use, all the little compound phrases that you would use, like wave rider, that you would use as substitutes for boat. So he essentially wrote a thesaurus. A poetry thesaurus. It’s so important, because he uses illustrative examples from skaldic poetry, much of which does not survive.
Anne Brannen 23:42
So another reason he’s important is he saved some stuff for us.
Michelle Butler 23:45
Yeah. It’s not his intention to, he’s not intending to save that skaldic poetry because he doesn’t know it’s going to get lost. But he is important because of the poetry he is certainly saving there. But also because of what he’s telling us. Much of what we know about how the poetry was put together, and how they thought about putting this poetry together, comes from the fact that he sat down and wrote us a guidebook.
Anne Brannen 24:11
So he’s the one that tells us all these things we know.
Michelle Butler 24:17
He’s so important. We don’t get that a whole lot. Nobody sat down in 14th century England and said, ‘Okay, now I’m going to write you a guide to how we write alliterative poetry.’ That would have been nice, but we don’t have it.
Anne Brannen 24:38
No, that doesn’t exist. No. We just have to figure out the how the alliterative poetry works by reading the alliterative poetry.
Michelle Butler 24:47
But he sat down and wrote us out the rules, which is nice. I appreciate that. Then of course we have the Helmskringla, which is a really important collection of sagas going from the legendary way-past to the near past of 1177. It’s humongous. I did not attempt to read all of it.
Anne Brannen 25:09
No, it’s humongous.
Michelle Butler 25:11
It’s so huge.
Anne Brannen 25:12
It really is covering a lot of territory to be sure.
Michelle Butler 25:17
I spent an awful lot of time trying to find something that I thought should exist, but doesn’t. There is no historical novel about Snorri as far as I can tell, not even in Norwegian or something. I mean, I dug all through the internet. What the heck. Fascinating childhood, connection with important people, murdered in his home, incredibly important author. What more do you want. Hollywood?
Anne Brannen 25:50
Plus at least two marriages that I remember and a great many illegitimate children. So really, you could have a lot of romance.
Michelle Butler 25:58
He has such an interesting life. Why is there no biopic? Why is there no novel? Why is there no movie? Come on. Get on it Hollywood.
Anne Brannen 26:08
You would think, and especially since we’ve got all that whole Viking trend and everything. You’d think that really people could do this for us.
Michelle Butler 26:15
He’s often compared to the Beowulf poet because of being a Christian writer who is retelling the pagan past. But personally, I think a better comparison is Thomas Malory. He reminds me of Thomas Malory because he is close enough to this past to still understand it, but far enough away from it to understand that it needs to be preserved and retold and repackaged for the people who currently exist and the ones that are going to follow. He’s at this really crucial cultural moment. 100 years before is too early, 100 years later is too late. But it’s as if Thomas Malory had written, in addition to Morte de Arthur, a synopsis of the Bible and also a writer’s handbook.
Anne Brannen 27:07
I would like to see a writer’s handbook from Thomas Malory. I think that would be fun. What exactly the hell are you doing, Thomas? How are you making sense of these things that do not fit together?
Michelle Butler 27:18
I am now quite impressed with Thomas Malory at least having not been murdered.
Anne Brannen 27:25
Yes, he didn’t get murdered.
Michelle Butler 27:27
Because his political sense is atrocious.
Anne Brannen 27:30
Yes, pretty much as bad as Kit Marlowe’s, and Snorri’s.
Michelle Butler 27:33
He did spend a lot of time in jail and specifically excluded…so maybe the person sent after Snorri was just being overzealous and could have taken him back in chains and Snorri would have died in prison. But that’s not what he did. There is delightful Snorri-based tourism.
Anne Brannen 27:53
Do tell. We can go see his house, right?
Michelle Butler 27:57
There’s whole itineraries set up, where you can go see it. I just now ran across that there is an app. Yay. There is a Snorri app.
Anne Brannen 28:11
What happens with a Snorri app?
Michelle Butler 28:16
This is a tourism blog. Locatify. “Locatify has been working closely with Jónína Eiríksdóttir, Product Manager at Snorrastofa over the last year and is proud to announce the release of the much anticipated Snorri app on Android and iOS. The Snorri app provides guests to the Reykholt region a digital tour guide and tells the stories of one of Iceland’s most historic figures Snorri Sturluson, and his hometown of Reykholt. The app was released just in time for the Follow the Vikings Conference, which Snorrastofa has been taking part in, a four year long EU funded project aimed at making the transactional Viking heritage accessible and understandable to a worldwide audience.” Let me go over to my phone and see if I can find this Snorri app. I literally found this while we were chatting. I was pulling the websites back up. It is the Snorri app from this…it’s called Snorri. It’s from Locatify. It is an educational app. It’s for the Snorri Sturluson Museum, the politician and poet. Then it tells you all about the guide, how you have the option of walking around, it’ll give you the guide to it. Oh, exciting. This is so cool. Snorri has his own app. And–I’m delighted to report– he has an author page on Penguin, because they have published pieces of both the Edda and Helmskringla. So he has an author page on Penguin.
Anne Brannen 30:14
Does it tell us how to get in touch with him?
Michelle Butler 30:17
That would be hilarious. Yup, there it is. Let’s see what Penguin thinks. “Snorri Sturluson was the son of an upstart Icelandic chieftain. He rose to become Iceland’s richest and, for a time, most powerful leader
Anne Brannen 30:36
Yeah. Was he a powerful leader? Hmm.
Michelle Butler 30:40
Then they list the books by him that they have published.
Anne Brannen 30:43
‘He can be reached…”
Michelle Butler 30:46
You can send him fan mail. It’s a standard page for all of their authors. They just use the same template. So under this it says, ‘sign me up for news about Snorri Sturluson and more from Penguin Random House.’ In case he has new releases.
Anne Brannen 31:05
Yeah, I totally want to read his new releases. I really really do. What is left of his house, by the way? Clearly, there’s not an entire thing.
Michelle Butler 31:14
It sure doesn’t look like it. The picture mostly is of a hot spring. “You will find the famous Snorralaug, Snorri’s personal hot tub. It was connected to his home by a tunnel and hooked up to nearby hotsprings.”
Anne Brannen 31:30
Oh, do we get to go in it?
Michelle Butler 31:33
I don’t know that you get to go in it. But the aquaduct has survived and so has the pool. That’s pretty awesome.
Anne Brannen 31:41
So the hotspring is kind of like a natural…that’s a natural thing. But there’s a way to get to it?
Michelle Butler 31:49
I’m looking at the picture right now. It is a round, in the earth tub of water that is fed…it’s got an aquaduct that was built.
Anne Brannen 31:50
So that’s a natural hot springs, and what’s built is a way of having a bath. Okay, good. Very smart.
So this sounds fascinating.
We have to go to Iceland. You’ve been, haven’t you?
Michelle Butler 32:19
Oh, no. I would like to go to Iceland.
Anne Brannen 32:21
I thought you had been to Iceland.
Michelle Butler 32:22
I’ve been to Sweden. When you were talking about the kings after the Napoleonic Wars, I was looking up to see whether something they told us in Sweden is actually true.
Anne Brannen 32:39
Oh, yes. Do look that up.
Michelle Butler 32:41
We got told that this King of Norway–this King of Sweden, sorry–had been…Wow. Okay. It is actually true.
Anne Brannen 32:50
Oh my. What is it? What is it?
Michelle Butler 32:52
The story they told us in Sweden was that in 1818, the king died and was succeeded by the Crown Prince, but he was not actually his son. What he was, was a French soldier who was handpicked for them by Napoleon when Sweden wrote to him and said, ‘We are in serious trouble because the king is dying and we don’t have an heir. So what on earth are we going to do?’ Napoleon’s like, ‘I have just the guy for you.’ So he sends them a French soldier to be their king. It’s the sort of thing where you’re like, that sounds totally bogus.
Anne Brannen 33:44
That’s totally bogus. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 33:46
But apparently, it may actually be true.
Anne Brannen 33:50
So a French soldier that isn’t actually of noble blood, which is usually what you get when you’re having a monarch, but some guy from the ranks? What, was he a private? Was he an officer? He should be an officer, I would think.
Michelle Butler 34:07
I am looking right now at realscandinanavia.com because I hadn’t looked this up. This didn’t seem totally relevant to Snorri. But in the early 19th century, Sweden had this problem because the king was suffering from chronic ill health. He had a stroke soon after his coronation and he was childless.
Anne Brannen 34:30
There’s several things about this that you don’t want in a monarch if you’re having a monarchy.
Michelle Butler 34:35
They wrote to Napoleon for help, because they thought they were going to be in serious trouble. What was going on is that rumors were circulating that Russia and Denmark were planning on dividing Sweden between them because the king’s weakness. So they wrote to Napoleon for help, and he sent them Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who is in fact a commoner.
Anne Brannen 35:14
What was his rank in the French army?
Michelle Butler 35:17
“As a 17 year old, he enlisted as a soldier and then rose through the ranks–“
Anne Brannen 35:24
Okay. All right.
Michelle Butler 35:25
“As the French revolution opened up opportunities for capable men without noble blood. By 1794, he was a general.”
Anne Brannen 35:33
All right. So he wasn’t a noble but he had actually proven that he had some, you know, mental wherewithal and could run things. Okay.
Michelle Butler 35:41
“He had gained the notice of Napoleon while they were serving together in Italy, and in 1804, Napoleon had named him as one of his 18 marshals, the highest military rank of France.” I’m totally mostly quoting here from realscandinavia.com. He didn’t just go out onto the battlefield and pick some random dude. He sent one of his most trusted and highest ranking dudes.
Anne Brannen 36:09
All right, okay.
Michelle Butler 36:10
‘I got the guy for you.’
Anne Brannen 36:12
How did that go over in Sweden? Were they like, ‘Oh, yay, we love our new king. He has such a nice accent?’ I mean, what was going on with them?
Michelle Butler 36:21
They seemed like they were pretty happy about it, because they got sent a capable soldier to keep Russia off their butt.
Anne Brannen 36:28
Okay, yeah, that always being an issue, isn’t it? Okay. And there weren’t it wasn’t any NATO yet. So they couldn’t do that. All right. Got it.
Michelle Butler 36:37
They realized pretty quickly that they were in trouble. So they wrote for help in 1810. So he had several years, like seven or eight years, to serve as regent for the ailing king before…and get adopted and deal with all the formalities before actually taking over. But it’s one of those stories where…you know, we’re touring the royal palace in Sweden, and they tell us this and we’re like, that sounds so spectacularly bogus. But it turns out, it was true.
Anne Brannen 37:15
Sometimes the most spectacularly bogus stories are the actual real ones. Okay. But you just said get adopted. Who adopted him?
Michelle Butler 37:24
He was formally adopted by the king and his wife.
Anne Brannen 37:28
Oh, oh, okay. So he was their heir.
Michelle Butler 37:33
He was. He was made into their official heir. Crown Prince.
Anne Brannen 37:40
Okay, thank you. All right. So Sweden.
Michelle Butler 37:45
It was clearly a rough time for Scandinavia, the 19th century.
Anne Brannen 37:49
It was kind of a rough time everywhere really.
Michelle Butler 37:52
Well, that’s true.
Anne Brannen 37:54
Everybody had their own flavor of rough time-ness.
Michelle Butler 37:57
So they got lucky. Napoleon sent them a capable soldier to help them defend themselves. So Denmark did not take them and Russia did not take them.
Anne Brannen 38:09
I’m actually impressed that Napoleon did that. Because, you know, he didn’t always behave well. Well, I said to you that I would say a little something about genealogy. The reason I wanted to say something, the reason this even occurs to me at all–because who cares?–is that there are places where genealogy intersects with Snorri problematically, as one might think. Because, you know, he does history. He also does mythology, and the medieval genealogies, you know, they’re still useful, if you’re interested in genealogy, and you’re following back lines and whatnot and understanding history, except sometimes that they are fraudulent, which is a problem with genealogies. That goes on down through. I mean, we have famous genealogy frauds, you know, going on down. I don’t think it’s stopping. I keep running into things. But in the Middle Ages, the genealogies that link medieval people into the Franks, you know, the whole Carolingian thing, they’re legion. Like, no, you made these people up. They didn’t exist. As a general rule, what’s going on is that the purpose of the medieval genealogies is kind of different from the way people think about genealogy now. Theoretically, although there’s a whole lot of ‘I’m descended from Charlemagne and Edward the second’. I mean, there’s a whole lot of that going on. But the medieval genealogies were specifically put together showing how whatever noble family had commissioned them, how that family was related, and descended from important personages and the gods and legendary people. That was the job. They show up still. If you’re doing your amateur genealogy and you’re working on family websites and stuff, you can still find yourself descending from Odin, for instance. Because, you know, obviously the kings, the high people, of Scandinavia and Norway and Denmark and Sweden, they were all descended from Odin. So they go back into the gods. Snorri’s writing the sagas, which are histories. That often gets…we get into discussions all the time about being descended from Odin. We get all these lineages from all around like, you’re descended from King Arthur or you’re descended from Magog, who’s a biblical figure who then got made into the ancestor of the Irish kings, or you’re descended from, as you rightfully noted, the people that manage to escape Troy, even though they don’t show up in the only story we have of Troy as having escaped. But at any rate, there they are. They get away and they found lineages in Britain and Ireland and Wales, and God knows what all. Or you could be descended from Beli Mawr, the sun god of the Welsh. So it can be really sort of difficult figuring out what is the line between mythological figures or deities, and actual humans. In general, you could say, for instance, that if you have a story, wherein your ancestor is the kind of person who can jump over nine people at once and kill dogs with his teeth and conjure up fairies from the garden, probably this isn’t a real human. But as you know, sometimes stories get attached to real humans. It can be quite a problem. But at any rate, if you are doing a genealogy, and you find out someplace online that you are descended from Odin, you aren’t. If the proof is from Snorri, it’s like, yes, in his terms, this is true, but not in ours.
Michelle Butler 42:13
Genealogy is so difficult. My mom called me up the other day and asked me if I could find out anything about a John Bishop who emigrated from England. And I’m like, probably not.
Anne Brannen 42:25
What time period?
Michelle Butler 42:28
That would have been good information. I actually went on to Geni and got back to what she was asking me about. But what it says is, we don’t know. He came from England, in 1698.
Anne Brannen 42:44
Oh, we have some of those ship records is the deal. That’s why I was wondering if you knew the time,
Michelle Butler 42:51
That request gave me a headache, because it’s too general to be real. Also, I don’t know why we’re looking this up because there is a solid 75% chance that the ancestor of ours who took on the name Stephen Douglas Bishop was stealing a name from a dead baby.
Anne Brannen 43:11
Okay, yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. All right. We’re gonna have a little segway here wherein I find out about the dead baby? What are you talking about? Your ancestor stole a name from a dead baby? What the hell?
Michelle Butler 43:25
My mom’s grandfather called himself Stephen Douglas Bishop. But when my uncles have gone to look for that, all they find is a couple of records for infants who died.
Anne Brannen 43:41
Uh huh.
Michelle Butler 43:44
Also, we know for sure that this man faked his own death to get away from his wife. We thought for a long time that…he was a Singer sewing machine salesman and this was his second marriage, the one that resulted in my grandfather. It was believed in the family for a very long time that he died in a inn fire. During one of his travels, the inn caught on fire. But there were reports of hearing a carriage in the night. When my uncle actually started digging into genealogy, he found this rat bastard in Ohio with a new family. So the only real question is, did he set the inn on fire? Or did he take advantage of the situation?
Anne Brannen 44:36
There used to be–I think it’s gone now–but there used to be a geneological society called something like the black sheep and you could join it if you could prove that you were descended from someone who was really quite nefarious. You could have been in that.
Michelle Butler 44:53
He was a piece of work. If you look at the pictures of him–we just have one or two–but you can see that his ears are very pointed. Alex is convinced he’s a fae.
Anne Brannen 45:05
In which case, he had totally different morals than we do. And he was being just fine. I mean, the fairies are amoral, not immoral. It’s older.
Michelle Butler 45:16
The pointed ears have come down. A bunch of us have them. As far as I know, nobody has both but many of us have just one. It’s really wild.
Anne Brannen 45:26
Oh, goodness me.
Michelle Butler 45:28
He was a piece of work. We have wild family stories. My grandmother got into a fistfight with her sister in law when she was eight months pregnant and won.
Anne Brannen 45:42
Your family tells these stories, right?
Michelle Butler 45:44
Oh, yeah.
Anne Brannen 45:46
See, some families don’t. Some families don’t want you to say any of the bad stories. One of my great uncles told us, told the whole family that no one was ever allowed to mention that my great great grandfather, Andrew Walker, was in prison for murder. He wrote a book about it. So I think that that’s not a secret, you know. But even if he hadn’t written a book about it, I would have talked about it anyway. Because why would I not? At any rate, yes, it’s just history. That’s the deal. But people have ideas about what it is that lineage means and it’s often just quite annoying.
Michelle Butler 46:27
Grandma didn’t like Aunt Anna, because they–Aunt Anna and her brothers–had tricked her favorite brother, my grandma’s favorite brother, into marrying Aunt Anna. They had done the little thing where the brothers and the dad were waiting with guns, and then they had her pretend like she’d hurt her ankle or something. When he bent down–the fool–to look at her shoe, they came in with the guns. ‘You’ve got your hand up her skirt.’
Where was this? Iowa?
Iowa.
Anne Brannen 47:04
Okay, Iowa. And this sounds like what, end of the 19th century?
Michelle Butler 47:08
My grandmother was born in 1902.
Anne Brannen 47:11
Okay, so no, we’re talking 20th century.
Michelle Butler 47:13
Early 20th. It would be in the 20s. My grandmother could remember getting the right to vote, and was very adamant–it didn’t matter whether she was voting for the dog catcher.
Anne Brannen 47:28
She damn voted.
Michelle Butler 47:31
Everything she could vote for, she voted. Because she remembered getting it and not having it.
Anne Brannen 47:38
I like family stories. Sometimes they actually end up being true. I mean, I’ve had that. There’s been stories in my family that I completely didn’t believe that turned out to be quite and very true. Then sometimes, of course, they’re just wrong. People are not actually, you know, descended from George Washington or whatever.
Michelle Butler 48:02
As far as I know, none of us have delusions of grandeur.
Anne Brannen 48:05
No, you like the other stuff.
Michelle Butler 48:08
We’re just terrible. To be perfectly honest, I do not trust anything genealogical past about the 17th century. Because, like you were saying, the reason for keeping the genealogies are different before that, so that I find them very suspect.
Anne Brannen 48:30
What I love about all this is the history. I love the history of it. And, you know, I like to read stuff. But I would say also, I don’t actually completely trust the genealogies after 1700. Because even when there’s documentation…I don’t know if you know this, I’m sorry to break this to you, Michelle, and to any listeners who might not know this. But occasionally, there have been people who were female who gave birth to children whose father was not actually the person they said they were. This is why for the Old English, your closest male relative was not your father, but your mother’s brother.
Michelle Butler 49:14
This is true. Sending in data to the ancestry sites is creating a really interesting problem for people who a generation ago thought that they had secrets that they had buried.
Anne Brannen 49:28
Yeah, no, they didn’t bury them. Not after the DNA shows up. I think of all the records as the things that people said, and that probably at the time, most people believed. I’m down with that. I can do that. It’s all history. It’s all history. It’s as close as you can get to evidence, but it’s not necessarily fact.
Michelle Butler 49:53
That’s a good point. Just because they say this is who their father is, that does not mean it. And you end up with so much confusion with people being named after…if you’ve got a nephew who’s named after an uncle, then they over time start getting confused with each other, or you have younger children being named after dead older ones. Oh my gosh.
Anne Brannen 50:20
As you know–at least Michelle knows, I don’t know if you all do–but as you know, I spend most of my time over on Geni working in the medieval Welsh tree. There’s a couple of things going on there that can be quite confusing. One is that often Welsh families would have many children with the same name, all of them alive. Or there are also lines of cousins with the same names after each other. So you can very easily mix the cousins’ lines up. Oh, my God. Plus it’s all in Welsh. So it’s a really difficult piece of the tree. Oh, no, the humans aren’t easy.
Michelle Butler 51:03
I’m so happy that you want to volunteer your time to do that, because I have no patience to do it at all.
Anne Brannen 51:11
It’s the ADD. Because I’m like putting all of Peter Bartrum’s Welsh genealogy charts into Geni. It’s just simply ADD. I love that stuff. It’s like names, do do do. Do I think that all of this is incredibly real? Actually, I don’t. No. But I love it. I love the little works. It’s nice. I like that. Then occasionally I have to explain to people that no, they are not descended from Bonnie Prince Charlie, or the argument is they are descended from King John–lots of us are. Big deal. The problem is, as we know from several podcasts we’ve done, King John was horrible. He was a horrible man. There might have been something good about him. I don’t know what it was. I hear this argument, No, there’s been revisionist history. He’s great. I’m like, No, actually, no. There hasn’t been. I’m so sorry. Your ancestor was a horrible man. I’m just so sorry to tell you this. But that doesn’t mean you’re horrible. It’s just a piece of history. There was this guy. He was terrible. He had some kids, then they had kids. Now you’re here. At any rate. Odin. You’re not descended from Odin. So don’t worry about that. Don’t worry about that.
Michelle Butler 52:21
Probably not the Trojans either.
Anne Brannen 52:23
No, nobody is descended from the Trojans. I’m just saying. No. Also, here’s another terrible piece of things. Not only are there these Irish manuscripts that explain to you that the Irish are descended from the Trojans and also the pharaohs–that’s in there too, oh, and biblical figures–but then there’s this whole list of Irish high kings who did not exist. They weren’t there. They show up in all the genealogies too and I’m like no, I’m so sorry. Before Niall of the nine hostages, we got no evidence, sorry about that. In fact, it doesn’t make any sense. No. If you’re the Irish, you’re not descended from the pharaohs or the Trojans or the biblical people of the Middle East. They’re just not.
Michelle Butler 53:17
My favorite place where genealogies have a foot in reality and a foot in mythology is the guy who was the inspiration for the show Vikings that was just on. Ragnar Lothbrok appears to have maybe existed but probably not. But weirdly, his children do exist and are attested to. Oh, that just makes my brain hurt.
Anne Brannen 53:51
It’s the same thing with Niall of the nine hostages. He was probably historical, but the person who’s theoretically is his father was not there. We just don’t know. I’ve had so many people insist we have to know who they are. Of course, we know. We don’t necessarily. We don’t necessarily know whose people’s parents were, you know, even now, much less back then. I like genealogies. But I don’t know why. Because it’s not for the usual reasons and looking at history. It’s like historiography, we’re what you’re doing is examining and thinking about the ways in which people think about history over time. I really like looking at the ways in which people think about genealogy over time. From whom are we descended? What are the stories we are telling ourselves? Because even if you like have a lot of information about your family, you’re not telling all the stories. That’s thousands and thousands of people you might know about. You’re not telling all their stories. First of all, because some of them were really boring. They were really boring. So you’re telling the stories that matter to you. Obviously in your case, your family tells the story of not enormously great behavior because you like that. My family too. We do that too. But of course my father’s family were East Texans. So there’s a lot of guns involved. Like the time that Weaver Dial got shot dead in the streets of Trinity. He’d been bullying somebody after he’d stolen his Christmas whiskey. He was awful. Somebody he’d been bullying shot him. But he comes down as a sort of family legend. My grandfather used to tell–he was his favorite cousin–he used to tell the story all the time about Weaver Dial getting shot dead in the streets of Trinity, Texas. But he told everybody a different story. We’re getting together trying to figure this out. We realized that we actually do not know. Did he get shot dead in Trinity? Or was it Groveton? Was he shot in the back? Or was he shot in the front? And he kept on coming? Weaver Dial kept on coming. I’ve heard both. I don’t know. Did the people of whatever it was, Trinity or Groveton, actually cheer and then put the guy on the train? I don’t know. Might have happened. Maybe not. Anyway, there was a Weaver Dial and he did get shot dead. I don’t know really the circumstances.
Michelle Butler 56:05
Oral history is an interesting challenge. Circle back to Snorri. He’s living at this time of transition between the oral culture and written culture. It’s happening throughout Europe. But it’s happening at that particular moment in Iceland. It happened in England 100 years earlier in the 12th century. So here we are in the 13th century in Iceland, and this transition is happening.
Anne Brannen 56:36
He’s in the middle of it. Not just as a poet and a historian, but in his work as a law speaker in the althing. He is speaking out the law so that the people who don’t read can hear it, but the law has been written down. It’s this transition.
Michelle Butler 56:52
It’s dangerous to assume that every single thing that gets transmitted by oral culture is wrong. And it’s dangerous to assume that everything that gets transmitted by oral culture is accurate.
Anne Brannen 57:05
Yeah, you can get into very big arguments about it. Oh, Snorri. Many people are descended from Snorri Sturluson. Because, as I say, he had lots of children. Most of them not actually legitimate. I’m not. He’s one of my cousins. I thought I’d just tell you in case you were interested. I can look it up and see if he’s one of your cousins. The answer will be yes, he is. But how distant I do not know.
Michelle Butler 57:30
It’ll be pretty darn distant because we’re mostly German and Irish. Well, that was a pretty far walking all over the place. You’re gonna have to cut a bunch of that out.
Anne Brannen 57:41
No, I don’t think I will. I’m gonna keep it on in. I think it makes sense with Snorri. He was all over the board. So were we. Genealogy, he was interested in it. So there you go. The next time that y’all hear from us, we are going to go back to England, although it’s really at about the same time because we’ve just been in 1241 in Iceland. 1242, the next year, we’re going to England when William de Marisco is executed for various crimes, among them piracy and trying to have Henry the third kill. So that sounds like fun.
Oh, gosh, did I put this on the list? Because I don’t remember anything about this.
I don’t remember this at all. I think you must have put this on. After that we seem to go into the realm of saffron. At any rate, next time it’s 1242.
Michelle Butler 58:33
Well, so here we are talking about Snorri’s assassination and why on earth this doesn’t exist as a screenplay that has been picked up. I’m so frustrated.
Anne Brannen 58:45
We have been running into a lot of things that ought to be historical fiction. It’s like the historical fiction kind of ends up lighting on certain things and completely ignoring others. Very odd. Okay. This has been True Crime Medieval where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. And now we don’t need 70 people to kill somebody in their basement. We can be found on Spotify and Stitcher and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts hang out. You can find us at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word, where you can find links to the podcasts and show notes and transcriptions, and you can reach us through there. You can leave comments. We love it when you leave comments and tell us about medieval crimes that we should pay attention to or explain to us when we were wrong. So that we can let you know that there were two scholars named…what is this?
Michelle Butler 59:41
Eleanor Searle.
Anne Brannen 59:43
Eleanor Searle. There was a scholar and a person who studied some music and married well. They are two different people. But one of them has a room of dedicated to them at a university and one of them has a fellowship dedicated to them at a university and they are not the same person. So now we know that. Thank you. Because it was confusing. It’s confusing. I can’t remember if there’s anything else I’m supposed to say. Blanca didn’t show up today.
Michelle Butler 1:00:13
She was really quiet actually. That’s surprising.
Anne Brannen 1:00:17
It is surprising because she laid an egg and has been screaming lately because apparently it’s spring and it’s some kind of time when as a cockatoo you’re supposed to be even more obnoxious than usual. Believe me, the level of obnoxious behavior with cockatoos–that’s a fairly high bar. I’m just saying.
Michelle Butler 1:00:36
Sometimes she has something to say about every other sentence.
Anne Brannen 1:00:40
Yes, several of the podcasts have outtakes of us trying to deal with Blanca, but she was quiet today. So that was Iceland. Now we’re back in the 21st century.
Michelle Butler 1:00:54
Poets should not fancy themselves politicians.
Anne Brannen 1:00:59
Apparently not. We have some evidence that, you know, it’s sort of deadly. That’s all for us. Bye.
Michelle Butler 1:01:05
Bye.
78. Special Episode: April Fool’s Debunking of the Myth of the Medieval Shame Flute
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:37
Usually, we have a crime or purported crime that we are focusing on. I bring a lot of the historical context and whatnot. Michelle goes and finds very interesting things concerning scholarship and who’s making bad movies or whatnot. Today, we’re doing things a little bit differently because I have been otherwise engaged with various sorts of health things. So we’re having a special episode today. Our April Fool’s episode is going to consist of Michelle telling me a hell of a lot of stuff about a thing I know nothing about. Because there wasn’t any way that I could go research this thing. So it’s Michelle’s hour and I’m just going to be reacting. I have no idea. I heard none of these things. In fact, I forget what the hell the name of this is. Michelle, what are we doing?
Michelle Butler 1:34
Today we are investigating the question for our April Fool’s episode about whether shame flutes are a thing in the Middle Ages.
Anne Brannen 1:43
Please describe a shame flute as I have no idea what one might be.
Michelle Butler 1:48
If you go and google “shame flute,” what you will find is a whole bunch of articles and blog posts, all claiming that in the Middle Ages, bad musicians were punished by being publicly shamed by having a faux instrument that kind of looks like a clarinet but it has an iron ring that would be clamped around your neck, and metal plates to squash your fingers into place. It’s not a real instrument. It just looks like one and you will absolutely find pages and pages and pages of Google results claiming that this was a real thing. They’re all citing each other and. Reputable places are citing this. QI reposted this, which surprised me.
Anne Brannen 2:38
QI is on the money usually.
Michelle Butler 2:42
I was very surprised to find QI retweeting stuff about the shame flute, but lots of bloggers talk about it, and reputable sites. And of course, also less reputable ones like Ripley’s Believe it or not. But it’s all over the place.
Anne Brannen 3:00
Where is this supposed to have happened? Because I know that I’ve never come across anybody getting forced to wear shame flutes in the English archives. Perhaps it was in Germany or something?
Michelle Butler 3:12
So here’s the thing. Everything about it is very general. All the discussions are very general. It’s just “in the Middle Ages.”
Anne Brannen 3:26
Oh. 1000 years.
Michelle Butler 3:29
Right. I put this on the list, because I had run across it and it kind of set off my bullshit meter, but stranger things have happened. Maybe it was a real thing. I wanted to find out.
Anne Brannen 3:42
The children of Hamelin actually really disappeared. So hey, yeah.
Michelle Butler 3:45
People really did dance themselves until they collapsed. So I was skeptical, but I wasn’t willing to just write it off. I wanted to have the opportunity to go look at it. One of the reasons that it set off my bullshit meter is that there’s a known history of invented fake torture devices, which are then attributed to the Middle Ages.
Anne Brannen 4:09
Yes, I believe a bunch of them are in various sorts of museums, where you can go and look at torture devices that were created by the Victorians.
Michelle Butler 4:20
Exactly. There’s things like the Brazen Bull, which we know is not a real thing. This is that idea that you make a bull out of brass, and then you stick your enemy in it, and light a fire under it and roast them to death, and their screams coming out of the bull’s throat makes it sound like the bull is bellowing.
Anne Brannen 4:44
Didn’t happen, huh?
Michelle Butler 4:45
This is not a real thing. It’s not even a medieval fake thing.
Anne Brannen 4:48
No, it’s a classical fake thing.
Michelle Butler 4:50
Exactly. It’s a classical fake thing that one classical dude is attributing to somebody else, a Greek who lived like 150 years earlier, but it’s not real. It’s not real. The Pear of Anguish is another famous–
Anne Brannen 5:04
The what?
Michelle Butler 5:05
The Pear of Anguish.
Anne Brannen 5:08
The Pear of Anguish, like pears like you might make it a lovely gingerbread pear thing out of?
Michelle Butler 5:13
Yes. It’s a device shaped like a pear that has petals that open up with a screw device. The idea is that you insert it into an orifice and then screw it open. But there’s no evidence that this is actually a thing. The engineering people who take a look at the surviving ones say that there is no way that that is strong enough, that the winching device is strong enough to open up in anybody’s orifice of any sort.
Anne Brannen 5:45
When was it invented? Is this 18th, 19th century?
Michelle Butler 5:48
The heyday for fake torture devices is the 19th century. The Victorians have a lot to answer for. One of the best known fake medieval torture devices is the Iron Maiden.
Anne Brannen 6:03
Of course.
Michelle Butler 6:04
Of course.
Anne Brannen 6:05
That shows up all the time. I see that on the TV constantly. So it must be true.
Michelle Butler 6:10
There was a really well known example of this in Nuremberg, which is important, so remember that for later.
Anne Brannen 6:10
Yeah. Nuremberg.
Michelle Butler 6:13
It’s an early one, too. There are references to this in the 18th century, but the surviving fake ones are from the 19th century.
Anne Brannen 6:28
They had to create some to match the things that have been made up in the 18th century. Then pretend it was the Middle Ages that thought them up. See, that’s the thing. If you’re going to have something that’s truly outrageous, you might as well say that it happened in the Middle Ages, everybody will believe you.
Michelle Butler 6:44
Bram Stoker helped popularize it. It was famous in Germany as a fake thing. Well, believed to be a real thing. It started out in Germany. It was really famous in Germany, and then Bram Stoker must have seen it, I guess, when he was traveling. He went home and wrote a story, a horror story, in which the Iron Maiden features prominently. He has a lot to answer for too.
Anne Brannen 7:06
He really does.
Michelle Butler 7:07
He writes a story, the name of which is that word we’re not supposed to use anymore for Native American women.
Anne Brannen 7:17
Uh huh. Yes.
Michelle Butler 7:19
So in the story, two English honeymooners go to Nuremberg, and they are in the museum. They see an American tourist there. He’s an early version of that ‘ugly American tourist’ who talks louder to people and is going to Europe to see things but complains about all of them. You know, arrogant and disruptive.
Anne Brannen 7:46
‘How much is this in real money?’
Michelle Butler 7:49
So this tourist, outside of the museum, picks up a stone and throws it at a kitten. He meant to scare the kitten, but he actually smacks the kitten in the head and kills it.
Anne Brannen 8:00
Okay, we hate him.
Michelle Butler 8:02
The mama cat watches him. He’s freaked out a little bit. The cat-mama’s eyes remind him of this story he heard about a Native American woman whose child was killed by the US military and sets out to take her revenge. So, foreshadowing. Anyway, Ugly American tourist goes into the museum and in front of the horrified honeymooners, bribes the museum curator to put him in the Iron Maiden because he wants to go home and tell the story about how he was in the Iron Maiden. This particular version of it is laid out horizontally, where it has a rope that winches up the top. He gets into it, and the cat-mama comes flying at the curator, biting and scratching and hissing, and he lets go of the rope. Boom. Take out the Ugly American tourist. This was a wildly popular story in the English speaking world and is for many people in the English speaking world, the introduction to the Iron Maiden.
Anne Brannen 9:11
I like the cat.
Michelle Butler 9:14
This is not even the only time cats will show up in my collection of random crap today.
Anne Brannen 9:22
Very well. So we’re talking about fake torture devices.
Michelle Butler 9:25
So there’s this history of fake torture devices, just made up stuff in general. But then there’s also a tendency to push some early modern shaming stuff back onto the Middle Ages. Things like the scold’s bridle were real, but they weren’t medieval.
Anne Brannen 9:45
Nope.
Michelle Butler 9:45
It’s early modern public shaming. This is one of my favorite pieces of this particular part. Most of these made up torture devices are 18th and 19th century, but in 2005–
Anne Brannen 9:58
Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Michelle Butler 10:04
- A hoax article was put on Wikipedia about the Spanish Tickler, which supposedly was a torture device in the Spanish Inquisition, which kind of looks like a rake but with really sharp blades.
Anne Brannen 10:23
Nobody expects it.
Michelle Butler 10:25
I certainly did not expect one of these fake devices to date from 2005. What the hell. And it has gone wild. You will see this one repeated everywhere as if it’s real. We know for sure what its origin is. So, you know, torture happens, of course, in the Middle Ages–we’ve talked about it a lot on the podcast. But these kind of elaborate, custom-made torture objects? No.
Anne Brannen 10:51
It was really actually usually much simpler.
Michelle Butler 10:54
It’s not that hard to hit people with a hammer. You already have the hammer. You don’t have to go to any extra work. Refining steel is a lot of work and very expensive. Nobody’s going to do that. All right. So here’s what I have for you about the shame flute specifically.
Anne Brannen 11:10
Okay.
Michelle Butler 11:11
Okay. There are exemplars held in two museums.
Anne Brannen 11:15
Nuremburg.
Michelle Butler 11:19
Well, close to Nuremberg. One is the Museum of Medieval Crime in Rothenburg, Germany, which is about an hour from Nuremberg. And one is the Torture Museum in Amsterdam, which I do not recommend that you go try to Google and find its website, because if you do you find a malware site. I don’t know what has happened to its Museum website. But I know that I had to click away from there and run a scan with my Trend Micro. Neither of these are exactly what you would call highly reliable sources. They’re sensationalized collections of highly questionable items. There are no examples of this item in any reputable museum.
Anne Brannen 12:00
Yeah. The torture museums are usually essentially tourist traps.
Michelle Butler 12:04
That’s exactly what these are. I remember Brian and I were in Amsterdam in 2014, and we walked past this and it was closed. We thought, that would be interesting. But we didn’t end up going back to it because we were only there for like a day and a half, and we were prioritizing Van Gogh.
Anne Brannen 12:21
Oh, of course.
Michelle Butler 12:23
I’m so glad we did that.
Anne Brannen 12:24
I would prioritize Van Gogh too.
Michelle Butler 12:26
I actually emailed both museums requesting information on provenance and dating, but have not received a reply.
Anne Brannen 12:33
No, you wouldn’t, would you? But, audience, the lengths to which Michelle will go to try to find the truth.
Michelle Butler 12:42
I tried. It was the best research project I’ve had in months. It was great. The only information about the dating of either object is a Ripley’s Believe It or Not video. I’m just not cool with having to rely on a Ripley’s Believe It or Not video.
Anne Brannen 12:58
I don’t think that’s a reputable scholarly site, no.
Michelle Butler 13:03
But it literally is the only thing about these that provided a date. It dates it to the 17th century. But there’s no information about provenance there, either. This is the very first time in the podcast where I have emailed a colleague and asked for help.
Anne Brannen 13:22
Oh, whoa.
Michelle Butler 13:23
I know, right? I emailed–it would be a stretch to say friend, but certainly a colleague I admire a lot. It’s more of a fangirl relationship than–
Anne Brannen 13:38
We sort this on down. Yes, yes.
Michelle Butler 13:41
Who is an expert in medieval music, Dr. Richard Rastall, who’s professor emeritus at the University of Leeds. I asked him, Have you ever heard of this? He said no.
Anne Brannen 13:53
No.
Michelle Butler 13:54
He told me in fact that the instrument that is seemingly represented in the shame flute object, and in the image that always accompanies it in discussions, is decidedly not medieval. So we have that authority saying this is bunk in terms of it being a medieval object, which I’d kind of already figured out. But I was glad to ask somebody. Do you have questions at this point?
Anne Brannen 14:19
So the things that we have that are in the museums, we don’t know exactly how old they are, but Ripley’s thinks that they’re from the 17th century?
Michelle Butler 14:34
Yeah.
Anne Brannen 14:35
Okay.
Michelle Butler 14:35
So that brings me to the image. There’s this same picture that accompanies every article about the shame flute.
Anne Brannen 14:43
Uh huh.
Michelle Butler 14:44
It shows a man locked into the shame flute with a caption–and it’s in German–Shameful Flute for Bad Musicians. Gosh, that looks super convincing, doesn’t it? There’s this illustration of the thing in action.
Anne Brannen 14:59
No, because I’m already wondering, why do we actually have to torture bad musicians? We already, you know, either throw things at him or don’t go to the gigs. There’s ways to deal with bad musicians that are just so much easier than creating this thing.
Michelle Butler 15:17
It’s also super not a medieval picture.
Anne Brannen 15:21
Is it a woodcut?
Michelle Butler 15:23
Nope, it’s a color image. It turns out, it is from a series of postcards published and reprinted by Ernest Nister, publisher in Nuremberg in the 1890s and early 20th century.
Anne Brannen 15:40
Like a series of postcards of what? Of medieval things, or fake medieval things?
Michelle Butler 15:46
It is a series of 10 postcards that essentially are showing ye old public humiliation.
Anne Brannen 15:54
Okay, all right.
Michelle Butler 15:58
Would you want to know what they are? I translated all of them using Google Translate. I mean, I was committed, because they’re all in German. Okay, just a little sidebar for a moment. Who the heck wants to send a public humiliation postcard? They’re real postcards, on the back with places for you to write the address and everything.
Anne Brannen 16:18
I don’t know those people, but I guess they existed. I don’t know.
Michelle Butler 16:23
They must still exist. Because right now you can go to a website and order Christmas ornaments–I wish I were joking, but I am not–you can order these images on Christmas ornaments.
Anne Brannen 16:36
What is Christmassy about the parade of shame devices? I don’t know. I don’t know. You know, we say 1000 years of people behaving badly. It’s also sometimes people behaving either stupidly or incomprehensibly. Okay, what are the shame devices?
Michelle Butler 16:57
Here you go. One is called ‘punishment of a scoundrel’ and it shows a woman wearing a metal scold’s bridle, and she’s got a cage over her head that’s kind of shaped like a horse’s head. It’s chained to the pole behind her. The sign that she’s wearing–because labeling the postcard isn’t enough, sometimes the people in it have to be labeled too. Her label is ‘punishment for unflatterers.’ One of the postcards shows a man with oversized replicas of cards and dice on him and his image is labeled ‘the faker’ which probably means that he’s a cheater. One shows a man in a wooden cage being dunked into a canal or a moat, and it’s labeled ‘the baker’s dunking because the loaves were too small.’ So the baker is being shamed because he cheated.
Anne Brannen 17:53
We do know, if you remember, we know of London bakers being paraded through the streets when they were giving false weights for bread and/or putting nasty things in it.
Michelle Butler 18:07
Yep. One shows two women connected by a V-shaped device that holds their hands and heads, and it’s labeled ‘for contentious women.’ So kind of like the ‘getting along’ shirt that is always made fun of, when you make your children wear one big shirt. This one’s interesting. It shows a man in ankle chains, and he’s pushing a wagon under the direction of another man. That one is labeled ‘punishment of forced labor,’ which is interesting, because that’s more about the punishment. We don’t know what crime that person committed. Isn’t that interesting? It doesn’t fit. There’s two barrel related ones. One is a man in a barrel, and it’s labeled ‘Spanish collar’ and it’s labeled ‘for drunkards, night owls, etc.’ I love that the etcetera is there. You can use etc. in early 20 century German. Who knew? The second barrel is also painted with scenes, but the person in it is probably a woman, given her shoes, and she’s wearing a mask that is similar to the scold’s bridle, and it’s labeled ‘punishment for sluttiness.’
Anne Brannen 18:40
Oh really?
Michelle Butler 19:20
Each of the barrels are painted with scenes that are about the person’s crime or sin. My favorite one of the bunch–I actually kind of want a print of this one. The woman is wearing a truly spectacular mask that kind of looks like the Green Goblin from Spider Man. It’s bright green, it has big pointed ears, has horns, red bulging eyes, and a red tongue that’s kind of hanging out insolently and it’s labeled ‘Punishment for Evil Woman.’ She’s wearing a sign that says ‘Hausdrache.’ ‘House dragon.’ I want to be a House Dragon. The very last one is the Iron Maiden.
Anne Brannen 20:04
Of course.
Michelle Butler 20:06
It has printing on it that says ‘located in the pentagonal tower in the Royal Castle of Nuremberg.’ I finally figured out this morning, about an hour and 15 minutes ago, that this is why he made the postcards. He’s piggybacking on the local tourist attraction to sell these things. Ernest Nister was an interesting dude. He published a lot of stuff. He specialized in ephemera. So he published postcards, puzzle books, and children’s books. He published more than 500 children’s books. I apologize for the rabbit hole we’re about to go down, but I could not stop. He’s at the forefront of creating interactive children’s books.
Anne Brannen 20:56
Oh, really?
Michelle Butler 20:57
Yeah, he is the generation before pop up books are invented. He has things in his books that are dials. You hold onto a tab and you turn it, and there’s a dial behind it. Images appear and disappear. Or you might pull on a ribbon, and things move. Just fascinating. I couldn’t stop looking at this because I’m supposed to put in my head that he published all of these shaming postcards, but also lovely, innovative cutting edge books for children. Whatever sells, I guess. One of the artists that he published is Louis Wain, who was an English artist whose anthropomorphic cat art in the second half of the 19th century sets the stage for the internet’s obsession. In fact, I want to go back over here to the Wikipedia page about Louis Wains because there is a delightful quote from HG Wells that I want to share with you about HG Wells’ opinion about Louis Wain’s cat art. So the cats do all kinds of things. There’s pictures where the cat is out playing golf and wiping his brow. There it is. HG Wells said “he made the cat his own. He invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world. British cats that do not look and live like Louis Wain cats are ashamed of themselves.” And this was one of the authors that Nister was publishing. So he is not in any way a backwater. And these things got reprinted. They were printed in the 1890s. They were printed in 1906. The Library of Congress has a set. I found several sets for sale on different antique sites, but only one that contained–because it’s a set of 10, but most of the ones that I found were sets of eight. The Iron Maiden one is one that’s nearly always missing, which I thought was interesting. Maybe that’s the one people sent the most. I don’t know. Yeah. Louis Wain, the artist with a cat obsession. There’s a movie about him that came out in 2021 starring Benedict Cumberbatch. This topic was the never ending rabbit hole.
Anne Brannen 23:15
I imagine it was.
Michelle Butler 23:16
One of Wain’s books is a retelling of a German folktale. Not Wain’s book, but the folktale is the source for the movie Edward Scissorhands. It’s about a boy who grows knives out of his fingers.
Anne Brannen 23:33
Wow.
Michelle Butler 23:35
Isn’t that wild? I finally just a few days ago, I went ‘I can’t poke at Louis Wain anymore.’
Anne Brannen 23:46
Well, if you decide you want to go into the English obsession with animals that are acting like people, there’s a lot you can do. There’s a lot of places to go.
Michelle Butler 23:59
I really was not aware that the entire…I don’t know. As we’ve talked about, my relationship with the 19th century is roughly like watching a train wreck in progress.
Anne Brannen 24:11
Yes, it was. Which we’re going to be cleaning up for the next 200 years.
Michelle Butler 24:15
It’s a disaster but I can’t look away. They’re so nuts.
Anne Brannen 24:20
Well thank you for Loius Wain. How is this? The trumpet? The trumpet of what? How is it…?
Michelle Butler 24:29
I’m gonna get us back. I promise. We’re two steps away at this point. I found Louis Wain because what I was trying to do actually was find the artist for Nister’s postcards, because I was hoping to uncover what source material the artist was using for these images. I found his name. His name is Adolf Jodolfi. But I can find even less about him than I did about Nister. I certainly can’t find anything about what sources he used to create this set of postcards. So what use, if any, was the deep dive into Nister’s public shaming postcards? It provides context for the shame flute image, which I think is really important. It isn’t this random kind of thing. It’s part of the set. In particular, when you look at the other postcards, the clothing in the set is very clearly not medieval. The clothing is 17th century. That’s not as clear when you look at the shame flute image by itself. But when you look at the set, it’s real clear that anybody who looks at this will say, Oh, it’s the Puritans. That’s the time period we’re talking about. It’s their clothing, it’s very clear. So even if Jodolfi had some kind of source for the images, it wouldn’t matter all that much because it’s clearly not medieval. We’re back into the realm of early modern public shaming. If it existed at all. I ran across one academic article that is trying to make the case for shame flutes.
Anne Brannen 26:11
Really.
Michelle Butler 26:12
I did. But–asterix–it’s not by a medievalist or even early modern scholar. It’s in an academic journal about torture, that is looking at the ways in which…it’s a sociological journal. So it’s academic, but it’s somebody stepping outside of their specialty to try to look at this. That article is called “He Plays in the Pillory: The Use of Musical Instruments for Punishment in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Era.” It’s attempting to use a painting of Bruegel’s as evidence. I do not find this persuasive. I don’t find it persuasive for a couple of reasons. The argument is that before the specially made pretend instruments, people will be put in the pillory and forced to play real instruments. So it’s arguing that we sort of work up to the shaming.
Anne Brannen 27:04
And there’s evidence for this that is showing up in the court documents?
Michelle Butler 27:08
No, no, there’s not. I read the article because I was hoping it might have some insight into the evidence for the specially made fake shame instruments. No, it just asserts that those really existed and cites the sketchy museum devices, and then claims that the image in Bruegel’s ‘Netherlandish Proverbs’ shows it in action–or rather shows the earlier step where they’re being forced to play an actual instrument. The problem with the argument is that the painting is a set of literal illustrations of proverbs. So if the wife is making a fool of the husband, the saying is to ‘put a blue cloak on her husband’ and in the painting, you do in fact, see a wife literally putting a blue cloak on her husband. So the fact that in the painting we see a man playing a fiddle on the pillory does not mean that anybody actually did that. Playing on the pillory is a proverb that means you’re drawing even more attention to your misdeeds than you ought to be.
Anne Brannen 28:17
Got it. It doesn’t mean you’re getting punished for something.
Michelle Butler 28:20
Correct. It’s attempting to make a stretch argument and the article knows it’s attempting to make a stretch argument. But I don’t think it’s ultimately an argument that works because of the nature of the painting…I think it’s very problematic and impossible to make an argument about literality from this painting that is intended to be showing proverbs. But I’m mentioning it because it is literally the only academic article I found trying to make a case for it, which means something really.
Anne Brannen 28:58
If indeed, this was something that was happening, we would see some kind of evidence. Perhaps not enormous amounts of evidence necessarily would survive, but we would see some kind of evidence in court documents. You know, people being made to do this, because we’ve got lots of evidence of people being made to do various things on account of naughtiness, but never heard of this. Nope.
Michelle Butler 29:21
Here are my conclusions about the shame flute. There’s a very shallow well of information that is being used for big claims about the shame flute. The two items in the sketchy museums and a postcard. I don’t really think that’s sufficient to make the big claims that the articles make and the articles all reference each other. This is a place for us to underline again that just because it’s on the internet and just because it looks like there’s a lot of it on the internet, does not mean it’s real.
Anne Brannen 29:50
Right. Things get repeated over and over and over and they’re not always true.
Michelle Butler 29:53
These articles are all citing each other and they’re citing each other like it’s a ‘god spoke from the heavens’ kind of moment. There’s no doubt whatsoever that this is true. I have a great deal of doubt.
Anne Brannen 30:06
Yeah, I don’t think it happened.
Michelle Butler 30:07
I don’t think it happened. Maybe possibly it’s part of that early modern public shaming, but I just don’t think so.
Anne Brannen 30:14
I don’t even think it’s that. I think it’s created later as something that had been going on earlier, like the chastity belt. You know, stuff like that. They weren’t there, but people believe them.
Michelle Butler 30:25
My husband and I were talking about this, like, what is the context? What is the scenario that involves using one of these things? If a traveling musician comes to town, and you decide they’re terrible and you do this to them, what happens? Your town is blacklisted. No traveling minstrel is ever coming to your town again.
Anne Brannen 30:43
Makes no sense.
Michelle Butler 30:44
If it’s one of your neighbors, you would just break his instrument. That would solve your problem. You wouldn’t go..I mean, for fuck sakes, nobody’s got the kind of spare time–
Anne Brannen 30:55
No.
Michelle Butler 30:56
To make one of these things. Come on.
Anne Brannen 30:57
No. And if you’ve ever been trying to sleep in a hotel room, and there’s somebody down on the corner, making terrible music, you know, that’s just a piece of life. You don’t go like ‘so what are the mechanisms by which I may make this person incredibly shamed’. Also, it’s just not that big a deal. So people played bad music. It’s no big deal.
Michelle Butler 31:24
We want to be clear, there is public shaming in the Middle Ages.
Anne Brannen 31:27
Oh, yeah.
Michelle Butler 31:28
There’s public penance.
Anne Brannen 31:29
Absolutely.
Michelle Butler 31:30
Henry the second had to do public penance after Beckett’s murder. Marginal groups, like lepers, were shamed by the wider community. There is, in fact, a marked rise in the use of public shaming in the 16th and 17th centuries. I found it really interesting that the original meaning of chivari was this. It was public shaming. If one of your neighbors annoyed you, you would go out with pots and pans and go to their home and draw attention to them.
Anne Brannen 31:59
The chivari would be for when your neighbors were quarreling. Like they wouldn’t stop quarreling. It was a way of humiliating both of them at once, so that they perhaps behave better. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, these things existed. But this isn’t one of them. Because these things existed, because there were things like shaming in the Middle Ages, and because, you know, the Middle Ages seems so far away, even if you’re 100 years laters, so far away, clearly, they were doing all kinds of dreadful things. So if you can think up a dreadful thing, it must be medieval.
Michelle Butler 32:34
You get that transition from it being this thing you do to your neighbors to it being a formal legal kind of thing. It really happened. Daniel Defoe was pilloried in 1702 because of a pamphlet, a satirical pamphlet he wrote called The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, which apparently was a satire of the high Anglican approach to dealing with those who they didn’t agree with. Basically, it sounded a lot to me like Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal, where you take the argument and you just push it out to the extreme and then you say it with a straight face. He got in trouble because some high churchmen didn’t recognize that it was a satire and went ‘yeah, that’s right, we should banish everybody and hang the preachers.’
Anne Brannen 33:27
Well, I’m happy to say that I don’t think that any of the English after reading Jonathan Swift said ‘that’s right, we should eat the Irish babies.’ I don’t think they did. So I’m glad that at least there was a moment there where the English were able to recognize satire against themselves.
Michelle Butler 33:45
Once they tracked down who wrote it–because it was published anonymously, they offered increasingly large rewards until someone ratted him out–Defoe was arrested and sentence to be pilloried three times. But what actually happened–I love this–his friends showed up with copies of works he’d written specially for the occasion, one of which was called A Hymn to the Pillory. And they sold them to the crowd. The crowd did not behave the way the government had intended for them to. They didn’t throw rocks at Daniel Defoe. They brought him flowers. This is one of those moments that points out the danger of public shaming when it’s being imposed by the government, because it might not work the way you wanted it to.
Anne Brannen 34:34
I’m perfectly willing to believe that some bad musicians got shamed in the Middle Ages. I have no problem with that. In fact, it seems probable. But this whole device that’s so difficult to make, that has to be a governmental thing unless you’re actually really some guy with a whole lot of money who’s spending your time making devices to go out and shame people with and that’s just not happening.
Michelle Butler 34:57
If you have a bad musician, you just run him out of town.
Anne Brannen 35:00
Or you don’t hire him for the next meal, you know.
Michelle Butler 35:05
I have one last little bonus for you from Richard Rastall. That is an actual connection between music and crime that existed in the Middle Ages.
Anne Brannen 35:16
Oh, so we have a crime. We have a real crime.
Michelle Butler 35:19
Well, it’s not a music-based crime but it is a connection between music and crime. And this is a sneak preview because the book won’t be published until April. So he very kindly sent me this paragraph from a book that will come out next month.
Anne Brannen 35:34
Sneak preview!
Michelle Butler 35:35
Sneak preview. You heard it here first. The book is called Minstrels and Minstrelry in Late Medieval England and it will come out in April from Boydell and Brewer. So here is the paragraph. “One regular type of minstrelry heard in the larger towns on a daily basis was rough music, the raucous noisy music that accompanied criminals to their punishment. There are few records of this in the medieval period and the function may be hidden in payments to minstrels for unspecified purposes. The records of London include several instances for which specific information is given. All are for punishment at the pillory or the ducking stool. None, as it happens, for the death sentence and show that minstrels accompany the miscreant from prison to the place of punishment and again on the return journey. The procession was a public humiliation of the criminal. The music drew attention to this, often in parody of the processional music used to accompany nobility and royalty.” Isn’t that awesome?
Anne Brannen 36:44
That is. And not for the death penalty?
Michelle Butler 36:47
No.
Anne Brannen 36:48
It’s kind of like beyond that. This is for the smaller stuff.
Michelle Butler 36:53
To make sure that people saw. You’re enhancing the public shaming part of it.
Anne Brannen 36:58
Right, right, because you’ve got to have a way of announcing things and so you’ve got to make some kind of noise. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 37:05
Then he has a sentence that tells us what instruments were used.
Anne Brannen 37:10
Oh what are they?
Michelle Butler 37:11
“The instruments played are variously described as trumpets, trumpets and pipes, loud minstrelry, and bag pipe, or horn pipe, and there are hints that such processions were accompanied by at least drummers.”
Anne Brannen 37:25
So there were shame flutes.
Michelle Butler 37:26
[laughter]. In so much as people are out playing the flute to shame criminals. Low level criminals, who they’re really, really hoping to reduce recidivism by making it embarrassing. Because, really, the death penalty, you’re not going to reduce recidivism.
Anne Brannen 37:46
Yeah, nothing.
Michelle Butler 37:47
No gracious sakes.
Anne Brannen 37:50
Well, thank you. Thank you. Is that the end of our shame flute Trove?
Michelle Butler 37:56
That is what I have for you. It was a wild ride and 90% of it was bunk.
Anne Brannen 38:06
All of it was bunk concerning the Middle Ages. But some of it is true, and it’s in museums, but it’s not medieval.
Michelle Butler 38:12
Just go off, dear listeners and be skeptical, particularly of torture museums.
Anne Brannen 38:22
Don’t go to the torture museums.
Michelle Butler 38:23
Because you’re learning a lot about 19th century neuroses and very little about medieval punishment.
Anne Brannen 38:30
You got to make it ‘there-then’ though, rather than ‘here-now.’ ‘We don’t do these things. They did them in the dark times before. The light came to make us all really intelligent, paying attention to logic. Yay. Yay.’ Yeah, no.
Michelle Butler 38:52
Oh, a whole bunch of the mentions I’m finding about the shame flute are people wanting to talk about online public shaming, and they’re connecting it back to this. Isn’t that wild?
Anne Brannen 39:06
Wow. So how is that working?
Michelle Butler 39:10
They’re saying this is a modern day–harassing people online and publicly shaming them is just like this thing that used to happen in the past. The implication, of course, is that this is how we know it’s barbaric. I forgot, I didn’t have that in my notes. But yeah, that’s one of the places where it shows up the most, is people who are opinionating about canceling people, online shaming.
Anne Brannen 39:37
Online shaming does exist and it has very, very long roots because the humans like to shame each other. But there was no medieval shame flutes, just saying.
Michelle Butler 39:46
Or shame violins. I have strong doubts about them too.
Anne Brannen 39:50
No, there’s no shame violins. There’s no shame bagpipes. Well, this has been True Crime Medieval where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. We can be found on Stitcher and Spotify and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts hang out. You can find us at True Crime Medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There’s links to the podcast and the show notes and the transcripts. You can reach both of us through there. We’d love to hear your comments. Please let us know if you’ve got crimes that you believe we might have might have missed, medieval crimes that we need to know about. We take them into consideration and actually most of them go on our lists.They do. Next time you hear from us, we will be discussing the time that Snorri Sturlson was assassinated in Iceland and when was it?
Michelle Butler 40:42
1241.
Anne Brannen 40:43
- All right. So that’s what we’ll be doing.
Michelle Butler 40:47
I’m looking forward to finding out why somebody murdered a poet.
Anne Brannen 40:52
Yeah why would people murder a poet? Or why would they shame musicians? There’s a theme here.
Michelle Butler 41:00
Except this really happened.
Anne Brannen 41:02
There really was this poet. We have some a bunch of his works. I might not be completely back to normal but I will be much more normal than I am today. So with that we say bye.
Michelle Butler 41:19
Bye.
77. Diarmait Mac Murchada Invites the Anglo-Normans into Ireland, Leinster, Ireland 1167
Anne Brannen 0:26
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 0:35
And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:39
Today we are discussing a subject that Michelle and I put on our list of subjects–I think we did this at the very beginning, didn’t we? Michelle? I’m sure we did, because we consider it at least a crime of incredible stupidity. We’re discussing that time in 1169 when Diarmait Mac Murchada invited the Normans to come to Ireland and fight for him, which turned out, of course, in the long run, to be the Normans fighting for the Normans. Not the best idea, really. So we think it’s not a technical crime, but we think it’s a crime anyway, so we stuck it on our list and we get to talk about it today. Yay. Anything you want to say about this before I go?
I’m pretty sure 800 years of colonization is in fact a crime. So I’m comfortable.
There you go. 800 years of colonization. Yeah. Is colonization an issue that’s completely gone in our time? No, no, it isn’t. No. At any rate, .we’re talking about Ireland today. So Diarmait Mac Murchada was the King of Leinster. He’d been born about 1110. His father, Donnchad, was the King of Leinster. Diarmait was also one of the great grandchildren of Brian Boru. He had a nice little lineage there. Diarmuit’s father died in battle in 1115, fighting on Domnall Gerrlamhach, the king of Dublin. In 1117 Diarmuit mac Enna, Diarmuit’s cousin–Diarmuit was a very popular name, I’m just saying–Diarmuit mac Eenna was the King of Leinster along with Dublin and when he died, our Diarmuit’s brother Enna became the King of Leinster. Okay. Gonna take a little break. This is one of those things where basically what was going on was that people were fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting, fighting one against the other. This shows up a lot whenever we’re doing Irish history from this particular piece of time, we’ve got a lot of this going on. At any rate, so by 1122 Enna was also the ruler of Dublin, though he was subordinate in Dublin to Tairrdelbach Ua Conchobair, the king of Connacht. Fair enough. Enna revolted, though, in 1124 and he pretty much won. Tairrdelbach handed him the kingship of Dublin. Then Enna died suddenly in 1126, so, so Tairrdelbach took Dublin back and installed his son Conchobhair as king and our Dairmuit became King of Leinster on his brother’s death. But Tairrdelbach opposed this and his ally Tighearnán Ó Ruairc– remember this name because he shows up a lot–Tighearnán Ó Ruairc invaded Leinster, he slaughtered livestock, he threw Diarmuit mac Murchada out. But in 1132, Diarmuit took Leinster back. He and Ua Conchobair were peaceful for a while, like some years. Do-to-do-to do. Peaceful time of years. While he was king, by the way, he built a lot of churches and abbeys and stuff like that. He’s really busy. But, alas. In 1166, the High King–we haven’t even mentioned the High King yet. The way this is all set up is that there’s kings, kings, kings, kings, kings, and then there’s the High King. So the High King, who was Diarmuit’s main ally, was killed after some very bad behavior on his part in violating a truce and an oath that he made to the Bishop of Armagh. Anyway, he did bad things and he got killed. At that point, Tighearnán Ó Ruairc, who was mentioned before, invaded Leinster again, and the new High King deposed Diarmuit from the Kingship of Leinster. Diarmuit fled, which was actually probably a good idea. Had he been caught, what usually happens is you get blinded, you know, or murdered. So anyway, he ran. So far, so good.We’re not hating Diarmuit yet. However. He went to Wales. He went to England. He went to France and he was in Aquitaine when he asked Henry the second of England for help. Henry the second did not actually give him anything directly, but he allowed him to go recruit. He was given permission to recruit amongst the Anglo Normans. He did, and the main nobles who agreed to help were Marcher Lords from the borders of Wales. So they were Anglo Normans, who were already used to being in places where…that really hadn’t been theirs for very long anyway. Right. Richard de Clare, for instance, Strongbow, was the main one of these. He was getting older at this time. In the Civil War, he had backed Stephen and, you know, Stephen hadn’t really won. This was a way they were going to be able to get some lands and whatnot. So there was Richard de Clare, Robert fitz Steven, Maurice fitz Gerald, and Robert de Barry. Diarmuit promised them lands and also he promised his daughter Eva to Strongbow to marry. So they invaded. They took Wexford in May of 1169. They raided the territories of three of the other kings of Ireland. Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, who was the High King, was holding hostages from Leinster, including Diarmuit’s son. He killed them all. A treaty was finally made. Diarmuit became the King of Leinster again and he recognized Ua Conchobair as High King. Yay. So everything’s gonna be fine, right? It’s all good. The Normans will have a little land, but mostly they’ll go back to England and everything will be fine. No, no, I’m sorry. No. Maurice Fitzgerald and Diarmuit then took Dublin. Strongbow sent Raymond Le Gros to take Waterford, and he married Eva. Then Diarmuit died all of a sudden. Okay, so that’s it. The Normans were there. In 1171 Henry the second sent major forces to take Ireland, you know, cuz the Pope said it was okay. There already Anglo Normans there and obviously it was a place where the Anglo Normans belonged, which you can tell because they could take it. That’s how you know that something was supposed to belong to them is that they got it. That’s why they have England. The pope–that was Alexander the second– he backed the Anglo Norman claim to Ireland. The Irish bishops went along with this. The Irish bishops backed him probably because it looked like that was the one way that things were gonna calm down and there was going to be peace. Yeah, that was gonna work. Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair lost the High Kingship and the kingship of Connacht. In 1175 the rest of the clans, who then kept some kind of local control, submitted and so it’s over. 1175, at least in name, the Anglo Normans own Ireland. In 1177, Henry declared his son John, who’s about 10 at the time, Lord of Ireland, meaning the whole island. Even at the time, there were English chroniclers who considered the English invasion of Ireland unlawful, but you know, it’s a done deal. So the Normans were there. They built castles. They’re very good at building castles, as we know, hence all those castles in Wales. They minted coins. They introduced a bunch of crops and different animals. In 1210 they instituted, by charter, English common law throughout Ireland, replacing earlier Irish laws. The Anglo Normans fought amongst themselves, of course, but that’s just the way it goes. From the end of the 14th century, though, until the end of the 15th century, the Normans settlements became less powerful and Gaelicized through intermarriage, and the Norman settlements were not as important to the English at that point. However, the Tudors. So the Tudors disrupted this. Henry the Eighth created the kingship of Ireland. That was the first time since Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair had been deposed that there was a king of Ireland. This would be Henry the eighth, by the way, and the Tudors kind of reconquered Ireland. In name it was theirs anyway, but they took it. This was by using the plantation system. They fought wars. They exiled Irish nobles. The province of Ulster was the most problematic for them, the most Irish of the Irish provinces, and so that’s the one that they use the plantation system in most powerfully. The way it worked was that they took the land, and you could buy the land and they were selling it to the Scots that they were trying to get out of Scotland because they were misbehaving in Scotland. My clan, the Elliots, that’s why they ended up in Ulster. What happened is that you’ve got a really good land deal. The land was cheap. You buy it in Ulster, they got you the hell out of Scotland, and there you were in Ireland not being Irish. You could buy it back if you were Irish but it was at an extraordinarily exorbitant rate, so hard to do. The nobles they exiled. At any rate, that’s where the Scots Irish come from. Any of us around here who say we have Scots Irish ancestry. That’s what it is. It’s the Scots who were put into Ireland by the Tudors. I think James continued that. Do you remember?
Michelle Butler 10:51
What I know about this time period is Edmund Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, in which he unabashedly argues that to the only answer to the Irish problem is to kill them all and start over. His answer to the problem of Ireland is kill all the Irish. It’s such a nice country.
Anne Brannen 11:13
Yeah, it’s a nice country, but it has Irish people in it.
Michelle Butler 11:15
It has Irish people in it. Remember, he had been married to an heiress who owned some land in Ireland and they got burnt out, with the pesky Irish wanting their place back. He got really mad about it and wrote this pamphlet, A View of the Present State of Ireland, in which he advocated genocide.
Anne Brannen 11:35
It’s not as good a piece as the Faerie Queen is.
Michelle Butler 11:38
Or even Epithalamion.
Anne Brannen 11:44
Unfortunately, unlike Jonathan Swift later, he’s not actually being sarcastic, is he?
Michelle Butler 11:50
Not in the slightest. He is serious as heart attack that that’s what he thinks is the best thing to do.
Anne Brannen 11:56
Spenser. There are many reasons I wasn’t a Spenser scholar and that might as well be one of them. Okay, so what happened to Diarmuit. He was dead and everything, that’s what happens. Everybody from that time is dead at this point, but he became known as Diarmuit na nGall, Diarmuit of the strangers. Diarmuit of the foreigners. You know, that’s like the guy that brought the foreigners. That’s who he was. The Annals of Tigernach describe him as of the “disturber and destroyer of Ireland.” And he was, but he was also described at that time as heroic and pious and great with the ladies, although really, that had a lot to do with abducting them in times of war. But amongst the Irish, at least, his reputation became that of a traitor, a devil. I’m going to leave my section and we’ll move on to Michelle. Every once in a while, we hit a topic that really gets Michelle exercised. I believe this is one of them. But I’m going to leave you with his obituary from the Annals of Tigernach. Did you come across this?
No, it’s not what I was looking at.
Oh, you’re gonna like it. You’re gonna like it. Okay, so here’s what the Irish at the time had to say. Dermod MacMurrough, King of Leinster, by whom a trembling sod was made of all Ireland, after having brought over the Saxons, after having done extensive injuries to the Iris, after plundering and burning many churches as Ceanannus, Cluain-Iriared and cetera, died before the end of the year after this plundering of an insufferable and unknown disease. For he became putrid while living, through the miracle of God, Columcill, and Finnen, and the other saints of Ireland, whose churches he had profaned and burned some time before, and he died at Fearamor without making a will, without penance, without the body of Christ, without unction, as his evil deeds deserved.” The end.
Michelle Butler 13:58
I’m actually okay with that.
Anne Brannen 14:00
I’m okay with that. They didn’t like him. I’m okay. So Michelle has a two kinds of ways she generally goes. One is, how did this come down in popular literature? What do we think about him now? And the other is what did the scholars say? And I believe that this time the scholars caught you. Is this true?
Michelle Butler 14:21
That is what happened. I know it’s a little bit unusual to talk about this because it’s not you somebody bopped somebody else over the head, but I think that the birthplace of the English Imperial Project, and the many many crimes that follow from that over the next few centuries is worth considering as a crime.
Anne Brannen 14:48
Okay, fair enough. A kind of like vast historical crime and this is where begins?
Michelle Butler 14:53
Yes. There are a number of scholars who argue, such as this particular article, from 2017, that argues specifically that “Ireland was central to Britain’s first colonial expansion and its techniques were honed in its expanded colonization around the world.” This is not the only article I ran into that argues that Ireland is the first step that leads to this worldwide empire, and the techniques that they honed in Ireland are what they use to subjugate people around the world.
Anne Brannen 15:32
Because this is the second thing that the Normans have done. They were Vikings already, giant Viking history behind them, let’s go here and there. So these are the French Vikings, they’re Normans. They take England, but they do it differently than they did in Ireland? Is that what’s going on?
Michelle Butler 15:52
Well, with England, they’ve been there for 100 years. They’re thinking about that now as at least part of their empire. But they’re also talking specifically–this article, and the others–are talking specifically about the harsh tactics that are used.
Anne Brannen 16:09
Okay.
Michelle Butler 16:11
Because that’s not so much in England–
Anne Brannen 16:14
William harried the North. There was some of that.
Michelle Butler 16:18
Exactly. But there was also so much of a successful decapitation of the government in the Battle of Hastings. So many of the lords died, it was easier to step in and take over. That’s different than when you’re going into a place and you need to scare everybody into behaving. Some of these techniques get worked out in Scotland as well, but a little bit later, because this invasion is so early. So what I was looking at is the ways in which scholars in the 19th and 20th century discuss the Norman Invasion of Ireland. I have three examples for you, I decided to keep it at three, because we don’t really need this to be hours and hours.
Anne Brannen 17:07
We need a little subset podcast. Michelle takes down all the scholars.
Michelle Butler 17:13
So mad. You could just keep going backwards. Because they cite the people before them. But in particular, these ones from the late 19th, early 20th century, and then I have another one. So I have two from that time period, and then I have another from the 1970s. They’re interesting because of what’s going on politically between England and Ireland at that time, and how this scholarship both reflects that and influences it. For example, in the 1880s, the two from the 1880s into the first decade of the 20th century, the big discussion at that point was Home Rule.
Anne Brannen 17:13
Right.
Michelle Butler 17:14
Should you allow Ireland to, I don’t know, maybe govern itself a little bit. It’s a huge, huge, huge argument going on whether, England should allow Ireland to be able to govern itself even a little bit. Similar to what is actually in Scotland, right at the moment. Scotland is still part of the United Kingdom, but it has its own parliament and has its own president. Nicola Sturgeon just actually announced her resignation. So my first dude is John Horace Round, who lived from 1852 to 1928. He is English. This is important, for obvious reasons, because the other two are not. He was an expert on the English peerage. He actually consulted with the monarchy. He translated part of the Doomsday Book. And he has a book called The Commune of London and Other Studies from 1899. I want to read you a wee little bit of it. In fact, I’m going to read you the last two paragraphs of the chapter about the conquest of Ireland. It’s a little long, so bear with me. “The Normans had found England a kingdom ready made, its people accustomed to governance and recognizing the reign of law.”
Anne Brannen 19:10
Oh, no, I see where this is going.
Michelle Butler 19:12
Yes, indeed. And, you know, we’re not even one sentence in…this is his conclusion.
Anne Brannen 19:18
I know where we’re going.
Michelle Butler 19:19
We’re one sentence in and we already know that things are being fudged a little bit because this is not true. It is not true that the English we’re accustomed to the reign of law and governance in a way that the Irish were not.
Anne Brannen 19:36
No, the Irish just had different laws. Cuz they were Ireland. Kinda like the Welsh also had laws too before the English got there. They were Welsh laws.
Michelle Butler 19:47
“In Ireland, on the contrary, the newcomers found no kindred system. It’s tribal–” and that word shows up over and over again.
Anne Brannen 19:58
Oooo. ‘Tribal.’ Like the Normans aren’t tribal Give me a break.
Michelle Butler 20:02
But that’s a word that has a different meaning in the late 19th century and they intend the meaning they’re using here. “It’s tribal polity had placed between its people and themselves a gulf impassable, because dividing two wholly different stages of civilization. With no common foundations upon which to build, they can only hope to become Irish by cutting themselves off from their own people. If, on the other hand, they wished to substitute law and order for native anarchy, there was no indigenous machinery for the purposes such as the Norman kings had found and used in England. They had no alternative but to introduce the system they had brought with them.”
Anne Brannen 20:48
‘They were being good, they were really being good. Helping. Helping the Irish by bringing them Norman civilization.’
Michelle Butler 20:57
The wording…the way these things get discussed are really, really interesting. There’s a lot of passive language with the Normans. One of the later ones uses the word ‘fate.’ As if it just falls into the Normans’ lap that they have to deal with this,
Anne Brannen 21:15
It seems to me that fate is also a kind of stand in for God. You know, it’s because the Pope said so too. But obviously, God wanted them to do these things.
Michelle Butler 21:28
“Whether Ireland,” –this is a awesome sentence– “Whether Ireland, if left to herself, would even yet” — i.e. by 1899– “have emerged from the tribal stage of society becomes doubtful when we contemplate the persistence of the mores hibernicae,” –i.e., the Irish way of doing things– “A comparison of the changes in our own people between the 12th century and the days of Queen Victoria or even of Queen Elizabeth, and those discernible in the Irish people suggest relative stagnation. It clings to its ways, as the peasant clings to that patch of soil which he will not leave and on which he can exist only in squalor and want. Of one thing at least we may be sure: no fonder dream has enthralled a people’s imagination than that of an Irish Golden Age destroyed by ruthless invaders.”
Anne Brannen 22:34
What’s the year this is?
Michelle Butler 22:36
- Anne Brannen 22:38
So the Irish Renaissance has already started.
Michelle Butler 22:42
Yes. And he’s pushing back strongly against the idea that there was an Irish Golden Age before this. Because that’s part of what’s going on with the discussion of the invasion–what was Ireland like before this?
Anne Brannen 22:55
He’s also pushing back against the idea that shows up in some of the nationalist writings from the time that the true Irishman is the Irish speaking peasant. You know, it puts you at a kind of a disadvantage if you’re actually Patrick Pierce, but anyway. He’s pushing back against that because obviously that’s so uncultured and so uncivilized. Interesting.
Michelle Butler 23:22
Here we go. Here is the last paragraph of the chapter.
Anne Brannen 23:26
Oh god. It’s gonna be worse than that one?
Michelle Butler 23:29
It’s worse. “We went to Ireland because her people were engaged in cutting one another’s throats. We are there now because if we left, they would all be breaking one another’s heads.” So let me let me continue here. I’m going to skip one sentence. “The leaders of the Irish people have not so greatly changed since the days when ‘King’–” and he’s got that ‘King’ in quotation marks–‘King’ MacDonnchadh blinded ‘King’ Dermot’s son, when Dermot in turn, relieved his feelings by gnawing off the nose of his butchered foe. Claiming to govern a people when they cannot even govern themselves, they clamor like the baboo of Bengal against that Pax Britannica, by the presence of which alone they are preserved from mutual destruction. No doubt, as one of them frankly confessed, they would rather be governed badly by themselves than well by anyone else. But England also has a voice in the matter, and she cannot allow the creation of a pandemonium at her doors.” He is an unabashed apologist for colonialism.
Anne Brannen 24:51
This is noblesse oblige. ‘We have to save these people because we are the superior culture.’
Michelle Butler 24:59
He implicitly–he shouldn’t be talking about India this way either–but he implicitly compares Ireland, throughout the chapter, to India, to South America, as these places of barbarism and anarchy. He uses that word ‘tribal’ a lot. There’s a complete blindness…one of the things I find really rich about this use of the word ‘anarchy’ is Henry the second–let’s just remind ourselves how Henry the second came to the throne. Henry the second came to the throne as the compromise candidate after a civil war that Victorian historians labeled the Anarchy.
Anne Brannen 25:41
Right they did.
Michelle Butler 25:42
It is willfully blind to how wild the Normans fought among themselves and the state of England before the conquest. He is probably the worst of the three, just to let you know.
Anne Brannen 25:56
Well, that’s good, thank you. It’s not gonna get any very worse, because that’s so humongously bad.
Michelle Butler 26:01
It’s really, really bad.
Anne Brannen 26:03
It’s really nicely clear as to delineating the ways in which the English are framing the Irish–the English that wish to continue this project–the ways in which they’re framing the Irish. It’s a hard, hard battle. It really is.
Michelle Butler 26:23
The next one I have for you is slightly later but he is Dublin Irish. So Anglo Irish. He has a four volume work called Ireland under the Normans. It was published between 1911 and 1920. Now, the thing that I find a little bit problematic–well, there’s several things, but one of the things I find problematic is our previous guy, John Horace Round, he kind of falls by the wayside in terms of scholarship after the first quarter of the 20th century, first half of the 20th century. Orpen’s–Goddard Henry Orpen–his book was published, this four volume work, was published between 1911 and 1920. It was reprinted, as is, in 1968. Then it was reissued in–wait for it–it was reissued in a one volume edition by Four Courts press in 2005.
Anne Brannen 27:24
Oh my god.
Michelle Butler 27:26
Yes.
Anne Brannen 27:28
With any kind of note about ‘this is a really kind of interesting way of looking at things’?
Michelle Butler 27:34
No. His book was controversial from the outset, because this is even further into the question…1911 is the lead up to the Irish War of Independence.
Anne Brannen 27:47
Yes, it is.
Michelle Butler 27:47
So it’s not like things have calmed down.
Anne Brannen 27:50
No, it didn’t.
Michelle Butler 27:51
So when he dropped a book, and in the prologue says this, “Due credit has not been given to the new rulers–” i.e., the Normans — “for creating the comparative peace and order, and the manifest progress and prosperity, that Ireland enjoyed during that period, wherever their rule was effective.”
Anne Brannen 28:13
Okay, this is wrong and nonsense.
Michelle Butler 28:17
“It is, I think, manifest that the most prominent effect of the Anglo Norman occupation was not, as has been represented, an increase of turmoil, but rather the introduction over large periods of Ireland of a measure of peace and prosperity quite unknown before.”
Anne Brannen 28:39
The Normans: a peaceful, peaceful lot of peacefulness, and also really nice laws.
Michelle Butler 28:46
Later in the book, he says (although that was the really important piece) “until the coming of the Normans, and then only partially, Ireland never felt the direct influence of a race more advanced than herself.”
Anne Brannen 28:58
Oh my god.
Michelle Butler 29:01
“She never experienced the stern discipline” –what the fuck? “–of Roman domination.”
Anne Brannen 29:09
Republished in 2000 and what?
Michelle Butler 29:11
- Anne Brannen 29:13
Wow.
Michelle Butler 29:14
“She never experienced the stern discipline of Roman domination, nor acquired from the law givers of modern Europe a concept of the essential condition of a progressive society, the formation of a strong state able to make and, above all, enforce the laws.” See, this is not true. Ireland had laws. They just didn’t like them. But I’m just…I’m frankly troubled by his wording that worships the strong man, particularly in this…I mean, we know what’s coming with the First World War and then the second World War. This language is more than a little fascist. I’m not liking it. But in particular, the dropping of a prologue in which he says, ‘the Anglo Normans brought peace and prosperity,’ then he gets his feelings hurt when the Irish nationalists are like, ‘Dude, you have totally hurt the cause, you have absolutely carried water for the English staying here, because you said it was a good thing for us.’ He opens in a prologue to a later volume that, you know, ‘he’s just doing scholarship. He doesn’t think that this is fair at all.’ Not surprisingly, the Irish reviews pan the book and the English reviews praise it. And he says, ‘I’m just doing scholarship and it has absolutely nothing to do with the contemporary debate about Home Rule. I don’t know why you guys are being so mean to me.’
Anne Brannen 30:52
Wow. You know, the thing is, all scholarship is political because the humans are political.
Michelle Butler 30:59
Yes, of course.
Anne Brannen 31:00
You see things through your filter. To pretend that scholarship is not political, when you’ve written something extraordinarily political, is quite disingenuous.
Michelle Butler 31:10
It is true that the line between politics and scholarship was thinner in this time. One of Orpen’s most strident critics was a historian named Ewan McNeil, who pivots actually from being a historian to running for office. One of his kicking off his political career speeches is absolutely flaming Orpen. Sean Duffy has a 2000 article in which he wants to rehabilitate Orpen. He has some points that I think are bunk. One thing he tries to argue is that Orpen is not an “unequivocal apologist of the invasion.” That’s bunk. You can’t walk that back.
Anne Brannen 32:00
He totally is. He says he is.
Michelle Butler 32:02
He says in the prologue he is. You can’t walk it back. There are other places in the book where he shows a little bit more, you know, weighing of things. But he says in the prologue what his project is, and I think we need to take him seriously that that’s his thesis. He said it is. But he does make the point, and I think this is a fair point, that Orpen is doing the best he can in the time period in which he’s working. He is absolutely working through a Victorian idea about civilization and colonization. So he says things like, ‘the Vikings bring cities, this is a good thing.’ He works from the assumption that cities are a good thing, and that when the Vikings bring them, as he’s claiming that that’s moving forward. He has this idea of progress, and that the Irish weren’t following the standard, accepted way to become a civilization and therefore they’re not as advanced. This is probably true, that he’s doing the best he can. He is well read. He’s read a lot of early Irish law, but his interpretation is thoroughly Victorian. I looked at the section in particular about Irish marriage customs, which are very different than the English 12th century. Women can ask for divorce, they have a trial marriage–you can get married for a year and a day and then reevaluate after that whether you want to stay married. He calls them “reprehensible and illicit.’
Anne Brannen 33:35
It’s the same kind of response that the Anglo Normans had to the Welsh who, you know, didn’t get upset if somebody was illegitimate. They considered children, children. You might not be the first to inherit, but you were part of the inheritance.
Michelle Butler 33:49
The fact that the Irish allowed polygamy and divorce is one of the reasons that the Pope cites to give permission for the invasion. So Orpen is still a big presence, which means that his endorsement of the invasion is still very much a live issue. Even though the book was written 100 years ago.
Anne Brannen 34:14
I am very surprised by that. And I’d like to say that I get it that he’s a product of his time in terms of scholarship. First of all, we don’t have to, you know, reiterate him. But second of all, there’s other stuff going on at the time. He would have been very familiar with the writings of the nationalists. So it’s not like you couldn’t find any other ways of thinking about things.
Michelle Butler 34:42
The last one surprised me, to be honest. The last one surprised me a little bit. It shouldn’t, because I actually can kind of remember this piece of history. It’s Francis Stewart Leland Lyons. He lived from 1923 to 1983. He is also Anglo Irish. A Dublin man. He wrote a book called Culture and Anarchy in Ireland: 1892 1939. It was published published by Clarendon in 1979. The paperback edition came out from University Oxford University Press in 1982.
Anne Brannen 35:23
Okay, okay. So we are no longer in the Home Rule.
Michelle Butler 35:29
No, we are now in the time period of IRA bombings.
Anne Brannen 35:34
The Troubles. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 35:38
The title of the book is a reference to Matthew Arnold’s book–Matthew Arnold, the 19th century poet and scholar– Culture and Anarchy, which argues that common culture pulls societies together. Ireland, Lyons argues, does not have a common culture. Rather, there are four–the English, the Irish, the Anglo Irish, and the Ulster Protestants, and the clash of these cultures has produced anarchy.
Anne Brannen 36:06
I see.
Michelle Butler 36:07
Yes. So my first reaction to that is, ‘and whose fault is that?’ Because three of those, if we check our notes, oh, those came from the invasion.
Anne Brannen 36:25
Well, if the Irish had only handled the Normans better than everything would be fine.
Michelle Butler 36:32
This is again harkening back to the argument that they’re not really civilized, so we don’t have to take them seriously. The word ‘anarchy’ is all over all three of the work of the scholars. Ireland is anarchic. I should have mentioned this with Orpen. His chapter about Ireland before the invasion is called “Anarchic Ireland, 9th to 11th centuries.”
Anne Brannen 37:11
So the idea is that Ireland is an anarchy because it does not have Norman laws. And then later Ireland is an anarchy because it is fighting against English colonization. Okay.
Michelle Butler 37:27
We’ve covered some murders that happened in early Ireland. We talked about how rough and tumble early Ireland is. The part I’m objecting to is not that. It’s that that is different somehow than what’s happening in Frankia. Than what’s happening in Italy. Than, you know, all of early Europe.
Anne Brannen 37:50
They’re all killing each other. We’ve also had several podcasts about the Franks killing each other, several podcasts about the Italians killing each other, and some podcasts about the Scandinavians killing each other. I mean, it’s not like the Irish are different here. They being of their time. ‘They can’t help being of their time.’
Michelle Butler 38:10
The quote from him that I want to share with you is this, because technically this book isn’t about early Ireland, it’s about 1890 to 1939. But he has this to say: “If they,” –the Anglo Irish lords– “were arrogant it was because it had been their fate to govern a people which, for much of its history, had shown little capacity to govern itself.” Again, this is one of these word moments. Fate. It just became their Anglo Saxon burden. Isn’t this what they say about colonization? The White Man’s Burden?
Anne Brannen 38:53
Yes, it is.
Michelle Butler 38:54
It was their fate.
Anne Brannen 38:57
And God is involved because fate.
Michelle Butler 38:59
He’s less strident. But in some ways, this kind of nonchalance is almost more irritating. And also, it’s 19-goddamn-79.
Anne Brannen 39:09
Yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes.
Michelle Butler 39:11
The other piece of this book that is fascinating and really points up the time period we’re dealing with is that it won a literary prize called the Christopher Ewart Biggs Memorial Prize. It’s named for Christopher Ewart Briggs, who was the English ambassador to Ireland. He’d been in the country for two weeks when he was killed by an IRA bomb and his family established the prize in 1977. Here I’m gonna quote from Wikipedia. “Its stated goal is to promote peace and reconciliation in Ireland, a greater understanding within the peoples of the United Kingdom and Ireland, closer cooperation between partners of the European community. It is awarded to a book, a play, or piece of journalism that best fulfills this aim.” But if you go and look at the list of prize winners–this prize is still being given out, by the way, it’s been given since 1976 and the list that I was looking at covers to 2021, so I assume it’s still happening, because why would it suddenly have stopped? But I don’t think that the 2022 one has been announced yet. Anyhoo, when you look at the list of prize winners, it tends towards Northern Irish and English sympathising. Very, very few winners are from the rest of Ireland.
Anne Brannen 40:40
Ireland proper, yeah.
Michelle Butler 40:43
So it’s a literary prize that has a stated goal, but appears to actually be given to people who want to toady up to England, to be blunt.
Anne Brannen 40:54
And the idea of ‘peace’ here is not peace because England changes. But because Ireland behaves itself.
Michelle Butler 41:07
I found this topic to be just utterly fascinating, because this is one of these places where you have a world pivoting sort of moment. Diarmuit’s anger at being deposed leads him to go make a criminally stupid decision and think he’s gonna invite the Normans in and somehow still going to end up king, when any cursory knowledge of them as a people would have dissuaded you from believing that. Then it leads to the huge crime of the invasion and the colonization, which goes on for centuries. And that’s still a live issue by the time we get down to the scholarship of the 19th and 20th century. You really would think that 800 years later we were able to kind of look back and work with it dispassionately, but clearly not. It is still too relevant to the discussion.
Anne Brannen 42:12
I think that one of the issues is not just that this has to do with the Norman Conquest of Ireland, but that the way in which it happens. It’s so easy to blame the Irish in general for what Diarmuit does. Clearly if they weren’t so anarchic, he wouldn’t have to invite the Normans. Because it really is Dermot MacMurrough’s fault that the Normans ended up there. Maybe they would have ended up there later, but this is how it happened. But it’s not the whole rest of the country saying, ‘hey, let’s get the Normans over here because they could fix things.’ I’m reminded of that time that Scotland says to Edward, ‘hey, will you come solve our succession problem?’ And Edward says ‘yes, if you’ll be my vassals’ and they say ‘A-okay.’ Then guess what? Anglo-Norman Scotland?
Michelle Butler 43:06
That’s another criminally stupid moment.
Anne Brannen 43:09
That was a parliamentary thing. It wasn’t like one person said ‘would you come help me get my stuff back.’
Michelle Butler 43:15
They should have known Edward the first well enough by then to know–
Anne Brannen 43:21
Yeah, it’s not like nobody knew who he was. They knew him. I love this idea that the Normans bring culture and law, because of course, they do have culture, they do have law like everybody else, but they’re also they’re killing each other too. They all fought amongst themselves in Ireland. They fought amongst themselves in Normandy. They had been having a giant civil war in England.
Michelle Butler 43:50
I’m deeply deeply enjoying the word ‘anarchy’ being all over this scholarship, and no recognition of the civil war that had just happened, which they call the Anarchy. The Victorians are the ones who name it that. All of this stuff is allowed to exist in Ireland and conveniently forgotten elsewhere. You know, I always end up referring back to Tolkien, but it does provide some really interesting background for me when he says to himself, ‘the Normans really screwed up everything.’ He’s really pushing against the tide from a scholarly point of view when he takes that perspective. That is not how people were thinking about it at this point.
Anne Brannen 44:48
Yet another reason to think highly of Tolkien. Tolkien. He goes his own way. Oh, my goodness. Oh, my goodness. Well, yeah. We knew that we were going to have a lot to say, we knew that we were going to probably get sort of emotional, we did not know that we would have to, you know, take on scholars, but there you go. We didn’t look at all at does this come down into popular whatsits, did we?
Michelle Butler 45:16
There’s historical fiction. I just got sidetracked immediately into ‘they said what now? Somebody said out loud that the Normans brought peace and prosperity? Really?
Anne Brannen 45:33
After that, everything was really great, except when people were being, you know, not very happy and understanding how great the Normans were.
Michelle Butler 45:40
I see people sometimes who justify invasions by saying, ‘that’s just how it works. Survival of the fittest. If you can walk in and take a place, then it’s yours.’ Fine. That’s at least intellectually consistent. But trying to tell me with a straight face that the Normans brought peace and prosperity to Ireland is hard for me to wrap my brain around.
Anne Brannen 46:08
Yeah, yeah. And the idea that the Irish didn’t have laws, and that their their system of governments was, you know, anarchic or primitive, because that’s what ‘tribal’ is meaning in this context.
Michelle Butler 46:24
I think this is an important topic for Americans to be familiar with, because everybody still has such strong feelings about it 800 years later. We try to tell each other, just get over it. It’s been 50 years, get over it. It’s been 100 years. Why are people so unhappy about the fact that there was slavery in the US? Nobody cares about that anymore. I was just reading the other day that President Tyler, who was born in 1792, has a living grandchild alive right now. Holy crap. He’s still alive. He’s 90, but he’s still alive. We’re a young country. This version of…there’s not enough continuity–because we did it on purpose–between what the Native Americans had and what got set up. So from the English-construct colonial government, that’s a very short history. Man, oh, man, is this a learning moment for how long things can have ramifications. Plus, it was a crime. I’m just going to be real firm on the idea that I think colonization is a crime. Stay in your own damn country.
Anne Brannen 47:49
I believe that as a podcast, we stand for no colonization, understanding the vexed history behind us. Yes. And this is why we support Ukraine in the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We’re thinking a lot about that these days. I’m thinking about, you know, methods of colonization. The idea that the invading force says, we’re the colonizers, and we have the culture and we have the language, we have the right laws, and we have history behind us. It’s all very well and good, unless you’re looking at it from the other side, in which case, none of those things are true.
Michelle Butler 48:24
At some point, we should do a later podcast about the really, really genocidal moves by the Tudors to–
Anne Brannen 48:36
Yes, let’s do that.
Michelle Butler 48:37
–to suppress Irish culture. I was just reading this week that Paul Mescal is an actor who was at the BAFTAs and he gave an interview in Irish. It was a sensation because only about 2% of the Irish population is gaeltach, speaks Irish as their native language. So did Brendan Gleason, but he’s a little bit older and he from a Gaelic speaking part of Ireland. So that didn’t make as many waves as when Paul Mescal did. But both of these interviews kind of became a big deal. There’s an Irish speaking film up for an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. But this is a result of deliberate actions taken by the English government in the 19th century. The understanding was if they could get rid of the Irish language, they could get rid of the Irish culture. It’s the same approach that was taken with the Native Americans where you’re beating children for speaking their own language.
Anne Brannen 49:45
Speaking of which, one of the languages that has not disappeared is Welsh. It’s amazing. Welsh is not dead, nor is it marginal. So it’s possible to keep it or to bring it back. It’s possible.
Michelle Butler 50:03
The articles I was reading about those interviews being done in Irish were talking about how they were they were feeling like they needed to have a discussion about how it’s taught because Irish is taught compulsorily in school.
Anne Brannen 50:17
It’s not anymore. It was.
Michelle Butler 50:21
It was not being taught in ways that lead to real people using it for conversation. It was more being taught as almost like a dead language.
Anne Brannen 50:30
Yeah, it was. It really was.
Michelle Butler 50:33
I didn’t know that they dropped the requirement.
Anne Brannen 50:37
They dropped the requirement, which really was not working. To make a language compulsory does not work any better than making a language illegal. They’re both vexed. Wales didn’t do that. It went in a different direction.
Michelle Butler 50:56
I’m pleased to report I have studied Irish enough that when I watched the Brendan Gleason interview, I understood two whole words. Go team.
Anne Brannen 51:10
When I was learning Irish I had some various different books, and one of my favorite ones was a little pamphlet. It was created for parents of children who were in the schools and therefore learning Irish in the schools, and so you wanted as a parent to be able to talk with them. It had a whole lot of useful phrases llike, ‘where’s the ball’ and ‘please eat your oatmeal,’ but my favorite two were ‘you are right monkey you’ and also ‘get down off the curtains or I will kill you.’ I thought there were good things to be able to say in Irish. Languages are hard. You can learn Irish on Duolingo. You can learn Welsh on Duolingo. And right now Duolingo is having a vast impact. There’s a whole lot of people learning Ukrainian, which I will tell you is for me, harder than Irish and harder than Welsh. It’s like a whole nother thing because it’s from a different piece of the world from where the languages I know come from and boy…but it’s possible. It’s possible.
Michelle Butler 52:18
I’m still working through Irish.
Anne Brannen 52:20
Irish is a good language.
Michelle Butler 52:23
That’s all a big sidebar. There were so many crimes. So many crimes. I felt bad about this originally, but I don’t feel bad anymore, because this is the spark to so many crimes.
Anne Brannen 52:34
Did you feel bad about it because it felt like it wasn’t actually a crime? It was just somebody making a bad decision?
Michelle Butler 52:39
I felt a little bit bad about it. I really I wanted to talk about anyway, but I felt a little bit bad about that. Maybe we were slipping something in. But no, this is moment zero for a whole lot of crimes.
Anne Brannen 52:53
It’s just so inevitable. ‘Thank you for the land, Mr. McCurragh.’ Here’s Henry the second. ‘We’ll just take everything now. Thank you very much.’ It was a bad idea. So now we have history, and you and I are both products of that history, and a bunch of others. Here we all are. The moral of all this is if you are having a big problem because your neighbor has stolen your house, do not go and get the mafia to come in and help you. Be careful who your allies are. This is the moral.
Michelle Butler 53:37
Just a sidebar–I wonder about the stories about how Vortigern invited in the Anglo Saxons? I wonder what the timeframe is in which we see those emerge because the parallels are just inescapable.
Anne Brannen 53:56
I’m lost here. What are we talking about?
Michelle Butler 53:57
The early Arthurian stories.
Anne Brannen 54:00
The Arthurian, right. The Arthurian Vortigern. Okay. Yes, yes.
Michelle Butler 54:10
So either Diarmuit hadn’t been reading the stories he should have been reading about the dangers of inviting foreign mercenaries in–
Anne Brannen 54:24
They wouldn’t have existed for him. He didn’t have them. We don’t have them written down until later in Welsh.
Michelle Butler 54:32
Because it’s right there. Don’t do that. They’ll take the place.
Anne Brannen 54:36
Don’t invite the Romans. Don’t invite the English. Don’t invite the Americans.
Michelle Butler 54:42
Well, it’s super logical. If you’re weak enough to have to invite somebody else in for help, of course they’re going to do the calculus and say, ‘why don’t we just take it for ourselves? Why should we help you?’
Anne Brannen 54:55
‘We’ll help. We’ll help a lot.’
Michelle Butler 54:57
If you’re weak enough to need help, you’re not strong enough to keep it.
Anne Brannen 55:01
So if really indeed, the whole point is that the strongest should by right have what they can, then this is just fine. But I don’t think so. I think really the strongest should just behave themselves. That’s where I’m at.
Michelle Butler 55:20
This argument gets hauled out most with the conquest of the Native American lands. They didn’t deserve to keep it because they didn’t defend it.
Anne Brannen 55:31
Yeah. And also, they didn’t have any culture. Oh for the love of God. They most certainly did, just not yours. How they thought about land is wholly different. So this was our discussion of the Anglo Norman invasion of Ireland, which we stuck onto our discussion of Dermot MacMurrough. Diarmait na nGall. He’s the Diarmuit of the strangers because that’s where he threw his lot. The next time that you hear from us… we like to do an April Fool’s podcast about a thing which did not exist. This year, we are going to do– Michelle found this–we’re going to do the shame flute. Is that what we’re talking about? Michelle?
Michelle Butler 56:15
I suspect this is not a real thing. But we’re gonna go find out whether it was a real thing. It gets discussed as if it was a real thing.
Anne Brannen 56:26
Sometimes we find out that things actually were real. Like we didn’t think the Pied Piper of Hamlin was real, and the pied piper isn’t but the children disappearing is. So, you know, you find things out. Anyway, we’ll do the shame flute next time. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today–oh, god, they’re just like they are today, aren’t they, just like they are today only with more technology as for instance, you know, tanks and javelins. We can be found on Spotify and Stitcher and Apple podcast, and all of the places where the podcasts are hanging out. If you want to get ahold of us, you can find us on True Crime Medieval.com, Truecrimemedieval is all one word. We have links to podcasts and show notes and transcripts there. You can leave comments there too. We’d love to hear from you. If you have medieval crimes that you think we might do well to look at, please let us know. We got a lovely, lovely suggestion the other day. We often do special episodes where we go out of the Middle Ages and into the early modern, but we haven’t done a special episode where we leave Europe and go elsewhere. This is one from the Middle East and oooo, it’s a blood feast. Yay! Do love a blood feast. We haven’t had one for a while. I think a blood feast would do us good. So we’re gonna put that on the list. That’s what we’ll do. Do we have anything else? I think that’s it.
Michelle Butler 58:01
I think I should probably behave myself, honestly. I was so mad. My kid probably was like ‘What on earth is going on?’ Because I’m like, ‘What? What?!?’
Anne Brannen 58:15
I enjoy it when you get exercised, so I’m alright with it. See you later. Bye.
Michelle Butler 58:20
Bye.
76. Special Episode: Richard Walweyn Wears Padded Pants, London, England 1565
Anne Brannen 0:22
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 0:32
And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:35
This was the first day in Albuquerque that we had a great deal of snow. The North, in the mountains, they’ve been getting more of it. But we have some snow in Albuquerque, and it’s nice and sunny, but it’s cold and the city was shut down for a couple hours this morning. But it’s not snowing in Tuscaloosa, is it, I’m just guessing.
Michelle Butler 0:54
No, it’s going to be 75.
Anne Brannen 0:55
I think we might be getting up above freezing for a little piece of time around noon. But no, we’re not going to 75 today. Today we are talking about the time that Richard Walwyn violated the sumptuary laws in London in 1565. What we’re really doing is talking about the sumptuary laws in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, but we decided we needed to have a crime to focus on. So that’s ours. Richard Walwyn. In London in late January of 1565, Richard Walwyn was arrested and imprisoned for wearing trunk hose, padded trunk hose. That would be a pair of short trousers. They’re puffed out from the waist, and then they come in at the thigh. You will have seen them in pictures, drawings and paintings of Elizabethan men. He wasn’t supposed to wear them because he was a servant. He was not allowed to, by law, wear that garment because it was reserved for men of a higher class than he belonged to. Walwyn was detained until he could prove that he actually owned some hose–hose means breeches in this particular parlance–that he had some hose that were, as the court put it, of a decent and lawful fashion. So the padded hose were not decent and lawful, unless you were of a higher status, in which case they were decent and lawful. Well, that makes lots of sense, doesn’t it? We would never make laws like that. That sounds so silly, doesn’t it, Michelle? Why would we regulate what kinds of things people wore? That would be just dumb, dumb, dumb. Okay, context. Gotta have context. The Elizabethan sumptuary laws are infamous, but we want to put them in this context of a larger pattern of societies regulating the actions of their citizens; that is, what they buy, what they consume, how they present themselves. These laws were meant to keep society stable by regulating what everybody was eating and wearing and buying, sometimes by prohibiting what people could eat and wear and buy, sometimes by requiring what they were supposed to eat and wear and buy. Either way, we have evidence of sanctuary laws that go back to the seventh century BCE in Greece and in Rome. In Rome, there were laws prohibiting overly high expenditures on dyes and silks. Sumptuary laws as early as the 12th century were regulating what sex workers wore. In this case, it would be things like the ornaments they were supposed to wear in order to show that they were prostitutes and so that you could know that they were. Also throughout the Middle Ages, often sex workers were allowed to wear clothes that regular women were not allowed to wear, like lower decolletage and things like that, again an emblem of their profession. Sumptuary laws could be meant to protect trade, as with the Roman regulations on dyes and silks, or the English laws that started with Edward the third, regulating the import of textiles. That was an attempt to protect the English wool trade. Medieval sumptuary laws were sometimes presented as pointed toward civic morality. Regulating excess luxury could be connected to the regulation of gluttony and sloth, for instance, but in large part, laws concerning what people were allowed to wear had to do with keeping the lines between social classes clear. They can also be used to delineate certain sections of the populace. For instance, throughout the Middle Ages, from 1215 on, Jews in various countries were caused to wear certain badges of certain sorts. They were different from place to place. But that’s a sumptuary law. In England, the Tudors would institute laws and call for enforcement of them in order to show, and this is a quote from one of the statutes, “a difference of estates known by that their apparel after the commendable custom in times past.” That statue clearly calls not just for making the estates and classes clearly separate, but associates this with a commendable past. It’s not surprising then that sumptuary laws run most rampant when times are uneasy and the Elizabethan era, which was concerned both with quelling religious upheaval and establishing a safe position within the European realm was strongly concerned with the behavior of its citizens, both in their secular laws and their religious lives. Richard Walwynhad fallen into the secular bad behavior by wearing puffed out balloon pants, padded hose and breeches. It would be possible for town to make money off the sumptuary laws too. In Florentine Italy, a law in 1415 restricted what women could wear, but if you paid a fine of 50 florens a year, you could wear your luxurious stuff. So what is that regulating? It’s like your class is whatever you could pay. Or not. Maybe you were just of the higher class. Who would know? That particular regulation erases the social context and simply goes for the big bucks. You could, throughout Europe, be fined, imprisoned, and sometimes put to death for violating the sumptuary laws. Policing of gender presentation could also be regulated by sumptuary laws, not just class. In the Elizabethan church court records, there are many, many, many instances of men or women hauled before the church court for wearing the clothing that was assigned to the other gender. The exception, of course, in the Elizabethan era was the theater because women were not allowed on the stage and so men took the women’s roles. There’s your nice little loophole, but in 1642, the Puritans would shut down the theaters, thereby shutting down the loophole. But we’d like to put all of this into further context, because often when we think about sumptuary laws, we automatically think about the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Fair enough. But sumptuary laws didn’t stop in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. Not surprisingly, in the American colonies, the Massachusetts Bay Colony prohibited fancy clothes for people who weren’t rich. You had to make–oh, I forget–you had to be worth something like 200 pounds, and if you were, then you could wear the fancy things like silver and little frills of ruffles and God knows what all. That lasts until 1634. In 1746, the Scots were prohibited from wearing tartan and kilts. That’s a sumptuary law. You may not wear the clothes of your people. That’s not uncommon. That shows up in other places. For America, laws against cross dressing started by 1845, and that was presented as a moral issue. Cross dressing arrests surged in the 40s, and through the 60s until the Stonewall Riots of 1969, which started when New York police raided the Stonewall gay bar, which they were trying to shut down. They arrested the bar’s employees and they targeted drag queens and kings and transgender people, and one of the trans cross dressing lesbians was getting beat up by the police and the crowd started throwing things at the police led by two transgender women of color. That Riot went on till 4am. The bar opened again that night and activists showed up. That marked a radicalization of the LGBTQ movement, which had been going on for decades before, but that was a kind of change in tactics. The police were targeting both cross dressing people and transgender people. There was no distinction that they were making. So it’s not surprising that cross dressing and drag have become, once again, a major issue for the pieces of American society who wish to regulate gender. And in that Elizabethan sense, go back to a commendable past, which is of course as usual, being imagined. The commendable past. Whenever anybody says ‘we’re going back to the commendable past’ it was never there. I don’t know. Can you think of an instance, Michelle, when there actually was a commendable past that people tried to get back to? It’s not there. It’s not there.
Michelle Butler 10:04
It’s always imaginary.
Anne Brannen 10:06
I think so. In the good old days. Yeah, they weren’t there. These times are uneasy, and so there’s a really strong push in several states to make drag shows illegal, regulating, you know, that Elizabethan loophole. For America, prohibition, that was a sanctuary law. No drinking alcohol for you. That language has been being used in the movement to decriminalize marijuana. In Washington State, the laws against cannabis were characterized as ‘repugnant sumptuary laws.’
Michelle Butler 10:43
I didn’t actually know that before I did this research. I thought the sumptuary laws is mostly clothing. But it was all kinds of conspicuous consumption.
Anne Brannen 10:56
Yeah, yeah, all kinds of conspicuous consumption or of making people behave in a certain way. Laws that don’t actually have to do with ‘don’t steal from people or kill them, or just even go by and whack them on the head.’ You know, laws that aren’t about hurting other people, laws that are about behaving in a certain way that the society has decided that it approves of at the moment. ‘You could be there then and you’d be fine, but you’re here now and you’re going to jail.’ The regulation under the Nazis that Jews wore a yellow stars, that’s a sumptuary law, prescribing that people must wear a certain thing in order to show who they are. Those medieval laws about Jews having to wear identification badges had gone by-the-by. The Nazis brought it all up again. And that went on into the concentration camps, the concentration camp system, to include pink triangles for homosexuals, purple ones for Jehovah’s Witnesses, on and on and on. So that’s a glancing look at a very large history of regulations on human behavior that’s not actually hurting anybody else. Essentially, people not minding their own business. So that was a glancing look at it. But we return to Richard Walwyn, who wore some pants he didn’t as a servant deserve to wear, and he got off easy. Yay. Michelle, I hand it to you now. But I know we’re gonna have conversation.
Michelle Butler 12:26
I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. But as I was doing the reading about this, I discovered that sumptuary laws have only gotten some real serious scholarly attention in the last couple of decades. It’s really a 21st century phenomena. Because fashion is associated now with women. And so the assumption was, that it’s just trivial nonsense, because fashion is now considered to be trivial, feminine nonsense. One of the books I was reading, talked a lot about the transition between that. Fashion by and large, in the Middle Ages is about men’s fashion. Women are spending money on their clothing, but not as much as the men. It’s about kings and lords. Their wives need to look good because it reflects on them. But by and large, it’s a competition among men, and that holds until the 18th century. In 18th century, you have something called the Great Masculine Renunciation, where men’s clothing transitions over to being that idea of, it’s not gonna be gaudy, it’s gonna be well made, it’s about elegance, not opulence.
Anne Brannen 13:42
Okay. So in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, it was more dangerous when men wore clothes above their station, because they were the ones who actually were holding power. And so women, unless they were prostitutes, in which case they had you had to be able to tell who they were, I guess it’s okay.
Michelle Butler 14:01
Yes, that is the argument that scholar was making. You do, of course, have laws that target what women are wearing in the Middle Ages, but the really disruptive stuff is about what men are wearing.
Anne Brannen 14:16
Yeah, and especially so like Richard Walwyn, a servant who’s wearing things…one of the things I was reading was also about how the problem, it’s not just that you can’t tell who’s who and where they belong on your little hierarchy scale, it’s that servants and men of lower classes, if they can wear these fancy things, they spend too much money on them. They just like ruin their lives and like entire inheritances kind of disappear going up in smoke with padded trousers, I guess.
Michelle Butler 14:53
There’s a whole thing in the 16th century, with Elizabethan clothing, where men really are wearing cod pieces that are in fact, questionable, by any kind of standards. When they were adapting Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, they had to change how they were dressing the men because they were afraid they were going to scandalize 21st century watchers with historically accurate codpieces.
Anne Brannen 15:25
What? What? We’re gonna get scandalized by cod pieces?
Michelle Butler 15:25
They were afraid that nothing would get talked about with the show except the codpieces, if they didn’t, because the 21st century viewers would not be aware that that was actually right. They were afraid that there would be no discussion about the show except the codpieces.
Anne Brannen 15:57
Right. Which then the audience would assume they had made up in order to be, I don’t know, Game of Thrones, or something.
Michelle Butler 16:07
So they, much to the disgust of the author, toned them down.
Anne Brannen 16:14
Right, right. Yeah, the codpieces were something else. I think really those padded trousers, I don’t see the point of that, quite frankly. I do enjoy fashion myself, you know, from afar. I don’t wear it, but I like to look at it. I mean, what is that about? They could get two feet across. Later on, women would have these hoops that instead of being round, were kind of oval and they would go out so far that you couldn’t get through the door, you know, except sideways. Kind of like that. Like, what? But that’s all about that kind of exaggeration is always so noticeable and big. You were talking about what you’re allowed to wear now that you’re not actually teaching and you have to go be social and stuff. It’s like that. Sequins, when you’re trying to explain the Middle Ages to your students, do not go well. They are not a thing.
Michelle Butler 17:11
I have a lot of sequins now because I’m allowed to do that. But, yeah, I became really aware of the now unspoken, but very much enforced, uniforms for different professions. Academics dress in a particular way this almost kind of ostentatious–
Anne Brannen 17:32
Dowdiness.
Michelle Butler 17:33
Yes, that’s a good word for it.
Anne Brannen 17:35
Ostentatious dowdiness. I like that as a concept. I could wear sequins, but I don’t. I could wear padded trousers but no, not doing it. We’re talking today specifically about sumptuary laws. But things don’t have to be codified in order to be very, very powerful. You can get killed for wearing clothes that offend people because they think you should be wearing clothes that look like they belong to another gender than you seem to be. I mean, you can get killed for that. Is it illegal for you to be wearing these clothes? Not at the moment, I don’t think, any place. Except of course, the drag queen shows for the libraries. But that might not be the law, but it’s a pretty strong kind of prohibition, a societal prohibition. You have to be very courageous and being very much true to yourself, to wear what you know you should be wearing, your real clothes, no matter what the society says.
It was very interesting reading the scholarship to see that there are two strands that go all through the centuries, as far back as we can trace this. One: fashion is trivial. It’s not very important. Nobody should pay attention to it. And two: people lose their minds if you’re wearing something that they perceive that you’re not supposed to. So it is both extremely trivial and extremely important.
I believe you and I are in agreement–I’m just guessing here, we haven’t said so–but I’m thinking we are in agreement, True Crime Medieval says that fashion is important, and sometimes people die for it. Right. Fair enough?
Michelle Butler 19:28
Yes. I have a couple of historical thingys to share with you.
Anne Brannen 19:32
Okay.
Michelle Butler 19:33
So there is a 14th century poet and diplomat from Florence. His name is Franco Sacchetti. He was specifically excluded from the general banishment of the Sacchetti from Florence after the Ciompi revolt.
Anne Brannen 19:50
Which I believe we talked about, did we not?
Michelle Butler 19:53
Did we? If not we should put it on the list. I don’t actually know if we talked about. We may have mentioned it because it’s a peasants revolt. So we may have mentioned it when we were talking about–
Anne Brannen 20:03
I think we did. Okay, Ciompi Revolt, on the list. People behaving badly in Italy. Oh, yay.
Michelle Butler 20:10
So we can circle back to that and look at it in particular. He was excluded because of his personal merits. Because he was a very good guy, basically, he was allowed to stay in Florence. He was mostly a diplomat. He was assigned to be the ambassador to Genoa for a while. He has a set of works called the Novelli that are his best known works. There are a set of short stories or vignettes. ‘Short Story’ implies a genre that they’re not. But they’re short narratives. They don’t have a framing narrative like the Decameron. But in one, in vignette 137, he has a little story about why it’s hard to enforce the sumptuary laws.
Anne Brannen 20:55
Oh, do share, do share. I don’t know this.
Michelle Butler 20:57
This is delightful. They have sent out…the Enforcer is coming back and explaining why he had trouble. “My Lords, I have studied all my life to learn law. And now when I thought I knew something, I find I know nothing. For when seeking those ornaments, which are forbidden to your women according to the orders that you gave me, such arguments as they brought forward in their defense, I never before found in any law. And from among them, I should like to mention to you a few. There came a woman with the long peak of her hood fringed and twisted round her head. And I said, Tell me your name, because your peak is fringed. The good woman took down the peak, which was fastened to the hood with the pin and holding it in her hand, she said, it’s only a wreath. And I walked along a little further, and I met a woman with many buttons at the front of her dress, and I said, you cannot wear those buttons. And she said, Yes, I can. They’re not buttons, they’re beads. And if you don’t believe me, look, there’s no buttonholes. They’re just beads.” So he goes on, and he comes across another who’s wearing ermine. And he’s wondering to himself, What is she gonna have to say? I’m kind of quoting, kind of paraphrasing. “You are wearing ermine,” he said, and is about to write down her name. “But the woman said, do not write down my name. This is not ermine.” He’s says, well, what is it then? And she comes out with a name that is a made up name of an animal that translates to ‘suckling.’ It’s like a little something or other. And he says, Well, what is that? And she says, an animal. So he’s out there, and he’s getting told, that’s not a button, that’s not the fur you think it is. The lawyer comes back and tells them “I would have you know that Romans who conquered the whole world could avail nothing against their women.” So it’s partially a story about how this is basically, the way it was written, it was unenforceable. But it’s also partially a story about the trope you can’t tell women what to do, because there’s a lot of anxiety about that in the Middle Ages. There’s a book called Jurists and Jurisprudence in Medieval Italy, by Oswald Kevlar and Julius Kushner, that came out from the University of Toronto Press in 2020, that connects resistance to the sumptuary laws in the 14th and 15th centuries to a backlash against university trained lawyers in general. And I thought that was interesting.
Anne Brannen 23:56
Oh really? How does that work?
Michelle Butler 23:58
They say that the government is using university trained lawyers to try to tighten up loopholes to make sure that all the taxes that you’re owed get paid, to try to start enforcing some laws, and they see both the existence of the sumptuary laws and the backlash to them as part of that greater context of the government trying to centralize their authority using university trained lawyers, and people saying, ‘No, we’re not used to that, and we’re not doing that. You don’t get to tell me what to do.’ So that was very interesting. But also I was reminded in a different book that in Thomas More’s Utopia from 1515, he specifically addresses clothing.
Anne Brannen 23:59
You know, I know that book and I had not remembered that.
Michelle Butler 24:47
I had forgotten that too. So I was glad to be reminded of it. We are told that “throughout the island,”–here I am quoting– “they wear the same sort of clothes without any other distinction except,” –and this is really interesting– “except what is necessary to distinguish the two sexes, and the married and unmarried.” So More starts with this idea that everybody’s going to have the same clothes. Except for the stuff we really need, which is to tell a difference between who was married and not married, and to tell the difference between men and women.
Anne Brannen 25:24
We have to know these things.
Michelle Butler 25:25
Yeah, that’s really important stuff. “The fashion never alters, and it is neither disagreeable nor uneasy. So it is suited to the climate, and calculated both for their summers and winters.” He actually has a little bit more detail about this later on. While they are at labor, they are clothed with leather and skins carelessly cut about them. When they appear in public, they have an upper garment. But everything is of one color, the natural color of the wool. And they use linen, but again, it’s the natural color of it. And they only have a few things. “While in other places, four or five upper garments of woolen cloth of different colors and as many vests of silk will scarcely serve one man, and those who are nicer think ten too few, every man there is content with one.” He imagines an ideal society in which people have one outfit, and it’s all the same color, except for some ways in which you still have a distinction of sex and between who is married and unmarried. It’s such an interesting…I mean, More’s Utopia is interesting in general. But this vision of the role of clothing in Utopia is quite fascinating.
Anne Brannen 26:54
I’m really struck by the ways in which this utopia, where it sounds like people can wear whatever they want, except that they have to show that they’re married or unmarried, or that they’re male or female, it’s actually incredibly prescriptive, because what’s going on is that society is all better. Because nobody is wearing the fancy stuff. You just take the fancy stuff out of the equation, and then you don’t have people worried about what their status is because it just doesn’t matter. It’s not something that you’re showing. But that’s still prescriptive.
Michelle Butler 27:36
Oh yes. It’s undyed linen, it’s undyed wool.
Anne Brannen 27:40
And it’s boring as hell. I mean, where are my fancy little things, my little buttons and whatnot. It doesn’t make any sense. I remember when I was very young, not understanding, like, why does it matter? I mean, I totally get it. You’re not supposed to run around naked. And I totally get it that different societies have different things you’re supposed to cover up. Okay, fine. But I never could understand why there were rules. I had no idea then that there were laws, but why there were rules about what you were supposed to wear, it made no sense to me. I do get why you might, as England, try to regulate the wool trade. That actually makes more sense to me. Making people wear little signs to show what faith they are or, you know, making people wear something that makes everybody comfortable with what sex they’re portraying, I don’t understand it. I never have. I think it’s okay with me that I don’t understand. I think I do not want to know that about my fellow humans, why it is so important to them that they cannot mind their business about what other people are wearing.
Michelle Butler 28:52
I don’t think it’s an accident that the times and the places that are the…as they’re transitioning from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, that’s where we see the bump. So 14th century Italy, 16th century England. Those are transition moments, those moments of crisis. That’s where we see an attempt to hold everything together by ‘at least we can just tell people what to wear.’
Anne Brannen 29:25
You hold everything together, because you’re trying to keep a hold of the imagined wonderful past.
Michelle Butler 29:33
Exactly.
Anne Brannen 29:34
This was when you could tell who everybody was and you could be comfortable and whatnot, whatever the hell else is going on.
Michelle Butler 29:42
Perhaps I should not have been surprised, but I was, to discover a pair of novels from the early 20th century, from 1907 and 1911, by a fascinating human who I probably would not have liked in real life, but he’s quite fascinating as a historical person to read about. His name was Robert Hugh Benson. He was a Catholic priest and also a writer. He actually was the son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, which means he was an Anglican to start out with. After his father’s death, he was having a crisis of faith. He went on a tour through Europe and came back a Catholic. It created headlines, of course. It would. The son of the Archbishop of Canterbury converted to Catholicism. It was a big hairy deal.
Anne Brannen 30:40
Where had he been hanging out? Rome, France, Spain, where was he?
Michelle Butler 30:44
He was all over Europe. He was going on his grand tour/mourning tour. And he was a zealot, the way that a convert is a zealot. He has lots of other books too. But these two. The first one is, the way he presents it, a dystopia, and the second one is a utopia. The first one is called Lord of the World, and it envisions this horrific 20th century future in which there’s hardly any religion and they’re being persecuted, and the commies have taken over.
Anne Brannen 31:20
Oh, wait, didn’t I see somebody saying that over on Twitter yesterday?
Michelle Butler 31:25
Then he writes The Dawn of All, where he says in his little intro, ‘some of you were depressed by the past book, so now I’m going to write you a utopia.’ And he writes what he calls a utopia, in which, in this version of 1973, the Catholics have taken over, they’ve reinstituted sumptuary laws, which is why I found it, and basically, they have recreated their understanding of the Middle Ages.
Anne Brannen 31:57
So More’s Utopia doesn’t need sumptuary laws, because nobody’s wearing anything fancy. It’s kind of like the place where people have chosen and embodied sumptuary law. This utopia, also, sumptuary law. The idea that utopia contains sumptuary laws. It just astounds me really.
Michelle Butler 32:17
I was fascinated to find this book.
Anne Brannen 32:21
Is it one of those ones that I kind of don’t want to go read? Should I?
Michelle Butler 32:25
I wouldn’t. I don’t recommend it. The description of it here in a compilation describing science fiction, early science fiction…what they say is “a description of a religious ideal society set in the near future.” Then there’s a sentence that describes what he thinks he’s doing. “Most readers, however, have found the Dawn of All more depressing, discouraging, and outrageous than the first book.”
Anne Brannen 32:54
I don’t want to read a utopia that sounds like I would have to go to jail, personally. Or you, for your sequins. That would be sad. Or my daughter for sure. I don’t want to do these things.
Michelle Butler 33:09
It’s interesting to me because a) I didn’t really know that Catholic priests were writing science fiction in 1911. So that was really interesting. But I really am interested in the fact that part of this ideal society that he sees, is really a recreation of what he thinks the Middle Ages was like. He perceives the Middle Ages as this height of Catholic power and he wants to recreate it. And part of that is reinstituting sumptuary laws, reinstituting clerical privilege.
Anne Brannen 33:50
Now when he reinstitutes the sumptuary law, in his utopia, which ones are these? How does he put this together?
Michelle Butler 33:58
I don’t know.
Anne Brannen 34:00
[laughter] You would have to read it.
Michelle Butler 34:02
I got three pages into it. I decided I could not possibly read this book.
Anne Brannen 34:08
For your own mental health, you went away from there.
Michelle Butler 34:11
What I did read of his, though…he wrote a mystery play.
Anne Brannen 34:17
Oh, did he? Am I going to be upset about this too?
Michelle Butler 34:20
No, that was okay. It’s a nativity play. He’s clearly aware of Everyman because he mentions Everyman in the author’s notes, but it’s an entirely reasonable nativity play. But again, I think that’s part of him being interested in the medieval as an idealized Catholic past, because now it needs plays, like it had before. I will leave you with one other kind of nice thing. Margaret Frazer, who was the best hands down historical novelist working in the Middle Ages–it’s not even close–has a book about an embroiderer called The Sempster’s Tale. It was the closest thing I could find to historical fiction that used the sumptuary laws as a plot device, which I really expected to find, but did not.
Anne Brannen 35:16
Yes. Here’s another historical novel that needs to get written.
Michelle Butler 35:21
The Sempster’s Tale at least has an embroiderer as the main character. It’s from 2006. It’s called Sempster, because as we get told in the author’s note, the word seamstress is not current to the Middle Ages.
Anne Brannen 35:37
True that. This is very true.
Michelle Butler 35:40
So that is what I have. I really was bowled over by how big this topic is.
Anne Brannen 35:53
Yes. It’s the kind of topic that you could spend several episodes on, but we’re spending one short one. Richard Walwyn, and he got arrested in London. Why? Here you are, you’re a servant in London, you know about the laws. I mean, there were people who would get taken in, their hose slashed and all the padding pulled out. I mean, you know you’re going to be in trouble. Why? It just takes such fortitude. ‘I will wear my padded damn pants, I’m gonna wear them.’ I’d like to know how padded they wer. Are these the two foot padded pants or just, you know, a foot and a half? I’d like to know that.
Michelle Butler 36:39
I was fascinated by some of the reading about the social wandering of earrings in medieval Italy.
Anne Brannen 36:46
What? Tell me.
Michelle Butler 36:48
They come in first to 14th century Italy as something only that the sex workers are wearing. So they decided to make it a law that sex workers have to wear the earrings to indicate that they’re sex workers. But they’re so cool that upper class men and women start wearing them. So now they have to change the laws that, ‘No, no, nobody except upper class men and women can wear these.’
Anne Brannen 37:20
Wait, wait, wait. And the prostitutes or…?”
Michelle Butler 37:22
Nope.
Anne Brannen 37:24
They have to give up their earrings.
Michelle Butler 37:26
They have to give up the earrings. So earrings have this whole fascinating journey through the sumptuary laws as what they mean changes.
Anne Brannen 37:37
Wow. And this is Italy specific.
Michelle Butler 37:40
Yep. Italy specific. But that, of course, connected to me with Shakespeare. Because Shakespeare has that one little earring. We know he does it because he’s being culturally pushy in some way. But we don’t know as much as we might like to know what specific meaning that has in the 1590s.
Anne Brannen 38:02
Right? Could be could be several.
Michelle Butler 38:06
That was still touchy enough that when I was certainly in high school and an undergraduate we were never ever…I was in graduate school before I saw the painting of Shakespeare with his earring, because it was still considered to be possibly scandalous that he had the one little earring. That was never the painting of him that we were shown.
Anne Brannen 38:28
I liked the one with the earring myself.
Michelle Butler 38:29
The first time I saw it, I’m like, Whaaatt? I didn’t know Shakespeare had an earring. Yeah, because nobody wanted us to know that the Bard of Avon had an earring. But the sumptuary laws with the earrings in Italy are really interesting, because it really points to how hard it is to make these things stick. They’ve got the laws–only the sex workers can wear the earrings. Until the upper class people are like ‘but that’s really hot. I want to wear those too. That looks really nice. And it’s a good way to show off my jewels. Everything about this is awesome.’
Anne Brannen 39:03
I want that and some padded hose. That’s what I want. But they have to change the laws. I want a farthinggale.
Michelle Butler 39:11
This was so complicated. I thought this was a fairly straightforward topic. You had sumptuary laws and by and large people ignored them. Oh, man, there’s so much more going on. Very, very fascinating.
Anne Brannen 39:23
I think one of the things that gives me a lot of hope about the humans is that they tend to ignore sumptuary laws. I think that’s a good sign. I like for the humans to have some wherewithal.
Michelle Butler 39:38
This was an interesting, interesting topic.
Anne Brannen 39:44
One of the things that also I wanted to mention is that the big rise in sumptuary laws in the Middle Ages, we know it’s tied to periods of unrest. One of the big periods of unrest, as we’ve talked about, was the Black Death. Because when there were fewer workers, the wages went up. Doesn’t that only make sense. So more people could afford the things that they weren’t supposed to be wearing, and it got harder to tell who people were. And of course, everything was kind of shaky. You know, we’re the nobility and the upper class, and we really need to keep our privileges. So really, you guys should behave yourselves. So we go back to the Black Death, as usual.
Michelle Butler 40:27
I read also that there are some technological advances happening in the late Middle Ages that bring down the price of clothing, which also then puts clothing more in reach. Spinning wheels become more common, so it’s faster to make cloth rather than have to do it with a drop spindle. It’s just a perfect storm. In fact, one of the things I was reading for this was talking about how the change in inventions that’s happening in the late Middle Ages, there’s really only two time periods like it. The Industrial Revolution, and then the 20th century computing technology. The speed of innovation that is happening in the 14th and 15th centuries, and the impact that it has on society, is in the same category as those those two other groups. Which I believed, but it was nice to have somebody else say it.
Anne Brannen 41:24
And when things change quickly, it’s an uneasy time. Uneasy times are not just times of war, or times when you’re trying to make people have the right religion. Uneasy times are also when things change really, really quickly and you’re born into a time when your television set is like really, really tiny inside of a giant, a giant cabinet. I remember this very clearly, watching Mickey Mouse, and then becomes smaller and bigger, and then now becomes a big lovely thing on your walls, just like a picture. That’s just the television, not to mention, you know, we’re carrying around the world in my hand on my iPhone. That’s a lot of change. And so you know what, it’s really important that people wear the right thing so we can tell who they are, and we can go back to the comfortable good times. That’s the plan. That’s the plan.
Michelle Butler 42:20
Cool. That’s gonna work well.
Anne Brannen 42:21
It’s gonna totally gonna work, as we’ve seen throughout history.
Michelle Butler 42:26
That’s the lesson of history. It always works to tell people what to wear.
Anne Brannen 42:32
And what to eat too. They like to be told what to eat. They really like to be told what it is they should be imbibing so that they can change their moods. They love these things, and they always obey. And then you can have everything be okay. We can have More’s Utopia, which is not at all like going to hell, even though it might sound like that. It is just not. It is a good time, when you’re very, very happy. Because all you’re wearing is brown stuff and echre stuff on account of that’s what color the sheep are. That’s the deal. Now that was fun. Do we have anything else? My dear, my dear?
Michelle Butler 43:11
Nope. That is what I have, other than acknowledging that it was a humongous, humongous topic.
Anne Brannen 43:18
Humongous topic and still going on. Fight against sumptuary laws. That’s where it’s at. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. Just, just, just.
Michelle Butler 43:33
Unfortunately.
Anne Brannen 43:35
Unfortunately. We can be found on Spotify and Stitcher and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. We can be reached at True Crime Medieval dot com, Truecrimemedieval is all one word. You can leave comments, which we’d love for you to do. If there’s any medieval crimes you think we should look at, let us know. We enjoy that. You can reach us through there. The show notes are there and transcripts are there and we’re catching up. There was a COVID thing. And then there was, I don’t know… we’ve had quite a little time but we’re catching up. So stuffs over there. We’d love to hear from you. Oh, and the next time we meet…I actually remembered to do this. We forgot last time.
Michelle Butler 44:22
What are we doing next?
Anne Brannen 44:24
Next time we meet we are going to 1169 in Leinster, because we want to talk about the time that Dermot Macmurrough invited the Normans over to Ireland. Because we personally, the two of us, consider that a crime, we’re just saying
Michelle Butler 44:40
Oh god, it’s like he never met a Norman.
Anne Brannen 44:43
What did he think the Normans were going to do? What do the Normans do? They’re the Vikings that actually took over so much of the world.
Michelle Butler 44:52
They’re an invasive species.
Anne Brannen 44:55
So we’re gonna go to Ireland next time. But that’s all for us today. We’re all over. Bye.
Michelle Butler 45:01
Bye.
75. Crime Rise in the Great Famine, Europe 1315-1322
Anne Brannen 0:25
Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, a thousand years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.
Michelle Butler 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:38
And our guest host, as usual, is Blanca the rescue cockatoo, who’s doing much better, but might, as usual, be doing a little helping. We edit it out as best we can. But sometimes she’s helping a lot. But she’s doing better. Yay. It’s very sad having parrots who are traumatized. Don’t get parrots unless you can take care of them. They get all traumatized and then they have to go to the rescue people and they scream, if they’re cockatoos. Screaming, screaming, screaming. Today, we’re not actually talking about cockatoos. We’re talking about the rise in crime during the Great Famine in Europe, which lasted from 1315 to 1322. So that’s what we’re talking about. Lots of people died, and everybody throughout Europe was very hungry. And so, the crime rate rose. The end. Okay, context. I’ll do context. Michelle has numbers and interesting studies. So there had been a rise in population growth, and there had been a lot of prosperity from the 11th century on because of the Medieval Warm Period, which was a period of global warming. Although not as warm as we’re doing our global warming. It was in those kinds of terms much lower. Anyway, the Medieval Warm Period lasted from about 950 to 1250. The temperatures fluctuated, of course, across the globe, but it was in general warmer. Glaciers retreated some. In Mesoamerica, the collapse of the Mayan civilization came after long droughts. Other places had lots of precipitation. There were floods in Asia and Russia. In Europe, the population approached levels that it would not reach again until the 19th century. There were a lot of people in Europe. The harvests were great by medieval standards, seven wheat seeds for each one planted. During the famine, it would go down to two seeds for every one planted. For us, it’s 30 for every one planted. We have really kind of different circumstances and agricultural methods and whatnot. But it was good times. The Medieval Warm Period was followed by the Little Ice Age. Now, it’s not really an ice age. First of all, it wasn’t across the globe. Second of all, it wasn’t that cold, but it was colder and it affected Europe. The Little Ice Age affected the North Atlantic regions. The Baltic Sea froze, and rivers and canals froze over. The Great Famine coincides with the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the beginning of the Little Ice Age. The tiny ice age. The small ice age. Previously there had been a giant ice age and a lot of glaciers and those were all those were gone now. Okay. In 1315, there was bad weather. That’s what happened. It was bad weather, crop failures due to severe weather, severe winters and rainy cold summers, throughout Europe. Because it was raining. It rained a lot. It rained a lot. Really, what it was doing was raining. There was rain, and it was cooler, and in cool wet weather the grain couldn’t ripen, hence the lower amount of seeds coming for every one you planted. The straw and hay for the animals rotted. Your meat couldn’t be cured because the brine wouldn’t dry out. Salt was missing. There wasn’t enough salt. If you did have salt, you couldn’t dry out brine anyway because it was just too wet. I live in Albuquerque. If I spill water on the kitchen floor, I often just let it sit there because it’s going to be dry by the afternoon. I didn’t do that when I lived in Pittsburgh because it was humid. Since the population had increased during that nice warm period, even a little failure of the crops meant that it had a big impact. So some people would go hungry even with a little, and in this case many people are going hungry. For the most part, the peasantry was the people that were going hungry since the grain stores as they existed belong to the nobility and the church. Even though it was so bad that the royalty was also affected. We have the story of King Edward the second of England, his entourage went through Hertfordshire and he couldn’t find food for them at St Albans, and that was the summer of 1315. So that was the first summer. Things got really bad after that, because there was this prolonged period of crop failures. So naturally, as happens in famines, people ate things they found in the forest, for instance, not always really edible. But that wasn’t even a possibility if you lived in the towns and the cities. People ate horses and dogs, and then they would eat their farm animals and their grain stocks, which of course then decimated the growing capability for the future. As time went on, the animals were getting diseased. That was a problem because eating diseased animals can do you harm. Prices skyrocketed, of course, because there was nothing to eat. Nothing was affordable, and it was really bad. In the freezing winters, animals and humans sickened and died. It wasn’t just that you didn’t have food. People were getting ill, especially with lung diseases. Because it was wet, and wet climates are harder on your lung diseases. There were stories of cannibalism. There were stories of children being eaten, or children being abandoned. The story of Hansel and Gretel seems to come from this particular time period, for instance. In Hansel and Gretel, everybody’s hungry and so the stepmother takes the children out into the forest to leave them there because she can’t feed them anymore. So she’s wicked, wicked, wicked. But that’s probably what’s going on in that particular story as it comes down to us. The idea of children being taken out and just abandoned. So it started in 1315, but it’s worse in 1317. At that point, the weather began to get better, but the people and animals were so weakened, those that had survived, that populations did not start to increase again until the middle of the 1320s. They didn’t increase a lot. As I mentioned, across Europe, the population would not reach the same height that it had had before the Great Famine until the 19th century. The estimate is that about 20% of the population died, especially in the towns and cities. I think Michelle has some numbers for us later. The Black Death would hit Europe in 1347, hitting a population that was both decreased and also pretty damn traumatized. That would kill over a third of the population of Europe or as much as as half of the population, by some estimates. But we talk about the Black Death a lot. We hear about the Black Death. It shows up in all kinds of good popular fiction and whatnot. We don’t talk about the Great Famine, but the Great Famine is the background of the Black Death. The crime rate rose, of course, everybody says the crime rate rose but I think how could the crime rate not rise? That’s sort of how these things go, having met the humans, and that trauma and the violence contributed to social changes. For instance, the warfare of the Hundred Years War, which decimated nobility in England and France differs from the warfare that had come before when typically nobles were not killed but taken for ransom. It became much deadlier for the nobles. That is something that kind of falls from this just, this very violent way of looking at life. The Great Famine was really bad and it lasted a long time. Edward the second, for instance. Another fallout from the Great Famine. Edward the second was already not popular and the famine didn’t help his reputation. One of the problems was that the nobles and the royalty were unable to do anything about this. Much as what happened with the Black Death later, nothing could get done. They couldn’t fix it. They could not fix it. Like in Game of Thrones, there’s that piece where “let’s open up the stores and give the grain to the people.” There wasn’t any. You know, what are you gonna do? So anyway, his popularity fell. I believe Michelle has more to talk about this but also I will refer you to our earlier podcast about the murder of Edward the second in 1327. Rates of theft rose, obviously and naturally. I mean, you gotta eat something and sometimes you have to steal it from somebody. Murder rates rose as well. The stories are that people resorted to cannibalism. They ran out of dogs and horses, and there’s also stories of people eating their own children rather than just putting them in the forest is. So there are a lot of stories of horrible horrible bad behavior. My estimate of all this is that there was a lot of bad behavior during the Great Famine. That there was as much bad behavior as the chroniclers tell us, I have real doubts about. But the crime rates rose, naturally the crime rates rose. The crime rates rose and the population went down. And so it’s even a larger percentage. So the Great Famine. That’s the background, the context for the Great Famine. The Black Death would come and kill more people. There would be a great deal of social upheaval, and there’s going to be more warfare, and it’s just gonna be bad for a while. Eventually, it’ll be the Early Modern ages, and it would be so wonderful, yes, because the Renaissance will come, and everything will be just fine. These are angel voices. So we’ll move out of the dark ages, where nothing good ever happened, and it was all famine and death and killing people and whatnot. We’ll move into the age of lovely light and good behavior where everybody behaved. Much as they do now. We’ll reach the end of our 1000 years. Michelle, I know that you have been very…this is this was Michelle’s topic. I’m glad she put it on. Because, quite frankly, we both knew a lot about the Black Death. We did not know a lot about the Great Famine. So we are glad to find these things out. Michelle, what did you think?
Michelle Butler 11:29
This tragedy got lost in the shadow of the different one that comes later. The very end of one of the books I read says that what distinguishes the Great Famine from the Black Death, where the mortality, as is well known, was enormously greater, was that the famine endured. It just goes on and on and on. In the Black Death, you’ve got two months, three months, of possibly a third of the people you know just dropping dead. But it’s three months. This goes on for seven years. Oh, my God, these poor souls.
Anne Brannen 12:12
One of the things also is that the Black Death killed you, if you caught it. Mostly, it killed you if you caught it. But the problem with the famine that’s different is that it can kill you later. I mean, it just keeps going. It isn’t just that you can’t eat that summer. You’re not going to be able to eat that winter, either. Then you’re gonna have to eat your horses and your dogs and your cattle and your pigs and whatnot. So then there’s nothing. The Black Death lasted a bit, but it didn’t have that kind of cumulative effect. It was a disease. It killed you. Then it moved on. It would come back now and then but it didn’t last in the same kind of way.
Michelle Butler 12:58
There’s definitely crime increases, but it’s not just personal, where people are stealing to eat. You also have profiteering going on, where people are stealing in order to resell. Of course they are. There’s a rise of piracy. Because of course there is. It was one of the things that the English and the French governments try to do to deal with the famine is to import grain from somewhere else. It doesn’t take very many ships of grain for people to realize it’s profitable to attack those. There is, of course, price gouging. There’s always price gouging in these kinds of situations, and there’s hoarding to sell at higher prices. That happens an awful lot. Or selling essentially on the black market. It’s the origin of the word ‘forestalling,’ which I didn’t know.
Anne Brannen 13:51
Explain this.
Michelle Butler 13:53
That is the word for if you’re not selling through the normal channels. ‘Forestalling.’ I did not know that. That was new to me. But all of these accusations of cannibalism. Jordan–I’ll talk about Jordan’s book here in a little bit–what he says is that there’s a few different scholarly approaches to this. One: that murder and cannibalism actually took place on a wide scale. Two: that its invocation in the chronicle narratives is a trope being used to indicate how bad the famine was.
Anne Brannen 14:31
Right. But as part of a common story that one always tells.
Michelle Butler 14:38
That it’s a metaphor of emotional distress. So that’s the third possibility. He suggests that it is a misinterpretation of other crimes that are going on.
Anne Brannen 14:51
Explain this.
Michelle Butler 14:53
What he means is that he is utterly convinced that in this kind of destitution, that if somebody got buried with any single thing on them that would be worth it for somebody else to steal, they got dug up. He does not think that that correlates, necessarily, to them being eaten.
Anne Brannen 15:14
Right. Okay.
Michelle Butler 15:17
What he’s talking about there is that he thinks that some of these reports, somebody may well have seen something. But it’s not necessarily the case that you can jump from there to cannibalism, because the point he makes over and over again is that a famine does not mean that there’s no food. It means that there’s not enough food and so prices have skyrocketed. What you’re really trying to do is get a hold of enough money to be able to buy what’s available.
Anne Brannen 15:49
Okay.
Michelle Butler 15:51
There’s a really interesting part where he talks about the word for ‘famine’ in Latin doesn’t have anything to do with food. It means ‘expensive.’ Caritas, it means that things are dear.
Anne Brannen 16:09
Yes, of course, of course. Okay.
Michelle Butler 16:14
There is no archaeological evidence that has been hitherto found of cannibalism that can be linked to the great famine. That to me is the big one.
Anne Brannen 16:24
That matters. That really matters.
Michelle Butler 16:26
That really matters. Because we have archaeological evidence for Jamestown. We know for certain that the English settlers in Jamestown in the early 17th century resorted to cannibalism. We have the skeleton, we can see the marks, we know for sure it happened. This was also under dispute for a long time because one of the people there had recorded that they’d resorted to cannibalism. But you don’t really want to believe that without evidence. Well, now we have the evidence. We know for sure. There’s even a facial reconstruction of what she looks like. The person who was eaten by the others.
Anne Brannen 17:07
So the reason we know then is from evidence of marks on the bones.
Michelle Butler 17:13
Exactly. Cannibalism leaves unmistakable marks on the bones that are different from the marks you get if you’re killed in battle, or even the marks you get if–a different study I found–if you’re chopped up because people think that you’re likely to be a zombie. Which was also interesting. I didn’t know that ever happened in England. So that was an interesting sort of study. I’ll give you the source for that, too.
Anne Brannen 17:44
I never heard of that. Thank you.
Michelle Butler 17:46
So that’s pretty interesting. Is it likely it happened somewhere? Probably. But the accusations are always ‘those people over there.’ Or ‘I hear tell.’
Anne Brannen 18:01
They’re not in the form of ‘my next door neighbor chopped up his kids and put them in the stew.’
Michelle Butler 18:13
No. The estimate is that this famine afflicted an area of 400,000 square miles, with a population of 30 million. So it’s a big area and it’s a lot of people, like you talked about. Anywhere between 5 and 20% of the population dies between 1315 and 1322. It’s not actually just from starvation. There’s drowning, there’s–
Anne Brannen 18:41
Oh, right. Because there was all the rain and therefore all that water.
Michelle Butler 18:47
Yeah, you have an awful lot of people who just flat-up drown in the flooding. Entire coastal cities get washed away. If you have both your hands in front of you, fewer than that is the number of days it stopped raining in 1316 and 1317.
Anne Brannen 19:06
Two years. Over the course of two years?
Michelle Butler 19:09
No, for each year. It rained less than a dozen days each year. It’s terrible.
Anne Brannen 19:16
It didn’t rain less than–
Michelle Butler 19:17
Sorry, yes, it didn’t rain. Yeah, it rained and rained and rained, it rained more than the Biblical Flood of Noah. A lot more. Prices were up 170%. My author Jordan says England never saw a similar subsistence catastrophe during the whole of the Middle Ages. Because it’s everything. You can’t even get the seed to stay in the ground. If it’s raining this much, you can’t get the seeds to stay in the ground. So wheat, barley, oats, rye, peas, lentils, grapes, everything. You lose your livestock herds. The records of the herds, they dropped from hundreds to dozens. Some of these fields never recover because so much of the topsoil washes away.
Anne Brannen 20:04
Oh. Do you know in general where those places were?
Michelle Butler 20:09
One of the places that Jordan cites in particular is Yorkshire. Southern Yorkshire had some fields that by the time it was all done, they were rocks.
Anne Brannen 20:20
Hmm. So that affects the area forever.
Michelle Butler 20:23
It takes a very, very long time for those places to…not regrow but re-accumulate enough soil to be productive again. Surprisingly, once the weather straightens out after 1322, the harvests bounce back fairly quickly. As long as we exclude the marginal areas. As the population had expanded in the 13th century, they started farming areas were not the best farmland. Places that had been boggy, they tried to drain and make into farmland, or places that had been timber. There’s a lot of cutting down of woods and turning those into fields. Places that had been marginal, become more marginal, because of the washing away of the topsoil. Another interesting thing is that the adults, people who survive this as adults, the malnutrition doesn’t hit them as hard as the people who are children. So this generation that manages to survive this, they’re not well. There’s things that you need to have when you’re growing up that even if you get them later, it doesn’t fix it.
Anne Brannen 21:47
Right. Of course, of course. So that’s one of the reasons that when the Black Death hits, two generations later, the population is still so weak.
Michelle Butler 21:57
You could very easily have survived the famine as a child to die in the Black Death because of the developmental issues. In particular, your immune system will suffer from the malnutrition.
Anne Brannen 22:10
Of course. One of the reasons then also that the diseases that hit, both animals and humans, were so virulent, because everybody’s immune systems had been–
Michelle Butler 22:22
It was bad in the countryside. It was worse in the small towns because people who were in trouble left the countryside and went to the towns.
Anne Brannen 22:32
Yeah. And as I was mentioning, in the towns you can’t kind of go out and get food from the forest, because you’re not where one is.
Michelle Butler 22:41
Protest poetry as a genre emerges, and comes into its own in Piers Plowman.
Anne Brannen 22:49
Of course it does. Of course it does. Thank you.
Michelle Butler 22:53
This explains a lot to me about why you get so much protest poetry in the 14th century, because it’s terrible. I actually have become convinced that the 14th century is what brings the Middle Ages to an end. Society cannot survive this. The 15th century is a desperate attempt to reestablish. This explains why the 15th century feels very self-referential…self-aware. Meta, it’s kind of meta-medieval. They’re trying really hard. Like, let’s go back to the way it was.
Anne Brannen 23:26
Yes, yes. The famine kills off chivalry.
Michelle Butler 23:29
I was totally and completely shocked to discover that decades of scholarly approaches to the famine is to blame these people for their own suffering.
Anne Brannen 23:39
Yeah, you were telling me about this earlier. I’m just shocked.
Michelle Butler 23:44
I’m shocked.
Anne Brannen 23:48
First of all, it makes no sense. Second of all, it’s mean.
Michelle Butler 23:52
William Chester Jordan’s The Great Famine in Northern Europe in the Early 14th century, was published– it’s a scholarly book by Princeton University Press–in 1999. It is the only, as far as I can tell, full-length scholarly book about the Great Famine. One of the things he does is take to task previous scholars who want to blame these poor souls for their own suffering. Arguments such as: the peasants are just basically lazy and have a lot of children to do their work for them. That they are backward. The peasants are backward and unwilling to change their farming techniques, even as it becomes obvious to everybody-of course it did–that’s making things worse.
Anne Brannen 24:34
Now, what I want to know is, what farming techniques save you when your topsoil is being taken away in by two years of having only cumulatively about 20 days of not raining.
Michelle Butler 24:52
A hundred inches of rain. What standing up to that?
Anne Brannen 24:56
What is that farming technique? Do we have it now? If that hit us now, we go ‘whoo, thank God that we live now and are able to fix this.’ This doesn’t make any sense. To blame the peasants for a natural disaster that had nothing–
Michelle Butler 25:14
Oh I’m not even done with the list of things that they get blamed for.
Anne Brannen 25:17
This makes me so nuts. Michelle explained all this to me, I think over breakfast the other day when she was visiting and I just couldn’t. I just wanted to kill somebody.
Horrorifying.
Just horrifying.
Michelle Butler 25:29
They de-nitrated the soil.
Anne Brannen 25:31
Oh, that’s why. I mean, if you have enough nitrate in your soil. It wouldn’t matter how much it rained, you’d be fine. How stupid are these people. Okay, sorry.
Michelle Butler 25:43
That they got greedy during the warm time and stopped rotating crops. By the way, there’s no evidence that that actually happened. But this is the lovely theory to blame these people for their own suffering. That they started having too much land under cultivation, so there wasn’t enough animals to provide the manure to re-nitrate the soil. They stopped letting things lie fallow. They stopped rotating crops. There is not a shred of evidence for any of that. It is true that more land comes under cultivation, that there is an extension into marginal lands. That’s true. And it’s true that a whole lot of timber was cut down. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, 85% of Europe is covered in forest. By the end of the Middle Ages, it’s about 20%. So there’s an awful lot of forests that come down. But it’s not just because of farming. By the end of the Viking period in Norway…one of the reasons they’re going to Ireland and they’re going to Newfoundland is that they have almost deforested Norway. It takes 60 trees to make a Viking ship. And that’s just kind of the normal 40 foot ones, not the 120 foot giant ones. Medieval society is very wood based. It’s not just about farmland. You burn wood to stay warm, you build things out of wood, you are building your ships out of wood. It’s a very timber-based society and to blame the deforestation simply on greedy peasants who want to grow more food to sell is quite outrageous and rather obnoxious.
Anne Brannen 27:22
What really strikes me about this, hearing this again, is that this is extraordinarily classist. Its the fault of the peasants that the food ran out? It makes no sense. Even the reasons given are not taking into account the reality of the situation, which was the climate change and the weather. I mean, did these people ever mentioned the weather? Because the weather was a big deal. I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but it was really rainy. There was rain happening.
Michelle Butler 27:58
100 inches of rain. We would struggle, right now, in the 21st century, with 100 inches of rain.
Anne Brannen 28:07
Yeah, we would really bitch about it, too. We would blame whoever was in power, because they should have done something. We blame all the people who had not actually…either we would blame the people who hadn’t paid attention to climate change or we would blame the people who had been bitching about climate change, whichever side we were on. Oh, wait, wait, we’re about to do this now. Ah. We’ll be doing all of this soon.
Michelle Butler 28:36
It doesn’t behoove us to go at a great famine with a lot of arrogance.
Anne Brannen 28:43
Although I will say that I think probably that there’s more to us having caused some things that are coming, the rising of the oceans et all, than there was to the peasants of Europe doing it in 1315.
Michelle Butler 28:56
I think you and I talked a little bit about, earlier, how Jordan thinks–and I agree with him–that there is a direct line between the famine of 1315 to 1322, and the persecution of the Jews that starts in 1321.
Anne Brannen 29:11
Yeah, I think so too. You wanna tell us about this.
Michelle Butler 29:14
Part of what happens is that as you have no money to buy food, you are borrowing heavily from moneylenders, and that resentment breaks out in violence, starting in 1321 with the accusations of well poisoning.
Anne Brannen 29:29
That it dates right then, next to the Great Famine, is certainly very telling.
Michelle Butler 29:38
Jordan also thinks that the increased persecution of heretical sects is tied in with the famine, because you see more persecution of people whose slightly not orthodox views were tolerated before. But the idea, I think, is that you work from the assumption that if this much bad stuff is happening, God is punishing you. So you’re looking to see who’s guilty for it. Who do we blame for this?
Anne Brannen 30:07
Why is God so angry at us? It’s clearly not me. Although it could be and I could say my prayers, but clearly some other person is behaving really badly. Ah, you, are you wearing the clothes that are correct for your gender? Because if not, it’s all your fault. Yep. It’s good that we’ve come so far from this, isn’t it? Here’s a spoiler alert, we call this 1000 years of bad behavior. We actually believe that what the humans have had is not a moment without bad behavior. So, you know, that’s where we’re at. Constant bad behavior.
Michelle Butler 30:45
One of the things that’s sort of interesting is that you would think–but humans being what they are, maybe we wouldn’t think this–that steps would have been taken after the harvest returned to normal. like building more barns to store things and building in particular, more drying barns, where you can at least keep things dry, if you manage to harvest something. Alas, this does not happen.
Anne Brannen 31:13
So we don’t get ready for the next terrible thing?
We do not Oh, we’re so predictable.
Well, it’s somebody else’s fault. I’m not sure who it is. But somebody did it, really.
Michelle Butler 31:24
I thumbs up recommend William Chester Jordan’s The Great Famine. It’s a very, very good book. It’s very scholarly, but I didn’t find it chock full of jargon or anything like that. I think it’s perfectly accessible to any standard reader. Another book that I’ve read that I’m going to be a little bit more cautious about sending people to is William Rosen’s 2014 book, The Third Horsemen: A Story of Weather, War and the Famine History Forgot. It’s intended more for general readers, which does not excuse–
Anne Brannen 31:58
The Third Horseman. I like the title.
Michelle Butler 32:00
The title is good. But even being for general readers does not excuse some of the egregious things that happen in this book. But if you want to read a book where it is very clear that the author is not a medievalist and did some research but not enough to overcome coming into it with the lens of what the Middle Ages is like–ie it’s violent and backwards, and how can you expect anything more from these people?–this is your book, to see that really, really clearly. It was actually interesting to see Jordan cite something and then Rosen cites it, and the interpretation is totally different because the assumption that’s being brought to it is totally different. For example, he takes the chronicles at face value all the time.
Anne Brannen 32:53
Yeah, it’s hard for non-medievalists to not take…I mean, historians. They’re dead historians. They wrote things down. Yes, they did. It’s hard for non-medievalists to not take the chroniclers seriously, every single one of them. Of course, some were good and some are not. We have different ways of writing history. We expect something different.
Michelle Butler 33:14
They frequently have their own agenda. So, what the book is really about is Edward the second. The book is about the reign of Edward the second and wants to talk about the impact of the famine on Edward’s reign. But he takes at face value the really excoriating history of Edward, The Life of Edward the Second, that is written by somebody attached to the home of one of Edward’s political opponents. It’s clearly not an unbiased source, but it’s being taken as if it is. He doesn’t always think through what he’s saying. We get told, for example, that the view of Edward the second that’s portrayed in Braveheart, that he’s feminine and clearly not living up to his father and all of the kind of trope-y things that are associated with him, is the view of Edward that has always been in place and it’s what most people accept. And then we get told, within two paragraphs, that there’s a whole bunch of people who didn’t like Edward because he had unnoble hobbies like digging ditches and thatching roofs.
Anne Brannen 34:22
I remember we talked about this in the podcast. It’s like, isn’t this a very non-effeminate sort of hobby, digging ditches and whatnot. This doesn’t make any sense.
Michelle Butler 34:32
He accepts a whole bunch of criticism of Edward without digging into the source at all. Then he goes up my nose because he’s constantly citing average life expectancy, which is a useless statistic.
Anne Brannen 34:48
Explain to our listeners why this is a useless statistic.
Michelle Butler 34:53
For example, he cites that average life expectancy during the famine drops from 32 to 25. These are both useless numbers because average life expectancy includes from birth on. And you have infant mortality. From zero to age five, you lose roughly half of your children. That then skews that number. What we find is that if you only include people who survived to age five, life expectancy in the Middle Ages is much closer to now than what we would think. It’s only about five years less than now.
Anne Brannen 35:26
You were very likely not to survive being born or if you did survive being born, survive being like two and things like that. But once you did that, it was just like–
Michelle Butler 35:39
This is a particular annoyance of most medievalists, us included, because that particular truth of infant mortality being 50% changes with vaccination–
Anne Brannen 35:52
Yep, it does.
Michelle Butler 35:53
–in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It has fuck-all to do–pardon my French–with the Middle Ages. It’s true of the 17th century. It’s true of the 18th century. It’s true of the early 19th century.
Anne Brannen 36:06
Yeah, it’s not about the Middle Ages being a dark and horrible time. It’s about not having antibiotics being a dark and horrible time.
Michelle Butler 36:15
Yeah, you can’t vaccinate against meningitis and pertussis and all the other terrible things that kill children. This is not a bad book, but I would be cautious with it, is what I would say. Just go read Jordan’s book instead, I think.
Anne Brannen 36:32
Here’s my question. Does this book, whose name shall not be spoken, does this book think that the peasants cause their own demise in the Great Famine? Because if so, I’m totally not reading it at all.
Michelle Butler 36:45
Kind of. He repeats…one of my irritations with him is that he’s clearly read Jordan’s book, but he doesn’t believe the pieces that bump up against his clear pre-existing bias about the Middle Ages being a stupid and barbaric time. Because Jordan very clearly explains why the Postan theory–that’s the scholar who in 1966 originally posited the idea that one of the things that happened here is the de-nitration, and that you’re not rotating the crops, you’re not letting the soil lie fallow, and it’s all the peasants’ fault. He repeats that. Even though Jordan, who he had clearly read, had taken it apart.
Anne Brannen 37:28
See, that’s the thing. He likes it because it fits in to what was already in his head. Okay, I’m not reading this book. This sounds really bad.
Michelle Butler 37:36
There were pieces that are okay. But the problem is, you know–
Anne Brannen 37:42
No, there aren’t. ,
Michelle Butler 37:46
By and large, what you can trust is that whatever the worst possible interpretation of the fact is going to be, that’s where he’s going to land. Whereas Jordan is taking the approach that anybody who could possibly have done anything, would have done something, and that people who farm for a living and have who, for generations, generally know what they’re doing.
Anne Brannen 38:07
Yes, that’s part of it, isn’t it? It’s amazing that the peasants were able to survive so long, thousands of years, doing their little agricultural things, then all of a sudden got nuts and caused the Great Famine. How could this be? What is wrong with people? You know, this is 1000 years of people behaving badly. We focus on people killing each other and whatnot. But really, there’s also people behaving badly by being just stupid, fiendly things.
Michelle Butler 38:34
It is fascinating. I’m willing to consider the scholarly treatment of this as a crime in and of itself.
Anne Brannen 38:41
Yes.
Michelle Butler 38:42
But it is super interesting how…I think this taps into some really human fears about starvation and needing to blame these people for their own suffering means that we would be smart enough that it’s not going to happen to us.
Anne Brannen 38:58
Okay. I get it. Yeah. One of the things about famine…I’ve been reading a lot about famine, because I’ve been reading a lot of history about Central Europe and Ukraine especially, and famine in general these days is mostly caused by politics. There will be climate things that go on, but everything’s made worse by how things are being handled, or there may be just simply a policy of taking everybody’s food away and letting them starve, as in the Holodomor. But this wasn’t political. This was not political. There was nothing that the nobility could have done and they were the ones that had power. There was nothing that the peasants could have done and they were the ones who were growing things.
Michelle Butler 39:51
They tried. Most of the famine relief happened at the local level.
Anne Brannen 39:56
Oh, tell me about that.
Michelle Butler 39:57
You had monasteries, for example, doing their best, even though they were suffering too. You have monasteries just die, like go out of business. They have to disperse their surviving monks elsewhere. The monasteries see that they need to be providing charity–many of them, of course–during the famine, because they rely so heavily on donations in good times. So they were convinced that it was not going to be good PR for them to slam the door shut and not be providing public relief.
Anne Brannen 40:04
Well, that makes sense.
Michelle Butler 40:35
It’s not exactly altruism, but at least it’s logical. National governments, kings, are doing their best, but even the actions they could take were very limited in their ability to do anything. They’re trying to regulate access to the resources. They’re trying to control speculation. They’re trying to have grain imported from elsewhere. They’re trying to keep the piracy under control that’s hitting those grain shipments. They’re trying to keep riots from happening. And that’s kind of where their power–
Anne Brannen 41:12
Right. There’s nothing that they can do about the foundation.
Michelle Butler 41:17
Exactly. Those are all controlling symptoms. Nobody can control the weather, hence, all of these crimes we’re seeing, because you can’t actually solve the core problem. You just have to wait it out. And of course, things get worse as you go along. After you’ve got like your fourth failed harvest in a row, you have no reason to assume it’s gonna get better the next year. I am shocked that I didn’t know more about this. Because it feels to me that it’s this really important touchstone for explaining the whole rest of the 14th century. Even why people lose their minds so much during the Black Death. It’s one thing to go through a trauma, and it’s one thing to go to through another one. The kind of hyperbolic reactions we see in the Black Death with the flagellants makes a ton more sense to me, knowing that those people…this is their second go in an apocalyptic scenario.
Anne Brannen 42:13
Yeah, yeah. And again, nothing that can be actually controlled. You can work on the symptoms of the Black Death, the societal symptoms, but you can’t actually do anything about the Black Death itself.
Michelle Butler 42:31
You will see online people repeating frequently that cannibalism happened. I just want to be real clear that we have no actual archaeological evidence of that.
Anne Brannen 42:46
Even the chroniclers are not saying ‘I saw this happen,’ or even ‘I know that this happened because my best friend told me.’ It’s just like, ‘we have heard.’ So there may well have been some cannibalism, but it was not widespread as far as we can tell. We don’t have any real evidence for it. Let’s assume that it happened some, because humans, but we don’t know where it was or when it was or how much of it there was or any of that.
Michelle Butler 43:19
I think that the comparison with Jamestown is instructive because places where cannibalism happens– Jamestown, the Donner party–that is a group of people who are disconnected from the wider society, and it’s much easier for those societal rules to be transgressed. When you’re still part of the wider society, it’s much much harder to psychologically convince yourself to disregard those things.
Anne Brannen 43:48
So, little sidebar, do you know anything about the family that survived the Donner party?
Michelle Butler 43:54
Oo, no, I don’t actually.
Anne Brannen 43:55
There was a family that damn survived the Donner party and they never ate anybody else at all. They were Irish Catholic and they refused to eat other people because it was wrong. I love them.
Michelle Butler 43:56
Are they survivors of the Potato Famine? They might have had some really pertinent life experience being brought to bear.
Anne Brannen 44:24
Just a sec. Forty-five of the original members of the Donner party survived. Doo doo doo doo. But there was only one family, I think, that refused to refuse to cannibalize. Donner party survivors. Hold on. This was 1847. How long had they been here? No, I don’t think so.
Michelle Butler 44:48
Probably not. The Potato Famine is happening from 1845 to 1852. They would have to have left pretty early.
Anne Brannen 44:58
Yeah. No. Who was it? The Breens? Much of what we know–I’m on Irish echo.com–much of what we know about the Donner party saga comes from Patrick Breen, who kept a daily diary chronicling their struggle to survive. The following entry is typical: “January 1, 1847. We prayed the God of mercy to deliver us from our present calamity if it be His Holy Will. Amen. Commenced snowing last night, does not snow fast. Winds southeast. Sun peeps out at times. Provisions getting scant. Dug up a hide from under the snow yesterday.” They prayed daily. They exhibited such faith that there was a 13 year old, Virginia Reed, who they were taking care of and she became a Catholic. She made a vow that she was going to become a Catholic if she survived, and she did. One of the things they did was they did ration. They rationed really, really carefully. But they refused. They refused. They prayed to God and refused to eat other people. So yeah, context. The Donner party. Sorry for the little segue. The Irish Catholic family that survived the Donner party famine, and refused to eat other people. They behaved well. See, it’s not just people behaving badly. Occasionally, they really behave well. Yay. They missed one famine and got another.
Michelle Butler 46:27
Sheesh. Poor bastards.
Anne Brannen 46:31
Is that fair? I don’t think so.
Michelle Butler 46:34
This was super interesting.
Anne Brannen 46:36
I liked this a lot. This was really good stuff to know. Especially as, as you say, context for the entire century that comes after.
Michelle Butler 46:48
I was sympathetic to Edward the second before but I’m more sympathetic. That man could not catch a break from the beginning to the end of his reign.
Anne Brannen 46:58
I already really liked that his favorite hobby was digging ditches. I find that highly admirable. I’ve decided to be an Edward the second fan. Basically, it’s just nothing but lies told about him, or things that are true then kind of like disguised by not thinking about them. Lies. Lies, lies.
Michelle Butler 47:20
It was going to a problem no matter what, because being Edward the first’s child…what I mean is, Edward the first was such a force of nature and he kept his nobles under such a tight rein that Edward the second was just basically destined to have problems with his nobles because they had some itchy rebellion that had been building up. There’s always tension between the central government and the barons, and they had been cowed by Edward the first and they were ready to resist Edward the second. They were already primed to do that. But this did not help.
Anne Brannen 48:01
Yes, and I will say that it is not Edward the second’s fault that he’s the first English Prince of Wales. It’s not his fault.
Michelle Butler 48:12
He made bad choices in his favorites. That’s definitely true.
Anne Brannen 48:18
Totally. If you have two in a row of just complete stupidity. We refer you to our previous podcasts, not just the one about the murder of Edward the second where we talk about what’s his name? Gaveston. But also the one that we entitled ‘The Sheer Dreadfulness of Hugh Despenser.’ It is Despenser, isn’t it?
Michelle Butler 48:40
Yep. He’s awful. He’s just dreadful.
Anne Brannen 48:43
Who was Edward’s other favorite and really should not have been part of anything at all because he was so bad. Yes. Edward did not have good taste in friends. He did not. But it wasn’t his fault he was Prince of Wales, I will say this. That was something that his dad had cooked up.
Michelle Butler 48:59
He attempts to do what he can with the famine. He makes all the nobles mad by passing a degree that they are not supposed to have more than two courses.
Anne Brannen 49:14
I’d forgotten that.
Michelle Butler 49:15
At their feasts. They’re all like, ‘what the hell, man?’ Because it was normally five to seven. How dare you expect this of us.
Anne Brannen 49:24
Yes. Okay. So there’s a lot of things that we agree on for things we just simply despise but I think that we can agree that we are fans of Edward the second and we think that he has been mistreated by history. So say we all.
Michelle Butler 49:41
I think that he is used as the foil for Edward the first and Edward the third in ways that are unfair.
Anne Brannen 49:48
Hmm, huh. Yeah, it’s true. The first and the third both get a lot of things done. That is true.
Michelle Butler 49:56
But they do the same thing to Isabella. She gets made into the She-wolf. Jeez.
Anne Brannen 50:04
True. But we do have to point out that when she found out that her sisters-in-law had been having affairs with the Norman knights, did she keep her mouth shut? No, she went and told her daddy and then he had to kill everybody and put people in prison. We refer you to our previous podcast. So, you know, Isabella, I don’t know if I’m willing to give a pass to Isabella. But Edward, yes.
Michelle Butler 50:31
That’s complicated, though. If she can discredit all of her brothers’ heirs, then her son could become king of both England and France. What ambitious mother wouldn’t do that.
Anne Brannen 50:42
Who wouldn’t get her two sisters in law put in prison and some young Norman knights killed off, why not?
Michelle Butler 50:54
In deadful, dreadful ways. Oh, my God.
Anne Brannen 50:56
Maybe she thought that he was just kind of going to give them a little slap on the wrist and let everybody go. We refer you to our previous podcast. What else did Phillip do? The Templars–
Michelle Butler 51:12
He slaughter the Templars. He steals their stuff, and then he holds on to it forever. During the whole time of the famine. He doesn’t give them their stuff until 1322. He doesn’t give the Templars’ stuff to the Hospitallers, which he was supposed to have done, until after the famine is over. He holds on to the all that money.
Anne Brannen 51:38
We refer you to a previous podcast, Philip kills off the Knights Templar, but also kind of like peripherally the murder of Marguerite Porete. Because remember Phillip was under that.
Michelle Butler 51:52
That’s actually one of the things that’s interesting about this. It is background for a whole bunch of things we’ve already talked about. It explains a lot to me about why people were so on edge. Well, I mean, I think Philip was just sort of a rat bastard in general.
Anne Brannen 52:10
He was horrible. Yes. Philip was just bad. Yeah, but Edward the second was fine. Edward the second, yes, Philip? No. Isabel. Hmmm. All right.
Michelle Butler 52:22
I think she was her father’s daughter.
Anne Brannen 52:25
I do too. And I do not mean that as a compliment. Hmm. So are we done with our famine?
Michelle Butler 52:33
Yep. Yeah. This is terrible, but during this reading, I could feel myself getting stressed by it. When you don’t have a good relationship with food, you do a bunch of work convincing yourself like, ‘I’m okay. This is an artificial shortage. But reading about the famine made me very stressed. Because I kept thinking I needed to go eat something, even though it wasn’t true. But you spend all this time convincing yourself that everything’s gonna be fine. Then you read about the famine and it’s like, ‘No, it’s not always fine. There’s a reason I have these instincts.’
Anne Brannen 53:17
Yeah, famine is very, very scary. Very scary. I was telling Michelle–Michelle was here and was hanging out in Albuquerque–and we were telling her that my family is descended from a man that survived the Irish famine, and we take our food very seriously. It’s our motto. We will never starve again, please pass the Doritos.
Michelle Butler 53:18
There’s a reason that people have these kind of instincts to eat when it’s available. Because until quite recently, you were one bad harvest away from not having a good time.
Anne Brannen 53:59
And as we have reiterated during this particular session, even with all the technology that we’ve got, you can’t fix three years of nothing but rain. You cannot make your wheat give you a 30 to 1 ratio of seed if you’ve got this much rain, and that’s not something we can do. We can’t take care of that. We can’t do it.
Michelle Butler 54:26
Yeah, I like I say, I’ve just been shocked at the number of scholars who want to blame these people for their suffering because I know for a fact that if the two calamities of the 14th century hit us, we would do just as poorly. We all know this for a fact now after the last three years of COVID. If something as deadly as the Black Death hit us, we would be in serious trouble.
Anne Brannen 54:50
Well, the Black Death, we can cure with antibiotics. But yeah, the viruses are a whole nother thing. Side note. The bubonic plague still exist, and we have it in my state. It exists in rodents, the prairie dogs, the rodent population in the desert. Mostly, people in America do not die of the Black Death. But occasionally they do, especially if they are archaeologists and go and visit New Mexico and go home and are ill, and nobody knows what it is.
Michelle Butler 55:25
Oh.
Anne Brannen 55:26
I used to have a button. I don’t know where it is now–damn, somebody stole it–that read, ‘New Mexico, Land of the Flea, Home of the Plague.’ Children on the Navajo reservations, for instance, will get bit by fleas that have been feasting on plague-ridden rodents, and you got to get them into hospitals. That is often hard going because that is often long long roads and no hospitals nearby. So yeah, so it’s a problem. We can treat it. That’s the deal. COVID, we had to actually build an entire arsenal for.
Michelle Butler 56:21
It’s viruses that would take us out, not a bacteria unless it’s a resistant one. I just meant that a lot of the discussions I see of this are contemptuous of how well they responded, how well they did, the governmental functioning, and a lot of laughing up their sleeve at the way people freaked out, with the flagellents and the other attempts to placate the universe that we see happen. Some of that happened too, actually with the plague. There was a lot of public processions carrying relics, trying to placate God. You see that getting talked about as, ‘haha, the superstitious people.’ But the things that we saw with COVID suggest to me that we would do no better.
Anne Brannen 57:15
Well, we haven’t done any better with COVID. The people are the same. Technology changes, but the people don’t.
Michelle Butler 57:27
Even with all of our farming technology, if it rained 100 inches, we would be in serious trouble.
Anne Brannen 57:33
No, that just was awful.
Michelle Butler 57:35
The last several years, it’s been very rainy in June where my brother lives and he’s a farmer. It’s been a real problem. Even with modern tractors, if it’s too rainy, you cannot get in the field to sow your crop.
Anne Brannen 57:50
You can’t. You can’t. It seems like it isn’t as delicate as it is. But there really is just a certain kind of range within which you get things done. You need some rain, but not too much.
Michelle Butler 58:06
Even if you do get seeds in the ground, if it rains again and washes them out, or if they rot, nothing good has happened. Maybe this is why we’re so bad about how we talk about these things, because these two historical things would totally do us in also if we got them.
Anne Brannen 58:24
Yes, I’m very grateful that we were able to put together vaccinations for COVID as quickly as we were. That was very impressive. That was extraordinarily impressive. All those scientists around the globe working together and getting that done. I thought it was gonna take years. The Great Famine. I was glad to learn about it. Although I’m really pissed off at a bunch of scholars now. When am I not?
Michelle Butler 58:47
You and I have been medievalists for decades now, and it’s unusual to run across something that “this changes everything.’ This changes everything.
Anne Brannen 58:52
This changes everything. I now have a much more comprehensive view of a century that I really knew a lot about. Yeah, it was cold. A little winter came, and it lasted for a while. You could go skating on the Thames. You can’t do that now. It never ices over. But it used to freeze solid.
Michelle Butler 59:18
This really does change everything for me. I wonder about things like the cycle plays. Can it possibly be a coincidence that these giant public processions start in the late 14th century? That feels really connected to me to the propitiation…let’s do the big public homage, to try to make it so we don’t have to do this again.
Anne Brannen 59:47
“Dear God, we really love you. Here is our giant play, which we really spend a lot of money on all year.”
Michelle Butler 59:57
“Please look with favor on your people’s offering.”
Anne Brannen 1:00:00
A lot of factors go into the creation of those plays. But yeah, the generational trauma coming from the Great Famine, and then the Black Death. And that’s extraordinary. It’s extraordinary trauma across Europe.
Michelle Butler 1:00:18
I think it’s similar to the First World War and the Second World War.
Anne Brannen 1:00:25
Yeah. Yeah. Nothing is ever the same after that.
Michelle Butler 1:00:28
They’re back to back. They’re a generation apart. If you live through it, you’re not okay.
Anne Brannen 1:00:37
No, there’s all kinds of ways of trying to make it not happen. Again, thank you for putting this on the list. By the way, we have topics for a whole nother year. We’ve been doing this for more than three years now. We’ve got a whole nother year coming. So if you are enjoying our little discussions into history and in scholarship, there’ll be more. There’ll be more. Have we dealt with the Black Death and the Great Famine and bad scholarship?
Michelle Butler 1:01:03
I don’t have anything else. I did a very real quick search to try to find historical fiction, but there doesn’t have to be anything.
Anne Brannen 1:01:12
No. If we were doing crime rates in the Black Death, we would have to do three sessions to talk about the popular literature but no, nobody, nobody does the famine.
Michelle Butler 1:01:22
This is actually where Rosen is correct. This did get memory-holed. That piece is correct.
Anne Brannen 1:01:28
Now, here’s what I want. I want somebody to make a movie. A good movie, not stupid movie. Don’t blame the peasants. A movie or some historical fiction concerning the Great Famine. That’s what I would like. I would like to see that please. I can’t do it, because I don’t do that kind of thing. Michelle can’t do it because she does historical fiction but only about things that didn’t exist, if I’m getting this right.
Michelle Butler 1:01:52
My tendency is more towards historical-based fantasy. I’m not saying I won’t ever circle back to it. But I find that I have a lot of anxiety about making errors. So I’m better off to do historical-based fantasy.
Anne Brannen 1:02:07
But you could do the Great Famine because apparently nobody–except the one book you read– nobody knows anything. It’s conjecture and stupidity. Except for Jordan, so you could do that. You could have a chronicler trying to get things right, and you know, people keep telling him stupid stories.
Michelle Butler 1:02:08
They’re eating babies three towns over.
Anne Brannen 1:02:11
They totally ate all the babies. Then they took the toddlers and stuck them in the forest. It was horrible. We tried to stop them. But we were too weak from the famine. 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 Stitcher and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts hang out. If you want to get a hold of us directly we’re at True Crime Medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. You can leave comments there and you can reach us through there. We’d love to hear from you. Especially if you have any crimes, medieval crimes, that you think we should pay attention to. We also do occasionally do special episodes where we do early modern because there’s some stuff that we just can’t bear not to talk about. For instance, the murder of Kit Marlowe, we did that. Referring to our earlier podcast, the murder of Kit Marlowe. But yeah, we’ll keep going. Don’t send us any kind of crimes that actually didn’t exist and somebody made them up because they thought that everybody in the Middle Ages was stupid because we just we’re not going to do them because we don’t think they happen. We’ll mention them. Cannibalism. Uh-uh.
Michelle Butler 1:03:53
Or maybe for for April Fool’s Day. Sometimes we do that.
Anne Brannen 1:03:57
Yeah, we do April Fool’s. We refer you to our previous podcast on Droit de Seigneur. No, it didn’t exist. I’m gonna go eat lunch. That’s it for us. Bye.
Michelle Butler 1:04:06
Bye.
74. Dafydd Gam ap Llewelyn ap Hywel kills his kinsman Richard Fawr ap Dafydd, Brecon High Street, Wales late 14th Century
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 0:38
We are very happy today for various sorts of reasons. We’re very happy today with our topic. I’ve been looking forward to this since we started. Today we are discussing…the discussion really isn’t going to be about the crime but the crime is that Dafydd Gam Ap Llewelyn Ap Hywel, sometime around 1413 or so, murdered his kinsmen, Richard Farr Ap Dafydd on the Brecon High Street in Wales. So that’s the crime. It really did happen. It’s not one of those crimes…sometimes we have crimes that didn’t actually happen. This one really did. Michelle’s going to talk more about that later. But really, what we want to talk about mostly, is the context. So that’s the crime. He was his kinsmen. Dafydd Gam is honored amongst the English for his service at Agincourt. You might think that if there’s a medieval Welshman who’s honored by the English, he’s maybe not honored by the Welsh, and you would be right. Davy Gam. This is Davy Gam. We’re gonna talk about Davy Gam and Owen Glendower. So before he killed his kinsmen…and by the way, Richard Farr was not only his third cousin once removed, they were both descended from Einion Sais who had fought under Edward the third, hence the ‘Sais’, which means Saxon, it means like he could speak English and he hung out with English. He was also the father of his brother, Willem’s, wife, Cecily. So they’re fairly closely related. We don’t know what the quarrel was about. We just know that there was a quarrel. He paid the weregild and then he fled the country. He had already been captured by Owen Glendower and ransomed by Henry the fourth of England. So we’re going to go back and get our context. Dafydd Gam was born into a Welsh family that had become powerful through their alliance with the English, as mentioned earlier. Einion Said had fought under Edward the third. He had been both at the Battle of Crecy and the Battle of Poitiers. The family continued its alliance with the English crown and the de Bohuns, who were marcher lords in Brecon as well as being earls of Hereford. Who cares about that, that’s not Wales. So when Henry Bolingbroke became Lord of Brecknock, on account of marrying Mary de Bohun, they were of course loyal to him. Daffyd Gam was being paid an annuity by Henry before he became king. When he overthrew Richard the second and became king Henry the fourth, Daffyd Gam was one of the king’s esquires. So naturally, when Owen Glendower led his rebellion in 1400, Daffyd Gam opposed him. Now more context, because, you know, what the hell. Owen Glendower had been born in the marches to a family descended from several royal Welsh families, and he was fostered by either David Hanmer, or Richard Fitz Alan so he knew the English, and he studied law at Londo. He went into military service for the king, serving King Richard the second under John of Gaunt, and was later a squire for Henry the fourth. He finally returned to his Welsh estates, where he was for some years, but then some stuff happened. The English Parliament didn’t hear a petition that he filed for redress of wrongs because Baron Grey had taken some of his lands and later that same Englishman called him a traitor for not sending troops to Scotland, though was Baron Grey who hadn’t told him of the command to send troops. And again, Owen’s petition against him wasn’t heard by the court. So that was it, really. In September of 1400, Glendower started the Welsh revolt against Henry the fourth, which would last 15 years. Glendower seized castles throughout Wales and got support from Scotland and Brittany and France, and his forces defeated Henry the fourth in Glamorgan. Glendower took the title ‘Prince of Powys.’ Powys had been one of the Welsh kingdoms. The revolt spread. The revolt was actually a predecessor to the Cousin’s War–to the War of the Roses. Those are the same people involved. Northern and Central Wales follow Glendower. Hotspur, Henry Hotspur, was sent to quell the rebellion. The king offered an amnesty to everybody but Owen and his relatives, and also the sons of Tudur ap Gronw. Tudur ap Gronw is the forefather of the Tudors. That’s how they get their name. Though the Tudors were pardoned later. Glendower took the title Prince of Wales and he was the last Welshman to hold the title Prince of Wales. After that, it was, you know, the English. Actually it had been the English and then he took it and then it was still the English. Now it’s still the English. William is now Prince of Wales. Now the Welsh who supported Glendower supported him wholeheartedly. The common people sold cattle to buy arms and there were meetings everywhere. Glendower gained more supporters and areas of the country. In response, the English instituted the Welsh Penal Laws in 1402. So the Welsh Penal Laws. Under them, the Welsh were not allowed to bear arms or have castles or hold meetings, or go around singing songs, on account of the bards had been going around singing songs about Owen Glendower and how wonderful he was and about the revolts. So they weren’t allowed to do that anymore. Or convict any Englishman in court–no, no, can’t do that. Nor could they hold offices. These laws did not actually squash the rebellion. They fueled it further, as often happens. It’s just not a good tactic. I’m trying to think in history–“Oh, penals laws, I guess we’ll behave now.” It doesn’t happen. People get pissed. Glendower captured Baron Grey at one point but allowed him to be ransomed. He defeated a force led by Edmund Mortimer and the king wouldn’t ransom Mortimer for various reasons. So Mortimer married one of Glendower’s daughters. Okay, whatever. By this time Glendower was burning Dafydd Gam’s estates in Brecon. Glendower’s estates were lost to Prince Henry. Glendower then was on the move because his home was burnt, and the south and the west joined the rebellion. By 1403, the revolt was national. Welsh university students were leaving Oxford and Cambridge and going back home to fight. Welsh journeyman and laborers who were working in England went home to fight. Very importantly, Welsh archers, who were in the English military, left to go home and fight. Glendower was crowned Prince of Wales in 1404. His plan for an independent Wales–I like this part because this is not just a rebellion, ‘we’re going to take Wales back.’ It’s ‘we’re going to take Wales back and run it better.’ This was the plan. He wanted to build two universities, one in the north and one in the south. He wanted to reinstitute the Welsh laws that had been instituted first by Hywel Dda, and he wanted to establish an independent church in Wales.
Michelle Butler 8:07
That’s interesting. I didn’t know that.
Anne Brannen 8:08
Yeah. He made alliances with Edmund Mortimer, Henry Percy, and the French. Then the French forces withdrew, because France was working toward a peace with England during the Hundred Years War, and the Welsh began to be defeated. They had been doing really well but they began to be defeated. One of the defeats was the Battle of Pwll Melyn in May of 1405, at which 300 of Glendower’s men were executed and his son Griffith was captured. The opposing forces were led by Daffyd Gam.
Michelle Butler 8:39
Ah.
Anne Brannen 8:40
England had greater resources. England had far greater resources, and the Welsh forces began to be ground down. Also the English were using trade blockades and economic sanctions. Edmund Mortimer died in the Seige of Harleth, which fell in 1409. Owen’s wife Margaret, two of his daughters and three of his daughter Katherine’s daughters–so more Mortimer’s daughters–were captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London. Never actually got out. But Glendower escaped during that siege, and he went into the wilderness and continue to wage guerilla war. He actually managed to capture Daffyd Gam again in 1412, and allowed him to be ransomed. After 1413 when King Henry the Fifth took the throne, things changed. Henry the Fifth was more conciliatory. He pardoned leaders of the rebellion and but Glendower wouldn’t accept the pardon. He remained on the run, and he wasn’t seen by the English after 1412. He is reported to have died in 1415. And he’s a national hero in Wales, the leader of the last great Welsh rebellion and the last Welsh Prince of Wales. Davey Gam is not a Welsh hero. After he was released from that second capture by Glendower he told the king where Glendower was and led an attack. Glendower then burnt down Daffyd’s estate in Brecon. They were very…they were very…they were enemies. So if you love Owen Glendower–here’s me, I do–you can’t possibly love Davey Gam. I don’t. But what happened to Daffyd Gam? What happened to Davey Gam? Okay. He fought with the archers for Henry the fifth at Agincourt and he died in the battle. Most of the stories about him are not reliable. One of the stories about him, being posthumously knighted at the battle, concerns him dying whilst saving the life of the king. So maybe, maybe not…but he was probably knighted at the battle or after the battle alive or posthumously, but we don’t know exactly. The whole thing of saving the king may just be Tudor propaganda. He is, in English lore, Davy Gam, loyal to England, valiant Welshman. He’s a stereotype of the acceptable Welshman. As opposed to, you know, the traitorous rebels like Glendower. The stereotype then being that the Welsh were more emotional, they were very pedantic, and they talked funny. Though Davey Gam, and Fluellen in Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth play, also are also brave and loyal. The stereotype is problematic because the king himself was a Tudor, and he was Welsh, so the bravery and loyalty of the former Tudor rebels has become loyalty to the Welsh-English, and also Henry Tudor doesn’t talk funny. He talks like an Englishman. Or at least he doesn’t talk so much like a Welshman. So there we are. Dafydd Gam Ap Llewelyn Ap Hywel killed his kinsmen in the High Street in Brecon, and he went on to kill his countrymen and he became an English hero, and he’s the epitome of the good Welshman. That is, somebody who kills other Welshman when they are traitors, and is loyal to the King. Do I like him? I do not. Over to you, Michelle.
Michelle Butler 12:22
When I was first looking into this, I really wanted to know whether this was a true story. Because I kept finding sites that were talking about it, but not providing how they knew it to be true.
Anne Brannen 12:36
It does kind of sound like one of the made-up crimes that we get that didn’t really happen.
Michelle Butler 12:42
So I wanted to know whether we could trace this any further back than the 19th century, because sometimes…the 19th century was really…there were a lot of people interested in medieval things and not so much interested in sourcing them.
Anne Brannen 12:59
They were interested in an idea of the Middle Ages, not necessarily the Middle Ages.
Michelle Butler 13:03
Exactly. So, you know, the places that were citing an 1862 book called Wild Wales–
Anne Brannen 13:10
Oh, no.
Michelle Butler 13:11
Which doesn’t inspire confidence.
Anne Brannen 13:14
No, no, no. They talk funny. They’re very emotional.
Michelle Butler 13:20
I went to that book and was able to start tracing this back. He gets the story–George Borrow, the author of Wild Wales–gets the story from the Theophilus Jones, who, thank God, has a meaningful name because the last time I had to go try to find a Welsh historian whose last name was Jones, that was, shall we say, a dead end.
Anne Brannen 13:44
Jones is a sort of common name. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 13:47
There’s too many to try to check it down. When I went to look up Theophilus Jones, his book is a history of the county of Brecknock in two volumes, and it’s from, I think, 1812. He got this from Hugh Thomas, who is an antiquarian who lived from 1673 to 1720. He wrote a book about the history of Wales that still exists, but it does not appear to have been published. It appears to exist in manuscript. The manuscript is in the Bodleian, there’s an incomplete copy in the National Library of Wales, but it was known and used by Theophilus Jones. So that’s nice. We’ve got a direct link there. The thing that I find persuasive about this is that his ancestor–Hugh Thomas was using the work of his ancestor Thomas ap John, who died in 1616, and he had written a history of Brecknock. That ancestor is a direct descendant of Gam. So that made me feel like we were on solid ground, that we could get back pretty far, to at least 1616. At that point, we’re within a couple hundred years of the actual event and we’re with his actual family. This is not the sort of story that you would retell if it wasn’t true because it’s not complimentary.
Anne Brannen 15:18
No, it isn’t really. If you’re one of Gam’s, descendants, you might not like it. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 15:26
So I felt reassured, after going through this research, that we were actually talking about a real thing. I needed to source it because it just sounded ridiculous. You know, you kill your kinsmen in the street, because he called you–I’ve all the reading I did said that Gam is a nickname that means squinty eyed or one eyed or something like that.
Anne Brannen 15:51
Essentially, it essentially means lame. The belief with Gam is that it has to do with his eyes.
Michelle Butler 16:00
It just totally sounds ridiculous. So I wanted, you know, sources. I’m kind of a source person.
Anne Brannen 16:07
I like sources too and I don’t usually just believe things, but I did believe this. But then of course, do I think that Daffyd Gam would be somebody who wouldn’t kill his kinsmen in the street? I do not. So there you go.
Michelle Butler 16:23
I was not entirely aware of this kind of internal tension among the Welsh, which I guess I should have been, because we see the same internal tension with the Irish as individual families make the calculation about whether it’s going to be better for them to resist the colonizers or throw in their lot with them.
Anne Brannen 16:41
Yes, it isn’t so simple as one might think.
Michelle Butler 16:45
The other thing I have for you is the extremely bizarre 1941 novel called Owen Glendower, in which Davy Gam shows up as a major character.
Anne Brannen 16:56
So it’s a novel?
Michelle Butler 16:57
It’s a novel. It’s enormous. It’s 980-some pages long.
Anne Brannen 17:05
Do I want to read this? Because I do love Owen Glendower.
Michelle Butler 17:08
It depends on whether your desire to read a novel in which Davy Gam is uniformly portrayed as negative and subhuman is going to outweigh the retrograde prose.
Anne Brannen 17:28
Uh oh.
Michelle Butler 17:30
I’m not saying it’s a bad book. This guy definitely..the author’s name is John Cowper Powys. He’s an interesting dude. He was born in 1872, which means he’s 20 years older than Tolkien. But this book, Owen Glendower, is being published in 1941, so it’s contemporary with The Hobbit. It was written between 1937 and 1939, then the publication was postponed by two years because of the war. He’s an interesting dude to compare to Tolkien, because many things are similar. The writing of giant books, the fascination with the medieval past. They’re very similar. But ultimately, Tolkien writes a better book. So I spent a lot of time wondering, trying to try to figure out exactly what about it makes me conclude, along with everybody else, that Lord of the Rings is a better book. It’s a couple of things. One is that the tone, the narrative tone, of the book towards its main character, is that faux jovial way that Tolkien starts out with in the Hobbit and then decides he hates and abandons. Powys uses this throughout. It ends up being very distancing. You can’t ever really get to like the main character, because you always have the narrative voice in between going, “and now our young hero…”
Oh, no, no, no. But you have to like Owen Glendower.
Oh, he’s not the young hero. The young hero is a 17 year old who was the authorial stand-in, going around and having adventures with Owen Glendower. In fact, I spent quite a lot of time making sure that the hero of this book was not the guy who Davy Gam ended up killing. Because the name is very similar. I just reiterate. 980-some pages long.
Anne Brannen 17:50
[laughter]
Michelle Butler 18:35
The name of the main character in this book is not Owen Glendower. It’s about Owen Glendower. But we’re seeing the world through the eyes of a 17 year old young man who–let me spell his name so we can figure out how to pronounce it–It’s Rhisiart.
Anne Brannen 20:12
Richard.
Michelle Butler 20:13
So you see where the first order of business was to make sure that this guy–he’s the main character, he shows up right at the beginning of the book coming to Wales, he’s of Welsh descent, he’s tangentially related to Owen Glendower–to make sure that he’s not the dead dude.
Anne Brannen 20:36
Because the dead dude was also Richard.
Michelle Butler 20:39
Yes. And of Welsh descent and a cousin. Oh, my gosh. So I got that worked up. He is the stand-in for the reader, who wanders around and meets people and doesn’t know anything, so gets to ask a lot of questions, and has a very bizarre kind of crush. He meets a 16 year old girl right at the beginning, and is overwhelmed by sudden feelings of infatuation. We’re treated to this extremely awkward flirtation.
None of this has anything to do with Owen Glendower.
No. Owen Glendower wanders in and out of the book being heroic. Although there is a very interesting scene, because one of the things we see is Davy Gam’s attempt to murder to assassinate Glendower. And of course, 17 year old hero of the book is the guy who stops him.
Anne Brannen 21:42
Of course he is.
Michelle Butler 21:45
There’s a very interesting scene where Owen Glendower goes to talk to Davy Gam while he has him imprisoned after the assassination attempt. But most of the time what we’re doing is following 17 year old dude, Rhisiart, around and seeing the world through his eyes, and having secondhand embarrassment with his dreadful flirtation.
Anne Brannen 22:08
What an interesting thing. So we’ve got this humongous tome, which theoretically is about Owen Glendower but mostly is about being naive and not knowing things and having bad flirtations. Why, one asks oneself, why did this book get written? Why? One does not know.
Michelle Butler 22:27
Davy Gam is is a big presence in the book and he is nuts. He is across the board negative.
I’m happy with that. Yes.
Here, let me just read you a couple of passages. “What an extraordinary figure the notorious David Gam was. Rhisiart had heard of his prowess as a soldier of fortune attached to the house of Lancaster but it was a surprise to find him a bosom friend of this lord of Nannau…” it’s got to be pronounced some other way. That was Mork and Mindy.
Anne Brannen 23:04
It comes down in English is Nani.
Michelle Butler 23:06
“–who was at least a distinguished looking person. Anything less distinguished, anything less of a gentleman than the famous swashbuckler from South Wales could hardly be imagined. Gam was of abnormally short stature but with arms so muscular and so long as to resemble those of a gorilla. He had the peculiarity of always keeping these simian appendages bare, though they were covered, as indeed was his head and his frequently exposed chest, with red hairs of an animal-like thickness.”
Anne Brannen 23:38
Oh for the love of God. Even I don’t think that we really need to be discussing Davy Gam in these terms.
Michelle Butler 23:44
He is an orangutan, basically.
Anne Brannen 23:44
This is terrible.
Michelle Butler 23:47
He’s constantly compared to a monkey actually. He is constantly described as having thick red hair all over his body, and he’s a gorilla.
Anne Brannen 23:58
Mm hmm.
Michelle Butler 24:01
The other quote that I really like is, “But Gam wasn’t an idiot. He was a person whose identity could only fully be realized when he was squeezing the life out of another person.”
Anne Brannen 24:13
Wow. I think what really strikes me about this is, you know, if you’ve grown up hearing about Davy Gam, or you know him from Shakespeare, you know, Davy Gam, good wonderful Welshman, blahblahblah, you have no idea of the background. You know, his history in Wales. This is so interesting. Because it’s not just thinking of him negatively and disliking him. That would be me. It’s vilifying him in ways that even I don’t think are necessary.
Michelle Butler 24:46
Powys is, like I say, a kind of interesting author. He and his many siblings are the son of a Welsh–they’re not born in Wales, but their father is very proud of his Welsh ancestry. Eventually Powys moves to Wales. That’s where he writes Owen Glendower and then the next book, which is apparently even weirder.
Anne Brannen 25:13
What is the next book?
Michelle Butler 25:14
The next book is set in the sixth century.
Anne Brannen 25:17
Is it also Welsh?
Michelle Butler 25:18
Yep.
Anne Brannen 25:20
What’s going on in this book in the sixth century?
Michelle Butler 25:24
Let me pull that one up.
Anne Brannen 25:25
I want to know this.
Michelle Butler 25:27
There’s a wonderful quote about this in the Atlantic article. So let me scroll down to that…it’s called Porius and it is set in the sixth century. It is so very, very long. It’s so long. Okay, here we go. “Eccentric though its treatment of history may be” — she’s talking there about Owen Glendower’s book–“it seems a conventional tale when compared with Porius: a Romance of the Dark Ages, a work that beggars description. He thought it his best. Set in October 499, it is more like a mountain landscape or an epic poem than a novel. Its characters include King Arthur, a Palegian monk, a Roman matron, a Jewish doctor, the shapeshifting, Merlin, the Bard Taliesin, and a family of completely convincing aboriginal giants who live on the slopes of Snowdon. We also meet the three aunties, gray haired princess survivors of the old race. In this twilight of the Gods, the cult of Mithras, the old faith of the Druids, the fading power of Rome, and the rising force of Christianity, do battle for a week beneath a waxing moon, while Powys’ characters intermittently find time to reflect on past times, and congratulate themselves on being so modern. There is comedy, Miltonic sublimity, chaos, and confusion in equal measure.” I didn’t even try to read that one. I was super busy with Owen Glendower.
Anne Brannen 27:15
Oh my.
Michelle Butler 27:16
This guy’s fascinating. I had never heard of him.
Anne Brannen 27:21
I had not either, to be quite fair.
Michelle Butler 27:24
He’s born in 1872. He dies in 1963. He writes a ton.
Anne Brannen 27:32
So these two giant novels are not the only thing he comes up with?
Michelle Butler 27:35
God, no. He has so many other books. This is probably my favorite quote about him. “Powys’ literary output was so voluminous that upon learning he had died in his 91st year in 1963, one is almost inclined to ask ‘yes, but did he stop writing?’
Anne Brannen 28:00
[laughter]
Michelle Butler 28:01
But all his books aren’t about Wales. It’s the last couple of books that are about Wales. He’s a strange duck. The two articles that I found about him…so nobody knows about him, and yet, there’s a article about him in the Guardian in 2006. There’s a big write up about him in the Atlantic in 2000. So people are circling back to him.
Anne Brannen 28:31
That’s interesting.
Michelle Butler 28:33
The discussion of him is very mixed. The one in the Guardian is titled “The English Degenerate,” and compares him to Tolkien in terms of his breadth of production, the breadth of creation. He apparently also left a lot of diaries in which…they’re full of TMI about his kind of outre tastes, and so people keep coming back to that just apparently to be prurient, I suppose. But in the Atlantic, the title of that one is “An Irresistible Long-winded Bore.” The author…this guy is a fan. He talks about having come across Powys’ 1929 novel called Wolf Solent, which is his first really big…it’s his fourth novel, but its the first one that becomes big. It’s not about wolves. Just FYI. It’s about a guy named Wolf Solent. He says, “one does not read Powys so much as enlist in him.” Because each book is 900 pages long. I think that the 20 years between when he’s born and when Tolkien is born is apparently a really important 20 years because Powys’ style is very much 19th century. He uses more exclamation points in any one page of Owen Glendower then Tolkien uses in the entire Lord of the Rings. Okay, here you go. Feel free to not include any of this because it’s just so off the wall. But the book is really bizarre because it goes back and forth between having little awesome moments and having moments where I’m like, ‘No, I got to put the book aside.’ Here’s an example. He has a really kind of hilarious moment where Rhisiart, having spent a whole day with this girl, thinks he knows all there is to know about women. Here’s how he phrased it. “Rhisiart, who after the experience of the last 12 hours felt that feminine psychology held few secrets for him.” That’s a really funny moment, and very cleverly phrased. Or later, when Rhisiart is convinced he’s going to die. “So strong was his conviction that his end had come that he already felt the arrows piercing his flesh.” Then there’s this, where he is describing the fleas that are biting Rhisiart’s horse. “Wisps of trailing parasitic tendrils, bewildered caterpillars and grubs, feeble brown moths, and flimsy white butterflies clung as he moved–” that’s the horse “–to his hot panting bulk. The vegetable waifs were among these disturbed natives, who entangled themselves in the woolly sheepskin and between the links of jingling armor, while the living insects, including little armadas of drifting midges, seem to ready to drug themselves to death in the sweaty, equine sweat, or risk more violent end between impatient human fingers so long as they could taste for one paradisic instant the inebriating nectar of mortal blood.”
Anne Brannen 31:57
That’s overwritten.
Michelle Butler 31:58
Yes. The writing is so much better when he doesn’t do this. It would have been super nice to have his editor rein him in a little bit. Because he has a perfectly readable author’s historical note. It shifts to an entirely different style, where you’re like, write like that. What are you doing? It’s the 19th century holdover.
Anne Brannen 32:25
Right. Yeah. The bad 19th century holdover, because not all 19th century stuff sounds like that.
Michelle Butler 32:32
Exactly. Exactly. But that is the sort of thing that…Tolkien wrote like that at the beginning of his career, and then realized, I can’t do that. I don’t want to do that. And he pivoted to something else. I want to be real clear. I am not in fact, suggesting that everybody go off and read Owen Glendower, or but you’re welcome to do so if you want to. He is an interesting, interesting dude. He got married really young, then he and his wife realized they did not care for each other. There’s way too much TMI information in the diaries about how the baby came to be conceived, oh, my God, and then they end up not living together. He’s on a lecture circuit in the United States–that’s how he is making his money for a while–and in Joplin, Missouri, he meets a woman who is roughly half his age, because she’s 23, he’s like 44 at that point, and takes up with her. They’re inseparable for the rest of his life. She becomes his most important source of criticism. If she says the book doesn’t work, then he goes back and works on it again. That’s all in the diaries.
Anne Brannen 33:55
Was she approving things at the time at which Owen Glendower was written?
Michelle Butler 33:59
Yes, apparently this passed her muster.
Anne Brannen 34:01
I see. Alrighty, then.
Michelle Butler 34:05
He can write perfectly fine. I was glad to read the historical notes, like, what are you doing? What is this? The historical note is fascinating because it implies a depth of research that doesn’t necessarily show up in the book itself. The author’s note situates Owen Glendower in the entirety of European history at that moment. This is what’s happening over here, this is what’s happening over here. And here’s how what’s happening here is related to all of these big trends.
Anne Brannen 34:48
What does he say?
Michelle Butler 34:50
For example, I pulled this quote out because I like it as an example of him being able to write just fine in a more modern style. “The period that formed the immediate background to the dramatic events related in this tale, 1400 to 1416, saw the beginning of one of the most momentous and startling epochs of transition that the world has known–the transition from the more or less federated Christendom of the Middle Ages to the turbulent evolution of our more modern states.” Throughout he talks about the ways in which Europe is switching from the twin poles of church and King to being much more about nationalism.
Anne Brannen 35:42
So that really kind of puts the rebellion in the context of other things going on in Europe.
Michelle Butler 35:51
This one too, I like because I actually agree with him, his analysis here. “The beginning of the 15th century may justly be described as an era of degenerate faith and degenerate chivalry. It was an age of unscrupulous individualism, but also an age when national self consciousness under independent rulers superseded the old feudal idea of a united Christendom under Emperor and Pope. The dominant note of this epoch was what might be called the cynical use of the masks and symbols of lost ideals to advance shameless personal ends.” That, I think, is a really interesting insight. I agree with him. I think the 15th century is this move into a late medieval time in which people don’t necessarily believe that anymore but they are still using it. I just saw a really interesting book about the Tudors doing that. That the Tudors are very much using all of these medieval symbols to advance their political agenda very, very cynically. I also thought it was useful that he called this “an age of unscrupulous individualism” because Stephen Greenblatt published about 10 years ago a book called The Swerve that argues that there isn’t individualism in the Middle Ages, that thinking about yourself as an individual is a product of the Renaissance.
Anne Brannen 37:17
Mm hmm.
Michelle Butler 37:18
So there’s some deep research hiding underneath all the exclamation points. His book is really useful, though, as something to look at to understand…it’s later than Hemingway, but it’s a good example of the sort of thing that Hemingway is losing his mind about in terms of in terms of advocating for simpler prose.
Anne Brannen 37:39
Oh, yes. Yes. After hearing some of the writings here, one could definitely see why one would advocate for simpler prose.
Michelle Butler 37:50
I’ve always wondered why he has a hate on for adjectives and adverbs, but I understand it better now.
Anne Brannen 37:58
Yeah, our author is using way too many of them. Did you have anything else?
Michelle Butler 38:03
Nope. That is it. Have fun going and looking at John Cowper Powys, who wrote a ton of books.
Anne Brannen 38:11
Well, I enjoyed getting to talk about Owen Glendower, and Davy Gam gave us an excuse to do that. We’ve agreed that we will discuss Agincourt at a later date. But we will focus on war crimes. Today we just have killing your countrymen and being loyal to the English. But yeah, one of the things that we’ve got here is a very clear picture of divided loyalties in a colonized country. There are reasons to side with the English.
Michelle Butler 38:48
We probably should mention Shakespeare because he shows up in Henry the Fifth. That notion of divided loyalty shows up in Henry the Fifth. There’s a really interesting scene where all of the, you know, the Welshman and the Irishman and the Scotsman are all sitting around talking about being hauled into this fight. Was it their fight? He was alive to that in a way that I am surprised by a little bit. Shakespeare really had his ear to the ground about that. Of course, there’s conversation all over the place about Davy Gam being the inspiration for Fluellen in Henry the Fifth. I have no idea whether that’s true.
Anne Brannen 39:33
Yeah, but it might…Davy Gam…
Michelle Butler 39:37
I think it may be more that they’re both of the same type.
Anne Brannen 39:40
Davy Gam and Fluellen are two different people and Fluellen is probably…his name is the English understanding of Llewellyn because they can’t hear the double L, and Flewellyn ap Gruffyd gruff in the Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First had already been on the English stage. So that’s also a possibility.
Michelle Butler 40:09
I’m sure that someone has done some really interesting work about the Welsh on the English stage. I didn’t go look at that. But I’m sure somebody has. But he does show up in Henry the Fifth, and Shakespeare is way nicer to him than Powys.
Anne Brannen 40:34
But it isn’t weird. Shakespeare is English. That’s the thing. What does Daffyd Gam have to offer the Welsh? He fights only for the English. Owen Glendower had fought for the English but then he had a rebellion. But Daffyd Gam never fights for the Welsh.
Michelle Butler 41:02
Yeah, it feels strange, having usually been taught it from the English point of view.
Anne Brannen 41:10
Well, I’m very glad that we–
Michelle Butler 41:12
Got a chance to come at it from a different point of view.
Anne Brannen 41:16
Daffyd Gam has a great many descendants. I’m not one of them. I’m actually descended from Owen Glendower. So hey, I’m happy about that. But he has a great many descendants. His name came down…once the Welsh had to take surnames, they made up surnames from different places and Gam came down Games. So the Games family is descended from him and he has a great many descendants, and they’re proud of their heritage. But he’s not a Welsh hero, and Owen Glendower is. So is that what we have then? So that’s our discussion of that time that Daffyd Gam killed his kinsmen Richard Farr on the high street in Brecon, for reasons that we don’t really know. I mean, the idea is that maybe Farr was calling him names, but I don’t know that that’s true at all. I don’t think I really believe it. I think probably the whole divided loyalty issue is some kind of piece of things. At any rate, he did do that thing. And that was a bad thing. He had to leave Wales because of it. But he had already been hanging out with the English and he was loyal to the English. His family had been loyal to the English for a long time. That’s who he was. And that’s our story. The next time you hear from us, we are going to be discussing a general sort of thing and not just a crime. We want to talk about crime rates or the rise in crime during the Great Famine in Europe, which was from 1315 to 1317. People who were very hungry and then they misbehaved as just one would, wouldn’t one? That seems quite reasonable to me. There you are, that’s what we’ll talk about. 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 Stitcher and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. You can find us at Truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. You can leave comments there. We’d love to hear from you. Let us know if you have medieval crimes that you’d like us to talk about. We’ll take that under consideration. Anything else I’m supposed to say? I don’t remember.
Michelle Butler 43:53
I think that was it.
Anne Brannen 43:54
Bye.
Michelle Butler 44:09
Bye.
69. King Olaf Kills Klerkon in the Market Place, Novgorod, Russia 10th Century
Anne Brannen 0:25
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 0:35
And I’m Michelle Butler. I’m now in Tuscaloosa. I don’t have a great tagline yet, because I’ve only been here like two weeks.
Anne Brannen 0:43
Oh, you’ll come up with one, I’m sure.
Michelle Butler 0:45
I will figure something out. But right now, I don’t even have a desk yet. I’m sitting on the floor of my bedroom, trying to find a quiet place to record.
Anne Brannen 0:56
I’ve got no tagline for Albuquerque, now that I come to think of it. Anyway, I will leave you to that. Today–we’re actually both really excited about this for different reasons. Today, we’re discussing the time that King Olaf Tryggvason–he wasn’t king yet, he was only about nine years old–but at any rate, Olaf Tryggvason killed Klerkon in the marketplace of Novgorod in the 10th century, sometime in the 10th century. We’re in Novgorod, which is now Russia, but wasn’t then. More on that later. Olaf was born sometime in the 960s in either Norway or the Orkney Islands, which is now part of Scotland, but at that time was a part of Norway. The Norwegians had taken it from the Picts. At any rate, he was born in one of those two places, but he was in Orkney as a young child, because his mother, Astrid Eiriksdatter, had fled there when Olaf’s father, Tryggve Olafson, had been killed at the Battle of Fitjar by Harald Greycloak, who was then taking over Norway. Okay, so Astrid was in Orkney with her son Olaf, our protagonist. Or maybe not Orkney, depending on which saga you’re reading. But Astrid fled from wherever she was to Uppland in Norway proper, where her dad lives, so that was, you know, a good place to go. Then she went to Sweden, but Harald Greycloak was still sending people after them, So Astrid decided to go to Novgorod, where she had connections because her brother was there. He was serving Vladimir the Great, who at that time, was Prince of Novgorod. But later he was going to be king of the Kievan Rus. It was very exciting to me to do all this because we worked with the Kievan Rus when we did our ‘that time that St. Olga massacre the Devlins’ podcast, but–
Michelle Butler 3:01
I was thinking about that too.
Anne Brannen 3:03
That’s his grandmother? great-grandmother? Grandmother. Yes. I think it’s his grandmother. I liked this because it gave me more of a chance to think about not so much the founding of the Kievan Rus as what happened to it later. What its relationship was with what’s now Russia. Okay, sidebar. I’m gonna explain the places. Kyiv was the main city of the Kievan Rus, which had been founded by the Varangian Norseman Oleg, who conquered the lands around Kyiv. He had that all down by about 885. Oleg’s nephew and successor, Igor, was Vladimir’s grandfather, and Saint Olga was married to Igor, so yeah, his grandmother, and the reason Vladimir, who would later be the ruler of the Kievan Rus, was in Novgorod was that Novgorod–that means new city, by the way. I love these ancient towns that are called ‘new city,’ like New Market in England. It’s not that recent–it was originally Oleg’s home base. He had gone from there to Kyiv and assimulated the territories that became the Kievan Rus. He was in Novgorod because Rurik, his brother and predecessor, and the Norse ruler of Kyiv, had been invited in 862 to rule Novgorod. Why? Because the tribes around Novgorod had rebelled against the Varangian Norse and driven them out of the area. So, you know, no more Vikings for you, haha. But then they fell apart because they were having all these wars. So they invited the Varangians back–‘dear Vikings, come back to rule us because you apparently have law.’ So that’s why the ruler of the Kievan Rus was in Novgorod. It was the second most important city in the Kievan Rus after Kyiv. Okay. Kievan Rus. Kyiv. Novgorod. Did you get all that, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 5:14
Okay.
Anne Brannen 5:18
That was my sidebar.
Michelle Butler 5:19
Trying to follow.
Anne Brannen 5:20
Where’s Moscow? Not here, Moscow, not happening. Novgorod. Kievan Rus. Okay. So Astrid took her child and she sailed off across the Baltic Sea to go see her brother in Novgorod, where she was going to be safe. Olaf at that time was about three years old. Alas. Estonian Vikings–that would be Vikings from Oeselia, which is now part of Estonia, who were not acting as Vikings so much as pirates–captured their ship and either killed everybody or enslaved them. Exactly what happened to Astrid we do not know but it wouldn’t have been good whatever it was. Olaf–little Olaf, three years old–and his foster brother, older than that, were taken by an Estonian Viking named Klerkon. Klerkon sold the boys to some guy named Klerk and Klerk sold them to some guy named Reas. For six years, they were slaves in Estonia. All right. But Vladimir of Novgorod–you remember, that was the ruler where our Astrid was headed to, whose court had sent Sigurd Eirikson to collect taxes in Estonia. You might be noticing that he and Astrid, Eric’s daughter, were both children of men called Eric. [SWAWK] Were they the same man? (That was my parrot.) Were they both children–[SQUAWK] Thanks. You naughty girl. She went to the vet yesterday. That was the first time and I was afraid that she was going to regress. But when she got home, she wanted kisses from Laura and she was very happy, so she thinks she’s home here. Anyway, he and Astrid, Eric’s daughter, were both children of guys named Eric. Was that the same person? Yes, they were. This is Sigurd, Astrid’s brother, the person that she was trying to get to. Anyway, so Sigurd noticed that one of the slaves didn’t seem to look like everybody else, we’re told. When he asked the boy about his family, Olaf told him that he was the son of Tryggvi Olafsson and Astrid, Eric’s daughter. So Sigurd bought Olaf and his foster brother from Reas, and took them back to Novgorod. Okay. I want to say something here. Olaf was three years old when he was captured, and that he knew the names of his parents really impresses me no end. But maybe his foster brother told him who they were, because, you know, three year old people are not going to be able when they’re nine to say, you know, my dad was Tryggvi. Did you catch that, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 8:14
I was not really thinking about this as real history to be honest. I was reading the story versions of it and noticing the ways in which his story hits so many of the hero’s journey points. I think this is a complicated…this is one of these places where you have a foot in history, you have a foot in legend–
Anne Brannen 8:41
And where exactly the line is, who knows.
Michelle Butler 8:44
Right? Because Ragnar shows up in here and we’re pretty sure he wasn’t a real person. But the people who are thought to be his sons, we know were real people.
Anne Brannen 8:53
Yes. I just want to say that as far as legend goes, it’s a little unbelievable to have Olaf…but this is the story. His uncle’s like, Oh, here’s a child of my sister, wherever the hell she is, I gather at the bottom of the sea…But then we come to our crime. Apparently it’s fairly soon after that. One day, he saw Klerkon in the marketplace at Novgorod, and he whacked him on the head with an axe and killed him. Okay. There’s another piece here. Klerkon took him when he was three, and then he sold him. How did Olaf recognize him? But so then I thought, well, maybe all these Estonian pirates hang out together, they have dinners and whatnot, and so over the six years that Olaf was in Estonia, maybe he saw Klerkon. I don’t know. But at any rate, this is another problematic piece of the legend. So that was the crime. That was our crime. It was very bad. Enslaving him and doing God knows what to his mom, that apparently was not a crime, but whacking him over the head with an axe in the marketplace, not good at all. That was wrong, and so Olaf fled the marketplace. There was a mob on his heels. [SQUAWK] And he went to the to the palace. [SQUAWK] Good lord. Blanca, Blanca. [SQUAWK] Why don’t you come here? [SQUAWK] You have never been part of this before. Is this the new jet? Is this what we’re doing now, we’re being part of things? Yeah, that is a loved bird. She bites me every time she sees me. And he went to the palace where Allogia, Vladimir’s aueen, protected him and paid his blood money. So the mob went away. Okay, having a little segue here. I’m going to tell you some about blood money. Blood money is a payment made by an offender to the kinsmen of a victim. Usually, this is murder. The wergild system, which is what we’re using here, was common across Scandinavia and the Germanic areas. Laws set the fines. There’s a scale for the payments. There were some crimes that you couldn’t pay for. Rape, for instance, or killing somebody in the church or in the royal palace grounds. That’s just death penalty. You can’t give money for that. The scale varied, and we don’t know exactly how much Queen Allogia paid. But there’s a scale from about 200 CE and so here it is. If you kill a freedman, you have to pay six ounces of gold. A son of a freedman is eight ounces. A bonder–a rural householder–12 ounces; a landowner, 24 ounces; a marshal, 48 ounces; and an earl or a bishop, 96 ounces. If you kill somebody royal, they just kill you. Okay, so that’s your blood money. That’s the story.
Michelle Butler 11:49
You have to have this because you’re dealing with societies that don’t have prisons.
Anne Brannen 11:54
Yes. They didn’t have prisons. They had to just deal with things as they were. You either die or you get something cut off or you give us some money.
Michelle Butler 12:03
There’s a there’s a whole infrastructure of law enforcement that we take for granted that just doesn’t exist.
Anne Brannen 12:10
Yeah. It sounds, because there isn’t a prison system, it sounds lawless, but it’s not lawless. There was laws. It was really clear. At any rate, she paid the blood money, and so then everything was fine. So that’s the crime. But what happened later? You always want the context. Because Olaf will end up being King of Norway. But at the moment, he’s nine years old in the marketplace in Novgorod, hanging out with his uncle. Here’s what happened. Vladimir gave Olaf command over his soldiers after he got a little older, but tensions grew between them. Olaf was like popular or something. So Olaf left Novgorod and he took up raiding the ports in the area. Why not? He married the queen of Wendland, we’re told, and he took control of that area. There were areas that had been refusing to pay taxes and so he conquered them. But she died three years later, and he was very upset. So he went and raided all around for a while because he was so upset. During that time, he apparently converted to Christianity, although I don’t think that has much to do with stopping the raidings, so whatever. Then he married the queen of Dublin, which was at that point ruled by the Norse. Okay, fair enough. He became king of Dublin. The King of Norway heard that there was a Norwegian king of Dublin, so he sent someone to find out how things stood. But that guy convinced Olaf that he could conquer the Norwegian King. Everybody hated him. His name was Haakon, by the way. So Olaf went to Norway, where Haakon and one of his slaves were in hiding because there had been a rebellion because everybody hated him, and the rebels joined up with Olaf as their king. Olaf ordered a big old reward for Haakon’s head and Haakon’s slave cut Haakon’s head off and took it to Olaf, who rewarded him by cutting his head off. Da-da-da-da! So Olaf ruled all of Norway and he made everybody be Christians. He baptized Leif Erickson, by the way, that’s a nice little footnote. He finally died in battle fighting the combined naval forces of several of the areas that he had conquered, because did they just lay down and roll over? No, they didn’t. There was more fighting. That was the year 1000. There’s a lovely statue of him–I might use this for our picture–in the city of Trondheim, depicting him standing over the head of the slave who had decapitated Haakon. By the way, when Olaf died in battle, the way he died in battle was he threw himself overboard, so many people believed he survived. All over the known European world and the Holy Land people kept seeing him for about another 50 years. So that’s Olaf. But one more little bit because we had the Kievan Rus earlier. Whatever happened to the Kievan Rus? Are they over there where there’s a war going on right now? No, they’re not–that’s Ukraine and Russia. Where’s the Kievan Rus? Because that’s where they were–Ukraine and Belarus and pieces of Russia. So what happened to them? Here’s my last segway. Vladimir the Great was ruler of the Kievan Rus–that’s the end of the Varangian period. Kyiv was a wealthy crossroads because the east-west overland trade route went through there, and Novgorod linked the Baltic Sea to the trade route going to Baghdad. So the Kievan Rus was a really wealthy area. Yaroslav the Wise, Vladimir’s son, connected the Rus to the rest of Europe by marrying his daughters off to various kings. This includes the King of Norway. But after his death, the Kievan Rus began to disintegrate. There were internal wars, the fall of Constantinople–that was one of the main trading partners. So that was gone. The Crusades affected the trade routes. Novgorod, which still controled the trade routes that it had up there in the north, became independent. A region which would become Moscow broke away, and other principalities broke away. Finally the Moscow Duchy absorbed Novgorod and the rest of the North, Kyiv became less and less powerful, besieged and sacked by various sources. Moscow was the end of the Kievan Rus. So there you go.
Michelle Butler 12:10
I thought this was a really interesting comparison with Olga, because Olga and Olaf’s mom end up in very similar situations. There are very interesting analogues. Olga’s husband’s been killed, and she manages to hold on to power and protect the son long enough for him to grow up and be able to come into his kingdom, but Astrid has to flee after the death of her husband.
One of the differences between them is that she is not actually royal. They’re connected to the royalty, but she doesn’t have any soldiers at her command and Olga did.
That’s an important piece if you’re gonna try to hold on.
Anne Brannen 17:27
We know from the stories that Olga was getting…other people were helping, you know, by digging big trenches to put the emissaries in and besieging the city and whatnot. Yeah, she needed soldiers. And Astrid did not have that. She had been attached to one court. [SQUAWK] She was trying to get to another.
Michelle Butler 17:50
Bianca really has opinions.
Anne Brannen 17:53
Blanca.
Michelle Butler 17:54
Blanca. She has opinions about this today. This is really funny. She’s never done this before.
Anne Brannen 18:00
No, she never has. She doesn’t talk. She just screams. Some Goffin’s cockatoos talk. The males talk and some of the females do, but she doesn’t. She just screams. [SQUAWK] Hey, little one. Her feathers are beginning to grow out.
Michelle Butler 18:23
She just wants to be part of the conversation.
Anne Brannen 18:26
[SQUAWK! SQUAWK! SQUAWK! ] This may go on for a while. I don’t know what she thinks is going on.
Michelle Butler 18:29
She reminds me a little bit about trying to talk to my kid when his cat’s present.
Anne Brannen 18:39
The animals have a life of their own. We’ve got a cardigan Corgi puppy coming in. So you know, that’s going to add to the chaos.
Michelle Butler 18:48
So mostly what I did with this was look at the literature that is connected with with Olaf.
Anne Brannen 18:57
Were there any operas?
Michelle Butler 18:59
There are!
Anne Brannen 19:00
I said this facetiously. I thought for sure no.
Michelle Butler 19:04
There is everything. The retellings of Olaf story are quick afterwards. We know that things existed, even though they don’t survive now. In this way, it’s like Olga too. We know the story started being told but what survives is later and then the it just keeps… This is a living story. I found storytellers on YouTube from now who tell his story as part of their Ren Faire.
Are they telling like the whole life or are they focusing on one piece of it?
It’s the whole story. The killing of Klerkon is really interesting. I thought it was really interesting because I was trying to piece out what exactly he’s taking revenge for. I don’t think it’s the enslavement because he doesn’t go back and kill the person who bought him. This is about the killing of his foster father. This is a blood feud. When Klerkon captured the boys, he killed the foster father that was with them. He decided he was too old to take as a slave. So he killed him in front of the kids when they’re originally captured.
Anne Brannen 20:28
Oh, right. Okay. All right. [trilling and squawking] So it’s Klerkon who kills–would you guys cut this out? Yellow, it’s okay. It’s okay. Do not do that anymore. That was very naughty. What she likes to do is–
Michelle Butler 20:48
So both birds are there?
Anne Brannen 20:48
Oh, yeah. Yeah. They have different cages. But she can reach him in places and she likes to feed him things and share her toys with him and bite him. Yeah, that’s what you do. That’s what you do. You bite him. He loves her. I don’t know if you can hear him. Can you hear the little liquid sounds? He loves her. She’s beautiful. They’re different species. He’s an Amazon. She’s a cockatoo.
I can hear him trilling. It’s not really as loud as her screaming.
We had not heard him do that until she got here.
Michelle Butler 21:37
He’d been doing that kind of chirp, chirp. He wasn’t trilling like that.
Anne Brannen 21:43
Yeah. Yeah, this little liquid trilling is just delightful. I think I might actually close this, missy, so that you don’t get him anymore. There you go. Yeah. Sucks to be you. I love that bird. I’m glad she’s here because she’s loved and she’s safe. She doesn’t pull her feathers out anymore. And, you know, she adores Laura. The rescue parrots, you know, a year after you get them, you discover who they are. It really takes a while, because they live so long and they have to come to trust you, that you’re actually somebody that they’re going to stay with. When I took her to the vet yesterday, she was going around, around, around in the crate. She was so upset. We went to the vet and then we came back and she’s in the crate going home, and she was perfectly still and she just looked out the little window. I don’t know, I mean, I’ve never taken her to the vet before. Did she know that we were coming home? I don’t know. But she was so glad to get home.
Michelle Butler 22:55
Maybe that’s part of what she’s doing today. She’s talking this much because she’s asserting that she’s home.
Anne Brannen 23:02
I think so. I think so. You know, after her beloved owner died, and she was getting passed around. I’m sure that all his kids…I mean, of course they hated this. Who wants a screaming cockatoo in your house if it’s not something you chose? So she probably got into a lot of trouble for just being herself. Not even mentioning like biting everybody. Yeah, well, she’s doesn’t bite Laura. But she bites me. And Yellow. So now she just to gets to be her, so she was screaming. Where were we? She’s playing with her toy now. We got a minute.
Michelle Butler 23:41
We were talking about the killing…I was wanting to circle back to the killing and talk a little bit about what Olaf was doing.
Anne Brannen 23:52
So you’re thinking that it’s not about killing Klerkon for enslaving him. It’s for killing the foster father. Yes, that actually makes sense.
Michelle Butler 24:02
Things that I read…some said one and some said the other–or, to be more honest, I think people assume it’s about the injury done to him in the enslavement. But other people, who I tend to agree with, think it’s more of revenge killing. Taking people and enslaving them is part of their culture if you capture somebody, but being able to kill somebody who has killed a family member is also part of their culture.
Anne Brannen 24:32
That actually makes so much sense to me. I hadn’t thought of that. But that makes a lot of sense. It’s actually kind of in line–It’s separate from wergild, but it’s the same kind of concept. You owe me. You hurt my kinsmen, and you owe me it.
Michelle Butler 24:49
It is semi-sanctioned revenge.
Anne Brannen 24:53
But the mob in Novgorod, they’re not down with this whatsoever.
Michelle Butler 24:57
No, because he’s a foreigner. He would be on solid ground if he were back in his own country, but he’s not.
Anne Brannen 25:06
If he was in Norway. Interesting. Interesting.
Michelle Butler 25:10
So his crime is geographic dependent.
Anne Brannen 25:13
I love that. Thank you.
Michelle Butler 25:19
I spent the vast majority of my time on two things. The first one is Snorri’s Heimskringla. Snorri’s a really famous and important Icelandic poet, who is one of our primary sources for an awful lot of the early Scandinavian stories. It’s problematic, because his stuff dates from the early 13th century and it’s definitely been influenced by the couple hundred years that have taken place in there. But it’s what survives. We know that there were poems before this that he’s using as sources, and he quotes some of them.
Anne Brannen 26:01
We even know their names. Cool.
Michelle Butler 26:05
Yeah. We know they existed, but they don’t exist anymore. So we have to make do with Snorri. There is a very nice new 2011 edition of the Heimskringla available from its publisher, the Viking society for Northern research, and it’s available on the web, which is nice.
Anne Brannen 26:24
Oh, lovely. So we’ll link to that.
Michelle Butler 26:27
I read the King Olaf pieces, which are extensive, not the entire Heimskringla. If something becomes relevant, I’ll go back and read those. But for this, I just read the the King Olaf chunk. It feels older than 1230 in the kind of story it’s telling. There’s a really strong break in the 12th century between the kind of stories that get told before that and the kind of that get told after. Before the 12th century, you tell stories about battle. After the 12th century, you tell stories about love. That’s a really, really broad brush. But there’s some truth to it, too. This is a story about battles, though he has a gazillion wives and they each get mentioned in passing. The only one that gets mentioned in any detail is the one who tries to kill him on their wedding night. It’s actually a great part of the story. She comes in with a knife to their wedding night. She tries to kill him. He kind of says okay, fair, because it had been one of these arranged marriages in an attempt to create peace. So he doesn’t do anything to her except send her home and say this isn’t going to work.
Anne Brannen 27:47
So they get it annulled? I guess if they to kill you that seems like reason enough.
Michelle Butler 27:53
Olaf isn’t even present for significant chunks of his supposed saga. It’s more about telling a story of a time period than about following him around like he’s the main character. It also is part travelogue. There’s observations about the customs in the places they’re talking about. ‘So this is something that happens in England.’ ‘It was made law in Iceland that an insulting verse should be composed about the king of the Danes for every nose that was in the country.’ Every place that Olaf goes to, it has commentary about the customs.
Anne Brannen 28:31
And the stories. I mean, the stories have him going a lot of places.
Michelle Butler 28:34
He’s going everywhere. He runs up against a magician, there’s a bonus blood feast when he’s trying to get rid of the magician.
Anne Brannen 28:44
Oh really?
Michelle Butler 28:45
Yeah.
Anne Brannen 28:45
We hadn’t a blood feast in a while.
Michelle Butler 28:48
I pulled this out because I thought it was really fascinating. King Olaf had all these people put into a room and ‘had it well furnished, had a banquet provided for them and strong drink given them, and when they had got drunk, Olaf had the building set fire and the room was burned and all the people who were in it except Eyvindar, who got out through an opening in the roof and got away.’ He was the magician.
Anne Brannen 29:15
Ah. Because I was gonna say, how did he get up to the roof? Oh, he was a magician that answers it.
Michelle Butler 29:20
He’s the magician who got away from the blood feast that was intended to kill him.
Anne Brannen 29:27
Oh, wait, wait, wait. So a whole lot of people died in a blood feast that was intended to kill the one person that got away?
Michelle Butler 29:39
Yep.
Anne Brannen 29:40
That didn’t work then.
Michelle Butler 29:42
No. There’s a lot about Olaf’s adventures in trying to bring Christianity to Sweden. But an awful lot of it involves torturing people.
Anne Brannen 29:52
Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, he was one of those ‘become Christian or die type’ of people.
Michelle Butler 29:58
‘Convert by the sword’ types. I have a great passage describing him from the saga. It’s my favorite paragraph in the whole thing.
Anne Brannen 30:08
Okay, let’s hear it.
Michelle Butler 30:09
‘King Olaf was, at sports of every kind, the most accomplished man in Norway about whom we have information. He was stronger and more agile than anyone. And there are many accounts written about that. One is about when he went to Smalsarhorn and fashioned his shield on top of the precipice and again, when he helped one of his men that had earlier climbed up to the precipice and found that he could neither get up nor down, but the king went to him and carried him under his arm down onto the level.’
Anne Brannen 30:46
You need him if you’re going to Mount Everest.
Michelle Butler 30:48
‘King Olaf used to walk along the oars over the side while his men were rowing”–he would dance dance the oars–“and he used to juggle with three daggers so that there was always one in the air, and very time he caught the handle. He fought equally well with either hand and threw two spears at once. King Olaf was the most cheerful of men and liked games, kindly and condescending, an impetuous person about everything, magnificently generous, a man very distinguished in appearance, surpassing all men in valor in battles, the fiercest of all men when he was angry, torturing his enemies horribly, burning some in fires, having some torn to pieces by savage dogs, maiming some or having them thrown over high cliffs.”
Anne Brannen 31:41
But he was really cheerful and generous while he was doing it.
Michelle Butler 31:44
“As a result, his friends were very fond of him, while his enemies were afraid of him. So his success was great, because some did his will with love and friendliness, while some did it out of fear.” I love how this paragraph just embraces the whole thing. ‘He was the best at everything, including torturing his enemies.’
Anne Brannen 32:09
He was awesome. I have to say, quite honestly, that listening to this causes me to think that there might not be that much difference between the people who obeyed because they were afraid and the friends.
Michelle Butler 32:32
My husband decided it would not be appropriate to put any of this on his wall. In his office.
Anne Brannen 32:42
No, no, no, I don’t think we would want to emulate Olaf. No. You can’t really pick out the good pieces of this because it’s all integral.
Michelle Butler 32:55
I’m sure somebody could write a New York Times best selling business book, you know, “Lead Like a Viking” and cite this, but that’s not going to be me.
Anne Brannen 33:06
No, no. King of Norway. Allrighty.
Michelle Butler 33:11
I also found a couple of interesting blog posts about whether Olaf was on the other side of the Battle of Malden
Anne Brannen 33:20
Okay, wait. How did they get that?
Michelle Butler 33:28
Because one manuscript of the Anglo-Saxon chronicle says that it was Olaf.
Anne Brannen 33:34
Do we have two?
Michelle Butler 33:35
Yeah, there’s more than one. They all derive from the same source but then once it got sent out to different monasteries, they added on to it. So there’s different–there’s one manuscript that says that it was Olaf. But the other ones say it’s not and apparently the scholarly consensus is that it’s not actually Olaf–that that’s an error. But it did stop me for a second like whoa, wait–is the guy who killed Brythnoth? No, apparently not.
Anne Brannen 34:08
We have to stop a minute here and explain the Battle of Maldon poem. The Battle of Maldon is an old English poem, in which the Old English fighters who are in Maldon are at a bridge and the Vikings are on the other side and they want to come over and, you know, sack the city. But Brythnoth, the leader, will not let them come over. So the Vikings insult him and then he lets them come over and the Vikings slaughter everybody. That’s a precis. Hwat thu sayeth abot hwat thes folc sayeth.
Michelle Butler 34:45
It’s a really, really important poem and important battle. So I had to go track it down when it just got casually mentioned in one website: ‘Oh, and he was on the other side of the Battle of Maldon.’ It was a record scratch. What?
Anne Brannen 35:05
I love that poem so much. I always wonder, like, because what we don’t hear is what’s going on back in Maldon where I like to imagine that the women of Maldon are like, ‘Oh, God damn.’
Michelle Butler 35:17
‘What were you thinking?’
Anne Brannen 35:23
Everybody has to be really big and throw swords around. So there you go.
Michelle Butler 35:27
The other thing I have to share with you, that I’ve brought to the table, is that one of the people who retells–it’s hard to overstate how much retelling there is of Olaf, so let me let me go there first. There’s an unfinished opera from 1873. There is a production of that unfinished opera from 2015.
Anne Brannen 35:53
Whoa.
Michelle Butler 35:53
And it’s on YouTube.
Anne Brannen 35:55
Where was it done? Where’s it made?
Michelle Butler 35:57
It was done in Sweden. It was in Malmo, which is, of course famous to us, because that’s where ‘The Bridge’ takes place.
Anne Brannen 36:04
Yes, it is. We love ‘The Bridge.’ The Scandinavian version, not the American.
Michelle Butler 36:08
There’s so much heavy metal about vikings.
Anne Brannen 36:12
Of course. Of course.
Michelle Butler 36:14
There’s actually a subgenre called Viking metal. There is a song about Olaf in the Viking metal subgenre. I’ve given you that in the show notes.
Anne Brannen 36:26
Is Viking metal a phenomenon from the English speaking world? Or is it entirely Scandinavian?
Michelle Butler 36:34
Maybe, but mostly what I’m finding is Scandinavian.
Anne Brannen 36:37
There you go. Okay.
Michelle Butler 36:38
There is the Ren Faire storytellers. There’s a version of it from the Faroe Islands. I’m just astonished that I had not heard of this. Because it’s huge. It’s absolutely huge. But not so much in the English speaking world.
Anne Brannen 36:58
And it’s the Scandinavian world and not the Novgorod-Kyiv world.
Michelle Butler 37:05
Yes, yes. He is a huge, huge figure in Scandinavia. And of course those islands up by Scotland that were held by Norway or Denmark for so long. And then there’s Longfellow. I had a giant sidebar into trying to figure out what on earth this 19th century American poet was doing writing a giant, giant–it’s not one poem, it’s a whole set. There are 22 poems in the sequence. The Saga of King Olaf Sequence.
Anne Brannen 37:52
Wow. Does it have the same kind of structure as Snorri’s?
Michelle Butler 37:56
Yes. That’s his source. There was a new translation of Snorri that had just come out. He had read it, and it was a source for him. Actually, the killing really doesn’t show up in this at all. There is just a quick mention of it in the very first poem, sorry, the second? what am I in here? The first poem in the sequence is “The Challenge of Thor.” Thor is challenging Olaf to go back and claim his throne, ‘get off your ass and go do what you were born to do.’ In the second poem, when we actually hear from Olaf, there is one tiny little half of a stanza where he reflects back: “Then strange memories crowded back
/Of Queen Gunhild’s wrath and wrack,/And a hurried flight by sea;
/ Of grim Vikings, and the rapture/
Of the sea-fight, and the capture,/ And the life of slavery.” That’s it.
Anne Brannen 38:59
That’s it. The life of slavery is really not a big part of things.
Michelle Butler 39:03
And neither, as far as I can tell, is the killing of his captor. That does not appear to show up in Longfellow, which is interesting because it is actually in Snorri.
Anne Brannen 39:16
Yeah. Yeah, it is. So that’s an artistic decision that Longfellow made, that the whole slavery thing and the killing thing. Not only not important, but needing to be left out.
Michelle Butler 39:30
His focus is on what he does as an adult. His story starts with coming back to claim the throne. All the stuff that’s in Snorri before that is compressed and or ignored. This is part of a larger work. Although Longfellow started writing it before he created this longer work called Tales of a Wayside Inn, which is absolutely inspired by The Canterbury Tales.
Anne Brannen 40:01
So the Olaf stories are being told by…someone is telling these stories?
Michelle Butler 40:09
Yes. He kind of decides to do the opposite of what’s going on with the Canterbury Tales. In The Canterbury Tales, everybody’s telling stories as they’re traveling, and in Tales of a Wayside Inn, they’re all together in an evening at this inn, and they’re entertaining each other by taking turns telling stories.
Anne Brannen 40:28
And a whole bunch of them know about Olaf?
Michelle Butler 40:31
One of them knows about Olaf. This is one person.
Anne Brannen 40:34
And pontificates for quite some time.
Michelle Butler 40:37
Yes. Different people are telling different stories, although more of them are medieval. One of them tells a story of King Robert of Sicily. So a number of the stories are actually medieval stories. But the biggest chunk is this is the musicians tale, and that’s the one who is telling King Olaf’s story.
Anne Brannen 40:59
I can’t believe that I’m now actually going to go read Longfellow. I haven’t read any Longfellow in many decades–many, many, many, many–since I was a child, but I’m obviously going to have to go read Longfellow, God help me.
Michelle Butler 41:14
He has a prologue that is just like the Canterbury Tales. We are well within the realm of what you could call Canterbury Tales fanfiction, which is not really fair, but it kind of is. “One autumn night in Sudbury town/ Across the meadows bare and brown/ The windows of the Wayside Inn/ gleamed red with fire light through the leaves/ Of woodbine hanging from the eaves.’ Their crimson curtains rent” It just starts, you know, let me position you in time and place, just like the Canterbury Tales, and then you have an introduction that goes through and introduces everybody–
Anne Brannen 42:00
Oh my god.
Michelle Butler 42:01
–who are gonna be telling stories. Okay, I’m going to share my favorite one. “A youth was there, of quiet ways/ A student of old books and days,/ To whom all tongues and lands were known./ And yet a lover of his own.”
Anne Brannen 42:21
Whoa.
Michelle Butler 42:21
Isn’t that lovely?
Anne Brannen 42:23
Yes, yes, it is.
Michelle Butler 42:25
So he goes through, just like the Canterbury Tales, introduces everybody, tells us who all the crowd of characters are, and then it’s the musician who tells King Olaf’s story.
Anne Brannen 42:37
So you’ll give us a link to that. Were you able to find this online?
Michelle Butler 42:42
Oh, yes. This is entirely available online.
Anne Brannen 42:44
You’ll give us the link. Thank you.
Michelle Butler 42:47
The poem that is the interlude between the end of King Olaf’s saga and the new one is a very interesting poem about “‘The reign of violence is dead,/
Or dying surely from the world;/
While Love triumphant reigns instead,
/ And in a brighter sky o’erhead
/ His blessed banners are unfurled./
And most of all thank God for this:/
The war and waste of clashing creeds/
Now end in words, and not in deeds,
/ And no one suffers loss, or bleeds,/
For thoughts that men call heresies.'” He decides to have the lesson of King’s Olaf’s saga be ‘isn’t it great that we don’t fight about religion and kill each other over it anymore?’ It’s such a sweet thought. Like, Oh, damn, wouldn’t it be nice? Wouldn’t it be nice if that had been true in 1863?
Anne Brannen 43:47
Wouldn’t it just be nice.
Michelle Butler 43:48
That’s a lesson he has the theologian deliver to us as what the lesson of King Olaf is–isn’t it great we’re not killing each other over religion anymore.
Anne Brannen 43:59
Well, thank you. I mean, I think I would have thought there was no way in hell I would be wanting to read Longfellow again. But it’s kind of nice, actually, to have him rehabilitated, at least partially. Because I trust you. I believe you. So thank you.
Michelle Butler 44:12
I like Longfellow. I mean, sometimes, sometimes the lines don’t fall awesome. But sometimes they’re beautiful. It’s hard to read him without having to push back through the modernistic scorn that we were all taught, to think that anything that is rhyming poetry is simplistic and stupid.
Anne Brannen 44:34
We’ve been reading Emily of New Moon, which is by the same author that wrote Anne of Green Gables only kind of like is infinitely better. It’s another young girl coming of age story. Emily writes poetry, she has to write poetry because she’s continually being inspired by nature around her and whatnot. She writes poetry that really is very dreadful. But it is apparently supposed to be read as something which is great. But that’s the thing–it’s all the da-da-da-da-da. It’s all rhyming. The structure, the structure overrides.
Michelle Butler 45:13
Wikipedia has an interesting paragraph about that. I’m just going to quote. “Modern scholar Robert Gale praises the book”–‘Tales of a Wayside Inn’–“as showing Longfellow’s wide interests and knowledge of other cultures, and its use of a wide variety of poetic formulas and styles, such as blank verse, ballads, dactylic hexameter, octosyllabic lines, ottava rima, and iambic pentameter, including heroic couplets. He says the book ‘remains the best combination of narrative poems ever written by an American.'” I think that’s an interesting observation because it pushes back against the idea that Longfellow just does the kind of poetry that you were talking about, that it’s da-da-da-da-da, that it’s just that one kind of sing-songy not really style, exactly…meter, meter, that’s what I’m looking for. He’s actually pretty good at doing different ones, such that it sort of slides into the background.
Anne Brannen 46:16
So if he’s doing that in Tales of a Wayside Inn, then that’s also like The Canterbury Tales, where you go from genre to genre?
Michelle Butler 46:26
Yes. I think that he thought he was a pretty good poet, and he decided to see, am I good as good as Chaucer?
Anne Brannen 46:34
So here’s my question. What editions of Chaucer were running around at that time?
Michelle Butler 46:38
Oh, that’s a fascinating question. Oh, let’s find out. I don’t know. I do want to mention how much money he was making.
Anne Brannen 46:48
I’m going to look up thatwhile you–
Michelle Butler 46:51
I was set back on my heels about finding out how much money he was making as a poet towards the end of his career. When he was at his highest earning potential, he was making $3,000 a poem.
Anne Brannen 47:07
That’s unbelievable.
Michelle Butler 47:09
$3,000 in 1874 money. That’s not inflation-adjusted money. That is real money.
Anne Brannen 47:15
Wow.
Michelle Butler 47:17
Just astonishing how much money he was making. I didn’t think to look up what is known about Chaucer at this point. That’s a good question. I looked up his source for Snorri. That translation, which of course had just sort of…there’s a whole different book that I didn’t talk about that I read for this called ‘The Vikings and the Victorians’ that is tracing the 19th century obsession with the Vikings. We can talk about it at a later time because it’s really fascinating and huge and complicated. All of which is to say Longfellow isn’t wandering off and finding things that people aren’t talking about. The Vikings were huge in the 19th century. It’s part of that pre-raphaelite movement. Everybody’s fascinated with the Vikings.
Anne Brannen 48:06
I have got an answer to my question.
Michelle Butler 48:08
Oh, excellent.
Anne Brannen 48:08
There’s an 1807 edition. “This 1807 edition is important because it is proof that people in the 19th century were interested in Chaucer and made intellectual decisions about what was or was not important about his poetry nearly 100 years before we previously thought this occurred.”
Michelle Butler 48:27
I’m glad you thought about that, because I had not. I just assumed that Chaucer was well known in the 19th century. But of course we can’t make assumptions like that. There isn’t any question about whether Tales of a Wayside Inn was inspired by The Canterbury Tales. That’s really, really obvious and accepted. In fact, he had to be talked out of calling it ‘The Sudbury Tales.’
Anne Brannen 48:53
Yeah, yeah. But it’s true. You were saying something about how he just…you know, you called him a magpie. You know, we’ve got the poem about Evangelion, you know, Arcadia, and we’ve got Paul Revere and we’ve got Hiawatha.
Michelle Butler 49:08
He didn’t just work from English translations of things. He spent time in Europe. He studied German and Dutch and Danish and Swedish and Finnish and Icelandic so he had dabbled, at least a little bit of exposure to a lot of languages.
Anne Brannen 49:26
So the youth–that piece that you read me–that’s him?
Michelle Butler 49:29
Yeah, it is a little bit of a self insert fanfiction. But isn’t that really how writing works?
Anne Brannen 49:40
That also was like The Canterbury Tales because Chaucer did it.
Michelle Butler 49:43
I kept thinking about Tolkien a lot with Longfellow because they’re responding in very similar ways to the Viking work. Longfellow is doing it two generations earlier. But he is reading this and instantly his response is, I want to write my own version of it, which is exactly what Tolkien does when he reads all of the Scandinavian literature. This just, you know, rings a bell in my soul, and I want to write a version of it. But also this: in one of his other poems, he has a character who says, ‘We want a national literature commensurate with our mountains and rivers, we want a national epic that corresponds to the size of the country, we want a national drama in which scope will be given to our gigantic ideas and to the unparalleled activity of our people. In a word, we want a national literature altogether shaggy and unshorn that shall shake the earth like a herd of buffaloes thundering over the prairies.” I think it’s fascinating that Tolkien has the same response–that in the Vikings, you find the ability to tell a story worthy of your own country.
Right, right and thereby feed the nationalistic impulse.
I would not have put Longfellow and Tolkien in the same kind of poetry bag.
Anne Brannen 51:14
Doing the same kind of thing. Okay, fair enough.
Michelle Butler 51:16
Oh my god, he wrote a poem about Chaucer. Oh, wow.
“An old man in a lodge within a park;
/The chamber walls depicted all around
/With portraitures of huntsman, hawk, and hound,
/And the hurt deer. He listeneth to the lark,
/Whose song comes with the sunshine through the dark
/Of painted glass in leaden lattice bound;
/He listeneth and he laugheth at the sound,/Then writeth in a book like any clerk.
/He is the poet of the dawn, who wrote
The Canterbury Tales, and his old age
/Made beautiful with song; and as I read
/ I hear the crowing cock, I hear the note/
Of lark and linnet, and from every page
/Rise odors of ploughed field or flowery mead.” Oh, he loved Chaucer. He loved Chaucer, and he sees him as the beginning of English poetry. So of course he wants to measure himself against him.
Anne Brannen 52:30
All right. Well, thank you. That’s really beautiful.
Michelle Butler 52:35
I hadn’t actually found that before. I wasn’t thinking to try to figure out what his source for Chaucer was. But he’s saying that Chaucer so persuasive, he can smell…
Anne Brannen 52:50
Chaucer is good. It’s true. It’s true. All right. Well, I had no idea when we put King Olaf on our list that we were going to end up in the realm of Longfellow. I had no idea.
Michelle Butler 53:07
I’m sorry, I could not get any further than what the actual hell is going on with ‘why is Longfellow writing about King Olaf?’
Anne Brannen 53:17
I count on you for the rabbit holes. I go into the history I’m like, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Where are we? How did we get here? Where’s this city from? So I go there. Anything else on King Olaf? I’m going to put that Trondheim statue on as our picture because I think that pretty much sums it all up.
Michelle Butler 53:38
I don’t really have anything else. I used my extra week well.
Anne Brannen 53:46
So that is us for King Olaf, or the future King Olaf, whacking people with axes in the marketplace at Novgorod. The next time that we are taping all this stuff, we are going to Italy um, not so far–just maybe a couple hundred years…we’re gonna go to Italy before where we are today. When Albuin of the Lombards is assassinated in Verona. We haven’t done Italy in a while.
Michelle Butler 54:20
You know, I actually lied. There is one more thing that’s interesting.
Anne Brannen 54:24
Oh, what was it?
Michelle Butler 54:24
Edgar Elgar–that’s a name that’s hard to say–takes some of Longfellow’s poems, including, you know, King Olaf and sets them to music, and there is a production of that by the Longfellow chorus. Apparently they set a whole bunch of Longfellows poems to music and then sing them. There’s there’s enough for a whole chorus to keep going with that.
Anne Brannen 54:58
Have we got a link to that too?
Michelle Butler 54:59
Yep.
Anne Brannen 55:00
Okay, thank you. So that’s it for King Olaf. He’s all over the board. Very busy man. We’ll see you next time in Italy. That’s it for us. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. We are on Spotify and Apple and Stitcher and all the places where the podcasts hang out. You can find us there and leave reviews if you like. You can find us at True Crime Medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There you can find the show notes and the transcripts that Michelle does, I do a blurb and put everything together and find you a lovely picture for everything. We’d love to hear from you. Especially if you’ve got ideas for crimes that you think that we should look into. We take them under advisement and we still have a list. This is almost three years we’ve been doing this, isn’t it?
Michelle Butler 56:00
That’s right. Three years in October.
Anne Brannen 56:04
So soon it’s three years and we still are not running out of medieval crimes because there were so many of them. We take 1000 years and the continent as our purview, and then sometimes we go into the early modern era just cuz, cuz we want to talk about Christopher Marlowe, or Guy Fawkes. I believe we’re doing gonna do Guy Fawkes for Guy Fawkes Day.
Michelle Butler 56:31
Oh, yeah, we should definitely talk about–
Anne Brannen 56:36
We haven’t done Guy Fawkes. So I believe that’s it. And so we’ll say bye.
Michelle Butler 56:43
Bye.
68.Llewelyn the Great Hangs William de Braose, Aber Garth Celyn , Wales May 2, 1230
Anne Brannen 0:23
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 0:32
And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.
Anne Brannen 0:36
Is this the last podcast that we’re recording while you’re in the most medieval state in America?
Michelle Butler 0:41
Yes, indeed.
Anne Brannen 0:43
Okay. Well, next time you’ll have some different tagline. We don’t know what it is. But yes, we’re having a really busy time of this particular piece of the summer. But today we are discussing the time that Llewelyn Fawr hung William de Braose. This would be the second of May 1230 in Gwynned, Wales. I’m so happy about this. This was one of the first things I put on the list although we’ve held it off till now, because this is one of my favorite crimes of the Middle Ages. I’m not a good woman. So we have a story. Llewelyn Fawr, which means Llewellyn the Great was married to Joan, who was the daughter of King John of England. The illegitimate daughter. Her mother was named Clementia and was, we think, a Norman noblewoman. She was illegitimate, but John loved all his kids. The only nice thing I know about John really is that he was fond of his children. Any rate, he married her off when she was a teenager to Llewelyn Fawr as part of a treaty because–I don’t know if you know this–but England and Wales, problems back and forth. So this was supposedly going to help make relations good, which it did insofar as the fact that Joan was good at negotiating. So she would go and talk to her dad, you know, to get things done, but really, it didn’t improve things much. So that was the point of it, but it was a good alliance. I mean, this is a teenager who spoke Norman French who is sent out to Wales which was not a place that the Normans thought was like a place of high culture and stuff like that. She was sent off to Wales where they were speaking Welsh. By Welsh law, when you got married, the woman belonged to whatever country her husband is, so Joan was Welsh. Siwan, her name was. That’s who she is now, Siwan, but we’re gonna call her Joan so y’all don’t get confused. It was a good alliance. She negotiated for Llewelyn. She was one of his counselors. They had several children and things were just, you know, they were going great. She was negotiating with both her father and then her brother Henry, who became our King after John. They had at least three daughters: Gwladus Ddu, Ellen, and Susanna, and a son, Dafydd. So we’re going to have a little side note here for context. Before Dafydd, Llewelyn had another son, Gruffydd, with his longtime companion, Tangwystl. He wasn’t married to her, so technically, according to the Anglo Normans, Gruffydd was illegitimate. The Welsh did not see things that way. As far as the Welsh were concerned, Gruffydd was the heir because he was Llewelyn’s son. Who cares, marriage, no marriage? The Welsh were so different from the English. They just really were. But this was an Anglo Norman obsession, as you know, probably from having reading history and listening to our other podcasts. Welsh didn’t care so much. Anyway, according to the Welsh, Gruffydd was the legitimate successor to Llewelyn but Llewelyn wanted Dafydd, who was half Anglo Norman and was legitimate by Anglo Norman standards, to be his heir. Also the relationship with Joan probably counted in there. So King Henry the third, Joan’s half brother, recognized Dafydd as Llewelyn’s heir. Llewelyn got the Pope to declare Joan legitimate on account of neither John nor Clementia had been married when they conceived this child. After 1240, when his father died, Dafydd would rule Gwynedd until Henry invaded, which was like the next year afterwards and took everything but Gwynedd as well as Gruffydd, Dafydd’s half brother, who Dafydd had captured because Gruffydd had been quite unhappy with the succession decision so he’d gone to war with his brother. Henry took Gruffydd and he imprisoned him in the Tower of London from which Griffith would die while attempting to escape out of the window in 1244. Dafydd would be involved in hostilities until 1246 when he died suddenly. Any rate after Llewelyn the Great dies, everything falls all to Hell and gone, but there you are. Right. So that’s our side note about Llewelyn’s children. Dafydd, though, we’re going to mention again later. Okay, so, Joan and Llewelyn had been married for about 25 years when William de Braose was captured by Llewelyn. Llewelyn was fighting Hubert de Burgh. He was the Justiciar of England–we’re not going to mention him anymore. We don’t care about him at all, just that that was who William was fighting for and Llewlyn took William de Braose hostage. So he was gonna get a ransom but he was there for a while, about two years, and he allied himself with Llewelyn. He was ransomed, and they agreed that they were going to marry their children together. That would be Daffyd–here being mentioned again–Daffyd ap Llewelyn and Isabel de Braose. So there we are. They agreed that they were going to marry the children. Now we’re going to have another side note. Michelle is going to like this part. We were already discussing this before. This is another part where Michelle, who occasionally gets scandalized by the Middle Ages, which she studies so much, she’s gonna get scandalized. Okay. Sidenote to explain who the people are. All right. Deep breath. Ah. The William de Braose that we’re talking about today was the grandson of the William de Braose that we talked about in earlier podcast, two of them. One when he slaughtered a whole bunch of Welsh nobles in the Christmas massacre of 1175. The de Braoses were Marcher Lords, having married into the Fitzwalter line in the country in the 12th century. The second time we mentioned him was in the podcast about King John starving William’s wife and one of his sons to death in Corfe castle. We don’t even have a separate podcast about the other crime that William de Braose was involved in, which was the time that he helped King John kill Arthur, who was his nephew and the heir to the throne.
Michelle Butler 7:44
I’m sure we’ll get there eventually. It’s too big of a crime to not cover at some point. But John had so many terrible things that he did we have to sort of spread them out.
Anne Brannen 7:54
Yes, we can’t consolidate them the way we did for…who was that guy?
Michelle Butler 7:59
Hugh Despenser.
Anne Brannen 8:00
Hugh Despenser. Yeah. Edward the second’s favorite. Yeah, we had a whole podcast on the badnesses of him. But John really is so much worse that it takes a lot. That was our second on crimes that King John committed. The de Braoses were Marcher Lords, that being the Anglo Normans who were set up in the borders of Wales to run castles and try and subdue the Welsh or at least keep them partly in line. Sometimes they managed this, sometimes not. Mostly not. They had married into Marcher families in the 12th century. Then our William’s father, Reginald…they started marrying into the Welsh. Okay, now Michelle can get all scandalized.
Michelle Butler 8:41
I am kind of scandalized, actually.
Anne Brannen 8:44
Not as scandalized as you were when there was a massacre in the Mass in Italy, but here we go. Our William’s father, Reginald, married Llewelyn’s Gwladus Ddu, so Llewelyn was his father in law. After Reginald died, Gwladus married Ralph Mortimer and had a bunch of children with him. She didn’t have any children with Reginald. As we have seen, Llewelyn and William agreed that Dafydd would marry William’s daughter–they wouldn’t have any children either–and Dafydd’s successors then were going to be the sons of his brother Gruffyd, the one who fell out of the window at the Tower. And John de Braose, who was the son of the William de Braose who had gotten stoned to death, married Marared ferch Llywelyn, who was yet another daughter of Llewelyn’s. Did you miss that?
Michelle Butler 9:36
Oh, god. And William was married to…
Anne Brannen 9:46
Eva Marshal.
Michelle Butler 9:47
Yes, yes. William Marshal’s–
Anne Brannen 9:50
William Marshal’s daughter, yes.
Michelle Butler 9:53
Oh my god.
Anne Brannen 9:55
Yes, it’s quite a family. It’s amazing that the de Braoses, not long after this, are going to completely fall off the map.
Michelle Butler 10:03
But, okay, how dumb do you have to be if you’re William de Braose here?
Anne Brannen 10:09
Really dumb, actually. Very dumb.
Michelle Butler 10:11
Because your father in law…I don’t even know how to describe his relationship with Llewelyn. But you decide to irritate the most powerful Lord in Wales.
Anne Brannen 10:25
Yeah, we haven’t gotten to the crime yet. We haven’t even said, you know, what William gets hung for. We haven’t gotten there. But he will. He does do something that we’re gonna get to. Yeah. Llewelyn was indeed the most powerful man in Wales at the time. What’s interesting here is that Llewelyn was not a person who did things quickly in anger. He was not known for having a temper. He made very, very astute political decisions. That makes this all very interesting. All right. So we go back to William de Braose. He’s captured, he’s held for ransom, he makes an arrangement with Llewelyn for the marriage of their children. So that was good. That was great. And then he went on home and he came back at Easter that year, and de Braose was discovered in Llewelyn’s private chambers with Joan of England, Llewelyn’s wife. So that was what he did to annoy Llewelyn. Llewelyn put Joan under house arrest–that lasted for about a year–and he hung William de Braose from a nearby tree. Tradition says that it was at Gwernen Grog. That means the hanging alder, the hanging tree. This was after a trial. He had a trial. William was already at that point called Willem Du, William the black, by the Welsh, who hated him, and all of his family and his grandfather especially, and all of the horses they were riding in on. The Welsh just hated him. Llewelyn then later said that his nobles had pushed for William’s hanging, which was public with hundreds of nobles in attendance, apparently. So there you are. And Llewelyn, who was not subject to fits of anger, and loved his wife dearly–he had already at that point built a church for her in one of his towns that they would visit. He had built a church for her in the town because the church there was up a steep hill and it made her tired. So he built a church for her. He loved her dearly. If he had any kind of fit of anger, which I don’t think he did, quite frankly, he got over it. William de Braose didn’t. Then he wrote, Llewelyn wrote to William’s wife, Eva, the daughter of William Marshall–we just love Billy Marshal, we talk about him a lot–to ask if she still wanted their children to get married. That was fine with her. So the marriage went ahead. Now, I just want to say that all of the history of the Middle Ages is full of things that you could not damn make up. But I think this is a thing that you really, really, really could not make up. Essentially, ‘Sorry, I hung your husband, shall we let the kids get married anyway?’ ‘Yes.’ I’m going to give you now a translation of this letter that he sent because it’s a good letter. So he wrote this. “I, Llewelyn, Prince of Aberconway, Lord of Snowdonia, to his esteemed friend, Eva de Braose, with love, Greetings. We ask you insofar as you might inform us regarding your wish, whether you would want to persist in the alliance made between David our son and Isabel your daughter, because she will never remain with us except that the alliance will stand. And if you would not want this, lest any worse harm might be able to happen, you would want to make known soon your will regarding that alliance and regarding the authority of your daughter with us. And you may know that in no way might we have been able to avert what judgment the magnates of our land might not do considering what revenge they have done because of the scandal and our outrage. And whatever you will have done from there, you might take the trouble to make known to us.”
It’s very polite.
It’s beautiful, isn’t it? ‘We couldn’t do anything about what our nobles decided to do because they had to have revenge because there was a scandal, and there had been an outrage against us.’
Michelle Butler 14:50
‘It’s really nothing to do with me. My hands were tied.’
Anne Brannen 14:57
Yeah, we just have to talk about this a minute. So the children got married and the de Braose lands were divided amongst the daughters, all four of them, because William did not have any sons. He had only these four daughters for heirs. Joan came back after about a year and took her position as beloved wife and counselor. When she died, Llewellyn was shattered. His grief is well known. He founded a Franciscan friary in her honor. Although later Henry the Eighth was going to destroy it. And we’re left to ponder the whole thing, asking ourselves, what the hell.
Michelle Butler 15:30
For real. I really had to stop and ask myself, what the hell? Okay, first of all, you and I did the math. Nobody involved here is a randy teenager.
Anne Brannen 15:46
No, these are not young people.
Michelle Butler 15:48
Good freaking god. I could almost understand if she was, you know, 15 married to a 55 or 60 year old man and William was like 21. That would be a different conversation we would be having.
Anne Brannen 16:05
We figured out William was a little over 30, Joan was nearly 40, and Llewelyn was nearly 50.
Michelle Butler 16:14
He was almost 60, I think. I think we found out he was 57.
Anne Brannen 16:17
Okay, yeah.
Michelle Butler 16:18
He was nearly 60. Everybody involved is a sober adult.
Anne Brannen 16:22
Yes, theoretically, the hormones are not raging out of control.
Michelle Butler 16:26
Just to recap, William decides it’s a really great idea to have an affair with the wife of the most powerful man in Wales. She is the half sister of the current king of England. He, William, is the son in law of William Marshal, who was a big hairy deal and his family is a big hairy deal.
Anne Brannen 16:54
Right? You wouldn’t want to annoy them.
Michelle Butler 16:56
They’re very powerful and they’re all over the place. So oh my god, the decision making process involved here is questionable.
Anne Brannen 17:09
The Welsh Chronicles say this all happened, but they don’t give us a lot of details. What we are told is that William is found in the private chambers. We are not told that they have been having an affair. I am not sure that we know that they were actually having an affair.
Michelle Butler 17:32
Okay, but he had no business being there.
Anne Brannen 17:37
Here’s the other thing. Why the hell would you fall in love with a de Braose? I just don’t understand that part at all. So I have real questions about the affair in the first place. Why are they having an affair? It’s so stupid. Why are they having an affair? One of them’s a de Braose–that’s not so great. She’s nearly 30, and she loves her husband, apparently. I just don’t get it. It makes no sense.
Michelle Butler 18:04
I just…I don’t know. But what Llewelyn does is also really questionable. You don’t have to like William de Braose but he’s still a nobleman. Taking him out and hanging him like a horse thief even after a trial…this is still a no go. If you’re going to execute him, there are ways you do that with a nobleman. A hanging is…it’s an aggressively shameful way to kill a nobleman. It’s essentially saying he’s not a nobleman anymore.
Anne Brannen 18:39
Also, I think we should point out whatever it is that he did, being in the bedroom or actually having an affair, by Welsh law was not a death penalty offense.
Michelle Butler 18:59
Do any of the trial documents exist? What argument did he make?
Anne Brannen 19:05
No or we would be hearing about them for sure. Historians have different interpretations of went on. You will read very often that Llewellyn killed William de Braose in a fit of rage. Obviously not, since he had been put on trial. You will see that they were having an affair for years and it had started when he was a hostage. Um, maybe. Maybe not. I’m not getting that. We don’t know. But part of what’s going on here is the idea that the Welsh are this uncontrollable, emotional force– ‘God knows what they’re doing, we the Anglo Normans understand them not.’ I’m reminded of that episode in The Crown when the Queen has to go to the devastated Welsh village and she finally agrees to go to the devastated Welsh village where everybody’s all unhappy because all the dead children and she’s told by her advisers ‘these are Welsh people so you’re going to have to show some emotion because otherwise it’s not gonna go over well.’ So there’s this idea that, ‘oh, well, you know the Welsh, they hang people from trees. Who knew?’ But he didn’t. He did hang him. I wish we had that trial because exactly what he’s accused of, I don’t know. It was stupid.
Michelle Butler 20:28
I am not convinced that, trial or no trial, Llewelyn was in his legal rights to be to be hanging William de Braose.
Anne Brannen 20:40
Absolutely not.
Michelle Butler 20:41
Yeah. And certainly not as was done, which was deliberately, offensive.
Anne Brannen 20:48
And made very public. There were hundreds and hundreds of people there to witness it. Oh, yeah. One of the ideas about what exactly is going on is that Llewelyn is allowing the Welsh a kind of revenge on the whole de Braose family, you know, because of William’s grandfather, William, having slaughtered the Welsh nobleman at the Christmas massacre. Really, really, really devastated Welsh-English relationships for quite some time, and certainly Welsh-de Braose relationships. Not good, not good. We have a whole podcast on that. But I’ll just say briefly, one of the things going on is that the Welsh people were invited to de Braose’s castle, because they were going to have reconciliation. It was on Christmas. Welsh custom is that you have reconciliations on Christmas, obviously. So they go to the reconciliation dinner, at which they are all slaughtered. It was really underhanded, and a use of Welsh customs against the Welsh. They hated the de Braoses. So one idea that historians have is that’s what’s going on is that Fluellen is using this as an excuse to just kill one of the de Braoses and nobody liked William anyway, so why not?
Michelle Butler 22:11
Well, there’s an argument there that he doesn’t have any sons, so if you take the opportunity to get rid of him, you take the opportunity to end the line. Stuff goes to the daughters. If one was writing fiction, one would probably have it as there not having been an affair and in fact, William has been entrapped, because it would make for a much more interesting story if he actually is the only decent de Braose to ever walk the earth and he gets entrapped.
Anne Brannen 22:48
What happens after our William de Braose gets hung, his brother gets part of Gower with help from Llewelyn Fawr. So his brother gets some of the Welsh lands and his son becomes a Baron of the Welsh lands. And then his son is another Baron, but there’s nothing after that. At the point at which he dies, which is 1326, his co-heirs are his daughters. There’s no brothers left. It’s gone. So killing this particular William de Braose doesn’t actually end the line at the moment, but it is certainly a nice little piece of having things fall apart. Because, you know, I don’t know if he would have any sons anymore. Anyway, these daughters have grown up and are getting married.
Michelle Butler 23:44
You certainly accomplish dispersing the property, which even if you have surviving male heirs, it reduces their power.
Anne Brannen 23:52
Yeah. Yeah. His property went four different ways, and comes into Llewelyn’s family because Dafydd married Isabel. Really, the Welsh actually make out pretty well from this. I mean, you know, although there will be a bunch of war. It doesn’t work for long.
Michelle Butler 24:19
Okay. But I really just have to say out loud, that we have a scenario in which a father and a granddaughter marry siblings.
Anne Brannen 24:32
Yes, we do. Yeah. Now, this is why you were perturbed.
Michelle Butler 24:38
Okay, so the thing is, I grew up in the country, and we have some sketchy things that have happened in our family tree. We got told that was behaving badly and not like royalty.
Anne Brannen 24:56
I know. You were lied to. I’m so sorry. Basically, this is the long and short of it. You were told some lies.
Michelle Butler 25:12
Reginald marries Llewelyn’s daughter and his granddaughter, Isabella, marries Llewelyn’s son.
Anne Brannen 25:22
Yeah. Then there’s Margaret marrying one of the others. I forget. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 25:26
It’s amazing that they have children who have two brain cells to rub together. It’s just all the inbreeding. Layers and layers of inbreeding.
Anne Brannen 25:41
Layers and layers.
Michelle Butler 25:43
Oh, my goodness. Well, not surprisingly, this is quite a popular topic in fiction.
Anne Brannen 25:52
Yes, you can get lots of books where this is…Did you find–any other than that play we’re gonna get to–did you find any where it was actually the main thing going on? Or is it like a thing that happens in a story about Joan or a thing that happens in a story about Llewelyn or stories about the de Braoses? Somebody who needs to do that–an entire historical fiction series on the de Braoses.
Michelle Butler 26:18
Actually, that would be really cool, and I haven’t seen that.
Anne Brannen 26:21
No, it doesn’t. You should write it. Oh, no, you don’t do historical fiction actually based on real people. Well, darn it.
Michelle Butler 26:30
The tricky thing with writing about the de Braoses is you have to get into their heads enough to make what they’re doing make sense.
Well, maybe they’re all psychopaths, I don’t know.
So we’ve got a play from 1956 that’s written in Welsh, which is interesting. It’s by Saunders Lewis, who was a Welsh nationalist. He was a veteran of World War One. He was a poet, playwright and novelist. He was also active in politics. He was concerned about how fast the percentage of the population of Wales was falling that could actually speak Welsh. He was really concerned about the survival of the Welsh language, and in particular, of native speakers.
Anne Brannen 27:20
I’m gonna say something about that in a bit, but let’s move on.
Michelle Butler 27:24
He also converted to Catholicism in 1932. So what I want somebody to write for me is a play in which he and Tolkien are having a discussion, because they’re such similar people. They’re both World War One veterans. They’re almost exactly contemporaries in terms of when they’re born and when they die. And they both converted to Catholicism, which is a big deal in England.
Anne Brannen 27:58
Yes, it is. It’s no longer illegal at this time. But you know, it’s a big deal.
Michelle Butler 28:04
It’s a big, big deal. Saunders Lewis thought that one of the reasons he didn’t get any further in politics is that the Welsh were just not willing to follow a Catholic leader. Anyway, it would be really interesting to have an imagined conversation between Tolkien, the English nationalist, and Saunders Lewis, the Welsh nationalist. I think you may have answered for me…I had this question about why on earth a Welsh nationalist had written a play about this foreign princess.
Anne Brannen 28:42
Siwan. She’s Welsh because she got married.
Michelle Butler 28:45
Apparently. I thought that was interesting.
Anne Brannen 28:50
Here’s the thing I wanted to add in because you were telling us that Saunders was active in promoting the Welsh language, but you probably know that the Celtic languages are–none of them–the main languages of the places where they are. Breton or Irish or Scots Gaelic or Welsh, they’re not the main language. But not only is Welsh not dead, it’s not dying anymore. It’s spoken by about 20% of the population, and that’s remained. Yeah. I don’t know why. I mean, it’s really hard.
Michelle Butler 29:31
That’s impressive.
Anne Brannen 29:32
I’m learning it. It’s not an easy language for English speakers to learn, but Welsh is totally not dead. We’ve been watching a lot of wonderful mystery shows set in Wales on our TV, and it’s nice if you have the captions on there.
Michelle Butler 29:51
Oh, that helps a lot.
Anne Brannen 29:55
I learned a lot of my pronunciation by watching these things. I really like it. Here’s my favorite word that I have learned in Welsh. Here’s how it’s spelled: smwddio.
Michelle Butler 30:14
Okay.
Anne Brannen 30:15
Now, do you have any guesses as to how you might pronounce that?
Michelle Butler 30:18
No, because there’s no vowels on the first part.
Anne Brannen 30:20
Oh, there are. There are vowels. W is a vowel. ‘Smoothio.’ It means ‘ironing’. Smoothio. I think this is hilarious.
Michelle Butler 30:33
That’s awesome. I’m impressed with Wales’ ability to hold on to Welsh.
Anne Brannen 30:40
Ireland legislated it for a while but that’s not what Wales did. But they got it. I think it’s, you know, a matter of pride.
Michelle Butler 30:49
The English are very, very good at cultural genocide. I mean, there’s been real genocide too. I wouldn’t want to take anything away from the English’s ability to kill people. But they’re also extremely good at destroying their colonies’ cultures.
Anne Brannen 31:08
Yeah, yeah. So anyway, where were we? We were talking about…?
Michelle Butler 31:12
Oh, I was going to tell you that two big historical novelists of the 20th century both took a crack at this. Edith Pargeter, who of course, we know we’ve already run into as Ellis Peters, the author of the Cadfael novels, wrote a book about this in 1962 called The Green Branch. She wrote a lot of books. I thought maybe this was one of her earliest books, but not really, it’s mid career.
Anne Brannen 31:45
Prolific doesn’t even begin to describe Pargeter.
Michelle Butler 31:48
Oh, my gosh, she wrote so many books under so many different names. Then Sharon Kay Penman. Her second novel is called Here Be Dragons and it is about Llewelyn. It starts with him. It’s from 1985. So I think we’re about due actually for somebody to take another crack at this. Like there was a generation in between those two books. Sharon Kay Penman’s book is interesting in part because there’s real interesting overlap between it and the one that I read before when we were talking about Richard because there’s time overlap between those. Here Be Dragons starts with Llewellyn as a child. And John is still alive. And at the very beginning of the book, Richard is still alive. So some of the things that we saw in more detail in the later book, A King’s Ransom, we get here as a hop, skip and a jump. It’s very interesting to see her come–I’m doing these backwards–to see her come back to that and deal with it in more detail. Which things got updated, which things are basically the same. Eleanor’s basically the same. Her handling of John, I think, got more complex in the later book. You can tell that it is an earlier–it is her second book, I think. A King’s Ransom is one of her last books and you could really see that her writing is just amazing in the later book. Certainly it’s accomplishing what it needs to accomplish in Here Be Dragons, but it’s just wonderful in the later book. But I do think it’s very interesting that both of them are are attracted to this particular historical moment of the Llewelyn and that conflict with William de Braose.
Anne Brannen 33:58
I don’t know how much you were able to get to, given the fact that you actually are packing up your entire household at the moment, but were you able to catch how it is that these different authors are dealing with this whole thing that makes no sense?
Michelle Butler 34:13
I’m sorry, I’m not that far into either. Pargeter’s book is not available as an ebook at all. So I had to order it and it hasn’t come yet, so I haven’t actually seen it. And the other one was not available as an audiobook. So I’m not that far into it. Here Be Dragons was available on Kindle, but it wasn’t available as an audiobook, which means I can’t do it and pack at the same time.
Anne Brannen 34:43
There’s a translation of Siwan available on the web, and we’ll put a link to that.
Michelle Butler 34:49
It’s interesting, though, that we do have both of them looking directly at this, whereas with Maude being locked in the prison and probably dying of starvation–of thirst, not starvation–that tends to show up in a lot of places, but as a mention, and not ‘we’re looking at this directly.’ Whereas this appears to be something that actually attracts direct focus, which I think is interesting. I don’t know which way the causality is, but it feels inescapably rhyming with the Arthurian legend. I don’t know whether that’s because the story is so big and scandalous that as people started writing–the golden age of Arthurian legend is after this–as people start writing about Lancelot and Guinevere and Arthur, that they have this real life example and now it becomes a ‘ripped from the headlines’ situation. But there’s a moment in Malory where Lancelot is with Guinevere in her bedchamber and it’s a setup and the guys come knocking on the door, and the narrator says to us, ‘we don’t actually know what they were doing, get your mind out of the gutter.’ It’s a moment that rhymes for me with what you were just describing about how the chronicles are talking. We know that the Arthurian legend picks up scents from the things that are happening historically, as it’s being retold.
Anne Brannen 36:47
Yeah, the English chroniclers went into much more detail, most of it supposition, about what was going on. In fact, one of my favorites, I’m never sure which chronicler it is, but Llewelyn is very horrible and fierce and murders the wonderful and noble, beautiful William de Braose. I mean, you know, Welsh people killing the Anglo Normans–they can’t be right, obviously, from the Anglo Norman point of view. Those savages killing the noble beautiful de Braoses. The English chroniclers don’t care much about the Christmas massacre of 1175.
Michelle Butler 37:39
One of the reasons that Tolkien was in my head when I was thinking about our Welsh nationalist Saunder Lewis is Llewelyn keeps getting talked about as Llewlyn the son of Iowerth.
Anne Brannen 37:57
Iowerth. Llewelyn ap Iowerth.
Michelle Butler 38:00
Of course, apparently Tolkien ran across that somewhere because that’s a name he picks up and uses in Lord of the Rings.
Anne Brannen 38:07
I didn’t remember that.
Michelle Butler 38:09
Ioreth is the woman in Gondor who is in the houses of healing and is chatting up Aragorn about kings foil. ‘Do you have any kings foil?’ ‘Oh yeah, we have this herb. Everybody says it’s just a weed.’
Anne Brannen 38:26
It’s spelled the same way?
Michelle Butler 38:29
It’s very close. It’s not exact.
Anne Brannen 38:32
Iorwerth’s the man’s name. The English can’t spell Welsh.
Michelle Butler 38:40
He was pretty fascinated with Welsh even though he found it almost impossible to learn.
Anne Brannen 38:47
But he tried. I didn’t know that.
Michelle Butler 38:48
He did try. He was fascinated by languages in general.
Anne Brannen 38:53
‘Smoothio!’ I’m enjoying my Welsh. I really am. The Ukrainian is really hard, really, really hard. It’s really hard for me and it’s hard for me to say things. It’s the language that I’m doing with Duolingo and Duolingo keeps telling me, no that’s not how it sounds, no no. Then sometimes they just, let’s stop this and move on.
Michelle Butler 39:25
I think that this is a really fascinating episode we’re covering because the crime is arguably Llewelyn’s response as much as what William de Braose did.
Anne Brannen 39:39
Yes. That’s how we’re going to be titling it–it’s Llewellyn hangs William de Braose. Some of the things I’ve read say that Llewelyn had a fit and he hung de Braose off the castle wall. Okay, no. No fit, no hanging. But I love that. That’s what I had first heard. He hung him off the castle wall.
Michelle Butler 39:57
That’s what I had first read too, and so it was very interesting to go and find out, no, that is not what happened. But it is interesting that for modern people retelling the story, we assume it must have went down that this was a knee jerk, hot headed response to the scenario that you find right in front of you.
Anne Brannen 40:21
He was hung from a tree. There’s a tradition as to where the tree was. And then there’s some historical reconstruction as to where the tree was. But no, he was hung from a tree. After the noblemen tried him. They must have been so happy to have a reason. To actually be holding a de Braose and being able to at least make up reasons to kill him.
Michelle Butler 40:46
Well, it just goes to show if your grandfather commits a massacre, you can’t expect the Welsh to give you the benefit of the doubt later on. They’re liable to to not do so.
Anne Brannen 41:00
Long memories. Well, you know, and the de Braoses are Marcher lords and the Welsh marry into the Marcher lords for political reasons. But.
Michelle Butler 41:10
I think we’ve mentioned before that Wales has more castles per square mile than anywhere on Earth, which tells you how difficult it was to conquer Wales.
Anne Brannen 41:20
Yes, because they weren’t building the castles because they really wanted to have some nice places to have tea and little shops with souvenirs. They were building the castles because they were military structures, and the Welsh were really, really hard to subdue. They were constantly constantly fighting–and fighting amongst themselves, to be fair, which is one of the reasons it was hard to organize. Hence, you know, Dafydd and Gruffydd going at it.
Michelle Butler 41:53
Llewelyn had had to fight to get his holdings back. He had to fight with his uncles to get back into it. They–the uncles, his father’s brothers–had had taken the kingdom from his father.
Anne Brannen 42:06
The fighting is just simply a way of life. Who were were talking about with that…?
Michelle Butler 42:15
All of them. It’s the Irish, it’s the Italians, it’s all of them.
Anne Brannen 42:19
The way of life. And the English were able to use it against them. One of the things that the English did besides fighting the Welsh was that the kings would ally with one group or another and then switch, so the lines were always moving, moving, moving. The idea of putting the Anglo Norman lords in castles and have them try and keep things in order actually was not a bad idea from the point of view of the Anglo Normans. I despise this, of course, as we know. It wasn’t a bad idea. I don’t know that they could have done any better than that, in terms of trying to keep the Welsh down.
Michelle Butler 43:02
We were talking earlier about how they keep intermarrying and it doesn’t appear to make anything better.
Anne Brannen 43:09
No, it never does. All these political marriages between the Welsh and the Anglo Normans just never…it’s like, ‘and here’s our alliance and there will be peace in our realm.’ There will not. No.
Michelle Butler 43:26
They keep trying it, but it doesn’t work. They keep doing these political marriages but it does not accomplish…it’s very interesting, actually, that that remains as a concept. ‘We’re gonna have this political alliance and things are gonna get better’ and yet it doesn’t appear to ever do that. Certainly not at this time. Well, I do not really have anything else. I think that the beginning of Sharon Kay Penman’ book is kind of interesting because you know, Llewellyn is still a child and she gives the Welsh a real scorn for the English because they let themselves be conquered.
Anne Brannen 44:06
Yeah, I like Penman’s book. But that is our discussion of Llewelyn Fawr hanging William de Braose not from the castle wall, but from a tree and not in a fit of rage but after a trial for a crime, whatever the crime was, that did not carry the death penalty, but he got one anyway. So really, I think but we’re going to make the crime be Llewelyn hanging William de Braose. What the crime is basically a travesty against justice, is what it is. He should have just beat him up. That would have been fine.
Michelle Butler 44:46
It could have been worse, though. You remember when the French king executed…
Anne Brannen 44:52
The Norman knights?
Michelle Butler 44:54
Well, I was thinking of Jean who ends up becoming a pirate because–
Anne Brannen 45:00
Oh, Jeanne de Clisson.
Michelle Butler 45:00
Her husband had been executed by the French king in a deliberately offensive and public manner.
Anne Brannen 45:08
Right, right. Well, and what I was thinking of when you mentioned France, I was thinking of the Tour de Nesle affair where two Norman knights were executed for having affairs, which they really did have in this particular case, there was enormous amounts of evidence as to them actually having an affair.
Michelle Butler 45:29
That’s true. He did not torture William.
Anne Brannen 45:32
Yeah. William de Braose did not get tortured. They did. He just got killed. Could have been worse.
Michelle Butler 45:39
Which does tend to argue against the idea that he was personally offended, that it’s much more of a politically advantageous move.
Anne Brannen 45:49
Well, there’s also the fact that Joan is put under house arrest for awhile. I mean, that’s really basically nothing. He did not really punish her.
Michelle Butler 46:02
No. I mean, if you look back to Henry the second. He puts Eleanore in prison for 16 years.
Anne Brannen 46:09
Yeah. Joan’s not in prison. Joan’s under house arrest. No, Llewelyn’s doesn’t seem to be actually really that upset, so we should not read this as Llewellyn having a fit and killing William de Braose. William de Braose. He annoyed the Welsh and he died.
Michelle Butler 46:27
Their family trees are such a mess.
Anne Brannen 46:30
They are really really, really a mess. Where is my thing? I always forget to find this out.
Michelle Butler 46:36
Oh, what we’re doing next?
Anne Brannen 46:38
Do you have it?
Michelle Butler 46:40
It’s Olaf Tryggson kills Klerkon in the marketplace in Novgorod, Russia in the 10th century.
Anne Brannen 46:48
We’re going into Russia. Crime in Russia. Well, that’s hard to even imagine, isn’t it? Oh, let’s not get me started and how I’m feeling about that. What year is that?
Michelle Butler 47:01
You just have it listed as the 10th century. July 13.
Anne Brannen 47:04
So we don’t really know what year. We just know that it was in July. Okay. The 10th century. So we’re gonna go backwards and go to Russia and have somebody dying in the marketplace and that’s what we’ll do next time. Because as you know, we like to move around and do different things at different times. I was very happy to get to go to Wales and discuss one of my favorite medieval crimes.
Michelle Butler 47:29
The de Braoses are just an unending well of crime. It’s got to be some kind of record that William the third is involved personally, with at least three.
Anne Brannen 47:46
Three major crimes. Yes.
Michelle Butler 47:48
It’s not like I dug real hard. There’s probably more.
Anne Brannen 47:50
No, no, these are just the ones we know about. But really the only one we’ve got for this guy is that he gets…he may have been very nice, he may have been a beautiful noble young man of the de Braoses, we don’t know. Bad Llewelyn. Yeah, really Llewelyn I think should probably not have done this, but I can’t find myself caring that much that William de Braose is dead, because, you know, just kind of par for the course for the marcher lords.
Michelle Butler 48:19
Every single one of them is old enough to know better. I think that’s part of what’s so frustrating about this. Everybody involved is solidly middle aged.
Anne Brannen 48:30
This was not ‘Oh, we couldn’t help it because we were 20.’ No. Nope, nope. High stupidity. 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 Stitcher and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcast are hanging out. We are over at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There you can find links to the podcast and the show notes and the transcripts and the little blurbs with pictures. I don’t know what I’m going to use for a picture for this one. We’ll have to find out. Hmm, no, I’ll think about…I might be able to find a picture of the hanging tree. That would be fun. You can leave comments there. We’d love to hear from you. If you have any suggestions for medieval crimes that we should look at, let us know. We may put them on our list because I think we still have at least another year to go with this stuff, don’t we?
Michelle Butler 49:34
Oh gosh. There’s many, many.
Anne Brannen 49:36
How many? How long are we even doing this? We started in October what?
Michelle Butler 49:41
It’s almost three years.
Anne Brannen 49:48
There’s 1000 years and an entire continent. There’s a lot of stuff. That’s it. B
67. Peter von Hagenbach is Convicted of War Crimes, Breisach, Germany 1474
Anne Brannen 0:25
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.
Anne Brannen 0:40
We don’t actually try to be trendy but we don’t mind when we are. Today we’re discussing Peter von Hagenbach, who was convicted of war crimes in Breisach, Germany in 1474. It’s the first international war crime trial. I will talk about that in a bit. Some of us, we’ve been thinking about war crimes a lot lately, because they’re in the news, and I’ll have my little list of war crimes. Here we go. So we’re in Breisach, Germany and Peter von Hagenbach was convicted of war crimes and executed on May 9, 1474. It’s a famous trial since it’s the first international war crime trial in Europe. It’s like a forerunner to the Nuremberg trials of the Nazis. Now, the concept of war crimes is an ancient one. This is not some 19th or 20th century invention, not even medieval. We were talking about the European reaction to Vlad Tepes when he slaughtered the Saxon men, women, and children–it was very clearly war crimes–in our podcast about Dracula. Very clearly war crimes. So there was clearly a medieval notion of things you weren’t supposed to do just because you were at war. Before that, Sun Tzu in the sixth century BC, outlawed humanitarian limitations on hostilities. In 405 BC, the Spartan commander Lysander called the allies of Sparta together, so that’s maybe an international trial, depending on whether or not you’re counting Greek city states as totally independent. It was international, maybe. It’s a forerunner to international war trials. He wanted to judge the fate of the Athenians for war crimes that they had committed against Spartan prisoners, as well as some that they intended to do, but that they haven’t done yet. So intentionality was totally a part of that. The Romans, at the end of the sixth century, had articles of war that included humanitarian limitations on military actions. Not long after that, at Ahkvah, the followers of Muhammad took an oath to fight for the cause of Islam and not to mutilate the enemy, which is a war crime. In Naples in 1268, Conradin von Hohenstaufen was tried and executed for starting an unjust war. In 1305, the English convicted William Wallace–known to some of you as Braveheart–of atrocities in war. That’s one of the things they got him for. So there’s a history of the articulation of what war crimes are and there’s a history of trials of people who violate the humanitarian rules of war. But von Hagenbach’s trial is generally called the first international trial. Unless, of course, as I say, you’re counting the Greek city states. So, what happened? Von Hagenbach, who had been born around 1420 to a minor noble family–and he spoke fluently French and German both–had been working for Charles the Bold, who was the Duke of Burgundy, and he was administering territories on the Upper Rhine. These were territories that Charles had gotten from Sigismund of Habsburg, who had mortgaged them to Charles, because Sigismund was trying to hold back the Swiss Confederation, which was all expansive. Charles the Bold needed somebody to take care of these territories, and he chose his very faithful military commander von Hagenbach, who was unfortunately, exceedingly tyrannical. Eventually the towns of the Upper Rhine rebelled and put von Hagenbach on trial at Breisach for crimes committed there. But the garrison at Breisach hadn’t been paid because Charles hadn’t sent enough money. So they mutinied. That actually is how they got von Hagenbach. The townspeople of Breisach were really happy to go along with this, but they weren’t actually the ones that started it. It was actually von Hagenbach’s own men. So he was put under house arrest. Then he was put in the dungeon, the public prison, and he was interrogated under torture, apparently six times. Then he was taken to another building for more torture and interrogation. They had to take him in a wheelbarrow because his body was so broken. They tortured him some, more four times in one day, and he admitted everything. He admitted everything under all this torture. One of the things that he admitted was that he had intended to exterminate the citizens of Breisach. Did he? No, he did not, but he intended to do this. Oddly enough, after this confession, he was actually not immediately executed, which is why we’re having this discussion at all. Archduke Sigismund decided that von Hagenbach deserved an open trial. That was consistent with legal actions there at the time. But what was completely different and unusual was that instead of being tried by a local judge, they put together a tribunal of 28 representatives of Breisach and the towns around that were part of this whole place that von Hagenbach had been taking care of. That was what was unusual. So that’s our international tribunal. Here’s the indictment. The indictment was that van Hagenbach had–these four counts– 1) the murder in 1473 of four citizens of Thann who had gone to him as emissaries of their town, to complain about the exorbitant taxes that he had imposed, and whom he had summarily beheaded; 2) violating the laws of Breisach as a violation of his oath to uphold these laws, when he quartered soldiers in the town and he illegally allowed pillaging and all that plundering and whatnot and imposed exorbitant taxes. This is a lot of what he did, the taxes–you want to follow the money; 3) conspiring to exterminate the citizens of Breisach, as we have seen, he confessed to; and 4) rape of women and girls in the region. They had witnesses, who were the six people who had heard his confessions, I guess while they were torturing him–I don’t know whether they were just standing by or actually, you know, wielding the instruments. The defense was: 1) the citizens of Thann were justifiably executed because they were in rebellion. I didn’t know that going and visiting the government of a place was the same thing as rebellion. But now you know; 2) although he had sworn to follow the laws of Breisach, which admittedly he had done, subsequently Breisach had sworn allegiance to the Duke. So if Von Hagenbach was following the orders of the Duke, he was indeed following the laws of Breisach because they had sworn allegiance to the Duke. Did you follow that, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 8:06
Hmmm.
Anne Brannen 8:09
It’s a defense, it’s a defense, you really want to be able to follow it. Yeah, it’s like, I swear allegiance to follow your laws. Okay. And we swear allegiance to the Duke. Okay. So if I do what the duke says, then I’m following your laws. No, no, no, no. This is what this is. Got it?
Michelle Butler 8:26
Okay.
Anne Brannen 8:27
All right. 3) the Duke ordered him to quarter troops in Breisach. So hello. That’s why he did it. And 4) as for the rape, first of all, he said that other people had done it. But he said that he only paid for consensual sex. I don’t think anybody believes this whatsoever. The defence then moved that von Hagenbach be sent to the Duke because only the Duke could judge him and that soldiers owed absolute obedience to their superiors. The defense also said that the confessions being obtained under torture were invalid. But the prosecution said that he hadn’t actually said them during the torture just, you know, when he wasn’t being tortured. So I guess, during the time, a little rest in between the bouts of torture, that’s when he confessed and so it wasn’t actually under torture, if it was just like, by the side of torture or something like that. At any rate, that’s what they were arguing. Okay. And if he said that he had been given orders to do all these things, he was slandering his superiors because they could never have given such wicked orders. There you go. The defense asked for an adjournment so that they could confer with the Duke of Burgundy to see if he actually had given the orders. The tribunal refused. This is one of the most important pieces of this entire trial. The tribunal refused to give an adjournment to find out if the Duke of Burgundy had actually given the orders. The reason was that if he had been given those orders, he should have known that they were illegal. That’s the precedent for establishing the idea that following orders is not an defence. There you go. Isn’t it brilliant? Like, we don’t care what the damn duke said. It’s totally irrelevant. You knew not to rape people. So the tribunal discussed all this for quite a while and they found him guilty. He was sentenced to death. They stripped him of his knighthood, the Order of St. George, I think it was, which involves…there was a declaration of this and then they slapped him on the face with a glove of mail, so now he’s no longer a knight. He wept and cried, and he asked to be executed by the sword, which was agreed to, so he’s led to a field on the edge of town and he was beheaded. Now, after all this, a little while later, Charles was very angry, very angry. It took a while, but then he did invade and he murdered and pillaged and enslaved children. All of this led to the Burgundian wars, which ended with Charles losing a battle outside of Nancy, and his body getting thrown into a ditch. So there you are, that’s our story for today. Do you have anything to add just to that, because I have some more that I want to say about war crimes and what we think of them these days. But do you have anything else that you want to say about the trial?
Michelle Butler 11:33
I read about that, in general, but the more I dug, the weirder it got. So no. I don’t have anything about that, in particular.
Anne Brannen 11:46
You know, the whole torturing and getting a confession? No. Confessiones under torture don’t don’t count. However, I think there’s an enormous amount of evidence as to the rape. What they had the most evidence for was the rape. Well, and whacking the heads off the four people complaining about taxes.
Michelle Butler 12:08
I’m really intrigued by this happening, because it’s not altogether different than a lot of other things we’ve seen. His behavior is bad, but it’s the same kind of bad behavior we always see. So it’s very interesting that this case happens at this time.
Anne Brannen 12:28
Well, we’re down at the end of the Middle Ages…one of the scholars that I was reading was talking about something that you’ve mentioned a lot, this kind of movement from the feudal society into this now-bourgeois society that we’ve got. This is the town. His feudal, ‘I had orders, I had to obey the orders.’ ‘No, you didn’t actually and we’re concerned about the taxes, and we are the burgers of the town and we’re putting you to death. And that’s just how it is.’ There’s two really different kinds of authorities working here.
Michelle Butler 13:06
Yes, yes. We’re at that…we’re almost contemporary with Malory–
Anne Brannen 13:12
Yes.
Michelle Butler 13:13
–who writes this kind of shocking thing about Arthur just being a knight like everybody else, and he has to follow the rules of knighthood. The assertion that there’s a law above the king is definitely something that is emerging at this point. But I can kind of see Peter von Hagenbach’s position that ‘Why are you guys getting so mad?’
Anne Brannen 13:38
Yeah, I just doing the stuff we always do.
Michelle Butler 13:41
This is literally what everybody does.
Anne Brannen 13:43
It’s literally what everybody does. He was tyrannical. The taxes were really bad. He was obviously badly behaved. He let his soldiers behave badly. But it doesn’t seem worse than we’ve seen. But yeah, time and place, time and place. So I want to kind of take us into the present, is that okay?
Michelle Butler 14:06
Yeah.
Anne Brannen 14:07
The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907–there were two international peace conferences held in the Netherlands, obviously–laid down rules of warfare, which were immediately violated, by the way in 1914 when the Germans invaded Belgium, and the Geneva Conventions which followed confirmed these and have added on to them. So now, there’s a really, really, really long list of war crimes. We’ll link to them, but you can summarize the list…a little precis of the war crime list would be thus: So this is us now, obeying the Geneva Geneva Conventions. It is not okay in wartime: torture, wanton destruction of property, conscripting prisoners of war to fight for your side, deportation or transfer of citizens of occupied countries, taking hostages, attacking civilians on purpose, attacking humanitarian workers who are identified as such, killing combatants who have surrendered, misusing a flag of truce, settling occupied territory, using poison weapons, using civilians as shields, using child soldiers, firing on combat medics who have insignia, summary execution, pillage and rape, sexual slavery, forced prostitution and forced pregnancy. That’s a condensed list of what we recognize now as war crimes. I note that almost all of those crimes have been committed–some we have on video, some we have just testimony of–almost all of those crimes have been at least allegedly committed by the Russians in Ukraine. So that’s where we’re at, at the moment.
Michelle Butler 16:08
I went off and read a history of war crimes.
Anne Brannen 16:11
That was fun, wasn’t it? This is most interesting damn thing. It really was. Because you know, this stuff doesn’t stop.
Michelle Butler 16:19
Nope. It’s called A World History of War Crimes From Antiquity to the Present. It’s by Michael Bryant. There’s two chapters, about the High Middle Ages and then the late Middle Ages and early modern. This was interesting to come to because again, it’s one of these things that I’ve sort of bumped up against, but not really looked directly at. It helps clear up a lot of things from my point of view. The church’s view, shockingly, is that if it’s a just war, anything goes. It derives from the Roman Total War approach that once you have justified going to war, there are no rules. The medieval church’s point of view is that the ends justify the means. Lovely. Their concern is all about…the Latin is use ad bellum–the reason for going to war, the justification for going to war,. There is not, in fact, a unified church stance about whether an order from a superior justifies atrocity. Some theorists say yes, and some say no. Some say no, you are required as an individual to take responsibility for your actions. Others say no, your highest responsibility is to do what you’re told.
Now this is the church position?
That’s the church position.
Does the church have a position on how it is you know whether it’s a just war? Like when it’s okay to go to war at all?
Yes, there’s a lot of discussion about that. That’s way more complicated.
Anne Brannen 17:53
Cause if that was gonna be your only rule, you’d actually really have to clarify.
Michelle Butler 17:58
There’s a lot of theoreticians arguing about that. Of course, it’s always justified to go to war against the infidels. So there’s really no rules about what you can do to them.
Anne Brannen 18:09
Oh, not just the infidels, but that would be the same thing if you’re going to invade the Occitan if you were going to crusade against the Albigensians because they weren’t technically infidels, but they were the wrong sort of Christians. So therefore, you could do anything.
Michelle Butler 18:29
Exactly. That has its logical extreme in the Catholic-Protestant wars of the 16th century where really everybody gets tired of that, because everybody’s justifying the terrible behavior on religious grounds. It gets very, very bloody. In contrast to the church’s point of view, which is all about why are you going to war but once you’ve established it, you can do anything you want, the secular lords are the ones who have actual practical rules about how to conduct war. So from our point of view, they’re the only ones that are actually concerned about war crimes, what the behavior is in the war. So that’s things about ransoming a captured enemy. That’s the chivalric code. But it only applies to Christian noblemen, so it’s not really a widespread sort of thing. It’s about how knights and lords are required to behave towards each other. There are separate chivalric courts for complaints about the abuse of the chivalric code, but it turns out that mostly that’s property law, because it’s about the division of the spoils.
Anne Brannen 19:44
Yeah, that’s not about war crimes. No, no.
Michelle Butler 19:47
And about unpaid ransoms. Most of these claims in the chivalric courts are about ‘so and so promised to pay me such and such amount of money if I let them go, and they haven’t paid me so I’m here to tell you about my grievance and hoping that you ordered them to pay me.’ In the 14th and 15th centuries, you start having a move away from spoils, we’re starting to see just the nascent little developments of professional armies that are paid directly rather than relying on spoils.
Anne Brannen 20:22
Got it.
Michelle Butler 20:23
So you have Charles the seventh of France putting down ordinances forbidding looting. You start to have rules by the English and the French about indiscriminate killing of civilians and trying to cut down on rape. In this context, Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth becomes a very interesting play– there’s other scholars, this isn’t my genius insight–Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth is an extended meditation about the rules of war and war crimes. The play is just thinking about it all over the place, from the beginning of ‘Is this a just war?’ to ‘Do I execute these people who I consider to be traitors who were trying to keep us from going to war?’ It’s in every scene.
Anne Brannen 21:12
The soldiers who were pillaging–what do you do with them?
Michelle Butler 21:15
It’s in every single scene. It’s the theme of the play. And it’s very different than his earlier history plays, which were really more about how this is happening. The politics. The Henry six plays are about the politics of it. But the Henry five is about the theory and practice of war.
Anne Brannen 21:35
Yeah. It is.
Michelle Butler 21:37
One of the scholars that I read, Gregory Jordan, argues that the Peter von Hagenbach trial was obscure before it gets pulled on for justifying the Nuremberg trials. Let me pull up the specific…I want to quote him directly here: “Georg Schwarzenberger, an English jurist of Jewish German descent, who had fled Nazi persecution in the 1930s, saw an analogy between Nuremberg and an obscure case from the 15th century, the criminal trial at Breisach of Sir Peter von Hagenbach in an article written after the closing of evidence at the IMT trial while the judges were still deliberating. Schwarzenberger published an article in the Manchester Guardian, titled “A Forerunner of Nuremberg: The Breisach War Crime Trial of 1474.” In the article, Schwarzenberger opined that the Hagenbach proceeding appears to be–this is a direct quote now, a quote within a quote, ‘appears to be the first international war crime trial and that it was conducted in accordance with the highest judicial standards.'” So he’s actually like, we know who did this. We know who made this argument that this is the first.
Anne Brannen 22:51
Who dragged this up out of the dregs of archives. Yes,
Michelle Butler 22:55
Gordon is arguing that this was not really known for 500 years, but it creates this kind of backfill for Nuremberg.
Anne Brannen 23:06
It gives us the precedent.
Michelle Butler 23:09
That was pretty fascinating. Supposedly, Peter von Hagenbach’s head is on display.
Anne Brannen 23:16
Yes, I forgot to mention that. You can easily find pictures of it on the web.
Michelle Butler 23:23
Not everybody thinks it’s his head. Of course.
Anne Brannen 23:25
Of course not.
Michelle Butler 23:26
The Washington Post article is pretty fascinating because it says, ‘Yeah, his heads on display. But we don’t recommend that you go Google that.’ I just think it’s really fascinating that on top of everything else we have going on with this, we have this mummified head. That it matters enough that it might be his head, that it’s been preserved and attached to the story of him, which is just really fascinating. Which also kind of pushes back on the idea that this wasn’t important until the 20th century. Because you have this head that even in the 19th century–I think it was 1844 that you have the priest trying to work out whether this could possibly actually be and he concludes it’s not– but you know, you don’t preserve somebody’s decapitated head if it didn’t matter.
And you don’t worry about whose it was if it’s possibly him if it didn’t matter. No, it did. This wasn’t that obscure.
The idea that this head has been held on to and pointed to as ‘this is that guy who pissed us off mightily in the 15th century,’ that implies that it mattered. Even if it’s not his head, if you acquire somebody else’s head, and you make it into his head, that implies that it mattered 100 years later, when you acquired the head.
Anne Brannen 24:57
It mattered, yes, it mattered.
Michelle Butler 24:59
People were still pissed about 100 years later. ‘This is our example. This is what we do.’
Anne Brannen 25:04
‘We took his head right off.’
Michelle Butler 25:07
‘And we’re holding on to it as a warning to others.’ Far and away the weirdest thing that I found was a historical novel for children from 1907.
Anne Brannen 25:19
I’m just gonna have to lie down for this. I just…I can’t. From 1907. So I just want to point out that this predates the dragging up the trial for the Nuremberg trials.
Michelle Butler 25:33
That’s very true. It is a translation. It’s called Swiss Heroes: An Historical Romance of the Time of Charles the Bold, translated from the German of A.A. Willis, by George P. Upton. It is part of a series called Life Stories for Young People. It shows up today on a site called heritage history.com, that is supposed to be for homeschoolers, and people concerned about their children learning traditional values, which I don’t have a problem with, but in this particular instance, I think that might be questionable.
Anne Brannen 26:17
I can’t even what. What are the traditional values that I am supposed to be taking away from the life of Peter von Hagenbach, other than don’t do this?
Michelle Butler 26:29
The translator says that it’s about the behavior of the Swiss. Here’s what it says: “the heroism of the Swiss stands out conspicuously in this romance, but among all the characters in the stirring drama, none is more luring, more pathetic, more glorious than Heinrich Vogeli, who won his restoration to citizenship by his heroic death.”
Anne Brannen 26:59
So this is not Peter von Hagenbach.
Michelle Butler 27:02
But he’s in here.
Anne Brannen 27:03
Oh, I see. I see. Okay.
Michelle Butler 27:05
He is a character who shows up in this, and not just in a passing sort of way. He’s present, and the handling of him is fascinating.
Anne Brannen 27:18
Please do share.
Michelle Butler 27:20
It’s cleaned up clearly. The word ‘rape’ doesn’t show up in a book for fourth graders. The book is very clear that Peter von Hagenbach has annoyed the townspeople that he’s supposed to be governing. But it’s a little hand wavy about it, obviously. Mostly it’s about that he has a haughty attitude, and their forced labor.
Anne Brannen 27:47
That isn’t really a whole lot of reason for cutting off his head, is it? So it would make him very heroic.
Michelle Butler 27:56
He’s very arrogant, and that’s one of the problems, but then the book gives him a brave death.
Anne Brannen 28:04
He didn’t have one.
Michelle Butler 28:10
Here we go with a direct quote: “With a firm step–“
Anne Brannen 28:13
How could he have a firm step? He couldn’t even walk.
Michelle Butler 28:14
“With a firm step he mounted the scaffold and facing his judges and the people spoke thus with manly courage. ‘I fear not death. Too often have I faced it on the battlefield. I regret alone the blood which mine will cause to be shed, for think not my master will permit this day to pass unavenged. Grant me your forgiveness for Christ and our Lady’s sake. I am not guilty of all you have charged against me. Yet I humbly confess myself a sinner. Pray for me.’ He knelt and received the death stroke. The executioner of Colmar performed his duty well, but not a shout arose. Not a murmur of applause was heard. Peter von Hagenbach had shown he knew how to die and his death atoned for all.”
Anne Brannen 28:14
It’s nonsense. Now he did–I’m trying to find it because we do have a transcript of what he said. Hold on.
Michelle Butler 29:19
Even though earlier in the book, we’re told, Oh, the townspeople hate him and he’s arrogant, it redeems him with this death scene.
Anne Brannen 29:30
That is just awful.
Michelle Butler 29:32
I really wasn’t expecting to find a historical novel, and I most definitely was not expecting to find one meant to hold him up as an example for children. I got so deep into the weeds of medieval theories of war versus what was actually happening on the ground because a lot of what that book was talking about was the difference between the theorists and the practitioners. It was one thing to have the Popes saying ‘kill them all, God will know his own’ and the people on the ground going ‘yes but if I kill everybody and I get captured, the same thing will happen to me. So I’m not going to do that. We’re going to show a little grace.’ But it’s not really altruism. It’s covering your own butt for the next time something that luck goes against you.
Anne Brannen 30:24
So this is what… the hidden history of war crimes trials? is that the same book you’ve got?
Michelle Butler 30:33
That’s one of them, yes. That’s the one that Gordon is in. But I didn’t actually read the entire article. I just read part of it.
Anne Brannen 30:41
So will you go back and look at what it is that your your idiotic author says?
Michelle Butler 30:50
“I fear not death. Too often have I faced it on the battlefield. I regret alone the blood which mine will cause to be shed.” So I’m only feeling bad because other people will have to die to revenge me. “For think not my master will permit this day to pass unavenged.” And then he has the whole ‘pray for me.’ I am confessing myself a sinner.
Anne Brannen 31:14
This is essentially the same thing except it’s not as flowery. Your author, your translation, has made it sound really really big. “I am not concerned about my life. I have risked it enough on the field of battle. But I lament that the blood of many an honest man should be shed on my account. For assuredly my noble master, the Duke of Burgundy, will not suffer this deed to go unavenged. I regret neither my life nor my body. I ask only that you forgive me for having done what I have been sentenced for, and for other things even worse than that. Those of you for whom I served as governor for four years, please forgive what I’ve done through lack of wisdom or through malice. I was only human. Please pray for me.”
That actually is a little bit different. Our author here has him say ‘I am not guilty of all you have charged against me.’
It’s absolutely not what he said.
Michelle Butler 31:39
‘Yet I humbly confess myself a sinner.’ Wow, this is even worse, because this implies that this author has gone off and done a bunch of research and then tinkered with it to make him seem less awful.
Anne Brannen 32:17
I’m completely annoyed by this children’s book, which is teaching traditional values by lying about things that happened. Because von Hagenbach did do some things, and he didn’t say he was innocent. This is just ridiculous. He cried and was very upset. So this noble Victorian hero they’ve got is just…okay, so you found a children’s novel from hell. Great, thanks. But there were no, like, operas?
Michelle Butler 32:51
Not as far as I can tell. I did not really find much. I kind of expected him to show up as a character in other people’s stories, but not really.
Anne Brannen 33:09
No, no, no. I don’t know. It couldn’t have been that obscure if people were writing stupid children’s books about it in 1907. But, you know, fairly obscure.
Michelle Butler 33:24
1907. I have not been able to track down when the original German was written. This is when the translation into English was made.
Anne Brannen 33:35
What’s the name of it?
Michelle Butler 33:36
It’s called Swiss heroes: An Historical Romance of the Time of Charles the Bold translated from the German of A.A. Willis. This book is not hard to find.
Anne Brannen 33:49
Well, we have no idea when A.A.Willis was writing.
Michelle Butler 33:54
I really would have thought I would have been able to find when the original was published.
Anne Brannen 34:00
Yeah. I can’t find it. Our guy says that’s what he’s doing, translating it from A.A. Willis. But he’s not actually giving us any information.
Michelle Butler 34:12
There’s only one book by him on Project Gutenberg, which surprises me
Anne Brannen 34:17
This is it. This is it.
Michelle Butler 34:22
That suggests to me that he wrote other books, but this is the one that got translated, although maybe not…here we go. I’m looking at the National Encyclopaedia of American biography. He has 36 volumes in his series Life Stories for Young People.
Anne Brannen 34:46
Okay
Michelle Butler 34:48
Published between 1904 and 1912.
Anne Brannen 34:52
So at the end of his life, that’s what he was doing. Interesting.
Michelle Butler 34:56
That’s a lot of books though. That’s a lot of books to translate in a really… I mean, they’re short books, but even still. He translated 36 volumes between 1904 and 1912. That’s significant output.
Anne Brannen 35:15
So we have our trial, we’ve discussed war crimes in history, and war trials in history, and where we are today with war crimes in the world, and have mentioned a perfectly dreadful children’s novel that people can go and look at if they wish to find out things. But we aren’t saying that it’s very historically correct, since we know it to be full of lies, at least on one part. Anything else that we need to say about this trial that happened in the end of the 15th century?
Michelle Butler 35:52
I’m still fascinated that it happened. Because it really feels like it’s not the worst thing we’ve covered in terms of people’s behavior. He’s a couple of steps over a line, but everything that he’s doing that was part of how war was conducted.
Anne Brannen 36:17
He’s not nearly as far over the line is either Vlad Tepes or St. Olga.
Michelle Butler 36:23
I think part of what’s going on is that between the 15th and 18th centuries things are still really violent in Europe. But the concept, the theoretical concept of how you conduct war is changing. As you move towards more professional armies, you have a stronger idea of noncombatants.
Anne Brannen 36:46
That’s right. It becomes less personal at the higher level. It’s not your guy, fighting for your guy. It’s professional armies.
Michelle Butler 36:58
It’s kind of early in that but it’s also possible… I did read some people who were arguing that this is part of a political lever on the part of the person who’s doing the public trial. So it’s just really fascinating. We end up having this being used as an example of an early war crime. But the fact that this is happening is such a product of its context, the time and the place, and the things that are changing and the desire on the part of the lord to to further his agenda by looking like he’s really cracking down on this.
Anne Brannen 37:40
Yeah. My fascination about it really has to do with not just the nature of what is a war crime. That’s been codified, an idea of what an atrocity is. That’s been pretty clear. But the idea that even though we are subject to our superiors, and militarily when we’re supposed to be obeying orders, that we are not to cross the line and do things that we know to be wrong, simply because we were told to do them. That’s simply not an excuse. As referred to by one of our scholars, that’s a watershed.
Michelle Butler 38:32
Right, right. Yes. I was a little bit shocked to discover that the medieval churches…the positions being taken by the medieval church are quite shocking. Because it’s not that we haven’t run into that before. But it’s different to think that when you’re running into, you know, ‘kill all the Albgensians’ that that is the accepted position, and not somebody getting overenthusiastic. It really is different to have it be the codified standard central position, rather than somebody who has crossed a line and nobody can rein back in. It really is shocking to have the medieval church taking the position that the ends justify the means, the position that the fact that you are conducting a just war means you can do anything in pursuit of that goal. The scholar makes the best case for them that he can, that this is an inheritance from the Romans, who very much were like that, but that only goes so far.
Anne Brannen 39:53
Well, you know, when we’re talking about all this bad behavior over 1000 years, one of the things we find is that sometimes what we consider bad behavior is not considered bad behavior. And sometimes both we and the Middle Ages, we all consider it bad behavior. Sometimes they think things are bad behavior, which we think are just fine. This is a really, really liminal place. It is bad behavior. No, it’s not. Yes, it is. No, it’s not. Okay. So I believe that’s our discussion of a very important medieval war crime trial. It wasn’t really as important then as it is now, but it’s very important. Anything more to say?
Michelle Butler 40:37
No.
Anne Brannen 40:38
Well, the next time that you hear from us we are going to be discussing…we’re going someplace else entirely different. We’re going to be discussing the time that Flewellyn the Great hung William deBraose for having an affair with Flewellyn’s wife, who was the daughter of King John of England. So that’s what we’re gonna talk about. We’re gonna go to Wales. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are–so sorry to say–just like they are today only with less technology. You can find us at Stitcher, and Spotify, and Apple podcast and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. You can leave reviews for us there, which we appreciate, and you can find us at True Crime Medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. You can leave comments there. We’d love to hear from you. You can also let us know if there’s medieval crimes you think we ought to look at. We’ll put them on the list. I believe that’s all the things I say. Bye.
66. Henry of Trastámara Massacres the Jews of Toledo, Toledo Spain, 1355
Anne Brannen 0:27
Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen. I’m your host in Albuquerque.
Michelle Butler 0:35
And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.
Anne Brannen 0:40
Now, how long are you in the most medieval state? When are you leaving the most medieval state? A couple of weeks? Two, three months?
Michelle Butler 0:46
I am, at the moment, scheduled to be here through the end of August.
Anne Brannen 0:50
Okay. So like six weeks. All right. Let’s probably not record the week you’re moving. How about that? Doesn’t that sound like a really kind of sane thing to assume?
Michelle Butler 1:02
Probably a good idea.
Anne Brannen 1:06
Yeah. Well, we’re here. At the moment, we’re still in Albuquerque and the medieval state. Today, we’re discussing one of the massacres of the Jews in Europe. We’re going to focus the time when Henry de Trastamara massacred the Jews of Toledo, Spain in 1355, but one of many and so we have the background of that. Michelle has gone and found really interesting things as usual, but I’m background. So here we are in Spain. Under Muslim rules, Jews did not have the same rights as Muslims, but they were tolerated and certainly they were better off than the Jews in the rest of Europe under Christian rule where systemic oppression and murder started with the beginning of the First Crusade, which would be 1096. By 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella would conquer Grenada, and that would be the last of the Muslim rule in the Iberian Peninsula. Although they would say in 1490 that Jews would be tolerated, that was gonna be a myth and not a reality. But back to 1321. In 1321, the Shepherds Crusade went on into Navarre, which by that time had been under Christian rule for a couple hundred years. They massacred the Jews of Pamplona and Estella. We’re going to focus on that, on the 1321 massacre, at a different time. Maybe in another year, as we go through various things. But in 1348 Jewish communities across Europe were getting massacred during the Black Death. The Jewish communities at Barcelona and in Catalonia were massacred. In 1355–that’s where we’re coming on down to, that’s more or less the one we’re focusing on today–the supporters of Henrique de Trastamara, that would be Henry, he’s going to be Henry the second of Castile after he finishes this particular piece of the civil war, his supporters slaughtered the Jews at Toledo. His half brother, Pedro the cruel–we did a whole podcast on Pedro the cruel getting killed by Henry de Trastamara because it was murder, even though there had been a battle and then there was this murder. His half brother had been friendly to the Jews of the kingdom and Henry in his campaign against a Pedro, made use of antisemitism in Spain, in Castile, as a propaganda weapon. Henry de Trastamara attacked the Alcana, the smaller of the Jeweries of Toledo in 1355. At least 1200 Jews were killed in that massacre. Later in 1369, after Henry had defeated and murdered Pedro, he had to repay the Breton knight Bertrand du Guesclin for his mercenaries, who had been an important part of Henry’s military forces. He did this by demanding what comes to about 20,000 doubloons as a contribution from the already heavily taxed Jews of Toledo. I did some work trying to figure out what 20,000 golden doubloons in 1369 would be about now. The estimates completely range but they start at $50 million dollars and go up into the hundreds. So a great deal of money, and they’d already been heavily taxed and didn’t have it. He had them tortured and starved, and all of their property sold at auction. He forced the Jews of the kingdom, as well as the Muslims, to wear a badge. This was a red circle worn on the left shoulder. It was the Nazis that used the yellow star of David. There were badges used throughout Europe in the Middle Ages to make the Jews identify themselves, but they were different in different places. Here they wore a red circle on the left shoulder. He decreed that Jews could not use Christian names, and that Christians only had to repay two-thirds of any debts to Jews. That they had to repay them at all, I really actually question, but, I mean, this was the legal of it. Oh, and then they couldn’t hold public offices. Later in 1391–Henry was king of Castile at that time–the worst of the massacres of the Jews of Spain would occur. Antisemitism in Spain had been growing and the Archdeacon of Ecija, Ferrand Martinez, whipped up hostilities, commanding authorities to exile the Jews from their territories, and though the king commanded him to stop, he continued. He got suspended and he continued preaching violence against the Jews. Antisemitic mobs attacked across Spain, starting in Castile and going on into Aragon, which was actually odd at that time. Four thousand Jews were killed in Seville, perhaps as many as 50,000 Jews were killed throughout Castile and thousands converted in order to survive. In Toledo nearly all of the Jews there were murdered and their houses pillaged. The synagogues were torn down. Most of the survivors converted. The remaining synagogue was in 1411 turned into the Church of St. Maria la Blanca. It still exists. The conversos were expelled from public office in 1419 and then more of them in 1449 when there was a riot and murder and pillage of the conversos. In 1481, the Inquisition would begin in Seville. The largest of auto-da-fé was in Toledo. Do the Inquisition had started specifically as rooting out the conversos, who theoretically were not really Christian and were continuing to be Jewish. Some of them were and some of them weren’t. There’s a side note, which is that Teresa of Avila’s manuscripts will get confiscated by the Inquisition. Her grandfather was a converso, and so she was suspect. Her last great work, she had to write twice because they never gave the manuscript back to her. So she had to write it again. In Valencia, the queen of Bar ordered that the Jews be protected and the prince had a gallows set up outside of the Jewish community so that he could punish any people who attacked Jews. But nevertheless, about a month after the violence started in Castile, a mob attacked the Jewish community in Valencia, pillaging, murdering, raping. The estimate is that 230 Jews were killed there and most of the rest forced to convert. About 200 actually escaped. So persecution of the Jews in Iberia was, after the expulsion of the Muslims, widespread but Toledo was where much of the worst of the atrocities took place. It had been probably the center of Spanish Jewry. There were renowned religious writers. There were astronomers. There were poets. There were astrologers, because Toledo was also a center for the magic arts. So there’s some crossover there amongst communities working in the magic arts. There were grammarians, satirists, kabbalists, and Toledo was a center for Talmudic studies. So that’s why, although horrible things were happening throughout Spain, Toledo is the center. Yeah. So you found interesting things, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 8:42
I ended up going on a little sidebar into apparently, what is a central question–Spain is not really my area of expertise. So probably people who are experts in Spanish medieval studies were already familiar with this. But I was not–that one of the central questions or fault lines in Spanish medieval studies is whether Spain, because of its background of having been conquered by the Muslims and held by them for a while…the argument on one side is that that resulted in a society that was more tolerant, in which Christians and Muslims and Jews were able to coexist relatively peaceably. That particular argument was being made in the late 70s. Almost immediately, you have another side saying, ‘but look at all the massacres, that can’t possibly be true.’ Like anything, once you start having lines drawn up, things get pushed to being more extreme. The original person wasn’t arguing that there was never a massacre. Because that’s patently not true. But what he is saying is that it’s a place where the three faiths existed more peaceably than in the rest of Europe. The other side is saying that’s that’s not true, it’s basically just as violent there as anywhere else. So I found a scholar, whose name is David Nirenberg, and he really seems to be somebody who specializes in the history of Jews in Spain. He has a really fascinating premise in his book called communities of violence. And he is arguing that both pieces of this are true.
Anne Brannen 10:26
I’m so looking forward to hearing how this works.
Michelle Butler 10:30
His argument is really interesting. It’s not the obvious argument. You would think that if you say they coexist, except for these outbreaks of violence, that the argument that is going to be made next is the safety valve argument that steam builds up, and then you blow it off with this violence. What he’s actually arguing is that the position that each group–that the Jews and the Muslims–occupy in Spain is different, and so the violence that ends up getting directed at them is dependent on that social position that they occupy. So in the case of the Muslims, they’re allowed to participate in the feudal system, they’re allowed to be the vassals of lords, and so they end up getting pulled into local squabbles. So sometimes there is violence directed against the Muslims that is it part and parcel with violence being directed against the lords that they are adherents of.
Anne Brannen 11:37
Got it.
Michelle Butler 11:39
Whereas the Jews are not allowed to be vassals of lords. They are legally held to be answerable only to the king, and so the violence that ends up getting directed against the Jews is bound up with, oftentimes not in every case–he’s saying that if you just claim that all the violence has to do with pure religious hatred, that is way too simplistic, and it doesn’t deal with the realities on the ground.
Anne Brannen 12:11
So religious hatred is not the only reason for this. And also, the whole money issue is not the whole reason for this.
Michelle Butler 12:21
Exactly. He’s saying that it’s usually religious hatred and something else. So when the Muslims get attacked, it’s often religious hatred and we have a fuss with the particular lord that you’re answerable to. So we’re killing you, because now we have two reasons to do so. Whereas what happens to the Jews oftentimes, and I think 1355 is a good example of this, because they are answerable, held in law to be serfs of the king, their safety is directly related to the strength of the king. So in 1355, when Peter of Castile is under attack, then the Jews come under attack.
Anne Brannen 13:04
Right, right. So if you’re in a civil war, they’re in especial danger.
Michelle Butler 13:09
Yes. If the king is strong, and he’s able to protect them, then things are going along okay. But when the king’s power is weakened, then the Jews are in danger, because not only can he not protect them, oftentimes, they get attacked as proxies for attacking the king. That is complicated and made worse by the jobs that they’re being asked to do for the king. Being moneylenders, being administrators, when you’re unhappy with the king, and you don’t want to attack the king directly, it’s useful to attack the people who work for him and are perceived as having privileges because they work for him. The argument that Nirenberg is making is that yes, part of the time, this position of being answerable to the king means that people get along, but sometimes it means that you come under attack.
Anne Brannen 14:13
And it’s specifically because of that. Interesting. Which is not the same thing as a safety valve at all.
Michelle Butler 14:19
No, it’s very, very fascinating. I found his argument to be…it wasn’t what I expected. I kind of expected him to be making the you know, ‘sometimes the yahoos go and blow off steam and then you can go back.’ But it actually kind of reminded me of things that have happened in this country in terms of attacks on wealthy black neighborhoods. That happens when there’s an excuse to do so. It’s not just in Tulsa that people were unhappy that supposedly the black elevator operator touched the white girl. It’s that you had this wealthy neighborhood and when there was an excuse…so I found his argument to be really, really interesting. I want to read more of his scholarship. I want to circle back to his book when we get to 1321 because he talks extensively about that massacre.
Anne Brannen 15:15
I was familiar with the idea that in Spain, everybody was getting along fine. But this is despite the fact that there were all these murders, which completely makes this obviously not true. It’s interesting. So it’s a complex construction, not a simple one.
Michelle Butler 15:36
He talks about how the tension between expelling and inviting back that happens in the late 13th and then early 14th century is pretty interesting. That stuff is happening with France, too. It’s not just things are happening either in France or in Spain, but in the border areas what happens on one side affects what happens on the other side, so it’s also transnational. So if somebody in France, like when Philip the Fair starts stirring up trouble in 1306 and expels the Jews from France, then that causes problems down in Spain.
Anne Brannen 16:21
Right, of course, because, yes, humans have to go someplace.
Michelle Butler 16:25
Yeah, exactly. So his book is really interesting. The other really interesting thing that I got sidetracked over into is a book about trying to recreate Jewish cooking from the Middle Ages. It’s called Sephardi: Cooking the History, and it’s by Helene Jawhara Piner. This is her dissertation. She spent five years…I’m so fascinated by all of this. I find this kind of material history and experimental archaeology to be really interesting. She spent five years in her dissertation research going through Spanish cookbooks from the 13th and 14th century, and then also the records of the Spanish Inquisition.
Anne Brannen 17:20
So she’s working with Jewish cooking from Spain, from the Iberian Peninsula.
Michelle Butler 17:25
Exactly, exactly. She’s trying to recreate–reconstruct–not recreate but pull back together, because it’s not like there’s a history or there’s a cookbook of Jewish cooking that survives from the Middle Ages in the 14th century. That’s what she’s trying to recreate by pulling things from sources and putting them back together. She’s looking for recipes that exist in Spanish cookbooks that go out of their way to avoid things that Jews aren’t supposed to eat.
Anne Brannen 18:04
Oh, I see. Oh, that’s very clever.
Michelle Butler 18:08
For example, she looks for recipes that use eggplant rather than pork.
Anne Brannen 18:13
Right, right. Right. Right. Right. There’s no recipes for the giant roast pig with apples in his mouth or anything like that.
Michelle Butler 18:22
Then she’s using the records from the Spanish Inquisition to reverse engineer how Jews must have been cooking by looking at what the Spanish Inquisition was looking for in order to identify the people they thought were secret Jews.
Anne Brannen 18:41
What were they looking for?
Michelle Butler 18:42
They were looking for people cooking with pork, people cooking things on a Friday which then doesn’t have to be reheated to eat on Saturday.
Anne Brannen 18:54
Wait, wait, wait. So they were looking for people who were not cooking with pork?
Michelle Butler 18:58
Yeah, they’re looking for people who are not cooking with pork.
Anne Brannen 19:02
And who were cooking things that could be cooked on…that didn’t have to be cooked on the Sabbath because they’d been cooked the day before.
Michelle Butler 19:10
Exactly. Yes. So her book is just fascinating.
Anne Brannen 19:17
So also there wouldn’t be sauces to serve with any of the meats that contain milk.
Michelle Butler 19:24
I would assume so. What I got totally stuck on the challah bread recipe. Of course, you know, I’m not Jewish. I was raised Catholic. But my kids love the braided bread.
Anne Brannen 19:38
Because it’s awesome.
Michelle Butler 19:39
It’s awesome. And it’s gorgeous. My kids love it, so I cook it a lot. I really got stuck on her recipe for the braided bread and here’s what she has to say about it. “The challah braided bread, an icon of today’s Ashkenazi Jewish cuisine,” which, by the way, I didn’t know. That was cool, “had its first recorded recipe in Spain’s first cookbook in the 13th century. According to the Sephardic Jews, who were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula in the 15th century, the challah began its long journey north and eastward, passing through Italy to Eastern Europe. There it blended with the culinary practices of Ashkenazi Jews who adopted it and gave it a home of permanence and survival, not only at home, but throughout the world.” Then there’s the recipe.
Anne Brannen 20:28
Oh, yay.
Michelle Butler 20:30
Translated from Arabic, because a lot of what she’s finding is recipes that survive in Arabic.
Anne Brannen 20:38
So there’s cookbooks that are in Arabic, that are preserving the Spanish food, which has in it many things that come from the Jewish food of Spain?
Michelle Butler 20:55
You can understand why this research took her five years because she’s having to read a bunch of stuff and pull out the pieces that are recognizably Jewish.
Anne Brannen 21:07
I love this. So, the recipe as it survives–how like what you’ve been making is it?
Michelle Butler 21:17
One version of it is, one version of it isn’t. In one version, you fry the strands, and then braid them together. So that would be like a braided donut.
Anne Brannen 21:31
How do you…? Once you fry something, it’s not very pliable.
Michelle Butler 21:36
So here’s what it says.
Anne Brannen 21:41
You haven’t tried this yet?
Michelle Butler 21:43
No, I have not tried this. Let’s see what it says…it does have saffron in it, which is interesting.
Anne Brannen 21:51
Yeah, yeah, that’s why it’s yellow then.
Michelle Butler 21:53
Maybe they’re braiding this ahead of time. It sounds good though. Hmm. Moisten it with that, then put in semolina. Five eggs, saffron, beat this well, put it in a dish, let it rise. Once it’s risen, clean a frying pan, fill it with fresh oil, put it on the fire. Once it starts to boil…Oh, make braids of the leaven dough. So you braid it ahead of time, but then you fry it. Coat them in oil, throw them in the oil, fry them until they’re brown. Once the cooking is done, arrange them on an earthenware plate and pour over them skimmed honey spiced with pepper, cinnamon, Chinese cinnamon, and lavender. Sprinkle with ground sugar. That sounds amazing. But that sounds like a doughnut. Whereas the the next recipe is more like challah bread.
Is it something that you could recreate?
Oh, yeah. What she’s doing is, she’s finding these recipes and then she’s experimenting with them because they oftentimes don’t have amounts…you know how ancient recipes work, or even a recipe one gets from one’s grandmother. You know, my mom’s recipe for meatloaf involves a handful of oatmeal. How much is that?
Anne Brannen 23:23
We’ve got the recipe for my Texas grandmother’s cornbread. It’s the best cornbread ever. But there are absolutely no…it’s like some stuff. Some corn meal and get some bacon fat. We try to recreate it but she was doing it by sight.
Michelle Butler 23:48
She’s doing something in several layers here. She’s having to go identify the things in the existing sources that she can make the case for having been Jewish cooking, and pull them together. Then she’s adapting them such that they can be cooked now. Figuring out what how much–Oh, there’s pictures of one that’s fried, and then a couple of baked ones. How cool. This is very cool.
Anne Brannen 24:20
That is fun. Yeah, there’s a great many cookbooks available nowadays that take medieval European recipes and cause them to be something that you can cook now. It’s nice. It’s a lot of fun because there are these surviving manuscripts. I had no idea that it was possible to recreate some of what was getting cooked in Jewish households, as opposed to the Christian households of Spain. It would be interesting to see if that could be done in for Eastern European cooking. I’d like to know.
Michelle Butler 24:59
She talks about empanadas and how they get used by the conversos to basically conceal what they’re eating because everything is inside. So when the Spanish Inquisition is looking for people who are eating eggplant rather than pork, you can tuck everything inside the empanada and not make it so obvious what you’re eating. That’s very cool.
Anne Brannen 25:30
The converting was a way of surviving and a great many people did it. But converting at sword point is just not the same thing as actually getting convinced as to the rightness of another religion. So it remains an issue.
Michelle Butler 25:52
The other thing, of course, that is pretty cool about this cookbook is it shows the ways in which medieval cooking is spicy. This is true of rich people’s cooking everywhere, not just in Spain. If you’re anybody with any money at all, there are spices in your food in a way that we just generally don’t think of being true for the Middle Ages. When you ask somebody about their beliefs about medieval cooking, they’re going to think that it’s bland and boiled. I’m sure that for the lower classes that was probably true. But for anybody who could afford anything expensive you want spices. It’s much much closer to contemporary Middle Eastern or Indian food, than it is the kind of Midwest cooking that I grew up with. This next recipe that I scroll to has vinegar, salt, pepper, coriander, ginger, cumin, saffron, cinnamon, honey, and almonds. And that’s not a dessert. That’s eggplant. I think the place honestly where the kind of spices that are typically used in medieval cooking survive mostly for us is in desserts. In particular kind of 19th century desserts that we inherit from the Victorians. All of that cinnamon and cloves.
Anne Brannen 27:23
There was one thing, though, that survived much longer, the use of what we think of now as sweet spices with savory and that was actual real mincemeat. If you go and get mincemeat now in jars, there’s not actually meat in it. But it really was minced meat with a bunch of the sweet spices. And all those spices that are mentioned, those are being brought in from elsewhere. They’re quite expensive, with the exception, of course, of saffron, which was not expensive. You could grow. It was grown a lot in Spain, but also in England. Saffron Walden was a place where saffron was the main economy. The reason it’s expensive now is that it’s labor intensive, not that you have to bring it from far away. So it wasn’t expensive in the Middle Ages. Cinnamon, yes. And the pepper. Yes.
Michelle Butler 27:26
I have a really interesting book about medieval spices and how it is perceived…it’s kind of a Venn diagram of perceived as being healthy to have spicy food because you’re kind of clearing out your sinuses and generally feeling invigorated and warming yourself up. So it feels healthy to eat spicy food, but also that conspicuous consumption, being able to show off that you can afford to have spices. And of tasting good. So all of those things working together create the environment in which you have this fabulously profitable market for spices.
Anne Brannen 29:06
I haven’t heard it in a while, thank God, but there used to be a myth that the reason that they were using so many spices in the Middle Ages is that they were covering up the taste of rotted meat.
Michelle Butler 29:16
I have indeed been told that by students.
Anne Brannen 29:18
I don’t hear it these days. But it like patently doesn’t make sense. Because first of all, why would you be eating rotten meat in the first place? Covering up the taste doesn’t really change the fact that it’s rotten. Second of all, why would you be having rotten meat? Had you forgotten everything you’ve learned about salting meat? It doesn’t make any sense whatsoever. But it was a myth that came about because of all that money that was being spent on spices. Obviously you have to be using enormous amounts of spices and so, ergo, you were using it for something. What was it? Oh, it was the Middle Ages, where apparently everyone was naturally stupid, according to a lot of people. So therefore you were eating rotten meat. You were stupid enough to eat rotten meat but smart enough to put a lot of cinnamon on it. It makes no sense.
Michelle Butler 30:14
Particularly how expensive all the spices are. You’re not gonna sprinkle gold dust on a fish that you’ve left sit out for two weeks. That’s disgusting. Nobody’s nobody’s gonna waste–
Anne Brannen 30:27
They just don’t have to. I mean, you eat the meat before it goes rotten.
Michelle Butler 30:32
But it is a fascinating example of the ways in which we’re willing to believe all kinds of ridiculous things about the past in order to reinscribe or reaffirm our understandings of their stupidity.
Anne Brannen 30:48
So this is a segway, but my favorite example of this…one of my students once made the remark that well, in the Middle Ages, didn’t they just, you know, make insane people…they sent them out into the woods. I’m like, Okay, well, somebody may well have done that at some point. But it wasn’t a custom anywhere that I know of. Where did you hear this? She was actually able to track it down. It was a footnote in actually a scholarly book. It was a scholarly book in a footnote said this thing, and the evidence for it was a poem, which is kind of the equivalent of telling everybody that in America in the 20th century, there was an enormous number of people suffering from amnesia, and the evidence you have for this is soap operas. Going to take a poem and then tell me what the history is? The stuff that people invent and believe. Well, I guess, actually, we talk about this a lot, don’t we?
Michelle Butler 31:53
I know that we’re going to come back to some of the other massacres, but I do want to just stop and acknowledge that there’s so many of these, it’s basically its own sub genre of of topics, and that I spent an awful lot of years as a medievalist without knowing this. It’s not that I didn’t know that there were massacres against the Jews in the Middle Ages, it’s that it always got talked about as an isolated incident.
Anne Brannen 32:35
Ah. Yeah. If you go and you look up, like, the history of Henry the second of Castile, it’s in there. But it’s not really something that gets focused on. You have to go to Jewish history to find this stuff.
Michelle Butler 32:51
Yes, yes. That actually ended up being some of the sources I was looking at. My scholar, David Nirenberg, talks about in his introduction that well into the 20th century, nobody was talking about these massacres except Jewish historians. It’s only just recently, like the 1980s, coming into widespread scholarly discussion. That absolutely tracks with my experience as an undergraduate in the 90s, that the conversation was like, ‘Oh, well, you know, that happened. But that’s not…’ You know how people say after a mass shooting, ‘that’s not who we are.’
Anne Brannen 33:30
Yeah, in America at the moment that is who we are.
Michelle Butler 33:33
It very much is who we are, clearly, at this particular moment.
Anne Brannen 33:39
In America, we like to massacre people at concerts and in malls. We have fairly constant child massacres in school and to pretend that this isn’t something which is ubiquitous is fairly…these are not isolated incidents.
Michelle Butler 34:00
Yes. It was in no way clear to me, in undergraduate or graduate school, that you pretty much cannot go a generation in Europe without there being multiple acts of violence going on against Jewish communities.
Anne Brannen 34:18
Each area of France or England or Spain, or Germany will have their different histories but quite often, they will be all connected. As, for instance, at the beginning of the First Crusade, that’s across Europe, or the Black Death–across Europe. Otherwise, it’s tied to local politics.
Michelle Butler 34:47
Nirenberg talks also about how violence against lepers ends up going parallel with violence against Jews.
Anne Brannen 34:59
I did not know that.
Michelle Butler 35:01
At least in Spain, they’re on parallel tracks. When there’s violence against lepers, there’s violence against Jews, and vice versa. They end up being accused of working with each other, like both groups get accused of poisoning wells.
Anne Brannen 35:21
See, now this would make sense to me with the Black Death, because like we’re all getting sick. Obviously, it’s somebody’s fault. Not ours, so therefore, who is it? Well, people we hated anyway. But why, when it’s not during the Black Death?
Michelle Butler 35:37
He says that before 1321 that accusations of poisoning against either Jews or lepers are really, really unusual. It really is a product of the Black Death that those become widespread.
Anne Brannen 35:53
Okay, so then they just continue.
Michelle Butler 35:57
Sometimes the accusations that get made are that the Jews have hired the lepers to poison the wells.
Anne Brannen 36:04
Because they had money, that being one of the problems. Okay, got it.
Michelle Butler 36:09
At one point, there’s a leper who gets tortured–he gets arrested, and he confesses that he’s been hired by the Jews to take a powder that has been given to him and sprinkle it all over the place, and that’s going to cause everybody to become a leper. I wasn’t aware of that. I mean, it makes sense to me that anybody who is different is going to at some point or other going to end up being a target of violence when you have a society that is under stress.
Anne Brannen 36:44
And prone to violence anyway, frankly.
Michelle Butler 36:47
Well, the 14th century is under a lot of stress. Nirenberg’s introduction is all about how the 14th century is under so much stress. They’re under economic stress before the Black Death ever rolls through. So when the Black Death rolls through, you have just a double whammy of there being a motivation for violence against the minority groups. Although he does make the rather interesting argument and pointed observation that there’s kind of a sweet spot, shall we say, for violence against minorities. In Spain, for example, the Jewish communities were mostly in the cities. So you don’t have violence against the Jews happening in the countryside because there aren’t any Jews there. It’s an urban phenomena, because that’s where the community is. But you don’t have violence happening against the Muslims when they’re not a minority. So there are places in Spain where such a percentage of the population is Muslim that it’s really unusual. It’s not that you don’t ever have violence, because sometimes people come from elsewhere. But it’s unusual for there to be localized violence, because there’s so many. So there’s kind of a sweet spot of there being enough of the minority to be worth attacking, but not so many that they could successfully defend themselves. His book is just fascinating.
Anne Brannen 38:23
This does sounds good. Thank you for both these books. I want to read them both. Is that is for today?
Michelle Butler 38:33
I feel a little…I like to bring sort of an upbeat tone to what we’re doing. But it’s quite difficult to do that when we’re dealing with a massacre. It’s really easier for me to be upbeat when it’s just a bunch of noble cousins killing each other because who cares. They’re all jerks.
Anne Brannen 38:53
This is very true. We’re dealing with medieval crime, of course we’re going to talk about killing of Jews and this vast nastiness across Europe. And no, I mean, I find many, many things hysterically funny, as you know. I come by this honestly. It’s my family. If we’re at your deathbed, we’re going to all be making jokes. That’s how it is. But this is not. I never find this funny. Absolutely not. Well, that’s what we have. We’re gonna come back to this general subject in a few weeks. We’re going to talk about the Jews of York getting massacred at Clifford’s tower. That’s one of the massacres that interests me a great deal, how this works and betrayal and whatnot. So we’ll be doing that in a few weeks. The next time that we record, we are scheduled to discuss the time that Peter von Hasenbach was convicted of war crimes in Germany in 1474. We’ve discussed medieval war crimes before. I think it was when Vlad Tepes slaughtered the Saxons. We were discussing the fact that, you know, if you look at war crimes, medieval war crimes don’t get mentioned. There’s this idea that there’s no concept of war crimes in the Middle Ages, but there is. So we’ll talk about that. Unfortunately, war crimes is, alas, a very timely subject because there’s a bunch of them happening right as we are speaking. So we’ll do 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 Stitcher and Apple podcasts and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. If if you’d like to contact us, you can go to true crime medieval.com, truecrimemedieval.com is all one word. There you can find the show notes, and the blurbs with pictures that I put up, and the transcripts. Michelle does the show notes and the transcripts. In the places where the podcasts are hanging out, you can leave reviews. We’d love that. Michelle reads them. I kind of have to stay away from them. She can tell me later what they said. I find them a little difficult sometimes. Anyway, you can leave reviews, and yeah. Bye.
Michelle Butler 41:42
Bye.
65. King Lambert is Assassinated (or not), Marengo, Italy 898
Anne Brannen 0:27
Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I am your host in Albuquerque.
Michelle Butler 0:37
And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America. In my freshly painted and newly wood floor refinished, about to go on the market next week, house.
Anne Brannen 0:50
Yes. And after we finished recording, you’re going off to get more furniture for your staging. Are all your walls painted gray now?
Michelle Butler 1:01
All of my walls are painted gray or lilac. I did not repaint the ones that were lilac. I figured that was close enough.
Anne Brannen 1:10
Close enough to gray, yet a spot more cheery. How long will you be recording from Maryland?
Michelle Butler 1:18
I will be here until the house sells or the end of August.
Anne Brannen 1:24
Okay.
Michelle Butler 1:26
The way the market around here has been, I expect it to sell fairly quickly, by the end of July, but probably I will be here with the kids because Sam’s got an apartment and Alex has got an apartment, I have to get everybody…my house is dispersing into three places. It’s a logistical challenge.
Anne Brannen 1:50
A logistical challenge, and gray paint is involved. I don’t know. It’s sad. Sad.
Michelle Butler 1:55
It’s growing on me because it’s kind of a bluey-gray, not a browney-gray.
Anne Brannen 1:58
Okay, fine, fine, fine. I’ll never see it, will I. Because I’m in Albuquerque and I won’t be visiting before.
Michelle Butler 2:06
When the house listing is live, I’ll send you a link.
Anne Brannen 2:10
But after that, you’ll be in a different state, which we will name later when you get there. But for right now we’re in New Mexico and Maryland. And today we are going back. We’re going back to Italy at the end of the ninth century when Lambert, the king of Italy and Holy Roman Emperor, was assassinated or fell off his horse in Marengo, Italy, the 15th of October 898. Now, Lambert was the son of Guy of Spoleto and he was born in San Rufino sometime around 880. He became co-king with his dad in 891. Formosus, the Pope, crowned him co-Emperor the next year. Now we’d like to remind you that we have discussed Formosus before in our episode about the Cadaver Synod, one of my favorites, when Formosus’ remains were dug up and put on trial for crimes that Formosus had…that Formosus admitted to even though he was dead, because one of the lower clergy was giving answers for the corpse during the trial. Lambert was in on that debacle. He got mentioned then, but now we’re looking at him in specific and a crime that might have been committed against him when he might have been assassinated, or not. Many of these things are like, ‘there was a horrible crime,’ or ‘no, it wasn’t’ because the thing, is the Middle Ages is really really really full of horrible crimes. But it also seems to be packed with horrible crimes, which actually weren’t there. I don’t know. At any rate, we return to Lambert’s story. Formosus crowned him Emperor, but he wasn’t happy about doing that. Formosus wanted to crown somebody else instead. That was Arnulf of Carinthia. Formosus didn’t trust Guy. The position of Holy Roman Emperor and its relationship to the papacy…it was really, really vexed. Guy was one of the Guidonids, who were not fans of the papacy, and spent a lot of their time expanding their realms into the Papal States. Guy had forced Formosus to crown Lambert in the first place. [SQUAWWWKK!] I think I’ll leave that in. We are going to be having help from our new rescue cockatoo, Blanca. She’s growing her feathers in and is happier than she was. But sometimes she has something to say on account of being a cockatoo. I’ll edit out all of it I can, but there you go. Guy had forced Formosus to crown Lambert in the first place. So Formosus didn’t think that that crowning even counted. Of course not. So hence the conflicts and battles between Guy and Arnulf. Then Guy died in 894 after Arnulf had had some successes, and Lambert then became king and Holy Roman Emperor, all on his own–sorta, except that he was still young, about 14 years old. So his mom–that was Ageltrude of Benevento. Her dad, by the way, had been assassinated. The sheer number of assassinations in this era is kind of overwhelming. I’m gonna mention this later. We pick our candidates from out of that vast field. Today, we’re doing Lambert. She was regent and she went with her son to Rome to get Formosus to confirm Lambert as Emperor, sort of a ‘yes, I crowned him and I really meant it, and I’m crowning him again,’ but he wouldn’t do that. So they put him in prison. Lambert continued to fight Arnulf, who took Rome in February of 896. He let the pope out of prison and had himself crowned king and emperor [makes trumpet fanfare sounds] and he got Lambert deposed. Only he had a stroke, and he left off fighting, and then Formosus died. And so Lambert was once again, the Ruler of all things. [makes trumpet fanfare sounds]. After which he executed enemies, he made alliances, and he got Pope Stephen the sixth elected. So that’s when he got Pope Stephen to dig up Formosus’s corpse and put the corpse on trial, after which Pope Stephen got imprisoned and strangled because really, the city did not take too well to this. He was succeeded by Pope Romanus, who was Pope for about three months before he was deposed and sent to a monastery, which is so much better than prison, so he kind of lucked out. He was succeeded by Pope Theodore the second, who was Pope for less than a month, during which he annulled the Cadaver Synod and reburied Formosus, whose corpse had been thrown into the Tiber River. Then Theodore died. We don’t actually know what he died of, though, oddly, nobody seems to think he was murdered. But whatever. How that happened, I don’t know. He was succeeded by Pope John the ninth, who supported Lambert against Arnulf. He made a bunch of alliances and he smoothed over all the grievances. Everybody agreed that the Popes were going to be consecrated with agreement from the Emperor and everything was lovely, and there was rainbows and unicorns and flowers until suddenly Lambert died, and everything went back into chaos. Too bad. Lambert had been near Marengo–this is south of Milan if you’re looking at your map–and he had to go fight a rebellion, which which he won, but then he died on his way back to Marengo. One story is that he was assassinated by the son of Maginulf, the count of Milan, whom we haven’t heard of yet in this episode, but he was one of Arnulf’s supporters. That’s really his only claim to fame. His son Hugh supposedly assassinated Lambert south of Milan, or maybe supporters of Maginulf assassinated Lambert, or he fell off his horse, or it was a hunting accident. The falling off from his horse, like a hunting accident or not, that’s what shows up in histories most often. So Liutprand of Cremona, who a few decades later–he was the Bishop of Cremona–wrote a list of events in Italy from 887 to 949. He wrote this in about 970. He gives the assassination theory but there’s not a lot of evidence. So, you know, we get into these things, we go ‘oh, look, here’s a crime, Lambert got assassinated.’ So we get into these things, then we go look them up, and then we discover what’s going on. What’s really of interest to me in all this is how unimportant it seems as to whether the king of Italy and the Holy Roman Emperor all in one body was assassinated, or fell off his horse. Nobody seems to really care. So I want to give you some context. I’m gonna skip the Romans and just look at Kings of Italy. Kings of Italy and their children. Some of them are going to be Holy Roman Emperors later and some of them are not. Here’s our list. Oderic, leader of the Goths, was killed by Theoderic in 493. Theodahed was murdered in 536. Hildebad was murdered by a personal retainer in 541. Aeric was strangled in 541. Alboin was murdered by his own men in 572. Cleph was murdered in 574. Altker was poisoned in 590. Aldehald was poisoned in 625. Godepert was murdered in 662. Bernard, illegitimate son of Pepin, rebelled and was blinded and died in 818. I skipped some in there. Hudebret, a son of Charlemagne rebelled and was killed in 840. Berengar of Friuli was murdered in Verona in 924. Lambert, as we have seen, either fell off his horse or was assassinated in 898. Louis, the son of Baso was blinded in 905, but he lived actually for a little while after that. Lother the son a Hugh was poisoned, probably, in 950. Berengar the son of Adelbert was captured and died in prison in 1966. The thing is, basically, as we’ve mentioned before, becoming king of Italy and/or Holy Roman Emperor is sort of a death trap. Sometimes you actually get to be blinded and live someplace else, and occasionally people actually die of dysentery. I didn’t mention all the people that died in battle because that’s fair enough. You’re in a killing zone, you got killed. So that’s what’s of most interest to me about this. I like it that we come back to our Cadaver Synod and why it is we’re digging up dead popes, but this business back and forth between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Popes…it’s a power struggle that goes on for decades and decades and decades, and it is highly bloody and dreadful. I like that series of popes that is like ‘My 20 days as Pope,’ ‘My three months.’ People just didn’t last long in that position, either. You wouldn’t think that being pope was a deathtrap, but hey, there you are. I believe, Michelle, that you went and looked for sources, which I did, too, but I think you had more success.
Michelle Butler 12:10
I was struck, actually, trying to do this research, how similar being a king in Italy is in the eighth and ninth century to be a king in Ireland.
Anne Brannen 12:24
It’s much the same story, isn’t it? Because when we were talking about Bran Ardchenn getting burned to death in the church, and you gave us a list of all the dead kings. This is just the context. You just die. Because people help you over the border.
Michelle Butler 12:40
I’m actually quite impressed with Lambert. He was only 18 when he died. He was the last Holy Roman Emperor to issue a capitulary in the Carolingian way.
Anne Brannen 12:55
He was the end of the Carolingians.
Michelle Butler 12:58
He is arguably the end of Charlamagne’s line of Holy Roman emperors. How they went about doing things. He confirms the Donation of Pippin, allowing the creation of the Papal States. Trying to find the sources was fascinating. There’s a lot of disagreement even amongst scholars. I found some scholars saying, ‘Oh, the whole the whole Cadaver Synod, it had nothing to do with him.’ There’s other people saying that he and his mom were absolutely right there at King Stephen’s elbow, saying ‘we hate him too, pull him out, put him on trial, we don’t care that he’s dead.’ So there’s a history of the Popes from 1921. Let me find this for you because I absolutely, tremendously enjoy the way this is phrased. “Stephen was a staunch partisan of Lambert of Spoleto, but the act of vindictive sacrilege which makes his pontificate notorious in papal history is in no way characteristic of the chivalrous young idol of Italy, who now inherited the burden of the Imperium.” This particular historian from 1921 is absolutely clearing Lambert, which I think is a little bit sketchy.
Anne Brannen 14:34
Yes. Our 10th century chronicler refers to Lambert as young and good looking. He’s good looking and an all around great guy. So you can kind of see where this comes from.
Michelle Butler 14:55
What I found fascinating about this…most academics have a complex relationship with Wikipedia. It’s usually a great place to start your research. Often it’s a really nice springboard to other research. This particular subject and this particular article on Wikipedia is not awesome.
Anne Brannen 15:19
No.
Michelle Butler 15:21
It cites Horace Mann’s history, which was very important…His major work, The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, which is 18 volumes, published from 1902 to 1932. Absolutely enormous, important work of scholarship, but it’s not the cutting edge thingy anymore.
Anne Brannen 15:49
No, because it’s kind of old.
Michelle Butler 15:54
I’m definitely not going to argue that scholarship has an expiration date. But when I go and look up Horace Mann, what I get told is that, “His major work is The Lives of the Popes in the Early Middle Ages, treating the Popes from Gregory the first through Benedict to the 11th. The last four volumes were published posthumously. Although still valuable, the Lives have been largely superseded by later research.” This happens a lot on Wikipedia. Because it’s on the web and because anybody can edit it, it has this facade of being very cutting edge and up to date, when it is often actually citing out of date research.
Anne Brannen 16:39
Yep.
Michelle Butler 16:40
Frustratingly, we get told–and this is an actual error, I think–we get told that on his way to Marengo, Lambert killed “either by assassination, a theory about which Luitprand our primary source is reserved.” That actually is not true.
Anne Brannen 17:05
Ooh, because you found it.
Michelle Butler 17:07
I found it. I spent the vast majority of my research time trying to find an English translation of that historian.
Anne Brannen 17:16
I found the manuscript, but it was gonna take me awhile to read, and I was not having the time.
Michelle Butler 17:22
I actually found two. One is from 1930. One is much more recent, from 2007.
Anne Brannen 17:32
I’m glad to know. Did you have to order this? Or was this online?
Michelle Butler 17:38
The one from 2007…I was in despair, because if I wanted to get it, I was gonna have to order it on paper. It’s not available as a digital purchase for Kindle. But because of that, Google Books has it digitized and you can see pieces of it. I can see the one page I need.
Anne Brannen 17:58
Oh! Because so often Google Books gives you stuff but not the page you need. But you got the page.
Michelle Butler 18:06
In this particular…I can see the page I need. There’s actually a really interesting comparison between the 1930 translation and the 2007 translation. The 1930 translation is very hyperbolic in its phrasing, which to be fair is probably 95% the historian because he was very gossipy. He’s very different than some of the other chroniclers. He’s got a score to settle. He’s writing his history because he’s cheesed at…what the heck is that guy’s name?
Anne Brannen 18:44
Oh what is his name? I forget. Bernard…?
Michelle Butler 18:46
Barengar. Barengar the second. He had been working for Berangar and now he’s cheesed at Berangar the second. Because this is the next generation. He’s writing in the early 10th century. He is now cheesed at Barengar the second and is writing his book to settle. It’s actually called–
Anne Brannen 19:06
Tit for Tat.
Michelle Butler 19:07
Tit for Tat.
Anne Brannen 19:09
Which you don’t usually name a chronicle. Because naming your chronicle “Tit for Tat,” even if it is in Latin, lets your readers know that you have an agenda and are not pretending to–
Michelle Butler 19:23
He is not pretending at all. He has got a score to settle. He cracks me up. It’s a little bit like Alice Roosevelt saying, ‘if you’ve got nothing nice to say, come sit by me.’ He’s like that.
Anne Brannen 19:31
He does like the gossip.
Michelle Butler 19:45
What he has to say is–this is the 1930 translation–“It is said that while he [Lambert] was chasing boars with his horse on a loose rein, he fell and broke his neck, but I would not say that it were correct to attach credence to this account. There is another story of his death that is constantly repeated and seems to me more probable.” It’s not that he’s reserved about this. He’s absolutely saying ‘no, I don’t believe that other story at all. This is what I think happened. Let me spill the tea for you.’
Anne Brannen 20:21
What’s interesting about this is that he’s not saying ‘so and so was there.’ This is much like our discussion of the death of William Rufus and the rumor that he was assassinated and hadn’t died in a hunting accident. But there were stories that were attached to a person who was there. This isn’t that at all. This is like ‘some people…There’s gossip here. There’s gossip there. I like this piece of gossip.’
Michelle Butler 20:52
He is just repeating the gossip. The gossip he repeats is that “Manfred, count of Milan, who I mentioned just now, on being sentenced to capital punishment for his crimes against the state and the King, left one son Hugh as heir to all his property. Lambert, seeing that the youth was of conspicuous beauty, and surpassing courage, try to–” you know where this is going “–tried to assuage the bitter grief caused by his father’s death by showering favours upon him and admitting him to the privilege of his intimate friendship. So while Lambert was hunting at Marengo, there is a very large and beautiful wood there, which is especially suitable to the chase–“
Anne Brannen 21:37
Beautiful wood. Beautiful people. You need that.
Michelle Butler 21:40
“It happened that while the rest of his followers were scouring the thickets in the hunt, the king was left alone with this Hugh in a copse. They were waiting for the boar to pass but as he did not appear, the king at last grew weary of the long delay and fell asleep for a while, leaving the traitor in whom he trusted to keep watch and ward over him. While he stood there alone, Hugh the king’s guardian–or rather, the king’s betrayer and murderer–began to think again of his father’s death, and to forget all the kindness that Lambert had shown him. He did not consider that his progenitor had been justly put to death. He did not fear to break the oath he had sworn to his king. He did not blush to be called successor to Judas, who betrayed our Lord Jesus Christ.”
Anne Brannen 22:36
So much our hero Lambert. So much like him.
Michelle Butler 22:42
“What is worse, he did not tremble at the everlasting punishment that would be his fate. No! He took a big piece of wood and with a great effort broke the sleeper’s neck. He was afraid to use his sword lest he should be plainly revealed as a murderer. And his trick was so far successful, as there were no sword cuts but plain marks of bruises against wood. When the body was found, it was believed that the king had fallen from his horse and broken his neck.”
Anne Brannen 22:42
Oooh, I like this. We have the assassination, but it even explains why people thought he fell from his horse. Ahhaha.
Michelle Butler 23:11
Ahhaha. “For many years, the truth was hidden. But when in process of time Barengar gained the throne and held it firm without opposition Hugh himself betrayed the crime of which he had been guilty. Apparently he confesses.
Anne Brannen 23:48
Oh, okay, so there is a source. Which is the murderer himself.
Michelle Butler 23:58
The purple prose here–
Anne Brannen 24:01
I especially like the part, personally, where the king is on a boar hunt, and falls asleep.
Michelle Butler 24:10
[laughing]
Anne Brannen 24:11
Because the most dangerous prey of all in the medieval forest is the kind of thing that you can just take a nap during. No. Ha. Lie. That’s how we know this is a lie. Because it includes sleeping during the boar hunt. No.
Michelle Butler 24:34
In our 2007 edition–for this whole passage that contains the rumor, we have an extremely important footnote that says that this was not in the first draft of the Chronicle. It’s something he adds in later.
Anne Brannen 24:56
Whoa.
Michelle Butler 24:57
It says specifically “Liudprand omitted this sentence and the rest of chapter 43,” ie the rest of the rumor “when he wrote his first draft, probably in 958 and 957,” which tells me that it was added later. Not that this was omitted. That it wasn’t there, and it got added in. I love it when we have scholarly mysteries and intrigue as much as the actual medieval ones. That’s the thing about Lambert story. This has been all about the intrigue from the beginning.
Anne Brannen 25:34
From the very beginning.
Michelle Butler 25:36
From the absolute beginning. This scholar repeats the rumor, but the rumors existed for him to repeat them. He didn’t make this up. He’s repeating a lurid story that he’s heard. He’s happy to pass them along, but he’s not making them up. So let me read you the newer scholar’s translation. It is from the series Medieval Texts in Translation, published by the Catholic University of America Press in 2007. So this is a scholarly edition. Which is nice.
Anne Brannen 26:14
Yay!
Michelle Butler 26:14
I’m always happy to find something from the last 100 years. So he says the part about “while this Lambert was chasing boars, mounted with loose reins as the custom is, he fell and broke his neck. Actually, I would say it is absurd to lend credence to this claim. For there is another account of the death of that man which seems to me more likely and is told by all sorts of people. Manfred, Count of the Milanis city, of whom we made mentioned just above, when he was condemned to death for crimes against the king and state, left his only son Hugh as heir to his possessions. When King Lambert saw that along with having a remarkable physique he surpassed many in bravery, he tried to alleviate the boy’s great pain from the death of his father by conferring upon him as many favors as possible. Once he gave him the privilege of intimacy beyond that accorded to all others.”
Anne Brannen 27:12
Yeah, so this is like…murdering him is okay. You see why he would murder him. Not just because he was instrumental in the death of his father but also because he was making advances.
Michelle Butler 27:27
I think that’s pretty clearly the indication.
Anne Brannen 27:30
Clearly, that’s part of what’s going on.
Michelle Butler 27:32
“So it happened that while King Lambert hunted in the place called Marengo, for there lies a glen of wonderous extent and pleasantness and in addition, suited to hunting, with all of them rushing here and there, as the custom is, the king stayed behind in the glen with one man, namely Hugh. And as the king awaited the passage of a boar, and staying in one place for a long time, wearied of the long wait, he granted himself a little rest, committing to that untrustworthy companion the watch over his respite as if he were trustworthy. Thus, with everyone gone, the mind of the guard Hugh, betrayer and murderer, forgetful of the many favors conferred upon him, began to mull over within himself the death of his father. He did not consider that his parent had incurred a just death. He did not fear to violate the oath he took to the king. He did not blush to be called vicar of Judas, betrayer of our Lord Jesus Christ and what is more serious, he did not fear he would go undergo an eternal punishment. Rather, he broke the sleeping man’s neck with a good size stick, using all his might. Indeed, he hesitated to strike with the sword, less the thing prove clearly he was the author of the sin. The perverted mind arranged the whole thing is so it could give an attestation to those who found the corpse that Lambert had fallen from his horse, and departed humanity by breaking his neck, not by the wound of a sword, but by the manifest collision with wood. And the truth of this matter lay hidden for a great many years. But in the course of time, King Barengar obtained the kingdom in a manly way, with none resisting him. The treacherous Hugh himself made the crime emerge as his own, as he was its author. And it was fulfilled as the king and prophet says, since, ‘the sinner is blessed in the desires of his soul and the unjust man is blessed,’ but he could hardly have done otherwise on account of the words of truth, who says, ‘For nothing is covered that shall not be revealed nor hidden, that shall not be known.'” I didn’t read quite that far in the other one. The hyperbolic-ness of the 1930s translation is only a little excessive. The 2007 translation is more reserved, but clearly the meat of it is in the original.
Anne Brannen 30:01
Yes. And the original…this is the evidence for both of these rumors that come down to us. Both that he died in a hunting accident, he fell off his horse. And that this guy hit him with a stick and made it look like his neck was broken.You know, broke his neck and made it look like he had fallen from his horse and had a hunting accident. This is where it comes from. Yeah. So there’s no way to tell, looking at this, exactly which is true. What we have is two pieces of gossip, neither one of which has a whole lot of evidence for it. The last one…apparently somebody confessed, but where’s the evidence for this? Not around.
Michelle Butler 30:43
At least he’s got the sense to know that when you’re reporting a story, that you’re deliberately saying there are no witnesses to, that the only way to assert that it’s true is to have the murderer confess. Because otherwise, it’s totally bogus.
Anne Brannen 30:59
Yeah. Otherwise, all you’re doing is saying, ‘Well, I think that probably this is what happened because I really don’t like this guy.’ Yeah. So this is why we say he was assassinated or fell off his horse, because both these stories were apparently running around at that time and both these stories come down to us. And we don’t know.
Michelle Butler 31:25
We are familiar with the fact that the rumor of a crime is as powerful, frequently, as an actual crime having happened.
Anne Brannen 31:39
Yeah. If there had been an actual…for instance, if you use your sword and whatnot…the same thing as with William Rufus. If there had been an actual crime, there would have been some kind of evidence of an inquiry of people wanting to know what happened. People dragging somebody back to the castle and asking them questions. But it’s been explained by our chronicler as the person he actually did kill him but he made it look like an accident.
Michelle Butler 32:11
It’s really a testimony to the power of his wordsmithing that a king who was killed in the middle of a boar hunt, which is known to be extremely dangerous–that sort of death happens all the time–he is successful at persuading enough people…he repeats the rumor successfully.
Anne Brannen 32:38
Yeah. Nobody would have questioned it. I remember when we did the episode on William Rufus, you came up with a list of important people who had died in hunting accidents. It just went on and on.
Michelle Butler 32:53
It’s its own genre.
Anne Brannen 32:56
Much like my list of murdered people. It goes on and on. So hunting accident? Assassination?
Michelle Butler 33:05
Of course, in the context of Italian kings, it’s utterly persuasive that one of them might have been assassinated, but honestly, he seems to have been one of the few to die a natural death.
Anne Brannen 33:18
Yes. Oddly enough. Well, an accidental death. He didn’t die of old age. Who did that? Nobody.
Michelle Butler 33:29
I did, though, very much like the 1921 historian who wants to call him the chivalric idol of Italy and clear him of all involvement with the Cadaver Synod, which is almost certainly not true.
Anne Brannen 33:43
Yeah, no. I mean, the Cadaver Synod was so over the top. One of the things that’s wonderful about the Cadaver Synod is that you have all of these assassinations and death, we got piracy, we got blood feast, everyday happening in the Middle Ages. Cadaver Synod–once. Never since. The people do not dig up corpses and put them on trial. So it was really quite innovative and creative.
Michelle Butler 34:12
It’s still clearly raising eyebrows and shocking people in 1921. That historian feels the need to say ‘no, it had nothing to do with Lambert.’
Anne Brannen 34:22
‘Lambert didn’t do it.”
Michelle Butler 34:23
‘That was all Stephen. He thought it up.’
Anne Brannen 34:25
‘But it’s okay because he got strangled in prison. So don’t worry.’ No. Lambert was extremely angry at Formosus, who was not going along with anything at all and conspiring with his enemies. He gave away both crowns and just wouldn’t behave. So he’s very angry. It was the lowest point of the wrastles between the Holy Roman Emperors and the Papacy. The lowest point. Putting dead Popes on trial. Lambert was involved. But then it’s very sad, he fell off his horse. There was a whole lot of dying suddenly. His father died suddenly and apparently it wasn’t murder at all. He had a stroke. He had a brain hemorrhage. So that did happen. His father died a natural death.
Michelle Butler 35:32
You don’t have MEs. You have people who have ideas and theories. You can’t definitively answer in the ninth century whether somebody has died of poisoning, whether they’ve died of a stroke, whether somebody hit them over the head with a piece of wood, whether they fell off their horse. So if it’s advantageous to start a rumor, you start a rumor.
Anne Brannen 35:55
Now I do want to mention that there actually is a way in the Middle Ages to tell for certain whether or not someone is the murderer. We discussed this in our episode about…what was her name? Els, our sex worker in Germany, who was forced to have an abortion. We discussed forensics, medieval forensics, and so we let you all know that one of the ways that–because we don’t do this anymore, but it would still work–one of the ways that you can find out who murdered someone is you have the corpse in a room and you parade people by it–
Michelle Butler 36:37
Cruentation.
Anne Brannen 36:37
–the corpse bleeds when the murderer comes by. So they could have done that. They could have done that, but they didn’t. So it must not have occurred to them that it was a murder.
Michelle Butler 36:49
Well, he doesn’t have stab wounds. I think mostly it supposedly works if you have an obviously murdered victim and you need to find–
Anne Brannen 37:01
Right.
Michelle Butler 37:03
This was a blunt force trauma death. So I don’t think that the theory of cruentation would have would have worked.
Anne Brannen 37:10
It’s too bad. But I did just want to point out that they did have forensics. Not our forensics. It’s different forensics.
Michelle Butler 37:20
That hangs out in the imagination for such a long time.
Anne Brannen 37:24
Really? The whole corpse bleeding thing?
Michelle Butler 37:27
It’s in Shakespeare.
Anne Brannen 37:29
Oh that’s right.
Michelle Butler 37:30
It’s in Richard the Third.
Anne Brannen 37:32
We don’t talk about it anymore except, like, on True Crime Medieval.
Michelle Butler 37:37
He’s not even the last person to use it because it makes for such great fiction.
Anne Brannen 37:42
Uh-huh. Good scene. Well, I’m glad that Hugh actually confessed so that we know the real truth. Not. You know what I think? I think he was on a boar hunt and he fell off his damn horse. That’s what I think. So there you go.
Michelle Butler 38:02
Occam’s Razor suggests to me that he died hunting. Not that Hugh was mad at him for a number of overwhelming and awfully convenient reasons. Plus there’s that whiff of Lambert deserving it because of probably forcing his attentions on this younger man, but we don’t like him either.
Anne Brannen 38:32
So that doesn’t work. So we just mention this and move on, because, you know, it gives him another reason for being upset but we can’t really spend time on it because then we would be saying bad things about Lambert, given the circumstances, which are that we are in the Middle Ages. But the other thing that Occam’s Razor lets us know is that the king was not damn sleeping on the damn boar hunt. Ridiculous. That’s just ridiculous. ‘And then I took a nap.’
Michelle Butler 39:05
‘I just lay down.’
Anne Brannen 39:06
‘Nothing was happening. The boar wasn’t showing up.’ I mean, you regularly lose the boys that beat the bushes, you lose hunting dogs, and you often lose the nobles and kings on their horses.
Michelle Butler 39:21
I will say it’s likely that many of my uncles and cousins who went out deer hunting in November did in fact fall asleep up in the deer blinds but they certainly would not have admitted to it when they came home.
Anne Brannen 39:38
Falling asleep in the deer blind is so different from falling asleep in the bushes near a boar.
Michelle Butler 39:46
On the ground.
Anne Brannen 39:49
I am willing to believe that lots of people are sleeping in deer and duck blinds. I got no problem with that. But nobody’s sleeping in the bushes while they are hunting a boar. They just aren’t.
Michelle Butler 40:02
If you’re on the ground, you’re going to get trampled.
Anne Brannen 40:05
Right and gored, worse. Boars are dangerous.
Michelle Butler 40:12
That is almost as ridiculous of a story as the setting the birds on fire and sending them back.
Anne Brannen 40:19
That’s the Olga of Kiev episode, where she sets birds on fire and they fly home and set the town on fire that she’s beseiging. Yes, that didn’t happen either. Lots of stuff that didn’t happen that the chroniclers write down. I believe there’s dragons in Geoffrey of Monmouth. Of course, there are dragons in some reality, but not ours.
Michelle Butler 40:39
This one was fun because I got to do some primary source digging, which isn’t always my job, but I like it when I get to do it. There’s absolutely no fiction whatsoever about Lambert.
Anne Brannen 40:50
No operas. No plays. Nothing.
Michelle Butler 40:58
He has one rather sketchy Wikipedia page that I’m gonna make a little note to myself that I really should update because it’s kind of wrong, and citing some really outdated stuff. There’s definitely newer things that can be cited.
Anne Brannen 41:15
So not much on our guy, but I liked it. It was a nice little…it had some nice rabbit holes. So I enjoyed it. The next time you hear from us, we are going to be discussing something that actually did happen, I’m so sorry to say. Occasionally one of the things we talk about are the many crimes perpetrated against the Jews in Europe in the Middle Ages. Next time you hear from us, we’re going to be going to Spain in 1355 when Henry de Trastemara massacred the Jews of Toledo.
Michelle Butler 41:53
Oh good god.
Anne Brannen 41:55
I know, I know. But that one really happened. We’re gonna talk about that. But we haven’t spent a bunch of time in Spain. We talked about Pedro the cruel, and his death, which was also fairly amusing to me. But no, we haven’t spent a whole lot of time in Spain. So I’m glad to go there.
Michelle Butler 42:16
It’s deeply distressing that one of the subgenres of crime in the Middle Ages is those times that they massacre the Jews. Because it happens a lot.
Anne Brannen 42:29
Yeah, it happens a lot. Um, yeah. We have talked about it. We talked about the People’s Crusade, and–
Michelle Butler 42:40
The massacres that happened in the wake of the Black Death.
Anne Brannen 42:45
That’s right, the Black Death massacres and the People’s Crusade massacres. So we’ve got Toledo coming up, and then another one later, we’ll do York. That was very bad. That was very bad. All right, but that was it for today. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. Although I believe that you could just whack somebody with a stick on their neck and break it. I think that would still work.
Michelle Butler 43:13
You could still do that.
Anne Brannen 43:15
Which it didn’t. You can find us on Spotify and Stitcher and Apple podcasts and all the places where the podcasts hang out. We are over at True Crime Medieval dot com,Truecrimemedieval is all one word. There you can find links to the podcast, and also the show notes and the transcripts and the little blurbs with whatever picture I’ve put up. Have you seen the one that we put up last of the Pied Piper?
Michelle Butler 43:45
I did see it.
Anne Brannen 43:47
I was really pleased to put up the Kate Greenaway illustration, which terrified me when I was a child. Some personal meaning there. Who knows what I’m gonna find for Lambert. But you can find all that stuff over there. We’d love if you left comments and let us know if there are medieval crimes you think we should look at. Often we put them into our list. We’ve been doing this for like two, two and three quarters years and we still got a lot of crimes to go. Because it was, after all, 1000 years of people behaving badly. So you can find us there and you can leave reviews on the places where the podcasts hang out. My cockatoo, now she’s sleeping. She behaved pretty well. So that’s good.
Michelle Butler 44:38
One of the things I just added to our list are the fake princes. As a follow up to the princes in the tower. There were those imposters.
Anne Brannen 44:47
Oh, oh. Like Perkins?
Michelle Butler 44:49
Yeah.
Anne Brannen 44:50
Okay, good. Good. The princes in the tower. We spent two podcasts on that. The first was the Cousins’ War, or the War of the Roses, as Walter Scott called it and now we do too, took a whole explanation of how we got there. Then there was the whole what happened to them because we know they disappeared.
Michelle Butler 45:13
Did you see on the list that one of the things I found was a murder that happened in Ireland because the monks rebelled against their prior, because he wasn’t giving them enough beer?
Anne Brannen 45:29
I did not see that. And I am really glad to know that it’s on there. Yeah, so that’ll come up.
Michelle Butler 45:34
The 14th century.
Anne Brannen 45:39
It’s 1000 years. 1000 years and an entire continent. We got scope. So that’s all for us. We’ll talk to you later. Bye.
Michelle Butler 45:49
Bye.
64. Jeanne de Clisson takes up piracy, Brittany 1343
Anne Brannen 0:25
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.
Anne Brannen 0:39
We’d like to tell you that things will be changing. Michelle will not be in the most medieval state in America for a long, long time. She will soon be in a different state. We’ll tell you that when she gets there. I’m in the same state. But there’s now a cockatoo. So there may be some cockatoo screaming and the cockatoo, you know, has no power over being a cockatoo. She just is what she is. So we’re hoping this will work. But for now, what we’re talking about is pirates. We’ve got pirates, which I believe you were very excited about. Michelle, you’re the one who put this on the list, are you not?
Michelle Butler 1:16
Oh, yeah, I was really excited to read about this.
Anne Brannen 1:22
We are in Brittany in 1343, when Jeanne de Clisson became a pirate, and she really did, apparently, although there’s a bunch of stuff about her story which is legendary. Is this not always true? Have we gotten any stories that we’ve been talking about, medieval crimes, were what we have to say is, ‘here’s the crime, and here’s the evidence, and there’s no lies that have been told about it in the 500 years since.’ There’s just none of this. It never happens, does it? There’s always some things that people made up. It’s continual.
Michelle Butler 1:56
One of the things I find really interesting is that pirate stories are some of the first true crime stories that really take off in the popular press. There’s a book from 1724 that pulls together a bunch of pirate stories, and it just is an explosive best seller.
Anne Brannen 2:20
I had no idea. Is this in English? French? German?
Michelle Butler 2:24
It’s in English.
Anne Brannen 2:25
Hmm. I have to find that. Does it include Jeanne de Clisson?
Michelle Butler 2:32
I doubt it. Hold on one second, I’ll find the title. “The London publisher began selling a new book called ‘A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates.’
Anne Brannen 2:51
What’s the year again?
Michelle Butler 2:52
- Anne Brannen 2:54
- So we’re coming into the big piracy that’s associated with slavery. It’s what’s going on.
Michelle Butler 3:01
The author’s name is Charles Johnson. The book is illustrated with a series of engravings that really become the image template for pirates going forward. But from a from a true crime point of view, I found it very fascinating that pirate literature is some of the first because the emphasis in the title is on the crime: “The General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates.”
Anne Brannen 3:34
Mm-huh. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 3:35
I hadn’t really thought before about the connection between true crime literature and pirate literature.
Anne Brannen 3:40
No, I never hadn’t ever thought of that. Well, we have a pirate today. For various reasons. Michelle’s interested in pirates. It has a lot to do, I think, with your children.
Michelle Butler 3:50
I do have a super fan for Our Flag Means Death in the house.
Anne Brannen 3:55
Our Flag Means Death. Yay. Well, today we’re in 1343. That’s before both our first true crime giant bestseller and, naturally, Our Flag Means Death. And our story is: Jeanne de Clisson is a noble woman. She was born in the Aquitaine and she married three times. Then she got very, very angry when her husband was treacherously killed by the King of France. So she swore revenge on him–that being the king of France–raised a force of soldiers, attacked some French holdings in Brittany, which is where she was living, and then painted three warships black and raised red sails and became a pirate. Okay. The black ships, the red sails, no, but some other stuff happened. She killed a lot of people and she raided and sunk a lot of ships, and she aided the English in their war against the French. Then she settled back down in Brittany to a peaceful life with her fourth husband. To which we say, ‘Oh, really?’ Before I give you all the background as usual, let me explain the existing actual evidence. Over on the Wikipedia page, which is really, in my mind, quite hilarious, you will find an enormous list of “verifiable references,” but okay…well, let’s see what we’ve got. Bcause they’ll say “verifiable references,” and then they say, ‘she’s mentioned here,’ and ‘she’s mentioned there,’ but they don’t actually tell you what the mentioning is. But she really did exist. There was a Jeanne de Clisson and her husband, de Clisson, was indeed executed in the course of the conflict between England and France over the succession the Duke of Brittany. You might say to yourself, ‘why was England involved in this?’ but we remind you, you know, the English and French going back and forth. So there’s a judgment in France in 1343 that condemns her as a traitor. So this exists. This is in the records, and orders her lands confiscated. English records from 1345 show that Edward the third, who was being the English king at the time, considered her a valuable ally. Okay. So these things really did happen, and the Chronographia Regum Francorum cites her attack on a fortress held by the French, though it couldn’t be at Brest where they say it was because at that time it was being held not by the French, but by Joanna of Flanders. More on her later. The Chronicle of Normandy says that she attacked French warships weaker than hers and slaughtered all the French. So that’s actually the evidence. The bones of the story are true, though, the more romantic details–one of which is she used to kill everybody on board ship except one Frenchman so that they could go back to tell the tale– that wasn’t true. The black fleet with the red sails–that’s really nice, isn’t it? No, didn’t happen. Or that she called the flagship Revenge. Nah, that didn’t happen either. That all got made up later. This looks like it came from the historical romance, Jeanne de Belleville. She was born in Belleville so sometimes she’s called de Belleville, and sometimes de Clisson. Anyway, it was published by Emile Pehant in 1868. He was a Breton writer and it was part of the whole romantic ‘going back to your native true soil’ stories and whatnot. So for Brittany, it included the French pirate. Fair enough. So here’s the background. Here’s actually whatwe’ve got. Jeanne was born in Belleville in the Aquitaine about 1300. She married at 12 her first husband, Geoffrey de Châteaubriant, and she had two children. He died in 1328. She married Guy de Penthièvre, the son of the Duke of Brittany. Nice, great little marriage that was except that her family didn’t like it and they got the marriage annulled by the Pope in 1330. So much for that. Soon after that she married Olivier de Clisson who wasn’t actually from the nobility, but he had a lot of money. They had five children, or four, depending on, you know, when the first one was born and who the father was. But whatever, she had some kids.
Michelle Butler 8:29
That was pretty strange. That assertion that Isabel was fathered by following the husband even though she was born during the previous marriage.
Anne Brannen 8:40
I find that kind of hard to believe. I didn’t track that completely down. I must say I got bored with all the children and the marriages. How could this be? I don’t know. But that was me. So this was all very nice and they were a happy family in Brittany etc, etc, etc blah, blah, blah. But history, alas, was happening. That included the War of the Breton succession, which started in 1341, when John the third, the Good, who was the brother of our heroine’s second husband–you know, the marriage they got annulled–he died. And alas, Jeanne’s second husband, Guy, was already dead. So there was no heir. That was why there was a war of succession, because the two candidates for the Duke of Brittany position were Charles of Blois, who was married to Guy’s daughter Jeanne of Penthièvre. She had been John the third’s first choice for heir to the Duchy. I hope you’re following this. As usual, whenever we get into succession wars, they’re always just like ‘and they were all related and they took up arms against each other’ and none of this makes sense. It’s like every single damn time.
Michelle Butler 9:47
To be fair, now that my siblings are quarreling with one another over the farmland, this all makes a lot more sense.
Anne Brannen 9:59
You can see how this would happen. If you had you know pikes and halberds, you could do some damage. Okay, so Guy’s daughter Jeanne of Penthièvre was John’s first choice for being his heir. Okay, fair enough. And John de Montfort, who was John the third’s half brother by his father’s second marriage, was his choice in a will that he made after he said that Jeanne was his heir. Does this sound familiar? When was it last we had one of these…Henry II? You say your heir is somebody, then you say your heir is somebody else, or you’re on your deathbed and somebody says you changed your mind. Oh yeah, it was Henry the second and the whole English Civil War. Simon de Montfort–yet another Montfort and Empress Matilda. Any rate, so we’re having these people and they’re both legitimate heirs because the dead John guy said so. The French supported Charles de Blois, and the English supported John de Montfort. Why do they care? Ancestral ties to Brittany. Am I simplifying this? Yes. Now, the Hundred Years War had started a few years before, so England and France were already at war. Why not fight about this too? This just became one of the conflicts in the larger war. Now, we’ll take a little breath. Ah. John de Montfort’s wife, Joanna Flanders–I said I’d get back to her–she held Brest against the French forces. At that point, her husband was in prison. She held that until the English showed up to help, and then there was a truce. Then there was a seige at Vannes. Eventually, the English took over, and Olivier de Clisson–remember, this is Jeanne’s husband, her beloved third husband, because the story is that they were so in love and very happy. He had been fighting for de Blois. He was held for ransom, and it was a low ransom. So this is like, you know how in the Second World War, if you’re a Russian, and you were fighting the Germans, and you got captured by the Germans, and then you got away and you went back to Russia, they sent you to Siberia. It’s kind of like this. It’s like, ‘Ah, that was a low ransom. You must be a traitor.’ So that was nice. It caused Charles de Blois to be suspicious that de Clisson had been on the English side. Since his family had split on the issue, it was sort of confusing. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn’t. So in 1343, when a treaty was signed, Olivier and some other Breton and Norman knights were, quote, “invited to a tournament,” end of quote–here standing in for a celebratory blood feast. They all were arrested and had their heads cut off for treason. No trial. Very naughty. They put all the bodies in gibbets and they stuck the heads on pikes over the Salvetu Gate at Nantes. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Jeanne was banished and her property was confiscated, because you know, she was married to a traitor, duh. So she got some men together, and she attacked a castle. Then she attacked a garrison. Then she took to maritime attacks, which would be the period of her piracy, the whole thing that we were talking about in the first place, the being a pirate. The stories about her go on and on and on, but let’s just say she did attack French ships and the English did consider her an ally. In other words, sometimes what the pirates were, were actually in the service of a different army, you know, a different force. So that’s actually what she’s doing. She’s not being a pirate to go get some stuff. She’s being a pirate to fight the French. I don’t know that this actually counts as a crime. Unless you’re French. If you’re English, no, because they loved her. The English gave her some lands in Brittany and she went back there with her fourth husband. I forgot to tell you that she married Walter Brentley, who was one of Edward’s military deputies in Brittany. Edward granted him a bunch of lands in Brittany for his meritorious service. He was from Yorkshire, by the way, and had been a soldier against the Scots in the second Scottish war of Independence. So he was quite a soldier. He shared his war profits with his soldiers to keep them from pillaging the countryside (very much). So there’s that, and I guess it’s kind of nice. They both died in Brittany at the end of 1359 of natural causes. What the hell? In my mind, that’s the most unlikely piece of the story.
Michelle Butler 14:57
She manages to die in her own bed.
Anne Brannen 15:02
She’s in English territory. When the Hundred Years War had gone off someplace else doing something, she gets to go home and live a nice life with her fourth husband. I’d like to say, ‘and she loved him very much and they lived happily ever after until they both died of natural causes.’ Anyway, for a while, she was indeed slaughtering Frenchmen while they were on their ships. But this whole legend of piracy kind of got added later. Sorry about that. It’s still pretty good.
Michelle Butler 15:36
Even if what she’s doing is slaughtering Frenchmen on their ships, that’s still a pretty good story. I’ve been delighted to discover how well known this is on the internet.
Anne Brannen 15:53
It’s the legend stuff that’s well known. If you’re trying to find the actual facts, that’s really scant on the ground in internet land. I’m just saying.
Michelle Butler 16:02
This is true. But having been raised during the time period in which the only really accessible stories about women are ones I had trouble relating to–you know, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella. I got a whole entire lifetime’s worth of patience is what she expands in one day. I can’t relate to these women. So having the internet going back and finding the admittedly embroidered, but far more interesting–
Anne Brannen 16:42
I’d like to take just a little break here, where I kind of point out that, understandably, you do not relate well to Disney Princesses–got that–but I find it really interesting that you relate well to pirates. Slaughtering the French. We’re down with that.
Michelle Butler 17:04
Vengeful Olga and Jeanne–all of this makes sense to me. Quite frankly, it is a far better approach to your life than Cinderella just sitting around and being patient with people as they treat her crappily. That’s a terrible lesson for young for little girls. Put up with nonsense.
Anne Brannen 17:23
It’s nice to have a lesson that you could just take matters into your own hands and go whack people. I would like to just tell our audience that I have known Michelle for a long time and vengeful is not a word I would apply to her. But okay, I like it that you have aspirations.
Michelle Butler 17:39
I want it as an option.
Anne Brannen 17:45
It’s an option. Yeah, no, Jeanee did not go home to her banished lands and be all sad and sit around and eat doughnuts. No, no, she had stuff to do.
Michelle Butler 17:55
Some of the versions of her story have her take her two little boys to see their father’s head over the gate. ‘Alright, guys, this is why we’re going to sea.’
Anne Brannen 18:06
It’s a real Game of Thrones moment, isn’t it? ‘There’s your dad.’ Well, so that was me. I went and looked for stuff. I forget now what it was that you were going off to do?
Michelle Butler 18:22
I did not successfully find an English translation of that 1868 epic poem. I tried. But I didn’t find it. In fact, it’s not really accessible to the point where I found it being referred to a lot as a novel.
Anne Brannen 18:40
Yeah. And it’s a poem.
Michelle Butler 18:41
It’s a poem. What I’m finding is that there’s a lot of blog posts, there’s a lot of YouTube videos. Oh, and there’s a heavy metal song. I have come to the conclusion that if I had looked, I could have found heavy metal songs about all of our topics.
Anne Brannen 18:58
Did Christopher Lee do this one? Because, I mean, that’s the thing you need to know.
Michelle Butler 19:01
Nope, this is not Christopher Lee, this is someone else. But there is an opportunity here because there is a lot of interest, and there’s a lot of retellings of her story. But they’re short form. They’re, you know, YouTube videos and blog posts. There is not a movie. There is not a novel. Well, there was a novel published in 2021 but as far as I can tell, it is no longer available. I can’t actually work out whether it was actually published or whether it was planned and had a publication date and yet was not released. Because I cannot access it anywhere.
Generally, things that were published less than a year ago would indeed be able to be found someplace or other.
The author of that is himself a hoot and a half. His name is Lionel Fanthorpe, and he and his wife wrote, supposedly, a historical fiction called The Pirate Queen, but I can’t find it at all. The authors of the book are interesting people just themselves. He’s written a lot of books. He is some kind of religious person–it’s hard to tell–he’s a retired British priest and entertainer. He was born in 1935, so it’s possible that they were planning on writing this book, and it just didn’t actually happen. At any rate, there’s a real opening here for a more long form and in depth retelling of her story.
Anne Brannen 20:55
One of the things that we do as a helpful thing for the universe is let people know when there’s a good opportunity for a historical novel. And so here’s one.
Michelle Butler 21:05
Yeah, I think so. I did find mention of it in a mystery book that was set in Brittany. But there’s really not somebody like Sharon Newman having dug into this and done some serious research, which is too bad, because either choice, to tell the legendary version or to dig back and get into the real history, would make for an interesting choice. It is covered by Rejected Princesses, which is always cool.
Anne Brannen 21:39
Yep. Yeah. Rejected Princesses is careful. I like them. The internet coverage of Jeanne de Clisson reminded me very much of what we found when we went looking for St. Olga. You’ve got this humongous amount of ‘badass woman kicking butt.’
Michelle Butler 22:03
I found a TV series supposedly in development on IMDb, but that is literally all that is listed there. So I feel like there’s an interest in telling her story in a more detailed format, but it hasn’t happened yet.
Anne Brannen 22:21
It’s like something keeps getting in the way. How weird. Because this is a good story. I had never heard of her. You put her on her list. I was like, ‘Jeanne de Clisson becomes a pirate, what the hell are we talking about? Yeah, she’s very interesting. Can you say something about piracy, and how this all evolves? You know, this whole thing–the black ships with the red sails? That’s a much later kind of ‘pirate detail.’ You can’t see me do air quotes, but that’s what that was.
Michelle Butler 22:51
Oh, yeah. I actually am reading right now a book called Pirates: The Complete History from 1300 BC to the Present–
Anne Brannen 22:59
Oh, my god.
Michelle Butler 23:00
Which is where I found the reference to the 1724 book. I had gone to look at it because I thought maybe it mentioned Jeanne. It doesn’t, although it does talk about the Victual Brothers who we had covered at a different time. It also talks about how the sacking of Byzantium causes piracy to once again flourish in the Mediterranean because the Byzantine Empire had kept that under control because they had such an extensive navy. I’m finding this very interesting, but really the chapter on medieval pirates is not very extensive. Mostly it’s about the Victual Brothers and the Vikings.
Anne Brannen 23:46
They don’t mention Eustace, the monk pirate?
Michelle Butler 23:50
No, but they’re trying to cover a lot of centuries in just one one book. So it’s very much a high level. But the book is really clear about the fact that the image that we have of pirates is so based in fiction that it’s difficult for us in the 21st century to try to go back and actually get at the facts because we have this huge cultural filter that has been built over the last really three centuries.
Anne Brannen 24:24
So the image that we tend to have, the popular image that we tend to have in our heads about pirates, is there. They’re running around in 18th century clothes, for one thing.
Michelle Butler 24:35
It’s Robert Lewis Stevenson.
Anne Brannen 24:41
What were they looking like in the 18th century if they didn’t look like this? Although I’ve seen fairly contemporary portraits like of Anne Bonny, for instance. They don’t look much look like Captain Jack.
Michelle Butler 24:54
It’s Robert Louis Stevenson writing Kidnapped and Treasure Island.
Anne Brannen 24:58
What is he making up? If he’s fictionalizing it, what is he…? I guess what I’m asking is, you’re telling me we have an idea in our head of pirates that’s built on fiction. So what was the reality behind what he created, if you see what I mean?
Michelle Butler 25:16
Right, right. That seems like a complicated question to me, because even as somebody like Blackbeard was operational…it was like what you talked about with Richard the first. The legend-making was happening in real time.
Anne Brannen 25:35
Yeah, I know that’s true for, like, Stede Bonnet also. Yeah. Okay. All right.
Michelle Butler 25:42
I think part of…this is just me making things up, because the 18th century is definitely not my time period. But it seems to me that part of what you have going on there is the rise of the newspaper.
Anne Brannen 25:56
Okay. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 25:58
You have this not instantaneous, but much faster coverage of topics than what you’re having earlier on. In much the way that we’re having a need for content now to fill the internet, when you start having daily newspapers, you have that need for content.
Anne Brannen 26:19
So that piracy itself, that was actually happening. There were pirates.
Michelle Butler 26:24
Oh, for sure. Yeah.
Anne Brannen 26:25
For their own gain. They were surviving by being pirates. And then there were people who were hired.
Michelle Butler 26:32
I think that the whole 18th century pirates who are out for their own gain is a different phenomena than what we’re having earlier on, where we have privateers, who are essentially freelance soldiers.
Anne Brannen 26:47
Yeah, yeah. They’re like mercenaries of the water.
Michelle Butler 26:51
Exactly. Sir Francis Drake and his crowd that Elizabeth just gave carte blanche to do whatever the heck they wanted to the Spanish fleet.
Anne Brannen 26:58
The beginning for the Victual Brothers. They were privateers, then after they were no longer needed, they just continued the very very lucrative getting ships and getting other stuff game. And Jeanne de Clisson was a privateer. Really, she wasn’t a pirate.
Michelle Butler 27:13
I do think it’s important work, though, to talk about her and point to her because we tend to plaster over the past and say women only behaved in these particular ways.
Anne Brannen 27:29
There’s women warriors, and they aren’t all Joan of Arc. We’ve had several so far. Two already I mentioned today, Jeanne de Clisson and Joanna of Flanders.
Michelle Butler 27:37
Not everybody is Eleanor of Aquitaine either, who is so good at politics, doing things generally in the ways that women were expected to be doing things. She’s wielding power very successfully, but in more traditional and expected sorts of ways. Whereas I find Jeanne de Clisson so very fascinating, because this was not in any way what she’s expected to do. And she’s not like Eustace the monk who gets beheaded on the deck of his own ship. That was a fairly short career of piracy.
Anne Brannen 28:14
No, she has a short career of piracy also. You’ll find some things that say 13 years but it really was more like three months, but she survives it. What you’re talking about Eleanor of Aquitaine, she’s able to work in a political realm. She also leads troops and whatnot. But yeah, she’s able to work in a political realm in a much more womanly fashion, because she’s a queen and Jeanne de Clisson is not. She’s a minor sort of…she’s not what would become the working class, and she’s really not what would become the middle class either. But she wields specifically no political power. That realm just simply isn’t open to her.
Michelle Butler 29:00
This is very fascinating, right? She has to have a certain amount of persuasion because she’s not out there in the boat by herself.
Anne Brannen 29:09
She raises 300 or 400 men. Is this the legend? Is this true? But yeah, she gets a force together. She gets a force together. The first thing she does is attack a castle of someone that she was getting revenge on, and the next thing she does is attack a garrison. Then she goes on the sea. Goes and fights for the English, really.
Michelle Butler 29:36
And they follow her. Enough of their retainers are troubled by what happened to Olivier that they follow her.
Anne Brannen 29:47
Yeah. So they’re troubled by what happened to her husband and they’re also willing to trust her as a leader.
Michelle Butler 29:52
That’s just fascinating. Because we’re in the same time period in which Henry can’t get away with naming Matilda as his heir, and the assertion is ‘the men will never follow her.’
Anne Brannen 30:04
Although of course they do. She has quite an army.
Michelle Butler 30:07
I would have liked to have had a children’s book about Jeanne de Clisson on as a child. So many of the women figures I was given as a child are problematic. Guinevere. For heaven’s sakes.
Anne Brannen 30:21
I didn’t really pay much attention to Guinevere, although I really liked Elaine myself, so there was that.
Michelle Butler 30:26
I do suspect that one of the reasons she was able to go live out her life naturally is that she’s a woman. Nobody needs to behead her on the deck of the ship like they did Eustace the monk. I think that probably that is because the stated goal of revenge for the husband’s death is acceptable as a motivation for her to behave like this. For her society, they can forgive that–not forgive, but they can understand it. It’s one thing to allow her to fight against their enemies on the open seas and it’s a totally different thing to allow her to then go live out her life naturally with there being no repercussions. I think that is allowed and they give her refuge because ultimately for their society her motivation is acceptable.
Anne Brannen 31:25
She also wasn’t as dangerous as somebody who, like for instance Joan of Arc, who’s seen as someone who’s making miracles. That’s very very dangerous. So here we are, Middle Ages. We’re go gonna down into the Tudor realm when women get their heads cut off all the time just for being related to people who are Catholic. We’re still in the Middle Ages so you don’t necessarily cut the heads off women for being naughty. Now, for heresy, yes, dead dead dead dead dead. Burnt at the stake.
Michelle Butler 31:59
I think it’s also worth reminding ourselves that what happened to her husband was excessive for the time period. The way he was executed, the dragging of the body through the streets, the hanging on the gibbet, displaying of his head–that was all excessive punishment for someone of his social class.
Anne Brannen 32:23
Add to that the treachery of inviting people to a tournament and then slaughtering them. That’s never okay. It wasn’t okay when De Braose did it to the Welsh.
Michelle Butler 32:37
It matters because it helps people then be more accepting of what she does in response.
Anne Brannen 32:44
Fair enough. Here’s what we don’t know I would like to know. I would like to know what it was like when she goes back to Brittany. Do the neighbors love her? Are they scared of her? Or it is ‘Welcome home. Here’s some bread.’ I’d like to know.
Michelle Butler 32:59
I wanted to know more about those two youngest kids. What happens to them? Because one of them is listed as having died while they’re out, you know, a-pirating, and I would have liked to have known more about–
Anne Brannen 33:15
But isn’t it one of those kids who inherits? We know she’s dead by the time that one of her kids applies to Edward to inherit her lands, which he does. Is it one of those kids or–does she have any kids with Walter? I don’t think so. So one of those kids inherits the land and another one dies at sea.
Michelle Butler 33:41
I would really like somebody else to go do some serious research here. Because this is probably one of these places where there’s more information to be found. It just needs a scholar to go dig in it.
Anne Brannen 33:54
I think it needs reading the French sources too.
Michelle Butler 33:57
Yeah. It would be a good really good project for somebody who speaks French.
Anne Brannen 34:02
So you found a heavy metal song?
Michelle Butler 34:05
I did. About her revenge.
Anne Brannen 34:07
Who’s doing it?
Michelle Butler 34:08
That artist is called Bury Tomorrow, and the album is Blackflame. It came out in 2018. And the song is “My Revenge.”
Anne Brannen 34:18
Which was supposedly the name of her flagship, only it wasn’t. But okay, whatever. There were no operas? There were no plays?
Michelle Butler 34:26
I did not find anything.
Anne Brannen 34:29
There really should be. So often we hit these things and there’s like this giant mass–
Michelle Butler 34:36
Honestly, this would make a better musical than the Cadaver Synod.
Anne Brannen 34:40
Okay, wait. No, I’m sorry. I don’t think….well, okay, a musical. Sure. I think the Cadaver Synod itself is just highly dramatic. The Cadaver Synod is inherently dramatic. I mean, digging up people’s corpses, having a trial, then dragging the long-dead corpse around. Very dramatic, very dramatic.
Michelle Butler 34:43
I just think if you can make a musical out of Six–the wives of Henry the eighth–or the Count of Monte Cristo, you could make a pretty nice musical.
Anne Brannen 35:14
Yeah, you can make musicals out of pretty much everything we’ve covered, actually.
Michelle Butler 35:20
Musicals, you know, really work well with high drama, and there’s a lot of drama.
Anne Brannen 35:25
Medieval crime is inherently dramatic. Yeah. So that’s what we have. Jeanne de Clisson. She was very busy killing French people on the ocean. Well, the Channel, at the very least. And she really was there, and there are many lies told about her, but they’re very good stories, and you can find them on the internet. You’re gonna give us a bunch of these links, are you not? Especially one for the Rejected Princesses?
Michelle Butler 35:55
That one’s very good.
Anne Brannen 35:57
It’s just a great browsing site.
Michelle Butler 35:59
I find them very helpful.
Anne Brannen 36:02
The next time you hear from us, we will be discussing that time that King Lambert was either murdered or fell from his horse. That was Italy 898. We’re gonna go backwards. We have indeed mentioned King Lambert before, because he showed up in a previously mentioned episode, the Cadaver Synod because he was in on that. So we’ll have to mention the Cadaver Synod again, which I’m never sorry to do because, as I say, digging up corpses and putting them on trial. It’s awfully nice. Things we do for fun in the Middle Ages. That’s all for us then. 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 Stitcher and Apple podcast, and all the places where podcasts hang out. You can find us on truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. You can find there links to the podcast and our show notes and the little blurbs and transcriptions. You can leave comments. We love that. You can let us know if there’s any true crimes that you think we ought to put on our schedule. We’d love to hear about that. Also, you know, if you’re taking issue with anything we’ve said, please let us know. Occasionally people do, or they have things to add that we didn’t know. We love that. We’d love it if you’d leave reviews places too. We do this for fun, but it doesn’t hurt to get bumped up. My goal always is to show up if you’re in any of the podcast places and you’re searching true crime. I like it if we show up because I find that hilarious. So that’s my goal. I think that’s it. Bye.
Michelle Butler 37:44
Bye.
63. The Children of Hamelin Disappear, Hamelin, Lower Saxony, 1284
Anne Brannen 0:10
Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I am Anne Brannen and I’m your host in Albuquerque.
Michelle Butler 0:15
And I Michelle Butler in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.
Anne Brannen 0:19
Now I’ll give you a little warning. Michelle will not be in the most medieval state in America for much longer because she will be leaving for a different state in America. But we’ll tell you more on that later.
Yep, things are wild around here as we’re trying to finish up and get our house ready to go on the market.
Moving and selling houses. Isn’t it wonderful?
Michelle Butler 1:05
Painting everything gray as one is supposed to do.
Anne Brannen 1:08
Oh, really? We’re supposed to paint things gray now.
Michelle Butler 1:11
Yeah, gray is the ‘in’ color.
Anne Brannen 1:14
It’s all neutral so, supposedly, people can go into your home and envision themselves living in your home?
I guess. I mean, it’s growing on me. When we first did it, I was really sad because everything was painted yellow. I like yellow. It’s a cheerful color.
I like yellow. You know, I don’t care if gray is in or not, I’m totally not painting anything gray. No. Cream? Okay, fine. Yellow. But not gray. No, no. We’ve been watching–you’re not going to believe this–but we’ve been watching Selling Sunset. It’s this reality show with rich ladies in it with giant six inch stiletto heels, going around selling like millions and millions and millions of dollars property in LA. I don’t know why we’re watching it, except that we’re sort of now completely stuck on is what the hell is going on. What I’m fascinated by is the staging, which mostly is dreadful, to my mind. Because you’re supposed to be able to envision yourself there, which means that basically it’s nothing. Everything’s all white and metal and whatnot. But there was one stager who had brought in things like a table made out of bones, for instance. It was really interesting but they fired her right away. That was not working. She could have sold that house to me, but, you know, not to anybody in LA with millions of dollars. So there you go. Anyway, so don’t get any tables made out of bones because that’s totally going to screw the entire deal, as far as I can tell. Just saying.
Michelle Butler 2:49
I am trying to get rid of things and not acquire them so it’s fine. I will not be acquiring any tables made out of bones.
Anne Brannen 2:58
The last time you moved I remember I inherited a bunch of jars of pinto beans and whatnot, because you were trying to really cut down on the weight for the move.
Michelle Butler 3:10
Yeah, yeah. That’s true at this time, too. I’ve already gone through my pantry and I’m gonna make sure to go through it again.
Anne Brannen 3:16
Okay. Well, at any rate, we’re here and today we are talking about–I’m really excited about this. I’m the one that thought this up. So this is all my fault–we’re talking about the Pied Piper of Hamlin, who may or may not have been there. We will explain. In 1284, maybe, in the town of Hamlin, for sure it was Hamlin, in Lower Saxony in Germany, the children apparently disappeared, supposedly. There’s some town chronicles, theoretically from 1384, that say “it is 100 years since our children left.” But more on that later. Apparently something actually did indeed happen to the children of Hamlin. In 1284? Maybe not. There’s a quotation from the Chronica Ecclesiae Hamelensis says, supposedly that says, and I quote, “Anno post exitum puerorum nostrum.” And then some numbers saying how many days it’s been, which adds up to 100 years. Okay. Supposedly, although this is apparently hard to find. This gets quoted extensively. And everybody’s assuming this is all true. The date’s problematic because the phrase appears in two places, corrected with different dates. Okay. But we’re going to assume yes, something happened to the children of Hamlin at the end of the 13th century. So that’s our crime, which may or may not have been a crime, because we don’t know what happened to them. Now the ‘exitum’ of that phrase has been translated, ‘they left,’ but it might mean ‘they died.’ The ‘puerorum’ has been translated to mean ‘children,’ but it might mean ‘our boys.’ At any rate, something happened to some young people in Hamlin. And it was a bad thing. Some bad thing happened, or maybe not. Something happened to the children in Hamlin. What the hell was it? Around 1300, so not long after whatever it was that happened, there was a stained glass window in the Hamlin church in the marketplace. It’s was described several times in various chronicles and whatnot, as being a rendition of a piper dressed in motley, with a bunch of children in white. So that’s not long after. The information that there was a pied piper–‘pied’ means ‘motley”–pied piper, who was responsible for the leaving of the children dates pretty close to the event itself. Okay, fair enough. But what did he do? Well, we will tell you that we do not think the rats had anything to do with it, because they don’t even show up in the story at all until the middle of the 16th century. They are not in the stained glass window. They’re not in the chronicles. There’s no rats. No rats. They’re a nice touch, though, because they give it a little logic. There’s a German manuscript from the last half of the 15th century, which gives the story essentially, there’s a handsome Piper that showed up and he lured all the kids out the east gate, and they disappeared. So from the last half of the 15th century, that’s our story. The rats get added later, giving this lovely logic, because why did this guy show up and lure the children out? Why, why, why? I’ll tell ya, there were rats. There were a whole bunch of rats and the pied piper got really annoyed because he’d been hired to get the rats out of the city. He did this by, you know, playing his beautiful silver–the silverness of the pipe shows up places–his beautiful silver pipe, and he lures this plague of rats out to the river Weser and they all drown. But then the mayor won’t pay him and so he gets pissed, and so he lures all the children to away to…whatever, there were no rats. Now, given that we do think that something happened to the children of Hamlin, how are we explaining this? Well, I will tell you that there are many, many theories. Did you find these?
Oh, yeah. I saw that there was a ton of websites, but not as many sources as I would have…
Oh, no. No. Because the only sources are the Chronicle–we’ve got the Chronicle which says something about something–and a stained glass window which no longer exists because it got destroyed in 1660. And then the story that got written down that the piper lured everybody. That’s it. I mean there’s no…it gets mentioned over and over and over but contemporary sources? none. Sources from 100 years later? Yes. Stained glass window, which no longer exist? Yes. The sources? Not happening. Now. I’m going to tell you some of the things that people have said might have happened because we’re all assuming okay, right, something happened, children of Hamlin gone. All right. They all wandered out of town, and they were killed in a landslide. They all starve. I like that one. You’d think though the Chronicle would say ‘the landslide.’ They all starved to death or died of a plague. They all drowned in the river Weser which then later would be where all the imaginary rats would drown. They all suffered from St. Vitus’ dance, that disease that you get from ergot and so they all went, you know, dancing in the woods till they died. Or– this is my very favorite–the Pied Piper was a pagan who lured them all away to perform dancing rituals, and then they fell on a sinkhole.
Michelle Butler 9:21
Oh. Okay.
Anne Brannen 9:23
Don’t you like that one? I like that a lot. I don’t believe it, but I love this as a story. There’s some other theories, which maybe seem a little more sane. The idea that the children were being sent to live elsewhere due to overpopulation, that they were sold to a recruiter from Eastern Europe because it’s true that surnames from Hamlin show up in Poland. Okay, fair enough, you know, and that’s a Germanic language and not the Slavic language so, okay. That’s the theory that’s on the Hamlin website because Hamlin, as Michelle is going to explain to you later, Hamlin has not forgotten its Pied Piper. No, no, no, no. It’s much like when we were dealing with Elizabeth Bathory. Where she lived is all about the Elizabeth Bathory blood tours. It’s kind of like that over in Hamlin.
Michelle Butler 10:21
They are leaning into it.
Anne Brannen 10:23
They might as well.
Michelle Butler 10:23
Why not?
Anne Brannen 10:24
Yeah, why not? The pictures are great on the Hamlin website. I totally want to go to Hamlin, to this lovely, beautiful town and eat a lot of nice stuff and see Pied Piper things. At any rate, the Hamlin website goes with that theory, that they went to the Balkans. Although throughout Hamlin, there’s houses and streets that commemorate the ratcatcher theory, but whatever. In this case, then, the children were voluntary immigrants. Also they weren’t necessarily children, because ‘town children’ could mean ‘town citizens,’ you know, like the children of the town, if you see what I mean. So because we do know that there was immigration into the Balkans. There had been overpopulation in this area. But there’s that stained glass window with the children but okay. Whatever happened, it’s been turned into a horrifying story about a horrifying crime. And maybe there was one, but the legend had legs. There is so so much Pied Piper info. There’s a poem by Goethe. There’s an inclusion in the Brothers Grimm collection. There’s a poem by Robert Browning, which then goes into several adaptations. There’s films, both animated and not, from 1933 through 1995. There’s several operas, there’s several plays, there’s several novels. And if you go to Hamlin, you can visit the rat catcher’s house, which was built in 1602 and has nothing to do with any of this, except that it’s called the rat catcher’s house and there’s a plaque on it. There is a restaurant there, which is owned by the city, and you can buy Pied Piper merch. At the restaurant, you can get flambéed rat tails, which are actually strips of pork.
Michelle Butler 12:29
That’s good to know.
Anne Brannen 12:31
Cause you don’t actually want to eat flambéed rat tails. The thing is, there wouldn’t be much on them. You’d have to have a really big rat in order to have any kind of meat on a rat tail at all.
Michelle Butler 12:47
This is true.
Anne Brannen 12:50
I’m so interested because I thought for sure…this is what I thought. At first I thought, ‘Well, I’m wanna do the Pied Piper, because that’s going to be a wonderful April Fool’s Day thing, because there wasn’t any Pied Piper, and there’s no rats.’ And then I’m like, ‘okay, there is a pied piper. There was. But it sounds like he was a recruiter for the immigrants and there might have been children, or they might have been just townspeople in general.’ But anyway, there was, and it might not have been a crime, because if he was a recruiter, it’s not like he took them all away. But that this whole…it shows up so many times early on, this legend that he lured them out the east gate–it’s very clear–and then they disappeared. In some versions, he takes them into a cave, and then they go through some subterranean thing, and they show up in Transylvania. But he takes them out the east gate, and they disappear out the east gate.
Michelle Butler 13:44
I was really surprised when you put this one on the list, because I really didn’t think that there was anything historical behind this, because the stories are so self contained, and they make sense. Don’t cheat your workmen. It’s got a moral to it. He comes, he does this service for them, they refuse to pay him and so unintended consequences happen. He steals the kids. They don’t get their kids back. Don’t cheat your workmen. It’s got such a clear moral, it didn’t really feel like a story that was likely to have some kind of historical basis to it. I’m still not totally sold on the idea that something actually happened. I have so many questions. One of my questions is, can you have somebody dressed in parti-color in 1284? Or is that a piece that is coming in 100 years later? I looked up the etymology of motley and it’s late 14th century, but of course, we’ve got translation issues. Is there actually something else going on in German? I’m not entirely certain that that type of clothing is current to 1284.
Anne Brannen 15:10
I never questioned that. Good for you.
Michelle Butler 15:13
It’s possible that that piece is…this feels like something that started accumulating legend bits really early, and I wonder if the pied part of it is a really early accumulation. And then 100 years later, 200 years later, the rats get pulled in. But something about the story is very sticky, and attracts and holds these things.
Anne Brannen 15:36
Yeah, yeah. It really, as I say, it really had legs. It’s such a powerful story.
Michelle Butler 15:44
And it’s interesting, because the story as it comes down to us does have a crime. They absolutely tried to cheat him. And it has a moral. Don’t cheat. If you hire somebody to do a job, you need to pay them.
Anne Brannen 15:59
Right, right. And so as it comes down to us, it’s one of the brothers Grimms’ fairy tales. I mean, there’s some horrible crimes in “The Juniper Tree,” but we’re not gonna go be looking them up to talk about them.
Michelle Butler 16:15
It does get retold all over the place. There’s no way to cover it. It shows up in all the collections of fairy tales. Robert Browning has his version of it. It just attracts…I partially because it’s an unsolved mystery. What happened to these kids? And partially because of the rough justice.
Anne Brannen 16:39
I think also because of the horror of it. I remember, as a child, this story. I may use as illustration the Kate Greenaway illustration of the Pied Piper, which makes no sense, because they are apparently all of them living at the beginning of the 19th century, given what they’re wearing. That’s the illustration that I remember. They’re just so happy and cheerful, and they’re going off to God knows what, and they never come back. It’s a terrifying story.
Michelle Butler 17:13
I really don’t know what to make of the stained glass window, because we don’t have it. We have to do this with medieval studies. We often have to deal with the fact that we no longer have sources. But there’s a limitation to what you can do with a source you don’t have any more.
Anne Brannen 17:31
Right, right.
Michelle Butler 17:32
What does it mean for there to be attestation to a window that is this early? What was in it? We also know medieval histories are not always 100% reliable. Geoffrey of Monmouth is a liar.
Anne Brannen 17:53
Although in some reality, the dragons exist.
Michelle Butler 17:58
This one was…I’m really glad that your conclusion is ‘we don’t really know,’ because I was looking at the sources going, ‘I have absolutely no idea whether something happened or not.’ Because it was triggering my bullshit meter pretty hard. But a medieval bullshit meter has to be carefully calibrated, because a lot of things happen that are…if you just kind of said them out loud, they sound like they’re ridiculous.
Anne Brannen 18:27
Yeah. And we run across those a great deal.
Michelle Butler 18:29
Yeah. I mean, Richard the first. We talked about him recently. If you just lay out the facts of his life, it sounds like you’re making 75% of it up.
Anne Brannen 18:41
Right, right. Or Eleanor of Aquitaine, his mom’s.
Michelle Butler 18:44
Absolutely. So you have to really kind of calibrate. You can’t just say, ‘well, this makes no sense to me.’ You have to really calibrate. Even so, it’s still triggering my bullshit meter.
Anne Brannen 18:55
Yeah. The earliest thing we’ve got is so simple. It doesn’t say it was 130 Children, it doesn’t say there was a Pied Piper. It simply says, our children disappeared, or exited. Our children exited. They either disappeared or died. 100 years after, some period of time, after our children…there was something that was big enough in the town, there was an event that was big enough that the town could just simply say, ‘you know, that time our children disappeared,’ and everybody knew what that was. It didn’t need to get explained. And the chronicles, by the way, don’t start…the earliest we have is 1311. We don’t have any chronicles from the late 13th century. There’s no contemporary chronicles. So there you go. Did they exist at one time? Maybe, maybe not. Not there now. At a rate, everybody knew what it was. They didn’t need the details. So other things got added later. Were some of them out actually there at the beginning but just hadn’t been mentioned in the chronicles? Maybe. Not the 130 children, for sure. Not the rats, no. Some handsome musician showing up and in one way or another getting people out of town? Maybe.
Michelle Butler 20:17
They all got lured off into a cult.
Anne Brannen 20:19
Then fell into a sinkhole. Let’s be clear about that. I like the sinkhole, though. I really do. I mean, really, does this show up a lot in Hamlin, that there’s landslides and sinkholes out of town? It’s like, ‘Aaaah.’ You never know what’s going on. You go out the gates of Hamlin and the earth does things to you that you were not expecting. And there’s caves, subterranean things all the way to Transylvania. I’m thinking probably not.
Michelle Butler 20:47
I’m pleased to tell you that Hamlin has decided to just center the tourism industry…you got this inheritance, make use of it.
Anne Brannen 21:00
Right on. I believe that that’s what you’re sharing with us today. Now that I have explained to everybody that we don’t know what the hell happened in Hamlin. You’re now going to tell us what’s going on now.
Michelle Butler 21:11
Delighted by Hamlin’s tourism industry. I really want to go. They have a really well preserved late medieval…the center of the town is late medieval, early 16th century.
Anne Brannen 21:22
It’s really pretty.
Michelle Butler 21:24
It’s beautiful. It’s well preserved. And they’re just leaning into the Pied Piper part of things. I mean, there’s acknowledgment…it’s like anything else where you kind of shade between history and story to make it more interesting, but they’re really leaning into the rat thing. I think this is the only way to do it. To make them cute, and go for it. So the website has little colorful rats on it.
Anne Brannen 21:58
There’s rats all over the website. I couldn’t believe that. Although I will also say that prominent on the front page of the website is the Ukrainian flag because we are in solidarity. Slava Ukraini. Absolutely. I just thought I’d mention that because that’s probably not there all the time. But it is right now.
In the city, they’ve got painted little rats in the streets that show you how to get to the…basically, they’re are a path to get to the prominent tourist attractions.
Oh my god. I did not see that. That’s wonderful.
Michelle Butler 22:35
There are rat pastries.
Anne Brannen 22:38
What the hell’s a rat pastry?
Michelle Butler 22:41
A bun, shaped like a rat.
Anne Brannen 22:45
Like a croissant with a tail.
Michelle Butler 22:47
There is no rat in the pastry. It’s just shaped like a rat. Which is very cute. And probably probably tasty.
Anne Brannen 22:50
My guess is that there’s some marzipan in there. Because, you know, pastries in Germany. Bunches of marzipan. Yay.
Michelle Butler 23:09
That sounds awesome.
Anne Brannen 23:10
I know.
Michelle Butler 23:11
Sounds amazing. So here’s my favorite part of this whole thing. They have a play.
Anne Brannen 23:17
Of course they do.
Michelle Butler 23:18
They have a play, and I love the play. I just am so impressed with this. They have, every summer, a Pied Piper open air play. It is done by volunteer actors. They’re wearing a fairly decent approximation of 15th century clothing. Little kids are playing the rats.
Anne Brannen 23:44
Oooooh. That’s wonderful. So the little children are not playing the disappeared children. They’re playing the rats instead?
Michelle Butler 23:49
There may be some children playing children too. But the rats are definitely played by children. Because you can see that in…there’s videos on YouTube, you can see it.
Anne Brannen 23:50
Are we going to link to these?
Michelle Butler 23:56
Yeah, yeah. The show itself is free. It runs 30 minutes. And then you can pay to have the Piper take you on a walking tour of the town.
Anne Brannen 24:16
Whoa. Very nice.
Michelle Butler 24:17
I know! I love this. This whole thing. It feels very medieval drama-y to me.
Anne Brannen 24:25
Yes it does.
Michelle Butler 24:26
You got the amateur actors, and it’s being performed free–
Anne Brannen 24:30
And it’s in the street.
Michelle Butler 24:31
It’s in the street. There’s this second piece you can pay for and I really love them leaning into the legend where what they’re going to do is have the crowd then go follow the pied piper.
Anne Brannen 24:42
Yes, yes, yes. Do you happen to know…the website, you can read it in several different languages. Do you happen to know if this is all done in German?
Michelle Butler 24:53
Yes, it seems to be. Certainly the YouTube videos that show clips of the play are in German. It’s been going for 60 years.
Anne Brannen 25:05
Wow.
Michelle Butler 25:07
I really enjoy this community theater part of this.
Anne Brannen 25:12
Do you know what happened sixty years ago that caused them to invent this?
Michelle Butler 25:17
Let’s see what it says. I’m on their website right now. So let me see what it says. Play was started in 1929. They kept working on it, but, you know, stuff was happening. So it got a little complicated–
Anne Brannen 25:41
‘Stuff was happening.’ You’re talking about wars.
Michelle Butler 25:44
I am indeed talking about the Second World War, which tended to put the kibosh on the play for a while. They revived it in 1951. It seems like it’s always been tourism focused. But of course, you and I both know that when you do plays like this, it’s also community building.
Anne Brannen 26:14
Yep. Yep.
Michelle Butler 26:15
So it’s very exciting. I really like this community theater aspect of it. There is also…now we’re moving into just some weirdness. There is a musical from 1993 called RATS!. RATS, exclamation point: the musical. It’s based on Robert Browning’s poem. It’s really a musical designed for middle and high school students to be performing. But it’s cute. I mean, it feels to me like it’s in the same ballpark as Little Shop of Horrors, in terms of making fun of dreadful things. My kid’s elementary school did Little Shop of Horrors. In the year 2000, the people in Hamlin found out about the musical and translated into German and so they’ve been performing that too.
Anne Brannen 27:19
So if you go to Hamlin and there’s the festival, you see the play, then you can go on a tour that the pied piper leads. But I’m guessing that there’s tours all the time?
Michelle Butler 27:28
Yeah.
Anne Brannen 27:28
You go to Hamlin, you can go on a tour? You not just seeing the little things. But what’s in the tour? Because there’s no there there except for the east gate. They went out the east gate. So what’s in the tour?
Michelle Butler 27:42
You tour the old town. The historic part of the town. The 15th and 16th century buildings.
Anne Brannen 27:49
So it’s not just stuff about–
Michelle Butler 27:50
The pied piper takes you on a tour of the Old Town. The stuff that was inside the city walls. It actually looks like a lot of fun. I would totally do this.
Anne Brannen 28:01
Totally. Yeah, I would do it. Bucket List.
Michelle Butler 28:06
It looks like a lot of fun.
Anne Brannen 28:07
It really does. The old town is just beautiful. You can tell from the photo. It’s just gorgeous.
Michelle Butler 28:16
In the promo video that I was looking at for the pied piper open air play, there was a very prominent shot of one of the actors lacing up some very nice boots.
Anne Brannen 28:30
Oh, that is really good.
Michelle Butler 28:33
Not all the costumes are amazing, as you would expect. They’re an amateur, community theater group, but those particular boots looked great.
Anne Brannen 28:46
Good. He’s not running around in Reeboks.
Michelle Butler 28:50
I really liked that children and adults are doing this together.
Anne Brannen 28:54
I do too.
Michelle Butler 28:54
As community theater that is intergenerational.
Anne Brannen 28:56
Yeah. So it’s stuff you’re doing with your family, for your community. You kind of keep building on that. Things we do for our city.
Michelle Butler 29:06
But it’s also, thematically, almost a way of expunging the fear and remembered trauma of that loss, because that’s them keeping the children and working with them, and strengthening those bonds. So I think it’s really fascinating that that’s what they’ve settled on. ‘We’re going to talk about this, but we’re going to keep the kids in sight at all times.’
Anne Brannen 29:31
You know, that’s interesting, thinking about the remembered trauma. Because whatever it is that happened, back at the end of the 13th century, it is remembered as trauma.
Michelle Butler 29:43
Yeah, yeah. That’s true. We don’t know what happened. But clearly it left an impression.
Anne Brannen 29:49
That’s very interesting. Do you have anything else?
Michelle Butler 29:51
I do not.
Anne Brannen 29:52
It was very short today.
Michelle Butler 29:53
Well, you know, I only have three functioning brain cells right now.
Anne Brannen 30:01
Well, that’s our discussion of the thing which might or might not have happened in Hamlin and the pied piper who might or might not have been there. Our discussion was short today, because lots of things going on. The next time you hear from us, we are going to be discussing that time in France in the 14th century that Jeanne de Clisson became a pirate.
Michelle Butler 30:26
Oh, boy, I’ve been looking forward to this one. I don’t know what to do about it. Oh, my gosh. My kid has talked nonstop for a solid month about Our Flag Means Death. So I’m very primed for piracy.
Anne Brannen 30:39
Piracy is right up there in our brain.
Michelle Butler 30:42
I’m primed for pirates. My bookshelves have been rifled for books about pirates. He’s had to order a couple of books about sodomy among the pirates in the 17th century.
Anne Brannen 30:53
It’s important to, you know, have your children be reading all kinds of things. So he’ll be happy. Maybe he can help with Jeanne de Clisson becomes a pirate. Yeah, I don’t know anything about this either. So we’re gonna find out.
Michelle Butler 31:06
Oh, this is gonna be like our third episode with pirates.
Anne Brannen 31:10
Well, you know, it turns out that besides the blood feast theme of the Middle Ages, there’s also the piracy theme. Is it the third? Because we had the brothers that–
Michelle Butler 31:20
Yeah, there was Eustace the monk, and then there was the Victual brothers. So I think this is our third piratical episode. I really don’t associate pirates with the Middle Ages, but that’s mostly because that later image is so very strong. But of course, anytime you have boats, you’re gonna have people who steal using boats. I mean, the Vikings are basically pirates.
Anne Brannen 31:44
The Vikings were an entirely piratical bunch of people. The rowers. The Rus. So this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today except with less technology. Although in the case of the one we had today, we have no idea what it was and who knows what the technology was that was being used.
Michelle Butler 32:05
It’s short because we’re trying not to tell any lies. We could sell people lots of ridiculous things that are out on the web. We’re trying to sift and find the truth.
Anne Brannen 32:15
We’re trying to not tell lies. We could be Robert Browning but we’re just not that good. I mean, Browning.
Michelle Butler 32:22
Browning. I can pretty well recite ‘My Last Duchess.’ That’s how much I love ‘My Last Duchess’.
Anne Brannen 32:27
I love Browning. Yeah, Browning’s good. There’s a bunch of poets from that era that I do not like but he’s good. We can be found on Stitcher and Spotify and Apple and all the other places where podcasts are hanging out. If you go to Truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval, is all one word, there’s links to the podcast, you can see the show notes and the lovely blurb and whatever picture I’ve stuck on there, and there’s transcriptions. We’d love it if you leave comments. You can leave comments. We also have a Facebook page. You can leave comments there. Let us know if there are medieval crimes that we should think about or things that might have been medieval crimes, but maybe weren’t there at all. Maybe they were. There’s been several of those. The death of William Rufus for one. Was that a crime? We don’t know. We’ve got another one coming up of that kind. King Lambert either is murdered or fell off his horse. We don’t know which. We’ve got some things that are crimes and some things that we don’t know what the hell but we’ll we’ll talk about them, cuz we like to do that. You can leave reviews over on the various podcast sites and that would be great too. We’re just, you know, kind of hanging out talking about things in the Middle Ages. But I think that’s all for us. Bye.
62. Leopold of Austria Kidnaps Richard the Lionheart, Near Vienna, Austria 1192
Anne Brannen 0:24
Hello, and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 views of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, and I’m your host in Albuquerque.
Michelle Butler 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.
Anne Brannen 0:40
Today, we are ignoring all the horrible things going on in the world in order to talk about some stuff going on in the Middle Ages, which is kind of what we do every time we get together. That’s sort of what we’re doing. We’re talking about the time that Richard the Lionheart was kidnapped by Leopold, the Duke of Austria, December 1192, in Vienna. At that time, Richard the first, who was the king of England, was on his way home to England–or rather, back to England. It wasn’t really his home. He was the king of that country but over the 10 year period that he was its king he wasn’t there for more than about six months all together, on and off. But at any rate, he was on his way back to England. He didn’t even speak English. He spoke Old French and Old Provencal. You remember, Michelle, from our discussion about the Occitan?
Michelle Butler 1:40
Yeah.
Anne Brannen 1:40
He spoke that language. And he spoke French, but didn’t speak English. This was actually at the time where it was becoming an issue because his brother John was going to be arguing that someone wasn’t fit for an office because he didn’t speak English. So it’s about that time that speaking English, if you were running England was becoming an issue. It’s a while after the Normans got into England, but, you know, these things move on. At any rate, he was on his way back to England, because he was the king of it. Where he had been was in the Holy Land on Crusade. He had gone with Philip the second of France who was like…they were allies, they were enemies, they were allies, they were enemies. They were maybe lovers, there’s discussion back and forth. But at any rate, they had gone on crusade together, mostly because if either one of them had gone by themselves, the other one would have taken their territories. So they went together and to do this, Richard had completely emptied the English treasury, because going on crusade was very expensive. It was annoying if you were English, but he had a really high reputation as a warrior and a knight already. By 1187, he was being called ‘the Lion.’ Because of his fighting in the crusade he’s about to become being called the Lionheart. This is within his time. It isn’t a name that’s applied to him later, which so often is what happens. At any rate, there was grumbling, you know, money, money. It’s going to be more of an issue later, but there weren’t any revolts. Again, more on that later, because there will be some. At any rate, he was on his way home after his holy land career had kind of fallen apart and he’d had some trouble when his ship had to make a detour to stop at Corfu on account of the weather. Because the Emperor Isaac the second was pissed off at Richard for having taken Cyprus–more on that later–he had to get away from there. So he disguised himself as a Templar, and he got away but his ship wrecked again. So he ended up having to travel by land. He was on his way to Bavaria, because there was a Duke there that was one of his brothers in law. At any rate, he had to travel across land, and this took him through Austria, and unfortunately, he was recognized. We’re told that was because he was wearing his signet ring. The signet ring gave him away. I don’t actually know whether this is true or not. ‘Oh my god, it must be Richard the Lionheart, he has this fancy ring on.’ Was he that dumb? I don’t know. But anyway, he did get recognized for some reason or another. So Leopold’s henchmen arrested him and then Richard was inprisoned in Durnstein castle until the end of March, when he was taken to the Holy Roman Emperor Henry the sixth, who put him into Trifels castle in Germany. Finally he was released in February of 1194, after a ransom of 150,000 marks, which was way more than the annual English income. So the Treasury which was depleted, got more depleted. So why is this a crime? Why is it a crime and why did he get imprisoned? All right. What had happened is Richard’s history in the Third Crusade. He had, on his way to the Holy Lands, caused some grief in Sicily by looting and burning Messina. Then he went to Cyprus, because the Holy Roman Emperor, who I mentioned earlier, had captured Richard’s sister Joan and Richard’s fiancee Berengaria. Joan had been imprisoned in Sicily because of some power shifts and Richard had gotten her out of Sicily, but then her ship wrecked and Cyprus–keep up with this, keep up with this, there’s shipwrecks and everybody’s moving around. Anyway, Isaac had taken her and Berengaria prisoner. Okay. So Richard took Cyprus and gave it to the Templars. That’s what happened in Cyprus. So then he married Berengaria and she went on crusade with him for a little while. Then she went back to France and they didn’t ever see each other again. Richard went from Cyprus to Acre. He got there in the summer of 1191. Let’s have a little breath. Okay. Acre had been in Muslim hands since 1187 and the Europeans were trying to take it back. With Richard’s help, they did. The Crusaders took Acre back. Richard was very ill, by the way. During this battle, he was ill. He had this form of scurvy. He was being carried around on a stretcher and fighting with a crossbow. You cannot make this stuff up. Richard the Lionheart. And this is really important. Richard had Leopold of Austria’s flag torn down when he took Acre and thrown in the moat. So Leopold’s all pissed off. Richard had 2700 Muslim prisoners executed and then he defeated Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn at the battle of Arsuf that September against all the odds. It was the Hospitallers that broke…they broke ranks, they were supposed to be in a defensive position, and they broke ranks and they attacked Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn’s flank. Then Richard attacked and they won. By the way, Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn and Richard actually never met personally. They did fight and they respected each other as warriors. They held negotiations and they sent presents back and forth. Clearly it feels like they should have met but they didn’t. They appear together, fighting and then talking together constantly in medieval art. In medieval illustrations you can see Richard and Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn–by the way, Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn was renowned in Europe as a great warrior. He had defeated the Crusaders very badly at the Battle of Hattin in 1187. That really marked the beginning of the Crusader downfall. Yay. At any rate, Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn was very famous in Europe, and he shows up in all these illustrations with Richard, whom he never met. But anyway, back to the Frankish kingdom. The Frankish kingdom of Jerusalem. Okay, now we’re going to have more important stuff about Leopold. Conrad of Montferrat was elected King of Jerusalem in April of 1192. Then he got stabbed to death. And he’s…God, what is he? Is he Leopold’s nephew? He’s related to Leopold.
Michelle Butler 8:57
I absolutely want to put this on our crime list, because somebody hired the actual assassins to take him out.
Anne Brannen 9:06
Yes.
Michelle Butler 9:07
So I really want to come back and focus on Conrad’s assassination at some point.
Anne Brannen 9:13
Great. Then we can talk about assassins and we can go back into the Crusades, which a very fertile field for horrible crimes and just the Crusades themselves. The fact of them is a horrible crime, but there you are. I believe we’ve talked about this several times already. What is this, four or five times we’ve discussed various ghastly crusade…at any rate, he got stabbed to death. Then about a week later, his widow who was pregnant, married Richard’s nephew. We still don’t know who ordered the assassins to murder Conrad, although we will discuss this, apparently, at a later date. But everybody at the time thought that it was Richard and maybe it was. So that’s why Leopold really really really hates Richard. Okay. Richard’s and Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn’s forces continued to battle. They reached a settlement in the fall of 1192. There was a three year truce, or at least it was agreed to. Richard started home, which is where we started our story. Now, here’s the issue. Was it common to capture noble and royal warriors in battle and hold them for ransom? Yes, it was, and it was okay. But. First, when Leopold captured Richard, it wasn’t in battle. Second, Richard was the king of England, not just some noble guy. And third, it was against papal decree. Crusaders were protected–this is not by canon law but by papal decree–Crusaders were protected because otherwise their lands and their goods were in a lot of danger when they went on crusade. Indeed, people took crusaders’ lands and goods all the time. And, as you can see, sometimes just captured them and stuck them in castles. Leopold got excommunicated by Pope Celestine the third. Leopold, as we’ve heard, handed him over to the Holy Roman Emperor, who also got excommunicated. Whatever money was left in the English Treasury got handed over along with the takings for some very high taxes and the confiscation of a bunch of gold and silver nice things from the churches and whatever it was that Eleanor of Aquitaine, who was Richard’s mother, could gather up, and he got released in early 1194. Now, I promised that I would tell you about the rebellions. While he was gone, despite the fact that you weren’t supposed to touch the stuff that belonged to the Crusaders, his little brother John led a rebellion. He gave that up when Richard got back, and you will be very happy to know that Richard got crowned again in 1194 soon after he got home. Why? Well, why not? Any rate, he got crowned again. Philip had taken Normandy while Richard was gone. Was he supposed to? No, he wasn’t, but he did, and these people didn’t get excommunicated. It’s Leopold and the Holy Roman Emperor that gets excommunicated. You didn’t necessarily get excommunicated just because you did something that the Pope didn’t want you to do and everybody knew about it. There’s a lot of politics going on with excommunication at this level. At any rate, Philip had taken Normandy while Richard was gone. So Richard went to war with him to take Normandy back and secure Aquitaine. Then one day, in March of 1199, Richard was besieging a little castle in the Limousin and he got hit in the shoulder by a crossbow bolt, and he got gangrene. He died about a week and a half later. So his younger brother John had his nephew Arthur killed, probably–we were discussing this last episode–and he became king of England about a month and a half later. The end, of my piece of things. Your background to the horrible crime of kidnapping the King of England and sticking him in prison because you’re all annoyed at him for things that he might have done and throwing your flag in the moat.
Michelle Butler 13:22
That was why I wanted to talk about this. From our point of view, it looks bad. He’s coming home. In the discussions I have read of Richard, up until now, the held-for-ransom thing always gets discussed as a little sidebar. Coming home from the Crusades, oh, there’s a sidebar, but he ends up back home. It doesn’t really get discussed in detail. So I was interested in looking at that specific piece.
Anne Brannen 13:58
That’s why we wanted this. Because we’re like, wait a minute, wait a minute.
Michelle Butler 14:04
It is so blatantly against what the pope establishes as the rules for the crusade. You hear all of this stuff about Richard the great hero of the crusades. It just kind of gets shoved into a corner, all the crappy stuff that happened to him as a result of him actually staying in the Holy Land and trying to do this stuff. We can disagree with the crusades while also acknowledging that he was committed and trying to do it. Unlike Philip who slunk home.
Anne Brannen 14:36
Yeah Philip stunk home and took Normandy. Bad, bad man. Richard really, really was very good at being a warrior. He was apparently also, by the way, quite handsome. You can see why these legends sprung up, which you’re going to be discussing later. Even is in his lifetime. He bled England dry, way beyond dry. I think it’s very common to think of Richard using England as the place from which he got some money. He’s not real committed to England.
Michelle Butler 15:18
This whole kidnapping thing, I think, is worth looking at because it ends up being, in most discussions of Richard, the blip that doesn’t get looked at. There’s a lot going on there. Heinrich and Leopold know that they’re not supposed to do this. So they come up with rationales as to why he’s not really a crusader. That’s when they haul out the accusation that he hired the assassins to kill Conrad.
Anne Brannen 15:47
He’s not really a crusader. [laughter] So all these pictures of him fighting Saladin are not just fictional, but really, really fictional.
Michelle Butler 15:58
No, for reals, they argue that–in order to justify imprisoning him–they argue to the Pope that Richard was actually working with the Muslims all along.
Anne Brannen 16:10
[laughter] I did not know this. Oh, thank you so much. I’m so glad that what we do is we put both of us on these things, because we find very different things. Yeah, he was working with the Muslims. That’s why he slaughtered so many of them, I suppose.
Michelle Butler 16:29
They argue that because he had more cordial relations, and actually did have peace talks–not talks, but negotiations–with Saladin, that he clearly was a double agent. Richard refuses to go besiege Jerusalem because he says, flatly, ‘you know, I could take it, but I can’t hold it. There aren’t enough people here. So I’m not going to do it.’
Anne Brannen 16:57
Right. Right.
Michelle Butler 16:58
They haul that out as an accusation that he wasn’t really committed to the Crusades, he was just pretending. So they have all these justifications for why they’re ignoring how they’re supposed to be treating a crusader.
Anne Brannen 17:16
Interesting. The whole thing about not attacking Jerusalem when you know, as a commander, that you can’t hold it even if you can take it, that points to one of the many problems with this combination of military war and religious project. Because as a religious project, obviously, you throw yourselves against the walls of Jerusalem. You take Jerusalem at whatever cost and God is going to help you do this stuff, I guess. But as a military commander, he said, ‘this is a waste. I can’t do that.’ That’s a really legitimate and sane military decision. But that’s what the dividing line is. Hmm, interesting.
Michelle Butler 18:13
Leopold and Heinrich both come to sticky and untimely ends, which of course gets pointed to as, you know, judgment. Leopold in particular meets a horrific death. Not terribly long after Richard’s freed, on December 26–I think it’s 1194 but I would have to double check that–Leopold is out hunting, and his horse falls on him and his foot is crushed.
Anne Brannen 18:45
Oh I remember this. Yes, yes. Keep going and tell the rest of the story.
Michelle Butler 18:50
It gets infected. The circulation…the foot is dead. His physicians tell him it has to be amputated. But nobody has the nerve to do it for him.
Anne Brannen 19:02
No. It would be hard, wouldn’t it?
Michelle Butler 19:05
This poor man holds the axe against his own leg and orders a servant to hit it with a hammer. It takes three goes.
Anne Brannen 19:17
God almighty.
Michelle Butler 19:19
It doesn’t actually end up saving his life. But holy crap.
Anne Brannen 19:22
The gangrene had actually gone too far at that point.
Michelle Butler 19:28
So he dies on…I think New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. Yeah, it’s bad.
Anne Brannen 19:38
You told me that we need to put the Holy Roman Emperor into an entire episode of his own?
Michelle Butler 19:45
He’s terrible. He deserves his own episode of awfulness.
Anne Brannen 19:50
Okay, so we won’t talk about his awfulness. But tell me how he died.
Michelle Butler 19:56
He dies young. It’s not as bad as Leopold’s. But he definitely dies younger than we expected him to. He’s only 37, 35 something. He dies young, leaving his wife…holy smokes. It is possible this isn’t true but I’d like to think it is. Constance, his wife–they’re married for years and years and she doesn’t get pregnant. Eight years. She finally comes up pregnant at age 40. She is the heir of Sicily. She is how he is claiming…one of the dreadful things he does is a completely horrific conquest of Sicily. She’s the heiress and she’s queen of Sicily. That’s how he, Heinrich, has any kind of claim to Sicily. So it’s very important to her that her child is the acknowledged heir of Sicily. There’s all these rumors that she’s not really pregnant. She’s too old to get pregnant, she can’t possibly be pregnant because they were married for eight years. Again, this could possibly not be true, because the sources are sketchy on it. But given the Normans, I’m willing to believe this is at least credible. Medieval people knew this too, which is why the story is credible to them, too. She has a tent set up in the town square and invites all the women of the town to come watch her have that baby. To bear witness that that baby emerged from her body.
Anne Brannen 21:47
Not just noble women who could be thought to be lying on her behalf. Interesting.
Michelle Butler 21:53
Anybody. In some ways, it doesn’t actually matter if that story is true, because that is a story that’s being told contemporaneous.
Anne Brannen 22:03
So it means that people think of her as the kind of woman who was willing to prove that she was actually having a baby, and so therefore she did actually have a baby. Fair enough. Whether or not the story was true, people believed it.
Michelle Butler 22:18
It was believed that she was that kind of person. Anyway, so coming back to Richard. Richard, and the terrible people who kept him for ransom. This whole situation blows. Because Richard is kept away from his empire for so long that he comes back to a mess.
Anne Brannen 22:46
There was the depletion of the treasury issue. Also his brother John misbehaving.
Michelle Butler 22:50
John and Philip, between the two of them, have managed to make off with a huge chunk of the empire and Richard literally spends the rest of his life trying to put it back together. He becomes a figure of legend very, very quickly within his own lifetime. Within his own lifetime, the story of him reaching down the throat of the lion and pulling out its heart and then going off and eating it, which is how he’s getting that name.
Anne Brannen 23:18
Why do I not know this story? Tell me this again.
Michelle Butler 23:20
This is supposedly why he’s called Lionheart. This story is being told at least by 1300 because there is a romance called Richard the Lionheart. In which–this is actually great. I love this. I have links for this–in which his father Henry has married a Middle Eastern heiress. So Eleanor of Aquitaine has been wiped away.
Anne Brannen 23:56
That’s hard to do. That’s hard to do in her lifetime or after.
Michelle Butler 24:00
This romance goes back to that Angevin legend about having an ancestress who was a demon.
Anne Brannen 24:09
Melusine.
Michelle Butler 24:10
Yes. Who couldn’t sit through Mass. It goes back to that, but makes that person a Saracen princess who Henry the second then marries and is then Richard’s mom.
Anne Brannen 24:25
Fair enough.
Michelle Butler 24:27
So Richard has annoyed somebody, I don’t actually remember this part, but this person has set a lion on him figuring, ‘that’ll take care of my problem.’ Instead what happens is Richard kills the lion by reaching down its throat, grabbing its heart, and pulling it out–
Anne Brannen 24:45
Well, I think this probably actually happened.
Michelle Butler 24:47
–and then eating it.
Anne Brannen 24:48
Yeah, of course. Of course. I’ll believe this. So that’s why he’s called Richard the Lionheart. No, that’s a later story. That’s not why he was called Richard the Lionheart.
Michelle Butler 24:59
Not in his own lifetime but by 1300. That’s pretty quick.
Anne Brannen 25:04
Yeah, that’s pretty fast.
Michelle Butler 25:07
I didn’t know that it’s actually quite a bit later that he gets pulled into the Robin Hood legend. What happens is Richard is a locus of mythology himself. As the Robin Hood legend develops, you know, mythologies tend to attract one another.
Anne Brannen 25:26
Sure. They have like a magnetism. Okay.
Michelle Butler 25:29
Tristan and Isolde was a separate thing that gets pulled into the Arthurian legend. So Richard and the Robin Hood legend ended up coming together, but it’s after the Middle Ages, which is really fascinating. One thing I was reading was arguing that Ivanhoe really popularizes that.
Anne Brannen 25:50
Fair enough. Once again, Walter Scott.
Michelle Butler 25:52
I don’t know that for sure. I didn’t spend a lot of time looking up Robin Hood on this go. I was looking at things like Richard’s castle. He built an amazing castle, Chateau Galliard. It is the shit. He has it built in two years. So first of all, that is lightning speed. Two years.
Anne Brannen 25:53
That’s amazing.
Michelle Butler 26:10
It incorporates everything he learned about siege warfare over the course of his life. So it’s super sneaky. It’s got an oval shaped wall so there aren’t any blind spots.
Anne Brannen 26:39
Interesting.
Michelle Butler 26:40
One of the problems with castles before this was you could end up with blind spots where siege engines could be set up, and the defenders on the wall couldn’t get a direct line of fire back at them. So he did he designs…he is all over Chateau Galliard. He’s there supervising it, paying big chunks of money. He spends 10,000 pounds.
Anne Brannen 27:09
Where’s all this money coming from? Also isn’t this in the middle of the war with Philip?
Michelle Butler 27:16
Yes, yes. It’s being built specifically to make fighting Philip…it’s to allow him to win. He needs a stronghold right in the middle of where he’s fighting with Philip.
Anne Brannen 27:34
So he’s really busy.
Michelle Butler 27:36
This castle gets taken in 1204 but it gets taken because John adds on to it and the part that John adds on doesn’t have the military expertise behind it, and so it’s a weak point.
Anne Brannen 27:50
Oh, John.
Michelle Butler 27:51
The part that Richard build was, you know, infused with a whole bunch of on the ground military experience.
Anne Brannen 28:01
Sure, sure. John did not have that.
Michelle Butler 28:03
No. The book that I read about Richard was part of that Yale English Monarch series. Everything I looked at said that John Gilliam’s–which is what this book is–biography is the standard biography of Richard. Gilliam’s biography is interesting because he wants to push back a little bit against the idea that Richard was a bad king. He argues that Enlightenment historians who disliked the Middle Ages in general and the Crusades in particular start the trend of trashing Richard. Because the Middle Ages hold him up as the model of chivalry and knighthood and kingship, when you have pushed back against the Middle Ages, Richard is then the stand-in for the entire time period and so then you have to trash Richard.
Anne Brannen 29:06
In what ways was he a good king?
Michelle Butler 29:08
What Gillingham does is he goes to some of the Muslim sources on the theory that if your enemy has good things to say about you, then probably it’s a little bit more honest than what your your political enemies back in Europe are saying. So what Gillingham argues is that Richard is better at management than he is given credit for. He himself is not personally doing hands on things in England, but he’s really good at picking people to run the place while he’s gone. William Longchamp, and then Hubert Walter. What Gillingham argues is that things were going fine, until Richard gets kidnapped and that’s when everything goes off the rails.
Anne Brannen 29:58
Oh I see. Okay. But he had depleted the Treasury before that for the Crusades.
Michelle Butler 30:03
Certainly, that’s true. If you’re gonna go on crusade, you have to pay for things and Henry the second had accumulated a bunch of money because Henry the second was sketchy about how you would accumulate money. He was really good at leaving bishoprics empty in order to collect the resources. One of the things I just put on our crime list was when Reginald of Cornwall dies without a son. What’s supposed to happen is his estates are supposed to be divided up among his three daughters, and Henry just grabs them. None of it goes to those girls.
Anne Brannen 30:48
No, of course not. Yeah, Henry was very, very good at getting money in. Richard was very good at spending it.
Michelle Butler 30:57
Gillingham wants to say it’s not actually his fault he was kidnapped. The people he put in charge were doing fine.
Anne Brannen 31:05
Does he mention the signet ring? Because if he was wearing the signet ring, then it is sort of his fault.
Michelle Butler 31:12
Gillingham doesn’t really talk about that. He does not say that that is how Richard is found.
Anne Brannen 31:21
I think it’s probably a story.
Michelle Butler 31:22
He says that there are a number of stories as to how Richard was discovered. That they’re traveling as poor Templars, but they’re spending a lot of money is one story. Something happens and Richard ends up being found. The signet ring story is probably not true.
Anne Brannen 31:45
I don’t actually believe it. I just think it’s a nice story.
Michelle Butler 31:49
The idea that they were spending a lot of money while thinking they were going around incognito, I totally believe that’s plausible.
Anne Brannen 31:56
That I would buy. Also, quite frankly, I don’t know whether your author mentioned this, but Richard would have been very noticeable. He was extremely tall. He had strawberry blond hair and he probably wasn’t going around all, you know, hunched over or anything. He was probably walking like a soldier. You know, he was military man. So he might have been very recognizable.
Michelle Butler 32:23
Yeah. And it’s difficult for your knights to stop treating you like you’re the king.
Anne Brannen 32:29
Right. Right. Right. So the knights–
Michelle Butler 32:33
The behavior of the people around him probably gave them away too.
Anne Brannen 32:39
So there you are in the local pub and instead of, you know, slapping you on the back and saying, ‘Have another drink,’ your guys are on their knees in front of you saying ‘wouldst thou like some meat?’ No, no, won’t work, won’t work. No.
Michelle Butler 32:53
That was pretty much it. Gillingham is arguing that Richard planned for the Crusades better than he is given credit for, that he put in place people to watch over England, he put in place people to watch over his holdings in Normandy, he made sure Eleanor was on top of things, which is always a good plan.
Anne Brannen 33:13
Right. Eleanor was good.
Michelle Butler 33:14
And that the only reason it looks like it was a disaster is that he was kidnapped and held for a year and a half while Philip and John ran roughshod over everything. But before that, the plans he put in place were working.
Anne Brannen 33:31
Well, that’s interesting. So are you happy with this reconstruction of Richard? Do you like this?
Michelle Butler 33:38
I thought that Gillingham’s biography is pretty interesting. He definitely is an expert on Richard. This is his second book on Richard. He has one about Richard in general and his earlier book was about Richard in France and his holdings in France. But Richard’s difficult, because he becomes a figure of legend so quickly.
Anne Brannen 34:05
So quickly. Within his lifetime, just like Salah Udin, who was also a legend in his own hot time. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 34:13
It’s difficult because you have…even contemporary sources are lining up in a partisan way very, very quickly. So the German sources and the French sources…Richard is the devil incarnate. Philip actually writes to John when Richard is let loose, “the devil is loose, look to yourself.”
Anne Brannen 34:34
Yes, he does. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 34:35
So even the sources that are contemporary with Richard are not unbiased in any way. There’s the ones that were definitely pro Richard and the ones that were Phillip’s people or John affiliated or German affiliated, but I thought that was interesting because…I find Gillingham’s explanation or argument that Richard becomes a stand in for all things medieval to be persuasive, that for Enlightenment and 19th century historians who despise the Catholic Middle Ages and everything it stood for, and then make it the poster child for superstition and bad medicine and everything else that gets hung around the neck of the Middle Ages, it makes sense to me that then the poster child for that would be Richard, because he was established, you know, for the 500 years before that as the model of chivalry, the height of medieval kingship. So I find that to be persuasive as a stance.
Anne Brannen 35:48
Yeah, yeah. And you were going to talk to me about fiction. Does this fit in? Does this connect?
Michelle Butler 35:58
Yeah. I didn’t try to cover all. There’s way too much of it. What I did do was look at Sharon Kay Penman who in particular has two books about Richard. But the second one is called A King’s Ransom. I was curious to see how you make the king cooling his heels in prison an interesting novel. Because it’s a long novel. The audio book is 27 hours long. It took me a very long time to get throught this book. What it actually does is it follows Richard from the time he leaves the holy land until his death. But the captivity is a solid first half of the book. It reminded me so much of the importance of historical fiction–I really thought about this a lot. I was trying to figure out why I resist writing historical fiction. I finally figured out it’s because when we’re taught in academia how to deal with the past, we’re taught to not assign motive, not to pretend like we can get inside the heads. We can only judge by people’s actions, and that it’s bad scholarship to pretend that we can understand why people did things.
Anne Brannen 37:40
Even when they say so.
Michelle Butler 37:42
Yes, because they might be lying. So we’re not allowed to psychoanalyze, or psychologize, or in any way pretend like we can speak to motive of people in the past. You get taught that pretty hard in graduate school, to not pretend like you can speak for people in the past. But you must do that if you’re going to write historical fiction. So, you know, we know for a fact that Beregaria and Richard don’t see one another. We know that Richard doesn’t put her aside. But when she writes this book, she has to have a reason for that. She can’t just have it happen. If you’re gonna have psychologically persuasive and interesting characters in your historical fiction, there has to be a reason why that happened. What she comes up with, is that Beregaria was there with him during the crusades, and that Richard is so shamed by the captivity that he actually can’t handle her. Because she’s this reminder of the before time, that he cannot handle being around her.
Uh huh.
She was with him during the Crusades, he was very successful at that time, it’s the height of his…and it’s just salt in the wound to have her with him. That is an explanation. That’s the difference between being a novelist and being a historian. We don’t know why he behaved towards her the way he did. Maybe he just decided she’s unattractive and doesn’t want anything to do with her. But that’s not as interesting as a place to go for fiction. So she tries to give him an explanation that is both more interesting and less shallow, then ‘oh, well, she’s just not attractive to me anymore.’
Anne Brannen 40:02
So you’re talking specifically about historical fiction that’s based on historical people, rather than historical fiction which is set in historical times but just about somebody…you know, people that didn’t exist.
Michelle Butler 40:20
Yes, yes. Those are very different projects. I have written that kind of historical fiction.
Anne Brannen 40:25
I was gonna ask. Because you said that you didn’t write historical fiction. I’m like, well, actually you do. But it’s different.
Michelle Butler 40:34
It’s very different to write historical fiction in which you’re basically making up everybody, and occasionally, somebody who existed might pass by your fake people.
Anne Brannen 40:45
Right.
Michelle Butler 40:46
But, generally, you created those people. It’s very, very different than to try to go and write historical fiction about people who were real like Eleanor and like Richard and John and Philip. To try to write things and give them credible but also interesting explanations for why they’re doing what they’re doing. She has chapters from John’s point of view. John doesn’t think he’s a weasel. Everybody else thinks he’s a weasel. John thinks he’s a realist. He thinks it was perfectly reasonable to assume that Richard wasn’t coming home and to grab what he could grab.
Anne Brannen 41:39
It’s all on Richard and doesn’t go on into John’s kingship, so she doesn’t have to posit whether or not John thinks he’s a weasel when he starves Matilda deBroase to death.
Michelle Butler 41:52
I wasn’t looking for that. I have a complicated relationship with historical fiction. I really, really like well done historical fiction like what Sharon Kay Penman is doing. I tremendously dislike historical fiction that isn’t doing its research well.
Anne Brannen 42:12
Right. Right.
Michelle Butler 42:16
This is really amazing. Margaret Frazier’s books are really awesome. Ellis Peters.
Anne Brannen 42:23
Ellis Peters. Yeah. She writes, of course, some historical fiction that is about people who didn’t exist. Cadfael, for instance. But she also writes those, which I thought were very good, novels concerning the Welsh rulers. The Men of Gwyneth. They really existed. Yeah, I like her stuff. Very well researched.
Michelle Butler 42:49
I was reading Gillingham’s biography of Richard and Sharon Kay Penman’s second book about him at the same time. I was going back and forth between them. ‘Okay, here’s the thing that I just read about that is a fact,’ and then I could go over to the fiction, ‘oh, here’s how she is positing it.’ It was very interesting to be able to go back and forth. But, you know, you read in the nonfiction, ‘Richard got hit by an arrow and died.’ That is an entirely different experience than reading about the death of a character who you really quite liked for the last 300,000 words.
Anne Brannen 43:30
Right. And he’s dying of gangrene, which is really, really uncomfortable.
Michelle Butler 43:35
It was really bad. So historical fiction plays a really–
Anne Brannen 43:40
I’m sorry, Honey. I’m sorry, that Richard got hurt so bad at the end. What does she do with the business of…? Richard got hit by an arrow, a crossbow bolt, that had been shot by a young man or boy and Richard pardened him. After Richard died, they tortured him and killed him anyway. What does she do with it?
Michelle Butler 44:06
She has that happen in the book. After they’ve taken the city, they bring him in and Richard pardons him. But then his mercenary captain totally ignores that once Richard is dead.
Anne Brannen 44:20
Flays them alive and hangs him.
Michelle Butler 44:22
Yeah, it’s bad. It really reminded me of the role that really good historical fiction plays for us, which is to make people from the past back into people for us, rather than just these kinds of figures out there who are doing things. The only person honestly who the book has no sympathy for is Philip.
Anne Brannen 44:53
Oh, and in this book are Philip and Richard lovers? What did she do with it?
Michelle Butler 44:57
No, no, no, no. In an earlier book where Richard shows up as a kind of side character, she implies that he might be gay, but she keeps track with the scholarship and as the scholarship was saying, there’s no evidence for that.
Anne Brannen 45:14
Yeah, we don’t really know.
Michelle Butler 45:17
She has a fascinating page on her website…well, she passed away a year ago, in January of 2021. But there’s a fascinating page on her website, where she lists mistakes that she made in the books and found out about later, which I think is really honest.
Anne Brannen 45:35
That’s awesome.
Michelle Butler 45:37
It’s called ‘Sharon’s Medieval Mishaps.’
Anne Brannen 45:41
Interesting. You’ll give us a link to her webpage>
Michelle Butler 45:44
Yeah, yeah. They’re things like in her very first book, about Richard the Third, she has him see a grey squirrel but those are native to North America. So in later printings, they change it to a red squirrel.
Yeah, there weren’t any gray squirrels. That’s true. There’s no gray squirrels there. Those are ours.
This is an author I was really pleased to go read, because this is somebody I had heard of, and actually had seen at Kalamazoo, but had not actually read, partially because the books are so big. I just could not figure out how I was ever going to wrap my brain around…some of them are 1000 pages long. But I did it this time. I was glad that I did.
Anne Brannen 46:26
A mighty mighty warrior for our podcast cause. Thank you.
Michelle Butler 46:33
I was glad that I did it. It was worth doing. As other things are relevant, I will probably come back to her. Historical fiction has an important role.
Anne Brannen 46:50
Good historical fiction, yes.
Michelle Butler 46:53
One of the very last things she wrote before she died was about how the truth is important. That you have an obligation as a historical novelist to make sure that what you say is true.
Anne Brannen 47:06
Right. And if you make up parts, which you have to do if you’re going to be creating a character for a historical figure, you have to make those parts realistic within the context.
Michelle Butler 47:27
There were places in the book where I was like, ‘really?’ and went off and checked it and generally speaking, what she puts in there is true. God, poor Eleanor. She buries eight of 10 children and Richard and Joan die within five months of each other.
Anne Brannen 47:46
Yeah, yeah. Eleanor keeps coming up. We won’t end up having a podcast that focuses on Eleanor because she was not a sheerly dreadful person. If we have a podcast that focuses on one person, it’s because they spent their life being godawful, and she wasn’t. But she shows up a lot because she was all over the place. She was so busy.
Michelle Butler 48:09
She lives a long time, which is part of it. She lives to be eighty, and she way outlives Henry, which is interesting, because Henry was quite a bit younger than her.
Anne Brannen 48:23
You telling me she went to war?
Michelle Butler 48:26
After Richard’s death, Eleanor ends up at the head of an army helping defend the pieces of Normandy that he had to claw back from Philip. She ends up helping defend his holdings. They’re a bunch of tough cookies, man.
Anne Brannen 48:45
The plantagenets.
Michelle Butler 48:46
Plantagenets.
Anne Brannen 48:47
The whole Henry the second/Eleanor of Aquitaine nuclear family is like one of the most dysfunctional families in the history of Europe. I think of all of European history as being basically a dysfunctional family story. Everybody’s related at the top levels. But boy, that family. When you’ve got sons that go to war against their father and their mother’s in on it, and then you’ve got sons that go to war with each other. It’s worse than cousins. I mean, cousins. Okay, fine.
Michelle Butler 49:27
Eleanor spent 16 years being imprisoned by Henry, her husband, because of having been involved in helping the boys rebel against him.
Anne Brannen 49:36
Yeah, that didn’t go so well. Well, that’s interesting. I’m glad to know that there’s a revisionist history of Richard. I’m gonna have to find out about that, because that is very interesting. I think of Richard as an awesome warrior and a crappy king. That was my understanding. Now I’m being told that he’s an awesome warrior and a not so crappy king. That’s very good to know.
Michelle Butler 50:04
The book is from 1999. Gillingham’s. It was interesting, looking on the web, because there are some websites that very much still report the kind of old fashioned ‘he was a great warrior, but a lousy king’ version of things. But Gillingham’s argument is percolating out slowly. I did run across a blog post talking about that too, but they generally know that it’s Gillingham who’s making that argument. It’s sort of fascinating to watch ideas percolating through the knowledge web. But 1999 isn’t that long ago, and for it to have made that kind of impact tells me something too.
Anne Brannen 50:54
Oh there was one more thing you were telling me about, the connection of Richard the Lionheart and Robin Hood.
Michelle Butler 51:01
Apparently, that happens kind of late.
Anne Brannen 51:04
Late meaning…? Because I know what late means in our terms. Late meaning in the terms of the basic humans in general who don’t know the Middle Ages?
Michelle Butler 51:14
Post-medieval late.
Anne Brannen 51:14
Post-medieval late. The Middle Ages were basically the day before yesterday, you know, the Victorian era being yesterday.
Michelle Butler 51:23
I would want to go back and check on that, because a lot of Robin Hood research has happened since 1999.
Anne Brannen 51:31
So we may find it earlier.
Michelle Butler 51:33
That would be something I would want to double check because there have been new discoveries, in particular, earlier mentions of Robin Hood, than what existed–or was known about, of course it existed– what was known about in 1999. There are things in the records that have shown up where, you know, so and so is being accused of a crime and in the course of being accused of the crime, he’s being compared to Robin Hood, and that is an earlier reference than what we knew about. According to Gillingham, that connection happens post medieval and in fact, is popularized by Sir Walter Scott in Ivanhoe and then just takes off in post Ivanhoe versions of Robin Hood. But it’s also the case that there definitely has been discoveries of earlier references to Robin Hood than what we knew of in 1999. For example, there’s a record that is much earlier than what we had thought was the earliest known reference to Robin Hood, in which somebody is being accused of crime and he’s being compared to Robin Hood, and it’s 100 years earlier than the previous known. This is fairly new, like in the last 15 years, that this particular record came to light.
Anne Brannen 52:58
Cool. Where was it, do you know? Do you remember?
Michelle Butler 53:01
I really quite enjoy when this sort of thing shows up. It’s from 1226, and that is quite a bit earlier than what we had. We talk about the earliest literary reference to Robin Hood being in Piers Plowman and that’s true, but we have fairly recently found this legal record in the York Assizes from 1226.
Anne Brannen 53:28
That was my question, what was the manuscript? It’s a legal record from York. Lovely, lovely. So well known as a figure by that time.
Michelle Butler 53:39
There’s some argument about…the record mentions somebody called Robert Hod. The argument is about whether that is his actual name, or whether that is his, you know, nom de guerre. Or is that what they’re calling him in the record because he’s behaving like that figure. But 1226. This is really fascinating, because when I was in graduate school, or an undergraduate learning about Robin Hood, people really laughed off the idea of a connection between Robin Hood and Richard and John because there was such a big gap. The idea was that this later medieval story is getting pushed back on to them, but 1226 is not that long after. So you’ve pushed this concept way back in time…well, not pushed it, but you have evidence for it existing way closer in time to Richard and John. So maybe it isn’t something from later that’s being put back onto them. Maybe it’s something that is in fact, coming into existence fairly quickly. But I’m not a Robin Hood expert. I occasionally play one as a teacher, or did. But I don’t anymore.
Anne Brannen 55:01
Medieval legends. Yeah. Medieval legends.
Do we have any more on our medieval legend, Richard, the King of England, who was a Lionheart and got captured by a very bad duke?
Michelle Butler 55:18
Wrong of them. It was wrong of them. I shouldn’t be continually shocked that people behave as badly as they do. But I’m a little bit shocked.
Anne Brannen 55:30
Not as shocked as you were when the Pazzis tried to murder the Medicis during high mass.
Michelle Butler 55:37
That was super bad.
Anne Brannen 55:39
That was very bad. So that’s what we have to say.
Michelle Butler 55:45
This falls into the realm of no good deed going unpunished. Richard goes over there and tries his best and gets his land stolen and extorted.
Anne Brannen 55:59
The Crusades? I don’t know. There’s another point of view like, he went on crusade. I mean, is there any way in which the Crusades are fundamentally a good thing? No. So there’s that. Oh, the delusions.
Michelle Butler 56:16
I agree with that point of view. I just think that it was quite lousy of his contemporaries, who supposedly bought into the idea that he was doing a good and noble thing to treat him so badly. To take advantage of the fact that he was gone. And then extort him. That seems like bad behavior.
Anne Brannen 56:36
Yes, because theoretically, they all agreed that this was a good thing to do, go misbehave in the Holy Land. Or, as we know, Constantinople. Or the Languedoc. They all thought it was a good thing. And so there they were, misbehaving during a time of misbehaving. Okay, so that was Richard the Lionheart. The next time, we’ve come to an agreement that the next time you hear from us we are going to be discussing…we’re going to go somewhere totally different. We’re going to go to Germany in 1283, because something really, really bad happened to the children of Hamlin. Although we don’t know what it was, we know it happened. Later it’s going to turn into the pied piper. So we’re gonna discuss the pied piper.
Michelle Butler 57:26
All right. So another attempt to sort out the threads of legend and fact.
Anne Brannen 57:33
Yeah. Because it becomes legend pretty quickly, but it’s in the historical documents. ‘That time when the children disappeared.’ That’s all it says in the records. The children disappeared. Oh, did they? What the hell happened? Lots of theories. So that’s it for us today. 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 Stitcher and Apple podcasts and all the places where the podcasts hang out. We’d love if you would leave a review. You can find us at Truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. There you can find the blurbs that I write and they’ve got links to the podcast, and you can find the show notes, which Michelle does. And the transcriptions which Michelle also does, because, you know, that’s just how it is these days. Thank you, Michelle, for doing the transcripts now. So we’ll talk about the pied piper next. That’s it for us. Bye.
Michelle Butler 58:40
Bye.
61. King John Starves Maud and William de Braose to Death, Corfe Castle, Dorset, England 1210
Anne Brannen 0:19
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 0:29
And I’m Michelle Butler, in Maryland, the most medieval state in America.
Anne Brannen 0:33
Today we are discussing that time that King John of England–who there’s been revisionist histories that say he was okay but really he wasn’t–King John starved Maud de Braose and her oldest son to death in Corfe Castle, Dover, 1210. That’s what we’re talking about. How did we get there? Maud–Matilda–Matilda’s husband William de Braose had been, up until about when our crime occurs, one of King John’s favorite nobles. John had given him vast lands in Wales and England. De Braose was one of the marcher lords, who were Anglo Norman nobles situated in castles and lands in the Welsh borders to keep the peace. No, wait. They weren’t there to keep the peace. They were–
Michelle Butler 1:24
Yeah, no, no.
Anne Brannen 1:25
–there to keep the Welsh in line, but I kind of liked that. ‘They were peacekeepers.’ I believe we know of another current ‘peacekeeping operation’ going on in Ukraine, which is kind of the same. Peacekeeping by killing people. Many or even most of them married into the Welsh nobility. The alliances and conflicts therefore get pretty confusing. William de Braose was, on his mother’s side, descended from Gruffydd ap Llywelyn, who was–only for about seven years–the only king to actually be king of all Wales, rather than the south or the north or some pieces. Now, we’ve already talked about William de Braose, because in a podcast earlier, we discussed the fact that in 1175, William massacred Seisyll ap Dyfnwal and his men at a Christmas dinner. It was one of our blood feasts. A Christmas dinner because the Welsh had been invited there because they were all going to be solving their differences and negotiating, and the Welsh are used to considering Christmas a time when you did that, and so that’s why they went. Otherwise, they would never have thought that William de Braose would be a person that they should go to dinner with. And indeed, he wasn’t because then he slammed the doors and massacred absolutely everybody. Then he went and killed some other relatives and whatnot. Any rate, the Welsh didn’t like him, and they called him the Ogre of Abergavenny. So he was unpopular. That was this same William de Braose. In 1198–so this is later–while William was off with King Richard the Lionheart in Normandy, Matilda had defended Painscastle. That was built by Pain fitzJohn and so that’s why it’s called that, not because it’s you’re gonna get hurt there. Although some people were, as I’m about to say. She defended it against Gwynwyn ab Owain, who was trying to take the castle back. It had been Anglo Norman, and it was Welsh, then it was Anglo-Norman. He was trying to get it back. She did this for three weeks until Geoffrey fitz Peter, who was a sheriff and Justiciary got there, and he continued slaughtering the Welsh and the de Braoses kept the castle. She was quite…Matilda was beautiful, we’re told she was beautiful, and she was strong and powerful and brave and whatnot. Anyway, she defended the castle for three weeks while her husband was off messing around in whatever the hell Richard was doing at that point in Normandy. So this was a very powerful couple, and they were high in the king’s favor. William’s reputation, you know, in Wales is the ogre of Abergavenny, on account of the massacre. Maud’s reputation was different. And I believe that Michelle is going to be telling us a bunch of that later. I’m not going to be going into so much of that, but she will. But there were some stories about her because she was so awesome. That when they were building Hays Castle, she actually built Hays castle, all of it, in one night, because she was carrying the stones in her skirt. And she did that in one night. Also one of the stones fell on her foot. She didn’t like that and so she took it and she threw it across the river. It landed and it’s still there, and you can go see it. Yes, it’s over in St. Meilig’s church, because they’re trying to keep it safe from the elements. It was outside but, you know, things fall apart. It has a beautiful old Celtic cross carved into it which predates Matilda by centuries. So the stone would have had the cross carved into it at the point at which she threw it across the river. So I’m like, why? Why? Anyway, anyway, I guess it doesn’t matter since it didn’t happen. None of that happened. She did not carry stones all night and build a castle and she didn’t throw anything across the river. So forget that. But that’s the kind of story that was raised about Matilda. So at any rate, what happened? Because they were powerful and wonderful and gorgeous and mean. King John got angry with them why? The answer is, we don’t actually know exactly why. But we do have some ideas. We know that de Braose owed John some money because this is what John says. ‘He owed me money.’ Okay. All right. Well, you know, if one of your favorite nobles owes you some money, one of the things you can do is take some stuff. You don’t necessarily have to slaughter everybody. At any rate, that’s what John says. He owed him some money. We don’t think that’s why. What’s really likely is that this is all connected to the disappearance of Arthur of Brittany. Who is Arthur of Brittany? What could this be about? I will now tell you. When Richard the Lionheart died–you remember this is John’s brother–Arthur, who was the son of Richard’s and John’s brother Geoffrey, who was older than they were but had died before Arthur was born, Arthur was theoretically then next in line to the throne of England. Okay. But Richard named his brother John as his successor whilst he was on his deathbed, dying of gangrene from an arrow wound in his shoulder, because Arthur was only 12. And Richard thought that John, who was next in line after Arthur, would be a better King than a 12 year old boy. Perhaps not. But at any rate, that should have been okay, except that Arthur, who had been hanging around in France, had the support of the French. The French king gave him a bunch of lands in France, and John got the seneschal of them to capture Arthur and his mom–Constance was her name. So then there was a treaty and the French king recognized John as King of England. Arthur went to his uncle John, because, you know, his feelings were hurt and he was young at that point, and John was his uncle. So it made sense. But at some point, Arthur got suspicious, and thought it wasn’t really a good idea. So he fled back to France and he went to war against John in Normandy, in the process of which he besieged the castle where his grandmother Eleanor of Aquitaine was staying. You cannot make this stuff up. is grandmother’s in a castle and he besieges it. John went and took the castle and put Arthur in prison. He’s about 16 at this point because there’s been some years in there. John wanted Arthur mutilated, apparently, but the guards didn’t want to do that. So they put out word that he had died, but everybody thought he’d been murdered. So John sent him to Rouen where William de Braose–the guy that we’ve been talking about whose relatives are going to die in the prison–William de Braose was in charge of him. Then Arthur disappeared in 1203. We actually have no idea what happened. There was a lot of stories that John had murdered him with his own hands–lots of details to this. There were stories that de Braose had murdered him, also with his own hands because, you know, de Braose had slaughtered all those nobles and Seisyll ap Dyfnwal so why not? What’s some teenager? That’s possible. But we know he probably at least knew what had happened to Arthur. If anybody did, he did. But three years later, John seized de Braose’s land in England, and he was sending an army to Wales to take his Welsh lands. He also wanted to seize Matilda, his wife, because Matilda had made it very clear that she believed that John had murdered Arthur. She made this clear because John wanted her to send sons as hostages because there was this whole thing about the money and she refused to send him her sons as hostages because she said, ‘Why should she trust him? He murdered his own nephew.’ Good point. Okay. So William went to Ireland and then went back to Wales, where he joined forces…Okay, little segway here. He joined forces with Llewellyn the Great, Llywelyn Fawr, who was leading a rebellion against John, who was his father-in-law. Llewellyn was married to Joan, who was John’s natural daughter and we’re going to be talking about that later in the podcast, where we discuss that time that Llewellyn the Great hangs a different de Braose off the castle walls for having an affair with Joan, we’re not there yet. That’s going to come later but we don’t know when.
Michelle Butler 10:14
I take back every bad thing I ever said about whether soap operas were believable.
Anne Brannen 10:23
The entire Anglo Norman and Welsh nobility…it’s all soap opera all the time.
Michelle Butler 10:32
We are one can of Aqua Net away from Dynasty.
Anne Brannen 10:39
Joan might have liked some Aqua Net. So where am I? Okay. So once again, he had to hit the road. That didn’t work, you know, joining up with Llewellyn the Great. He had to flee Wales. At that point, Maude and their eldest son, who was also named William–sorry–were captured and they ended up in Corfe castle. That wasn’t good. At that point, John had already starved 22 prisoners to death in Corfe castle. They are prisoners that he took when he was liberating the castle where his mom was getting besieged. You were saying, Michelle, that those are Arthur’s knights?
Michelle Butler 11:26
Yeah. They’re people who were in Arthur’s retinue. The idea was to scare people from holding with Arthur.
Anne Brannen 11:38
I think, really, John’s making himself look like a very scary person. So you would never ever ever want to go against John. More on that later. Did that technique work? No, it didn’t. But we’re not there yet. So anyway, they were at Corfe castle, where people had already starved to death. I guess they had some method for starving people to death. Although you don’t need one, do you, you just put them someplace and go elsewhere. So Maud and William were starved to death there as well. At this point, I have to say, I wondered, ‘Is this true? Or is this is one of those stories that gets passed down, everybody talks like it’s true, but it isn’t really?’ Well, all the contemporary chronicles say that it happened so I’m gonna go with it. They starved to death. Fair enough. Though the details are missing from some. There’s a detail, for instance, that when they were thrown into the dungeon, a piece of bacon and a piece of oat bread were also thrown in. I liked that detail. Bacon and oat bread. Why? Why don’t you send rye? I don’t know. But anyway, they sent that in. The other detail that we know is that William died first and we know it because his mother, before she died, ate some of his face. So those details may be true, maybe not, but they died. They were in there. John let them die in the castle. But I have to say that rather than cowing the rest of the barons–‘oh my god, we better not go against John for he will do evil things to us’–No, no, no, no, no. It became part of their growing dissatisfaction with him, which is going to lead to the rebellion, which will end briefly with the signing of Magna Carta at Runnymede, which includes the provision and I quote, “no man shall be taken, imprisoned, outlawed, banished, or in any way destroyed, nor will we proceed against or prosecute him except by the lawful judgment of his peers, or by the law of the land.” In other words, we agree not to just throw people into the dungeon and let them starve to death without actually taking them to court. That’s what that means. Okay. So, Maud and William. William, by the way, was not a child. He’s their oldest son. He’s not a child. He’s married. He’s got kids. William’s son, John will be called John Tadody in Wales, which means John Without a Father. He’s going to marry Llywelyn Fawr’s daughter, Margaret, so back into the line of Llywelyn Fawr. By the 14th century, though, the de Broase line is no longer really powerful. The Barony falls into abeyance in 1326. So much for the de Braoses. If you Google Maud, you will find that site after site after site after site says that she is the subject of many Welsh Legends, has the same wording over and over which I think comes from Wikipedia, but all I could find was the building of Hay castle and this business with the magical use of stones and throwing them here and there with one’s incredibly powerful beauty and whatnot. That’s all I could find. Michelle, I believe that you looked stuff up. Whatcha got, honey?
Michelle Butler 15:05
I did spend some time trying to track down those Welsh legends. Because I found the same thing, that she had become a figure in legend. I thought that was really fascinating, because her husband becomes the Ogre of Agra..agr…
Anne Brannen 15:24
Abergavenny.
Michelle Butler 15:25
Abergavenny, and she becomes a rather…maybe it would be going too far to say ‘positive’ but certainly respected figure. She becomes a giantess. So there’s some respect for her in what she becomes legendarily, but I would feel more comfortable if I had some sources.
Anne Brannen 15:55
Yeah. And I couldn’t find any.
Michelle Butler 15:57
I can tell you what I did find. There is a JSTOR article that talks about a version of William Tell. This is from 1961. It was published in the journal Folklore so I have no reason to…this is probably the most solid source I’ve got. This article is called ‘A Welsh version of the William Tell legend.’ Here is the best quote from it. “William Tell is a historical figure for he appears in a rising planned for eighth of November 1307 to expel the oppressors. Maud de St Valere,”–which is what she’s sometimes called because that’s where she came from. She’s sometimes called Maud de Braose or William’s wife but that was how she was referred–“belongs to the 12th century and is a notable figure around whom as Moll Wallaby, numerous legends grew, no doubt of early date.”
Oh, no. Wait, no, wait. “No doubt of early date?”
There’s no citation. I can’t go look it up.
Anne Brannen 17:23
Yeah. When I see somebody saying ‘no doubt of early date’ in 1961, I’m wondering, how far are we from the Cambridge anthropologists? and I think probably not very. Anyway, go on.
Michelle Butler 17:34
So that’s one thing. It just is asserted. “About whom numerous legends grew, no doubt of early date.” No citation.
Anne Brannen 17:44
Even though it’s not cited, what is the story that makes Maud into a version of William Tell? How does this work?
Michelle Butler 17:52
Oh, I have no idea.
Anne Brannen 17:52
It doesn’t tell us? Oh, damn it.
Michelle Butler 17:54
No, no, no, no, no, I don’t have access to this. This is JSTOR. I can read the first page of it. JSTOR is like $200 a year.
Anne Brannen 18:07
Yeah, no, we’re not doing this.
Michelle Butler 18:08
So I don’t have that. But I can see the first page of it, and I can see that this exists. It doesn’t help me because there’s no citation. I might actually have been willing to pay for a month’s worth of JSTOR if there had been a citation to tell me where that comes from. Alas.
Anne Brannen 18:28
Alas, indeed.
Michelle Butler 18:30
I’m so irritated. I spent so much time trying to track down where these things come from. One thing that gets cited is a book from 18… Let me find the right citation here….
Anne Brannen 18:48
Wait, wait, wait. I can get into JSTOR, bizarrely enough, on some free stuff. What is the title of what we’re looking for?
Michelle Butler 18:59
It is called “A Welsh version of the William Tell Legend.” It’s by Mary Williams. It’s from 1961. Maybe she’s got something interesting in her bibliography, but there is no citation for that particular assertion.
Anne Brannen 19:16
Okay, there’s a Welsh William Tell in Peniarth 131…there’s not going to be anything in here. This is all about Madog ap Gruffydd Maelor. You’re safe. It’s only gonna have that one mention of the legend. At least we looked. So we don’t know what the legends are.
Michelle Butler 19:41
I don’t know. When I keep running across this on the web, the most commonly cited book–when a citation is given, the most commonly cited book is the one from 1888. It is by Wirt Sikes and it’s called British Goblins. This did not impress me on account of it’s not actually that old. However, I did go look up Wirt Sikes. He was an American journalist and writer. But he lived in Wales. He worked at the US Consulate in Cardiff, Wales, and while he was there, he produced a number of books on Welsh folklore. So maybe…?
Anne Brannen 20:41
Okay.
Michelle Butler 20:42
I am not finding any sources in him either. But…maybe? At least he was in Wales. I would have been much more skeptical about this if it’d turned out he was just pulling things out of his nose while he lived in South Dakota. But at least he was actually in Cardiff while he was writing this. Maybe he’s talking to people. Here’s the problem. They keep citing a book…the ones that I’m finding that aren’t citing Sikes. These earlier ones from the 19th century are citing a yet-earlier book, and they’re calling it Jones: Volume Three. They’re not giving me a title. There’s no bibliography. You’re just supposed to know. It is not feasible to try to find a book on Welsh history and/or folklore where all I have is, the author is Jones and there’s at least three volumes. I did try.
Anne Brannen 21:44
Yeah, there’s a bunch of Joneses. It’s true.
Michelle Butler 21:50
It’s not happening. I can’t find it. What I did find is that the way people talk about Maud is a very interesting litmus test. Some of the historians–need I add that these are all male–some of them are completely weirded out by her.
Anne Brannen 22:17
How so?
Michelle Butler 22:19
The word ‘Amazonian’ shows up more than it ought.
Anne Brannen 22:24
Huh. Well, well, I mean, she is throwing giant stones across the river. What are they talking about? Oh, oh, oh, it’s because she defends the castle.
Michelle Butler 22:35
Yes. There is a pretty famous history of Wales, where the author’s last name is Lloyd. Again, I probably could have found this but I didn’t manage to find it. She gets referred to as ‘Amazonian’ by that history of Wales, and also one that should have known better, from 1962, which is Thomas Costain’s The Conquering Family. His tone is disapproving.
Anne Brannen 23:11
Why?
Michelle Butler 23:14
I am not sure. But his tone is very, ‘mmmm, she’s very unfeminine. I don’t like her.’
Anne Brannen 23:27
Oh…like Empress Matilda.
Michelle Butler 23:29
Yeah, it is. It actually is a lot like how she was discussed, whereas there are other ones that clearly think she’s pretty awesome. With the same information.
Anne Brannen 23:40
Right, right.
Michelle Butler 23:42
There’s this one, which is from 1852. This is a local history book about The Pritchards of Breconshire. So it’s a family history. It’s a book about this particular family.
Anne Brannen 24:00
Little segue. Pritchard is one of the surnames that gets created in Wales. It’s from ap Richard, the son of Richard.
Michelle Butler 24:09
Oh, there you go.
Anne Brannen 24:10
We go on.
Michelle Butler 24:12
Breconshire is one of the places where they had holdings, where Maud and her husband had holdings. So in all of that family history, there’s a little footnote. “Maud’s castle, called Camden, the castle of Matilda and Colwyn” and then “Jones volume 1, page 116.” Thank you so fucking much. I totally could find it.
Anne Brannen 24:39
What? Like what’s even his first name? That would have helped so much.
Michelle Butler 24:44
There’s no bibliography. You’re just supposed to know. This book is from 1852, by the way. “William de Braose, lord of Brecknock, married Maud, daughter of Reginald de St Valery. This lady is the Semiramis of Brecknockshire.”
Anne Brannen 25:05
Oh, for the love of God.
Michelle Butler 25:07
“Under the corrupted name of Moll Wallbee. We have her castles on every eminence, and her feats are traditionally narrated in every parish.”
Anne Brannen 25:16
Okay. All right.
Michelle Butler 25:19
So he’s actually in favor of her.
Anne Brannen 25:21
Yes. And is telling us that there’s an enormous amount of legends about her and they’re all over Wales. Every single place in Wales. Kind of like Owen Glendower.
Michelle Butler 25:36
Oh, I’m sorry. That book is from 1878. I have a couple of windows open here. The one that is from 1852 is called Welsh Sketches by Ernest Silvanus Apple something…what’s his last name? Appleyard.
Anne Brannen 25:54
Okay, this is one of those, ‘I went walking around Wales and I had some nice food and saw some really lovely rural stuff and now I’m going to tell you all about it.’
Michelle Butler 26:03
I really love this one because this guy hates William de Braose but really likes Maude.
Anne Brannen 26:11
Well, I actually feel the same way so I’m down with that.
Michelle Butler 26:15
He blames everything on William and wants to say nice things about Maud. “Popular tradition, which has devoted William de Braose to unqualified execration.” I know that word, execration, but not how to say it. “Has honored the memory of Maud St Valery as one more than human.” Here we have a quote from the elusive Mr. Jones. Quote, within a quote here, “the castles of Maud Wallbee,” writes Mr. Jones, who knows where, “are on every eminence, and her feats are traditionally recorded in every parish.” I.e. the same quote that was in the other footnote. “Leland concludes”–Leland, another person I’m just supposed to know–“Leland concludes her to have been a witch.”
Anne Brannen 27:18
Oh, well, there you go.
Michelle Butler 27:19
“And certainly one story told of her does savor of witchcraft. She built–say the gossips–the castle of Hay in one night.” So that’s just attributed to the air. ‘Say the gossips.’ “The castle of Hay in one night, the stones for which she carried in her apron. While she was thus employed, a small pebble of about nine feet and one foot thick dropped into her shoe that she at first did not regard, but after a short time, finding it troublesome, she indignantly threw it…” It’s the same story that you told.
Anne Brannen 27:55
Yeah. I think really the best picture we can use is a picture of that beautiful stone, which is really very, very big because it’s actually a standing stone, you know, with a cross carved on it. She’s so strong.
Michelle Butler 28:10
It was quite irritating to try to research this, because they’re all telling the same stories while asserting that there’s lots of other stories.
Anne Brannen 28:21
In every parish.
Michelle Butler 28:22
The actual story is, do you find her awesome? Or are you creeped out by her? Because the tone tells me which. How the historian feels about her.
Anne Brannen 28:35
One of the things that’s interesting to me about this is that all of this business about Maud and the legends, yada yada, seems to be disconnected from how it is she dies. Do you know want I mean? It’s like a whole nother person. It’s not like the giantess who throws stones around was over in Corfe Castle starving to death.
Michelle Butler 28:55
Oh, yeah. It has nothing to do with that. This connects back to that siege that she held the castle through, and apparently impressed the crap out of the Welsh, to where she becomes a figure of legend.
Anne Brannen 29:10
There was a big death rate amongst the Welsh. They lost a lot of people that year.
Michelle Butler 29:17
Which is actually kind of interesting. There is modern historical fiction about her and it all is about how she dies. There’s at least one book that is about her, but she makes an appearance in a whole bunch of other books about John.
Anne Brannen 29:38
As an illustration of his horrible badness.
Michelle Butler 29:41
Exactly. So this is a very interesting bifurcation. The stories that grow up right after her immediate lifetime are about becoming a figure of legend because of the siege, holding out the siege, but these modern ones focus more on how she died.
Anne Brannen 30:00
That is very interesting indeed.
Michelle Butler 30:02
I do also think it’s quite interesting that the contemporary chroniclers, who do record how she died, want to blame all of it on her.
Anne Brannen 30:15
Now, we’re going to need for you, Michelle, to explain to us how it is that Maud de Braose is responsible for starving herself to death in Corfe castle.
Michelle Butler 30:26
They blame the fact that John and her family fell out on her not keeping her mouth shut about Arthur. Her husband is made into a victim actually. It all becomes her fault because she opens her mouth, you know, like the girls do, and says that thing about…which she may well have done.
Anne Brannen 30:56
It’s not hard for me to believe that somebody who was able to marshal forces and stave off a assault on a castle for three weeks is able to say, ‘I’m not going to send my sons, you killed your nephew.’ I think these things are kind of compatible.
Michelle Butler 31:13
I’m not saying she didn’t say that. Because it seems entirely plausible to me that she did. I just think it’s very interesting that across the board, versions of this that I found on the internet, they all talk about how ‘she mouthed off to the king’s messenger and thus ended up being starved to death by the king in the castle, which was really kind of bad, but you could kind of see his point.’
Anne Brannen 31:40
Wait, we want to say…as True Crime Medieval sometimes we will have a stance on things and our stance is that if somebody mouths off to you, it is not okay to starve them to death. That’s my stance. Is that your stance, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 31:59
It is my stance. It also is my stance that if your husband revolts three separate times against the king, he might possibly share some of the blame.
Anne Brannen 32:11
Oh ya think.
Michelle Butler 32:16
I’m really not comfortable with blaming all of this on Maud. She certainly has her share of the blame. You can’t mouth off to the king. You can’t mouth off to his messenger, even if you know that he killed his nephew. Probably because your husband was the guy who was in charge of holding on to Arthur.
Anne Brannen 32:37
I don’t actually think that King John starved her and her son to death because she mouthed off. I think that she might have mouthed off, or she might not, I don’t even care. I think that King John killed them because he could and William de Braose was out of reach. It’s terrorism. That was a way to show that you really shouldn’t mess with him. I don’t think it had anything to do with anything she said.
Michelle Butler 33:06
The book that I read…I found it very helpful to go and be able to find a real source. The stuff on the internet about this is so inflammatory, and there’s that fairly thick vein of victim blaming. You know, ;Maud mouthed off, what were you expecting to happen?’ I didn’t know at all about William’s three separate rebellions that happened after the mouthing off incident. Three different times he tries to raise an army, he tries to go against John, he flees, they all flee to Ireland. He tries to raise an army there. The role of Ireland in this is really interesting. But I didn’t know about any of that until I went to read Marc Morris’s biography. I was a little hesitant because normally where I like to go for this kind of thing is the Yale English monarchs series. But the version for King John is from 1997 and I wanted to read something a little more recent. Marc Morris’s biography of King John is pretty recent, it came out…I don’t know, within the last five years or something. I can check it, but it’s much more recent than the 1997 one. It’s so nicely researched. There’s real footnotes. Yay. That’s nice. That was the first time I’d heard about William’s rebellions, and maybe possibly it’s kind of his fault too. Marc Morris–and this is really fascinating-he thinks that William de Braose is the source for the story that John killed Arthur personally, that shows up in William the Breton’s Chronicle and the Margam Abby Chronicle. The reason he thinks that is twofold. William de Braose was present in both of those places to be the source for the chronicler. And the story he tells makes William look good.
Anne Brannen 35:10
Oh really? Like is William trying to, you know, like ‘STOP, STOP kill not this teenager for it is not so great.’ What’s he doing?
Michelle Butler 35:17
He portrays himself as ‘I’ve handed him over, and then I left for my own holdings. I have no idea what happened next. But I know for sure that John took him out in a boat and stabbed him and I had nothing to do with it.’
Anne Brannen 35:25
I like this version. It’s not even like ‘we go and we kill Arthur in his little cell. No, no. We take him out in the boat.’
Michelle Butler 35:42
Marc Morris says, ‘Okay, so first of all, this is bunk. We know for sure he was still there.’ Secondly, John didn’t do this. He actually called in people and they had a little con fab. This was, as Marc Morris reads it, this was a decision between John and his inner circle of counselors.
Anne Brannen 36:02
So not William?
Michelle Butler 36:03
No, William was totally in on it. It’s William saying William wasn’t on it after the fact. But William can be placed there. William was so tight with King John before the falling out, he witnessed more royal documents than any other lay person. The other thing that kept occurring to me as I was reading about this was this comparison. We talked when we talked about Stephen and Maud, the other Maud two generations back, and the Civil War, and about how they kept capturing each other and doing a prisoner swap and how the war went on for 18 years. Nobody actually decides to end the whole thing by killing somebody. Well, two generations later, John decides to try to end the whole thing by killing somebody. That didn’t work. The chivalric stuff that was holding them…that they were abiding by…John decides not to abide by and the Barons just lose their minds, because it was a really important taboo of their society. You don’t kill the fancy people, you hold them captive. Henry the first doesn’t kill Robert Curthose, he holds him prisoner for the rest of his life. But he doesn’t murder him to get rid of him. I think that they kind of understand that once you open that particular door, you can’t close it again.
Anne Brannen 37:25
No, you have to replace it with law. It’s interesting that this–it’s almost mythic–crime, this horrendous, starving people to death. It’s interesting how it’s at this nexus of change and power and what’s going on.
Michelle Butler 37:40
Of course, John becomes his own figure of legend. The shadow he casts and the stuff he does is so terrible, he becomes the bad guy in the Robin Hood legend, and justifiably so, I might add. I am totally okay with John going down in history as the bad guy of Robin Hood legend. Maybe Richard only looks good by comparison. He only spent three months in England of his 10 year reign so fine, he’s not doing too much. But comparatively…
Anne Brannen 38:16
John…John, yeah, he makes bad decisions. He’s mean and sadistic. Yeah. There’s also something that he screws around a lot too. But I don’t care about the screwing around. It’s the bad decisions and the sadistic and meanness. Those are not good.
Michelle Butler 38:30
In terms of a Robin Hood sidebar, he actually brings in, in I think 1208, a Frenchman to be the Sheriff of Nottingham. Isn’t that interesting? So I think maybe the oral history remembered more than we gave it credit for. Certainly if you have to pick somebody out of a hat and make him into the bad guy of legend, John was a perfectly adequate choice because he’s terrible.
Anne Brannen 38:55
He works. He really works.
Michelle Butler 38:57
I really was not aware before reading Marc Morris’s biography of how extensive his cruelty is. What he has to say about John’s treatment of Maud…let me give you the quote here. “John persecuted William’s wife Matilda with a malevolence, which was exceptional, even by his highly competitive standards.” This is why Morris thinks Matilda probably did mouth off to the king’s messengers, because John makes it a personal mission to punish her.
Anne Brannen 39:36
Yeah, it’s true he does. But why include the son in it unless what you’re doing is terrorism.
Michelle Butler 39:42
Yeah. Oh, yeah.
Anne Brannen 39:43
Because we don’t have any thing about the son mouthing off. We don’t…we don’t know.
Michelle Butler 39:47
They had a lot of children.
Anne Brannen 39:49
Yes, they say 16 theoretically, although we don’t have documentation for all 16. We have documentation for a bunch of them. She was very busy having babies.
Michelle Butler 39:57
They managed to marry them off to some powerful, powerful families.
Anne Brannen 40:04
They did. Yes. Gruffydd ap Rhys. Maud de Clare. Walter de Lacy. Grace Brewer and Gwladus Ddu, the daughters of Llywelyn Fawr. Robert de Beaumont. Hugh de Mortimer. Yeah, they married high up in both Anglo Norman and Welsh nobility.
Michelle Butler 40:32
Part of the conflict between William and John is some working out of the continued conquest of Ireland. I wasn’t really aware of that either. That part of what was going on was John wanting–after he’d lost his holdings in France–wanting to pay more attention to Ireland and actually kind of be in charge there, where he really wasn’t. William Marshall was the biggest English landowner. So he was kind of king of Ireland. John wanted to say no, you’re still answerable to me.
Anne Brannen 41:06
Ergo. Ireland.
Michelle Butler 41:11
He ends up tussling with William de Braose about some of the holdings there, basically wanting him to give some of the stuff he’d given him back so he could regift it to somebody else. The ways in which this conflict is in part connected to that conquest of Ireland was not something I was aware of. But I agree with you that it was necessary to go look and check the sources because it just sounds like we’re in fairy tales’ stepmom land when you throw somebody in jail, turn the key, and don’t come back for two weeks.
Anne Brannen 41:50
So often when we’re researching medieval crimes, we discover that actually, they didn’t happen or they happen very differently. So I was very suspicious. But yes, he really did do this bad thing. You had something you were going to tell me about not actually believing that Matilda ate her son’s face before she died?
Michelle Butler 42:16
I think that that is part of the victim blaming, to say that she was participating in cannibalism. Just because logic suggests to me that if they weren’t provided water, they died of thirst well before starvation.
Anne Brannen 42:34
Yeah, way before.
Michelle Butler 42:35
I think that is intended to be gruesome and hyperbolic, and, you know, awful. Make her look bad. That she was found sitting on him, gnawing on his face.
Anne Brannen 42:51
Like dying right there. Yeah, we don’t know. Maybe they were given water. It takes about 10 days to die of thirst and 60 to die of starvation.
Michelle Butler 43:00
That’s not long enough then because the chronicle says they came back in 11 days. So they knew exactly how long it was going to take them to die of thirst.
Anne Brannen 43:08
Right. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 43:10
This is one of the other reasons I figured it had to be a thirst thing not a hunger thing, because 11 days is not long enough.
Anne Brannen 43:17
They call it starvation. But they didn’t put anything in there with them. Fair enough.
Michelle Butler 43:22
John was bad news. I take back any nice thing I ever thought about him. “Hiss, you’re never around when I need you.”
Anne Brannen 43:30
When did you think nice things about him? I don’t think I have thought nice things about him.
Michelle Butler 43:35
You gotta remember I grew up in the country, where we had one channel. When the VCRs came in, it was a big deal. My sisters and I watched Disney movies on VHS. If you get the four youngest of us together, we can pretty much recite Disney’s Robin Hood, line by line, together. In that movie, John is more incompetent and foolish than flat-up evil.
Anne Brannen 44:12
See, I think he was both those things. I think it was all those things.
Michelle Butler 44:15
He’s vain, and he’s incompetent, but you’re not really afraid of him. Which I guess is appropriate for a children’s movie.
Anne Brannen 44:23
I do not think that Disney movies are going to include starving Maud de Braose. I just don’t. I can’t see how it would work you. No, no, because at least the little mice are going to show up with clothes and things and little pieces of bread.
Michelle Butler 44:38
Maybe I shouldn’t acknowledge this, but one of my huge interactions with John before was through the Disney film, and he is way worse than incompetent and foolish.
Anne Brannen 44:54
He is also incompetent. He makes some really bad mistakes about both how to run the country and what the barons are going to put up with. I mean, the terrorism didn’t work.
Michelle Butler 45:05
He is shockingly cruel, even by medieval standards.
Anne Brannen 45:09
Yeah.
Michelle Butler 45:10
The plan to mutilate Arthur so that he wouldn’t be able to rule was him trying to thread that needle between, ‘well, I don’t want him available to be king, but I don’t want to actively kill him’ and then when his lords said ‘we’re not gonna do that,’ he said, ‘Well, fine.’
Anne Brannen 45:29
‘Let’s go in the boat.’ Just like The Talented Mr. Ripley. We’re gonna go on the boat. We don’t know what happened.He just disappeared. Yeah, we just don’t know.
Michelle Butler 45:42
But they kind of do know fairly quickly. It’s not very long before Philip–because the rumors are getting out all over the place–and Philip Augustus, you know, the King of France is issuing decrees by that point where he’s saying ‘such and such Arthur if he still lives.’
Anne Brannen 46:00
What I mean is, they know he’s dead, but we just don’t know what happened. We don’t know how it came about.
Michelle Butler 46:08
If John was trying for plausible deniability, it did not work because nobody was fooled.
Anne Brannen 46:15
Nooo.
Michelle Butler 46:16
They knew he had done him in, they just didn’t know how. It didn’t work any better for him than it did for Richard the Third.
Anne Brannen 46:25
Yeah, yeah. Which we address at great length in our podcast about the boys. The princes in the tower, part two, I believe is when we discuss that.
Michelle Butler 46:37
I put so many crimes on the list just from John’s biography.
Anne Brannen 46:46
Dear listeners, I asked her, so like is this all John being bad? Do we have to do one of those things like we did for Hugh Despenser, the sheer dreadfulness of Hugh Despenser? Are these other people?
Michelle Butler 46:57
We could have done the sheer dreadfulness of King John, the phony King of England. He starts off his career by stealing one of his vassal’s fiances and marrying her himself. That’s a great way to keep people loyal.
Anne Brannen 47:15
Yeah. What was he thinking, really?
Michelle Butler 47:17
What the hell. So yeah, that’s what I’ve got. Other than a bit more…I can be outraged by John for quite some time.
Anne Brannen 47:26
So at this point, in like the two and a half years we’ve been doing this, the people who have outraged you the most are Phillip, the King of France, who killed off the Templars and did other bad things, and John.
Michelle Butler 47:42
Yeah, I’m pretty outraged. I’m still pretty scandalized by the murder in the church.
Anne Brannen 47:48
Oh, right. Right. Right. The DeMedicis.
Michelle Butler 47:50
That scandalizes me. The things that were in your soul the earliest are the hardest to ignore, and I was raised Catholic. So the idea that you use the Mass as a murder weapon is bad.
Anne Brannen 48:09
It’s really very bad.
Michelle Butler 48:11
It’s really really bad. But John, just in terms of basic human decency, he’s terrible.
Anne Brannen 48:15
He’s pretty bad. He’s pretty bad, indeed.
Michelle Butler 48:18
He is the example of why the chivalric code needed to exist. And why Stephen and Maud two generations earlier were so reluctant to break it. Because once it’s broken, it’s broken. These rules exist for a reason. Because otherwise these are just heavily armed, angry people and there’s just death all over the place.
Anne Brannen 48:41
Yeah. Well and then we have the Magna Carta. Yay.
Michelle Butler 48:46
When that gets covered in school, it’s very hazy what he did to annoy the barons.
Anne Brannen 48:57
They got upset and then took him over to a giant tree and made him sign a giant parchment. Yeah. The barons got upset.
Michelle Butler 49:07
For no good reason.
Anne Brannen 49:10
Usually you look for…but you might have gotten so sidetracked by the dreadfulness of King John that you did not actually have a chance to look at fictional the historical fiction.
Michelle Butler 49:24
There are some books. If you just go to the Wikipedia page. There are some books about her but there’s mostly what happens is that she shows up in mentions in books about John or books about the time period, historical novels about the time period generally rather than–
Anne Brannen 49:42
So there aren’t a lot of books that kind of focus on her?
Michelle Butler 49:45
There is one that focuses just on her, but it was described as heavily fictionalized. Also, I just was so down the rabbit hole of Welsh folklore trying desperately to find a source.
Anne Brannen 49:58
To find Jones the Historian. Well, that’ll be easy.
Michelle Butler 50:04
Dear readers, I did not find Jones.
Anne Brannen 50:10
I think that one of the problems with making…it’s different if you’re going to make a historical fiction about, let’s say, Elizabeth Woodville. You can talk about her entire life and make a nice coherent story about it and add in nice details and whatnot. The problem with Maud is that it’s much harder. How do you put this all together, with the defending the castle and starving to death and mouthing off to the messenger, all these? How do you put that all together? Especially if you’re going to add in, of course, throwing stones around and it makes it really hard. If you’re going to heavily fictionalize, you might as well go to magic realism.
Michelle Butler 50:57
I do just want to say I am not a Welsh expert. So if anybody is, in fact out there, who is an expert on Welsh mythology and wants to clue me in about the sources for this, please shoot me an email and let me know. But I, as you know a specialist in other things, could not track it down.
Anne Brannen 51:20
I couldn’t find it either. I’m kind of happy to be in the Welsh territory and I couldn’t find this. I couldn’t tell what author we were talking about either. I couldn’t find it. It wasn’t the recent one. There’s a very, very, very famous historian. That’s not him.
Michelle Butler 51:38
I’m so guessing this Jones is either 18th century or early 19th century because I know it has to be before 1852. But other than that, I don’t know. But I am deeply impressed with the Welsh when they looked at her and said, ‘Man, this is an imposing woman. We want to make her into a figure of legend.’ That’s kind of cool.
Anne Brannen 52:02
Yeah, it really is. It really is, especially when she was married to the Ogre of Abergavenny. Nope, I’m not finding it.
Michelle Butler 52:09
Yeah, it’s a source of serious frustration.
Anne Brannen 52:14
The deal is that in 1532 or whatever it was, when the Welsh were legally supposed to have surnames rather than the patronymics that they’d been using, they had to invent surnames. That’s why there are relatively few surnames in Wales as opposed to, let’s say, England or Ireland.
Michelle Butler 52:35
I didn’t actually know that. I knew that there were–Somebody is walking by right now with a corgi. Oh my gosh.
Anne Brannen 52:43
There’s a corgi.
Michelle Butler 52:45
I’ve never seen a corgi in the neighborhood before and I’ve lived here 11 years. This was a big deal.
Anne Brannen 52:50
That is a big deal. Is it a cardigan or a Pembroke?
Michelle Butler 52:53
It’s little.
Anne Brannen 52:54
It’s a Pembroke.
Michelle Butler 52:55
It’s little, and gray and brown and white. And I’ve never seen one here before.
Anne Brannen 53:01
Oh, it’s a brindle.
Michelle Butler 53:01
There are people in the neighborhood with retired greyhounds that look like tiny little thoroughbreds when they go by in their blankies. There are people with Great Danes. And there are people who walk something that looks like a direwolf. But I’ve never seen a corgi in the neighborhood before.
Anne Brannen 53:26
Yeah, we’re never gonna find this guy, are we?
Michelle Butler 53:30
I was so frustrated because I’m like, ‘Are you for real?’ If they’d have just had a bibliography at the end that would help me out. No bibliography. Let me see if I’ve got anything else interesting here that I wanted to say. I think I’ve got everything. I think I talked about everything that I wanted to talk about. I do very much appreciate Google’s digitizing of books that are out of print. That has been hugely helpful to me. I found more recent books about Welsh folklore, but they’re all citing Wirt Sikes’ book from 1888. It’s not independent. It doesn’t do me any good to be looking at a book from 2011 when it’s citing the book from 1888 that I already found. I was trying to get further back and I just ran into the Jones block. But I’m sure if there’s Welsh folklorist out there, they’re like, ‘Oh, well, of course. That’s Davy Jones from 1789, you fool.’ They’re out there yelling at their phone right now.
Anne Brannen 54:42
It’s Rhys Jones. We know.
Michelle Butler 54:47
Three volume history of Welsh history and folklore from 1789. I don’t know.
Anne Brannen 54:54
Okay, wait, I found me a whole list of Joneses.
Michelle Butler 54:59
But this was definitely a topic in which needing…we get lured by the idea that everything is on the web.
Anne Brannen 55:08
Oh, yeah.
Michelle Butler 55:09
Everything is on the web, but about 4% of it. And then you need to go and look at the actual scholars who have dug into it to get the full story. So I appreciated Marc Morris.
Anne Brannen 55:28
Well, I’m very sorry that Maud and William de Braose got starved to death in Corfe castle. I’m also sorry about the 22 French knights who got starved to death in Corfe castle earlier.
Michelle Butler 55:41
That actually sounds even more horrific, honestly.
Anne Brannen 55:44
Yeah.
They put them all in the same room together. Just terrible.
It’s pretty bad. They did that because they’d tried to break out. So then they stuck them all down in that dungeon and walked away. King John was very bad. Well, you know what we’re doing next time, we actually are staying in sort of the same time period, because we’re going to talk about John’s brother Richard Lionheart and that time that he got captured in Vienna. So it’s the same time period. After that we’re doing something altogether different. Every so often, we do a little set. So this is a little set. King John. King Richard.
Michelle Butler 56:23
Okay. Yeah.
Anne Brannen 56:27
I believe you’re the one that came up with that.
Michelle Butler 56:30
No, no, that’s fine. I was trying to remember. I had read something about this, but the time period’s off, so it must be just the number being used for comparison. At one point John says he will make peace with William if William coughs up 50,000 coins of whatever the coins were at that point. Marc Morris points out that would be as if William had coughed up half of what had been demanded earlier for Richard’s ransom. So of course he couldn’t possibly do that.
Anne Brannen 57:03
Yeah, no.
Michelle Butler 57:07
What I was working through was, that wasn’t really the same time period, of course, because Richard must have been dead by then but he was just using it as a comparison.
Anne Brannen 57:16
No, we’re going a little bit backwards in time because Richard still alive when he gets captured. And when John is king, he’s dead.
Michelle Butler 57:26
And then he gets killed by the arrow.
Anne Brannen 57:30
Yeah, he dies of gangrene. That’s not good. That’s not a good death. Neither is starving to death, I swear to God.
Michelle Butler 57:38
Honestly, I think that anybody who…if we’ve done any public service over the course of our two years here with podcasting, it’s to disabuse anybody of the notion that it is really really cool to be a noble in the Middle Ages. No, no, no. What you want to be is a pewter smith.
Anne Brannen 57:58
Yeah, yeah.
Michelle Butler 58:02
Be solidly middle class. Keep your head down.
Anne Brannen 58:04
You want to be in what will become the middle class, you know, not the peasants because that’s no fun.
Michelle Butler 58:10
It’s a really hard job and people abuse you.
Anne Brannen 58:13
Making stuff, you know, weaving, embroidering. I think pewter, you’re right, that’d be good. Silversmithing’s even okay, except the thieves might come by.
Michelle Butler 58:25
Don’t be a goldsmith, you’re still a target.
Anne Brannen 58:29
Pewter. Pewter’s good. Maybe embroidery I think embroidery’s okay. Gotta be careful with the gold work.
Michelle Butler 58:38
You don’t want to do too much that caters to the nobility because they don’t always pay their bills.
Anne Brannen 58:44
You don’t want to deal with the nobility. Don’t want to be in the nobility, don’t want to deal with the nobility. You don’t want to be in the road when the nobility come by. Just do not attract attention. And that’s how you get through the Middle Ages. That’s what we think. This has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. We can be found on Stitcher and Spotify and Apple and all those places where the podcasts hang out. You can go to TrueCrimeMedieval.com, TrueCrimeMedieval is all one word. That’s where we have, you can link to the podcast, we have the show notes, we have the transcriptions, and you can leave comments and give us information. You know, tell us about crimes that you think we ought to pay attention to. We’ll think about those and sometimes we use it and you can let us know how we’re doing. You can leave reviews over at the podcast sites and we’d love that. We’d love to hear from you. Bye.
Michelle Butler 59:53
Bye
99. Juliane de Fontevrault Tries to Kill Her Father (Henry I) With a Crossbow, Normandy 1110
Anne Brannen 0:22
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 0:33
And today we are back in Normandy. We’re in Normandy in 1119 because we want to talk about the time that Juliana of Fontevrault tried to kill her daddy with a crossbow. That’s what we want to talk about. Her daddy was Henry the first, by the way. That’s what we’re talking about. Kind of exciting, isn’t it, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 0:55
When I found out about this, I absolutely wanted to put it on the list, because I was so intrigued by, not only did she try to assassinate the king, she tried to assassinate her father and also because Henry’s notorious for the number of his natural children, but also how he treats them. He’s actually pretty good to his natural children.
Anne Brannen 1:17
Yes, he’d been pretty good to her too, actually, as it happens. But you know, there were some Norman, Anglo-Norman, French things that were all involved. That’s what’s going on. As usual, I get to do historical context, and I had a lot of fun with this, let me tell you, because it’s not really a rabbit hole if you are actually talking about something that is connected–I’m just saying for future reference in this podcast episode whilst I am talking. I’m just telling you. So, our context, Henry the first–who is the father that’s getting aimed at with a crossbow–Henry the first had become king of England in 1100 when his older brother, William Rufus, was killed in a hunting accident in the New Forest. We have talked this about this before on our podcast episode about, did William get murdered? We say no, it was a hunting accident, pretty clear it was a hunting accident–he was dead, at any rate, in the New Forest, and Henry got himself to Winchester and the treasury before his older brother Robert Curthose could get there. So Henry got crowned, and he was king. He was a quick thinking sort of guy, and he was also very fertile. He had two legitimate children that he had with his first wife, who was Matilda of Scotland–that’s William Atheling, William the Noble–who was his heir for a while till William died. He was gonna be the heir, but he died in 1120 in the wreck of the White Ship, which was one of our early episodes because I like to talk about the wreck of the White Ship, and so we had to do that pretty early on. Any rate, he was dead, and the other child was Matilda, who’s going to become Empress Matilda, because she’s going to get married to one of the Holy Roman emperors. After her father’s death, he wanted her to be queen. Since William was dead, he wanted his other legitimate child to be queen. The nobles had agreed, including the one who broke his oath–we have another podcast about that–who broke his oath and they went to civil war. That was Stephen of Blois. He was a cousin, and they ended up in a civil war. Stephen would win and become king, sort of, briefly, and then the crown would go to Matilda’s son, Henry. That’s going to be Henry the second of England. So that’s who his legitimate children are, although there might also have been a third one who died really young, a boy Richard who died pretty young. But there’s two that grow up and actually figure in history. His other children could not inherit the throne because they weren’t legitimate. There were about 20 of them, maybe as many as 24-25. There was a bunch. There was a whole bunch. We don’t know that we actually know all of them, but Henry acknowledged his illegitimate children.
Michelle Butler 4:13
He seems to hold the record for the most acknowledged natural children among all of the English monarchs, which is saying something.
Anne Brannen 4:20
Including King John, which is really saying something. Actually, Juliana had been born before Henry became king and before he was married. We don’t know who her mother was. Some of the other illegitimate children, a couple of them, might have been her full siblings, but we don’t really know. It was common for the Anglo-Norman nobility and royalty to have illegitimate children. Henry had an unusually large number of them, and he was public about his relationships with the women who were their mothers. He treated his illegitimate children well. In fact, some of the women who the mothers of these children, he had long relationships with and some of these illegitimate children were raised in his household. They had strong relationships with their father and their half siblings, which would actually, according to a popular story, lead to the death of William Atheling, the only legitimate male heir, because during the White Ship disaster, the story is that it looked like he was going to survive, but then he went back into the water because he had to save his half sister, Matilda, and they both drowned. Too bad. Any rate, they all knew each other. Henry made good marriages for the illegitimate daughters, and he put the illegitimate sons into good positions. I’m not going to go through all of them, just the main ones. Robert FitzRoy became the Earl of Gloucester, and he would later support his half sister, Matilda, in the upcoming civil war. Reginald de Dunstanville became the Earl of Cornwall. Matilda Fitzroy became a countess, Juliana was married off to a Norman nobleman, Eustace of Breteuil, Constance became the viscontess of Beaumont-sur-Sarth, Isabelle became the Countess of Pembroke, and Sibylla became the queen of Scotland. Juliana, though, probably did not grow up in Henry’s royal household in England, because she was Norman and she was 10 when her father became king. She might have spent some time in England, but that’s not clear, because she was married at 13. So however long she was in England, it was fleeting. She wasn’t one of the crew that grew up together. She was married in 1103 to Eustace of Breteuil, and he himself was illegitimate. He was the son of William of Breteuil. Back when Henry was high-tailing it to Winchester and grabbing the royal treasury, William had tried to stop him, but he didn’t manage that. He was there for King William’s hunting accident. Nevertheless, Henry married Juliana off to William’s son, Eustace. Side note: William, Eustace’s father had only two children, both of them illegitimate. William was dead when Eustace married Juliane–recently dead. That would have been a way for Henry to connect on Breteuil to himself more closely. We’ll see how well that worked out. William had been the abbot of a Benedictine abbey which he helped rebuild. It had been through some turbulent time and got damaged very badly. But when his father died, he inherited the estates, and so he had gotten married, though, as mentioned, his only children were illegitimate. He had no children with his wife. His daughter Isabel was married to the lord of Ivry, after the lord of Ivry tortured William until he agreed. More on that later. William is a saint in the Catholic Church on account of rebuilding the monastery. That’s all I can find. This bemuses me, because if that’s your criterion for sainthood, then pretty much the entirety of European nobles and monarchs would be canonized saints, which not. That’s not happening. But he must have been–it must have been very special. But at any rate, he’s a saint. His feast day is July 14, if you would like to observe it. But here is Sir Francis Palgrave’s explanation. Palgrave founded the Public Record Office, and he is taking this from the Battle Abbey role volume two. Here’s the quote about the torturing of William and how come and why. “Ascelin was a vassal of William de Breteuil. The designation of lupelus, or young wolf, had been bestowed upon him in consequence of his savage temper, common to his whole family. By ill usage and torture, he compelled his liege lord to grant him his daughter Isabel, along with 3000 pounds of French money–” 3000 pounds worth of ducats, “–and during three months, Breteuil was kept in duress, ironed, chained, plagued and starved without yielding. Till at length, the money and the lady were exhorted by an ingenious mode of torture in the depth of winter. Ascelin fastened him to the grating at the top of a bleak tower, unclothed save for a poor, thin shirt, and he was thus exposed to the whistling, biting, bitter winds, whilst water was poured upon him abundantly and continually till he was sheeted with ice. This anguish Breteuil could not resist, and so he consented to the terms proposed. He endowed Isabel in the church parish and gave her away.” Alrighty. Now you might be wondering, as I did, why Ascelin was so intent to marry Isabel that he, you know, tortured his liege lord until he got her and the castle. So here’s the story. It’s not a rabbit hole, Michelle, because it’s me explaining a thing that really is connected, if you see how that works. I think this is really true. I’m not even exaggerating.
Anne Brannen 4:20
I’m fascinated by the things you found that I didn’t find. I found the thing about the torture. I didn’t find that William was present at–because I didn’t read that far back, I was interested in other things–that he was present at the death of William Rufus. That’s really interesting.
Anne Brannen 5:20
So he knew that Henry was high tailing.
Michelle Butler 5:25
I was really intrigued by how people, you know, were talking about–because I read a whole article called ‘Affairs of State.’ It’s about Henry the first, all his children.
Anne Brannen 6:35
All his affairs.
Michelle Butler 6:37
And that particular scholar was trying really hard to argue that the fact that Henry has relations with so many women from so many different ethnic backgrounds really reflects well on him. He’s not a snob.
Anne Brannen 9:38
No, you’re right. He’s right. He believes in diversity. Diversity of the Anglo Norman illegitimate children.
Michelle Butler 9:38
He doesn’t look down on the Anglo Saxons. He has one of them as a mistress forever.
Anne Brannen 9:38
And there’s also, there’s a Welsh woman in there. Isn’t Nest?
Michelle Butler 9:38
Yes, yes. Nest. This scholar–and this, actually, I thought was really interesting argument–that this is not altogether different than what the Vikings were doing. You know, not that long before, their Viking ancestors would marry several times in order to form alliances. And so she was sort of arguing that we’re not really that far from those people. So Henry may well have thought about these as marriages, and he certainly has some of these relationships for a long time.
Anne Brannen 10:24
Absolutely. And as we all know, the Normans are nothing but French speaking Vikings. With historians attached. So here’s the story. This is the story about why the torture. In 1089–so we’re going back a little–Ascelin had taken the castle from William de Breteuil, our saintly guide, and given it to Robert Curthose, King Henry’s brother, who then sold it back to William. Then there was a war, and William was captured by Ascelin, which is when he got tortured, as I was explaining and Ascelin married his daughter, and got the castle back. Ascelin, by the way, was a horrible lord, which I think you could tell by his being named Little Wolf on account of his savagery. So I’m sure you’re surprised by that. Then in 1118, that’s the year before our main story is starting, Robert, who was Ascelin’s son, joined the rebellion against Henry. Alrighty. We’ll get to the rebellion in a minute, but that’s Eustace’sstory. He’s the illegitimate son of a future saint, and his sister is married to a wicked guy who tortured the future saint and held the castle and barony of Ivry. Okay, back to our main story. So. Juliana and Eustace were married in 1103. Soon after Eustace’s saintly father died, and Eustace inherited his father’s lands rather than some cousins who were actually legitimate. Though he was illegitimate, he inherited them because he was Norman, and the cousins were Breton and Burgundian, and the Normans wanted a Norman lord at Breteuil, and so he got it. And in 1119 which is when our main story takes place, Eustace and Julian threatened to join in on the rebellion against Henry that was going on in Normandy. In 1115–so we’re going back four years– Henry and Louis, the King of France, were fighting over the boundaries and rulership of Normandy. This went on back and forth, back and forth, till 1120 when Henry and Louise signed a treaty which made William Aethling, who wasn’t dead yet and wouldn’t be dead for another year, made him liege to Louis in exchange for William’s rights to Normandy. Alrighty. So that’s what’s going on in 1119 and Eustace and Julian threatened to join this war on the French side unless Henry gave them the castle of Ivry, which I hoped we remember, is where Eustace’s sister had been living with her charming and persuasive darling husband, and which Eustace said really was his by right. Okay, because you remember, it’d gone back and forth, back all right. So Henry is really busy with the war. Actually, he has other things going on, you know, than his daughter and her husband. So as a way of keeping Eustace and Juliana from rebelling, and to keep them believing that really he’s going to deal with them, don’t worry, he was just kind of occupied at the moment, he set up a hostage situation. This is very common at the time, and the idea is then that everybody behaves and doesn’t attack each other, because otherwise bad things are going to happen to whatever friends and relations you’ve sent on over to the other side. So. And that might have gone very, very well, only it didn’t, because Eustace, instead of taking very good care of the son of Ralph Harnec, the Constable of the castle of Ivry, listened to Amaury de Montfort, who is the great, great grandfather of the Simon de Montfort, who’s the father of the two guys who killed their cousin whilst he was at church in Italy that we talked about a few episodes ago. This is Amaury de Montfort, not Simon de Montfort, because that’s the Barons war against Henry the third and his son Edward the first. And that’s going to happen in the last half of the 13th century, and we’re at the moment in the first half of the 12th century. They’re related because, you know, one’s the great, great grandson of the other. But they’re not the same person. For those of you keeping track, the secret motto of True Crime Medieval–we have a couple of mottos which are obvious–1000 years of people behaving badly and crimes that are just like they are now, only with less technology. The secret motto is they’re all related. Okay. Anyway, Amaury had fought with William Rufus, had been on his side, but Henry was an enemy, quite an enemy. Amaury had lots of kinship connectedness with people Henry was fighting, including the King of France, and though Louis had given the countship of Evreax to Amaury, Henry garrisoned the castle and kept Amaury out. Amaury got the castle again. Henry besieged it. Henry garrisoned the castle and kept Amaury out. Amaury got the castle back, and then he gave the king the castle, but still got to be the count. Amaury, in the midst of all this, gave Eustace the advice that what he should do, instead of keeping the son of Ralph the constable all safe and everything, was he should blind him, which he did. Ralph the constable demanded justice, and Henry allowed Ralph to blind and mutilate the hostages that Henry was holding, and that was his two granddaughters, Juliane, and Eustace’s daughters. They were blinded and their noses were cut off, and this angered Juliane very much. She went to Breteuil to defend Breteuil, but her garrison didn’t care, and the people didn’t want her and her father lays lay siege to the castle, so Julian agreed to a parley with him, but instead of talking to him, she tried to shoot her father down with a crossbow from the castle whilst they were supposed to be talking. She didn’t hit him. He destroyed the drawbridge and confined her to the castle tower, but she escaped by jumping into the moat and fleeing to Eustace because he was at their holdings in Pacy. Henry confiscated the castle and everything they had, absolutely everything. He let them keep Pacy. Breteuil itself was given to another son of Ralph the constable’s, who was all grown up. That was William, and he hadn’t, you know, been blinded. That was his little brother. A few months later, Eustace and Juliana went to Henry, barefoot and without safe conduct papers, through Henry’s siege lines. He was besieging Evreux at the time, you know, where Amaury was, to beg for forgiveness, which he gave them after his nobles, including Robert of Lincoln, who was Henry’s son and Juliana’s half brother, who might have been her brother, but probably was her half brother, they interceded and Henry forgave them. He damn forgave them. Eustace was given 300 marks a year. He didn’t get Breteuil back, and Juliana became a nun at Fontevrault. Fontevrault was really new at the time, like just a few years old. I think the first abbess had been put in in like 1115. It’s going to become famous later, because it’s near Chinon, and the Plantagenets give it lots and lots and lots of money. Eleanor of Aquitaine is going to live there after Henry the second dies. Eventually the French Revolution is going to do away with the entire–you know, they’re gonna shut down the order of nuns, and the abbey gets turned into a prison. But that’s a way down the line. That’s not happening now. It’s a really great place to be. The daughters went there too–the daughters who had been blinded and mutilated, also went to Fontevrault. We know this because in 1130 Eustace makes a grant to the Abbey, which mentions, quote, ‘his wife and daughters who there serve God devoutly as nuns.’ End of quote. Julianna died in 1136, maybe after that–she’s a witness to a grant to some agreements in 1136, so she outlived her father by a year or more. And that is the story of Juliana, who tried to kill her daddy with a crossbow because she was really pissed off at him, and that was a bad idea, although, you know, Henry had allowed–he didn’t do it himself, but he had allowed–her daughters, his granddaughters to be blinded and mutilated. Henry was not the–this was a matter of justice, you know. It was a matter of justice and a kind of really, an important sort of agreement. You can’t rely on hostage situations to keep agreements safe if you’re not going to pay attention, strong attention, when hostages are not taken care of. You’ve got to keep that agreement. And Eustace had blinded the hostage that he was holding. That’s just not okay. And so there was retribution, but Henry forgave them, and then Juliane got to be a nun, and Eustace got some money, and he got to stay in Pacy. They kept Pacy. He got to stay there with an allowance. That’s what Henry was like. He actually gave Eustace an allowance.
Michelle Butler 20:57
I do not understand Eustace’s thinking in blinding the hostage. I really don’t understand how he thought that was going to work as a strategic move. I do understand that he probably thought it was a safe bet that Henry wouldn’t allow his own granddaughters to be hurt in retribution. But he misunderstood the character of his father in law.
Anne Brannen 21:23
He surely did.
Michelle Butler 21:24
If that was the bet he was taking. Because, no, that’s not how medieval kingmanship works.
Anne Brannen 21:31
It certainly doesn’t, even with Henry, who clearly is a kindly sort of person, in many ways, to his children. There’s a line. There’s really a line. I do get it, that Amaury was telling him all kinds of things, you know, he was really entreating him into treating the hostage badly. I get this. And the de Montforts, they’re really good at rhetoric, apparently. So there you go.
Michelle Butler 22:00
They do appear to have some family strength in persuasion and charisma. Yeah, I think that that is observably true.
Anne Brannen 22:11
Yes, I enjoyed this. But there were things I really wanted to know, because–so Julian tries to shoot her dad, and I want to know why. Okay. So there’s like, blinding of the hostages. And I’m like, well, why’d you do that? And then I’m like, well, what’s the connection of Amaury to all this? Why is there rebellion in the first place? There’s were a lot of things to look up. So I had a lot of fun. What’d you find, Michelle–where’d you go?
Michelle Butler 22:33
Oh, I looked at so many things. One of the things I looked at just briefly is a book called The Crossbow in the Middle Ages, which doesn’t actually add anything to the discussion, except that the author of this, Stuart Ellis Gorman, is kind of sad that she missed, which is hilarious. So I’m gonna scroll down to that, because this, I just loved this. “Sadly, the short length of this account makes it impossible to dig any further into the interesting character of Juliane. Perhaps, if Juliane had succeeded, then more medieval authors would have written about the incident and provided more detail, such as with the many accounts of the death of Richard the first, but since he survived, the story has been relegated to relative obscurity.”
Anne Brannen 23:27
So we want more details. What I would like to know, and we don’t know, had she been taught to use the crossbow? Is this something that she had practiced with? She might well have been trained, I don’t know.
Michelle Butler 23:41
Yeah, that is one of the questions he has. He wants to know whether she had previous experience with it. But he’s really intrigued by how rare–he really emphasizes how rare of an incident this is.
Anne Brannen 23:55
Like the woman picking up a crossbow, or a woman trying to shoot her daddy, which?
Michelle Butler 23:59
I’ll just read his sentence, because it’s pretty cool. “The most extreme detail, however, is probably Julian’s attempted assassination of her own father with a crossbow. Attempted assassination of a medieval King was fairly rare–“
Anne Brannen 24:14
Right, because you usually were slaughtered right after.
Michelle Butler 24:16
“Very rare for the would-be assassin to be the king’s daughter, and rarest of all for that to have been carried out with a crossbow. The preferred weapon of the medieval assassin was usually the knife or sword, something up close and personal, which made death or maiming of the target more likely, even if the assassin had far less chance of escaping.” So this particular author is really interested in how rare what Juliane does here is, which I thought was an interesting point.
Anne Brannen 24:49
That is. And it’s also rare that she survived it. Because usually, if you attempt to assassinate a king, you’re dead. She survives–she survives and is forgiven. Good lord.
Michelle Butler 25:01
I think Henry shows a great deal of restraint in the situation.
Anne Brannen 25:06
Even with the mutilation of the granddaughters?
Michelle Butler 25:08
That was a hard call, but he has to be seen as playing fair, because–
Anne Brannen 25:16
That’s right.
Michelle Butler 25:17
–if he’s not providing even handed justice–literally the job of a medieval King is to provide justice.
Anne Brannen 25:23
You know, Ralph the constable, has been taking care of a castle, and the king gets him to send his son as hostage, and then his son is is mutilated. There has to be tit for tat. There really does.
Michelle Butler 25:35
I was pretty intrigued by–I looked up my man Orderic again, to see what Orderic has to say about it. Orderic never fails to provide amusement, because he’s a really important source. He’s well placed. In this way, he’s like Matthew Paris, where he’s been tasked with this job of writing the history, and he does a really thorough investigating of things. He goes and talks to–people come to the Abbey and he talks to them so he has good sources. But his account of this is striking in that he is not in any way appalled by the fact that she tries to murder her father as a child. Orderic is appalled, not because this is a child trying to kill her father, but because this is a woman. He says, “In consequence, she treacherously sought a conference with her father, and the King, who suspected no such fraudulent design in a woman, gave her the meeting.” He’s appalled by the fact that a woman did this.
Anne Brannen 26:37
A woman was treacherous. So he’s not appalled specifically by a woman used a crossbow. He’s appalled by a woman was treacherous.
Michelle Butler 26:47
Yes, and attempts to kill him sneaky like. That she agrees to have a parley with him, you know, a talk about how to solve the siege and instead tries to kill him. But to be fair, in this context of Norman lords, having a child trying to kill a parent is totally par for the course.
Anne Brannen 27:13
And it’s a Plantagenet. I mean, really, they’re–
Michelle Butler 27:18
He’s shocked by the fact that she’s showing her legs–that climbing down the tower involved her legs being–and you and I were talking before we started recording that this is clearly him just using his imagination, because nobody saw this happen. If somebody saw it happen, they would have recaptured her. So, you know, clearly, he’s just kind of imagining how it must have happened, and there’s no way you’re going to be able to climb down without showing your leg. And he’s appalled by that.
Anne Brannen 27:49
Yeah, and you have to lift your skirts up in order to wade through the moat, obviously, or they drag you down. So there you go. Yeah, yeah. That’s appalling. Not that she escapes, but she does it in such a manner as to show her legs. I love Orderich. I really do.
Michelle Butler 28:08
He’s just hysterical, and he’s such an important source. He has something to say about everything. So I had questions about this castle that is the cause of the dispute. So I went to research the castle. Why? Why do they want this castle?
Anne Brannen 28:25
And this is?
Michelle Butler 28:27
The castle of Ivry.
Anne Brannen 28:29
Oh, yes, right, where the wolf guy lived, right.
Michelle Butler 28:31
Yes, yes, yes. So, as you talked about, it’s part of an ongoing feud among two branches of the family. They both descended from count Raoul, who had it built, and they’re just fighting over it. They both are claiming it as a family inheritance.
Anne Brannen 28:51
I actually did not realize that this was a family inheritance. Got it. So two different lines. All right.
Michelle Butler 28:59
They’re not closely related by this point, because the castle was originally built–this keep–around the year 1000, so we’re a little further along, but they are both claiming it by descent. It’s also a really important castle strategically. It’s on the border between Normandy and France. It’s sited to control passage of the river Eure. So it’s an important castle. It is famous enough that Orderic calls it ‘the famous tower.’
Anne Brannen 29:30
Which we had not heard of, but it was famous then there. Okay, got it.
Michelle Butler 29:36
It was famous for them. Orderic says that the countess–so it’s count Raoul and Countess Aubrey who have it built around the year 1000–and he claims that the countess had the architect beheaded so that he couldn’t build one for anyone else. Now I don’t think this is likely to be true, personally, but I think it’s interesting that it has this reputation of being important and clever, such that this is a story that gets attached to it. It is actually one of the first castles built in the way that becomes the Norman standard– that stone keep, which is essentially a fortified house. I’ve found arguments that this is the model for the White Tower. This is the model for the castles that William the Conqueror builds.
Anne Brannen 30:31
The White Tower being the Tower of London.
Michelle Butler 30:34
Exactly, exactly. So William wanted it because his father had it and then had been taken away. It gets enlarged over the centuries and becomes the kind of castles that we think about where there are curtain walls and, you know, two layers of them. But it’s captured by the English in 1424, and they destroy it, so the French can’t use it after that. So it exists. It’s in ruins. Once the English got a hold of it, they’re like, we’re done with this. I think it’s really fascinating that by in 1424, it is still an important and strategic enough location that the English, when they get it, raze it so that the French cannot re fortify it.
Anne Brannen 31:20
Yes, that really–because it’s that important. But I know also that this means–what’s important to me is that this means that probably we are not going to be able to go see it and find a tea house and get tea.
Michelle Butler 31:34
To the best of my knowledge, there is no tea house there. There are ruins that you can go visit. There are some websites that talk about it and a couple of books that I looked at that talk about what it would have looked like. So they create a picture to reconstruct it.
Anne Brannen 31:53
I like to have refreshments with my tours of, you know, old places myself.
Michelle Butler 31:59
It’s just kind of wild, right–400 year old building that’s been added on to, still strategically important.
Anne Brannen 32:06
So the English are going through but they’re not trying to keep that land, because if they were keeping it, they would not raze the castle.
Michelle Butler 32:12
And I am pleased to report that there is a historical novel about Juliane.
Anne Brannen 32:17
Oh, really. Yay.
Michelle Butler 32:21
It’s called My Father, My Enemy.
Anne Brannen 32:25
Okay–no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, that’s not a good title. No, no.
Michelle Butler 32:28
I’m not vouching for the book because I haven’t read it. I was busy reading about the castle, and it’s a fairly recent book. It was published in 2019. It’s part of a series of historical novels about medieval women that are not as well known. So I thought the existence of it was pretty interesting, but I was far more interested in why on earth Eustace was willing to be such a dumbass about trying to get a hold of this castle. Because, I mean, he just keeps over playing his hand, is what happens. He just keeps over playing his hand.
Anne Brannen 33:12
Yeah, yeah. He’s clearly not a good tactician. And one of the things we don’t know is the extent to which Juliana knew anything about the ‘let’s mutilate the hostage plan.’
Michelle Butler 33:26
Oh, you know, I didn’t think about that, but that’s true. She probably was not consulted about that. No wonder she was mad.
Anne Brannen 33:34
And she’s stuck with the consequences. She takes her daughters with her.
Michelle Butler 33:40
That’s interesting. I hadn’t thought about that.
Anne Brannen 33:45
After all this–you know, they go together to ask for forgiveness, but they don’t end up living together. She’s a nun in Fontevrault and he’s in–
Michelle Butler 33:57
If he did not talk to her about that plan before it happened, that would pretty well be marriage ending. I could see that.
Anne Brannen 34:08
I would think so. I don’t know, but I would think so. And if she was consulted about it, then I’m really surprised, because none of the other children of Henry the first seemed to be that stupid.
Michelle Butler 34:24
Yes. I this was why–like I say, I was wanting to put it on the list because I was startled to discover that one of his natural children tried to kill him, because my perception of him was that he has lots of natural children, but he treats them pretty well. He arranges good marriages for the girls. He sets the boys up with titles and land. Partially it’s trying to build a group of people who are loyal to him. So it’s partially building a power base, but it’s also partially because he seems to like his children and want them around.
Anne Brannen 35:08
Yeah, they’re in the household. They’re friends.
Michelle Butler 35:12
You know, one of the reasons I think that, is that they hang with each other. Even if it’s not true that William Aethling went back in for Matilda, that is clearly a plausible story, because it gets told.
Anne Brannen 35:26
Right, right. It’s the kind of thing that people would not be surprised he did.
Michelle Butler 35:30
Richard of Lincoln is why Empress Maude–his support is crucial to her bid.
Anne Brannen 35:37
It certainly is. She wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as she did without him.
Michelle Butler 35:42
So these two dozen children hang pretty tight, actually, which is pretty impressive, I think. I’m impressed.
Anne Brannen 35:50
Juliana doesn’t seem to have been really part of that, but she wasn’t treated badly. It wasn’t a bad marriage. He didn’t marry her off to the little wolf, you know. Hello. We don’t hear anymore from Isabel after that. Although they had, the little wolf and Isabel, had at least two children but we don’t know what happened. Was she happy? Because I don’t know, but I’m thinking not.
Michelle Butler 36:19
And Eustace and Juliana have two boys as well as the two girls, and that’s true by the time the girls are injured. So probably, you know, at that point he has his heir. She can go true. I kind of feel for both Henry and Juliana in this situation, because they both end up with no good choices.
Anne Brannen 36:46
Yes, I think that’s true. I think Eustace is an idiot.
Michelle Butler 36:51
My husband was asking me whether, is there ever an example of somebody named Eustace who wasn’t dumb? Because, of course, this is what CS Lewis names–remember the beginning of Dawn Treader? The first line of Dawn Treader is this wonderful first line of a book. ‘There once was a boy named Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.’
Anne Brannen 37:13
Eustace. Oh, well.
Michelle Butler 37:15
Eustace has shown up too as a monk-pirate. I mean, for heaven’s sakes. Not the same Eustace, but we had this other Eustace.
Anne Brannen 37:21
Now he was not stupid, though. He was just not well behaved.
Michelle Butler 37:25
No, he was badly behaved. Oh, my goodness.
Anne Brannen 37:28
The name Eustace comes from the Greek and it means fruitful. Yeah. Well, whatever, whatever. So I was glad to know that story. I’m sorry that you can’t get some tea when you visit the castle. I’m sorry that the English like made it go away.
Michelle Butler 37:48
It has a very interesting herringbone pattern in the stonework, which I found kind of fascinating because I don’t see that very often, and you can still see it in the ruins.
Anne Brannen 38:03
Fontrevault got turned into a prison. What is it now I want to know–we’ll look this up–Fontrevault is now called the abbey. Notable buildings: the abbey of Fontrevault. Under the Vichy government, some French Resistance prisoners were shot there.
Michelle Butler 38:18
Whoa.
Anne Brannen 38:18
I know. ‘In 1963 it was given to the French Ministry of Culture and a major restoration was undertaken. In 1975 the Centre Culturel de l’Ouest was formed to preserve the abbey and promote it as a cultural venue, and the complex was open to the public in 1985. Restoration of the abbey church, according to the earlier restoration, was completed in 2006 and the order has been revived.’ So, can we go there? I think we can go and visit it. Can we visit? ‘Plan your visit, opening hours, high season, very high season, free for minors and students under 25 the Abbey, the museum, the Abbey and the museum, bicycle parking, loans of chairs for disabled people, changing tables, luggage lockers. Don’t bring dogs, unless they’re guide dogs or assistance dogs. No food and drink.’ But do you have a tea room? I don’t think they do. I would go and visit it anyway, but I would know that they didn’t have a tea room. In England, you always have a tea room. If you are actually a building with doors and walls and windows and a roof, you have a tea room. Even if you don’t have those things, sometimes you put a tea room right close by. Tea rooms are very important. If you are a giant, big house and people are allowed to come see your house, there is a tea room. I count on these things.
Michelle Butler 38:18
Well, when we become very, very famous podcasters, we will host a tea room tour of England. We’ll just pick our favorites and go from place to place.
Anne Brannen 39:04
As you know, I like the one, it’s not an old house, but I like the one at the Norfolk lavender farm. I like that. It’s full of lots of good food and many things made from lavender. So that’s Julian and her daddy and the crossbow incident and some bad things about children and grandchildren of people who are sending hostages. So that’s what we have to say about that. The next time you hear from us, though, is going to be our 100th episode.
Michelle Butler 40:21
Ah! That’s true.
Anne Brannen 40:24
We are now in our fifth year of finding horrible things that happened in the Middle Ages and then blabbing about it for a while. We’ve enjoyed it very much. And you know, those of you who listen, thank you. It’s nice if people are listening. And as you know, as you all know, there’s no money involved. We do this for free, just because we’re having fun. But it’ll be our 100th episode, and we decided that in order to mark the 100th episode, what we’re going to do is talk about some of our favorite episodes so far. So that’s what we’ll do. There won’t be a new crime. We’ll just mention some old ones.
Michelle Butler 40:57
It’s going to be a retrospective and talk–you know, which ones really stand out to us. I’m looking forward to this.
Anne Brannen 41:02
So this has been True Crime Medieval, where the crimes are just like they are today, only with less technology. And as you know, everybody’s related. You can find us on Apple podcast and Spotify and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. Pretty sure we’re there. You can get a hold of us at True Crime Medieval.com, truecrimemedieval is one word. And there you can find links to the podcast, and there’s an index now to help you find what you’re looking for. It used to be the only thing you could do is go by date, which meant nothing to any of us at all. And so now you can actually look things up by subject, yay. And you can find the show notes and the transcripts, ater we get them up. They don’t go up as quickly as the podcast do, but we get them up as soon as we can. You can also leave comments and get a hold of us, and we’d love to hear from you. Yeah, so that’s us. We’re almost 100 episodes old. Bye.
Michelle Butler 41:57
Bye.
97. Galeazzo Maria Sforza, the Duke of Milan, is Assassinated, Milan, Duchy of Milan 1476
Anne Brannen 0:25
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:37
And we are very happy today because, you know, sometimes we talk about crimes that weren’t really there, only people said they were, or sometimes we talk about people who were murdered, who were really very wonderful and people shouldn’t have done that. But every once in a while, we get somebody who’s assassinated and you just kind of want to give him a meda. That’s one of these. They don’t get a metal, by the way–there’s no metals involved. But we’re going to talk today about the time that Galeazzo Maria Sforza was assassinated. He was the Duke of Milan. He was assassinated in 1476, in Milan, and really, he wasn’t a great guy. He just sort of wasn’t. So that’s what we’re talking about today, because we thought this was pretty entertaining. On December 26, which is St. Stephen’s day, the Duke of Milan went to church to St. Stephen’s, because it was his day. And he went there, even though it was freezing, and there was a whole lot of snow and you could barely walk around. Horses were even worse, and so everybody wanted him not to go. Also there had been a whole lot of omens–there’d been like three ravens flying around at one point and there was a comet that wasn’t supposed to be there. Oh, and it had looked like his room was on fire, only his room wasn’t on fire. Things were not good. So he wasn’t supposed to go, but he did go anyway, because he wanted to hear the choir because he really loved music. And he went to church and he got assassinated. That’s what happened. That’s our crime. So here’s our context. The House of Sforza had been the rulers of Milan since 1450, when Galeazzo’s father Francesco, who had married the daughter of the last Duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, became the Duke of Milan because he died and Bianca Maria, who had gotten married to Sforza, she was his illegitimate daughter and she was his only heir. So that’s when the Sforzas became the Dukes of Milan. So Galeazzo’s father became the Duke of Milan when Galeazzo was about six years old. And then his father died in 1466 and Galeazzo Maria was 22. He was at that time in France, because Milan was allied with France. It’s really important to ally with France, unless you’re actually at war with France, because if you’re not allied with France, you’re going to be at war with France at some point. Anyway, they were allied with France, and he was leading a military force for the French king. He got called back and the people of Milan acclaimed him our leader. He had been worried that there was going to be some problems with the succession and the transference of power. But they were all happy to see him. Now, his mother had been working behind the scenes to get the nobles to be all together about this. So everything was great. Yay. And he was, in a lot of ways, he was a good ruler. He’s especially good at the arts. He was so good at being a patron of the arts. He had the ducal chapel of the Sforza castle in Milan, which you can go to, it’s still there. And you can see these things. You can see the castle, you can see the chapel. He had it built. It was all built within a year. It was 1473. And it got done very, very quickly. Beautifully frescoed. It was gorgeous. The whole reason he had this done was that he wanted to bring together singers–he had like 20, 22, he had a bunch of singers from around Europe come and they got rich because he escalated salaries and bonuses. They got benefits and clothing and houses and mining patents and monopolies and whatnot. Within two years, the chapel was the jewel of Europe because he got such good singers together. And he was also pretty successful in foreign relations. He kept Milan out of war with Venice, yay. Mostly because Venice was at war with Turkey, so they were kind of busy. But yay, out of war with Venice. He kept up good relations with Florence and the Medici. Lorenzo de Medici was his son’s godfather. And in 1471, the Duke and Duchess of Milan, they went to Florence during the springtime because they were going to make this, they made this pilgrimage to Florence and this visit, this great, wonderful visit, because of the great relations and they partly made everybody adore them on account of they threw money around, and they partly scandalized everybody because they ate meat every day and it was lent. Also there was–I don’t know if you hit this, Michelle, but you’re going to be so happy. Not at really what happened but that there was a drama tragedy during that visit because there was a play at San Spirito church, you know, the Holy Spirit. And it was a play about the descent of the Holy Ghost, which, if you remember, has to do with tongues of fire. Unfortunately, if you do the tongues of fire, like, really realistically, you can set your church on fire and burn it down to the ground. And so that’s what happened.
Michelle Butler 5:30
I found that, and I was so excited to do so.
Anne Brannen 5:38
I’m glad you found it because I knew you’d be so happy.
Michelle Butler 5:39
That was so cool. And it reminds me, of course, of the burning pipes in the Castle of Perseverance. I suspect it’s the same technology because we’re at roughly the same time.
Anne Brannen 5:52
If you’re going to deal with something like the tongues of fire coming down, you can do it with art, you know, you can do that, but you can also do it realistically, because you have the technology. But the technology is not necessarily safe in and of itself. And it’s certainly not safe all the time. Yep, they burnt the church down.
Michelle Butler 6:15
Medieval special effects.
Anne Brannen 6:17
It tells us they were using very good special effects, like, very good. In ways.
Michelle Butler 6:25
Very impressive special effects. Here, I’ll share with you the thing I found about this. “Many churches in Florence were famous for putting on often spectacular performances on particular feast days, including hoists, machinery and fireworks. Here it was the ascension. But after the performance of 1471 led to the old church burning down, the feste was discontinued. A report from 1428 tells of the use of cannons or fire tubes. This is some commitment to your art.”
Anne Brannen 7:00
It really is and I would think sort of dangerous.
Michelle Butler 7:05
I mean, I was concerned about in the Castle of Perseverance where we have the burning pipes in his, you know, in his hands and ears and in his ass. This is fire tubes fixed to the heads of the actors playing the apostles. So that–
Anne Brannen 7:23
Oh god no.
Michelle Butler 7:23
–fire could appear over their heads after the dove of the holy ghost appears.
Anne Brannen 7:31
Oh, that is so dangerous.
Michelle Butler 7:32
Holy smokes. And that’s what set the church on fire.
Anne Brannen 7:36
So it burned the church down. But didn’t it hurt the actors too?
Michelle Butler 7:40
You would think. That is a next level.
Anne Brannen 7:44
It really is. No, I hadn’t seen that. I’m glad you found that. I hadn’t seen that. In 1474 to 1476,he re-allied with the French against Burgundy. And so, you know, doing some more stuff there. But what worked with art and foreign policy, which is like handing out a lot of money, is not so successful at home. He wouldn’t listen to his father’s advisors. And so they all left the court and the money that he was spending on art and foreign relations depleted the coffers and required higher taxes. Higher taxes never makes people happy. You know, sometimes the people in a country are willing to pay higher taxes for this higher good, but often not. Sometimes they’re just pissed off. Because things were relatively stable, he had some room to to expand and kind of really be himself. Live his real life. So he made some stupid laws, such as anybody who danced after one in the morning was subjected to the death penalty. Which is like–is that in your house or in the street or in a public place–like is that any dancing whatsoever? And how often did this does lead to the death penalty–didn’t find that out. He paid for lots of finery and extravaganzas. In 1475, 1205 embroidered cloaks of velvet and silver got bought, because they were commissioned for a tournament. That takes a lot of money. He did found a printing press and they printed up the first Greek books. At least that was nice. But besides all that, besides spending all this money and having high taxes, he wasn’t a very good person. Now, exactly how bad he was is under argument, because you don’t know whether all of these stories are true. The Sforza Dukes were kind of known for immorality and he’s like the prime example of immoral dukes, hands down. We have an order for instance, for some gold brocade fabric that he ordered. It was going to be just like the duchess’ but the order has to be all secret so the duchess doesn’t find out, which pretty much lets you know that he was buying it for someone that the duchess wouldn’t have wanted him to be hanging out with. A priest wrote a poem about the duke are calling him a false villain, so the Duke had him put in the worst dungeon that they had, where he promptly died. He had another priest starved to death because he said the duke would not reign long, which, ironically, turned out to be true. But you know, he got starved to death. He made an artist paint the walls of a room in one night or be put to death. Apparently, the artist did get it all decorated within one night–how good it was, I don’t know. He had the hands cut off of some guy who talked to his mistress. There was a poacher who got caught with a rabbit and so he made the poacher swallow the rabbit whole until he died. That was bad. There was a man who had robbed three pilgrims and he got hung on the road to Rome with a sign around his neck that said, ‘Leave pilgrims alone.’ Okay, I did find that amusing. Somebody else got nailed into a coffin and buried alive. He raped both men and women and then passed them on to his followers. He raped the wives and daughters of Milan’s nobleman. We don’t actually know exactly how many of these things really were true. Some of them must have been but probably not all of them, but that they were stories told tells us what his reputation was.You might think that the assassination was, you know, the rising up of the people against their horrible ruler, but it wasn’t it actually that at all. There were three conspirators that were in on this plot to kill him. Andrea Lampugnani was out of money, and he thought that there was going to be all this discord after the assassination, and then he was going to be able to make a lot of money. Exactly how that’s working, I don’t know. But that was his plan. I think that’s one of those stupid plots. Like if I killed my wife’s musician I’ll become King of Scotland. You know, stupid plots. I think this is one of them. Your favorite stupid plot. Michelle, that was the one where the high Duke of Poland that gets assassinated, the monk priest, that gets assassinated because–
Michelle Butler 11:50
Yes, that is very dumb.
Anne Brannen 11:55
Somebody assassinates him because he gave the crown to his brother and they thought that they should share it or something. Okay, so he was out of money. And Carlo Visconti–the Vicontis had been the rulers of Milan before the Sforzas. So this must be a cousin. Carlo Visconti wanted to avenge a sister that the Duke had raped. And Gerolamo Olgiati, who was a poet. He was a poet wanted to free the city. He was actually doing this in order to help the city. When poets go really wrong. And they had all been gathered together by Cola Montano, who was not well behaved at all. He was really bad. He was a teacher of rhetoric. He used it, I suppose, all this rhetoric to convince these younger men that they were going to be the saviors of their people, even if some of them were out for vengeance or getting money. So they got ready by meeting nightly and practicing. They have they had the moves down, which, you know, you have to do because otherwise you might freeze. They had the moves down, and they had all their prayers. They prayed that the city and the duchy would be restored to liberty and that the saints wouldn’t be all sad at them, because there was going to be blood spilled in the church. So it was a really snowy, cold morning, and they went to the church. When the Duke entered, Lampugnani stepped in front of the Duke and kneeled as if he was going to kiss the ring or give a petition or something, but instead, he stabbed upward, he stabbed the Duke in his guts, and then he stabbed him in the breast and the other two conspirators jumped in, they all stab them, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab, stab a lot. So he died really quickly–which, you know, okay, I’d rather have a quick death than a long one, which, I tell you, especially long deaths in the Middle Ages, you don’t want those. You do not want a long death in the Middle Ages. It’s not good. After that, Olgiati and Visconti, they got away but Lampugnani tripped over somebody’s skirt, and he fell down. So he was immediately killed by one of the Duke’s servants. And then, he got torn apart basically. Amazingly, oddly enough, Milan did not rise in joy and gratitude, which is what Olgiati expected. Olgiati had expected all of Milan to rise in joy and gratitude. Remember, he’s the one who was doing it for the people, the poet, but he discovered that this was wrong. He was wrong in this expectation when he saw the mob dragging Lampugnani’s body past him in the street. And they found Visconit and they found Olgiati and they got tortured. The poet continued to believe that he had acted righteously and he wrote some more poetry while he was in prison. He had a confession in Latin, and he died saying in Latin that they would be perpetually remembered after their death, which is obviously true since we’re talking about it. So hey, guess that’s so. Then their heads got cut off and stuck on the Broletto Nuovo tower. And so there you are. There was not an uprising and they were all killed. After the Duke was dead, people were very poetic about how great he was. They told stories about his greatness and his generous deeds, very different stories that they had been telling before he got murdered. However, his wife Bona of Savoy–Michelle, do you remember who Bona of Savoy is?
Michelle Butler 15:05
No, sorry, I didn’t look that up.
Anne Brannen 15:07
Ah. You remember Edward the fourth?
Michelle Butler 15:12
Yes.
Anne Brannen 15:12
Do you remember that he got married to Elizabeth Woodville?
Michelle Butler 15:18
Yes.
Anne Brannen 15:19
And do you remember that after that the nobles all met together because they were going to have him get married. Only he had to tell them sorry. He was already married. That was Bona of Savoy.
Michelle Butler 15:30
Oh, interesting.
Anne Brannen 15:31
Yeah, she didn’t go to England.
Michelle Butler 15:34
Well, that was a serious mistake on Edward’s part.
Anne Brannen 15:37
That would have been better, it would have been better for England. And it would have been better for Bona I think. I don’t know. Maybe she had a good time getting married to this guy. Although she would have been seeing people running around with the same gold brocade that she had on. I don’t know. His wife wrote to the Pope, because–here’s the deal. Galeazzo had died without having time to go to confession, so she wanted to know, if the Pope would let her confess for Galeazzo, and she would tell all his sins. Also, she gave some money to the fund that they were raising to defend the holy see from something or other, whatever it was that was attacking them in the moment. She was gonna give them money. And here were all his sins, so that he can get out of purgatory. She listed his sins. And this is what she said. She said that he had conducted unlawful warfare hours, and that he pillaged and he robbed and he devastated the country. He exhorted people, and he ignored injustices. He’d also knowingly committed injustices. And he had taxed the people too much, and had enjoyed carnal vices, and that there were various and innumerable other crimes, which she didn’t say. So those are the ones that she knew about.
Michelle Butler 16:55
And was willing to tell the Pope.
Anne Brannen 16:59
And was willing to tell the Pope. This Sforzas continued to be the Dukes of Milan, with some hiatuses when either the French or the German took over for a little bit, until 1535, when the last Sforza to rule Milan, Francesco the second, died childless. And so the Holy Roman Emperor got Milan, and he gave it to his son Philip the Second of Spain in 1540. So that’s the start of the Spanish rule in Milan. So, hey, the Sforzas. When we do these things, often mostly the way we set this up, is I’ve talk about all the history and whatnot, and then Michelle goes to find out whatever it is that caught Michelle’s eye, which can be different things, depending on what we’ve got. Michelle, what did you spend your time on?
Michelle Butler 17:47
I really was interested in finding out about the source, because the things he’s accused of are so terrible–having the poacher have to swallow the bunny whole, you know, and choking on it.
Anne Brannen 18:05
People all buried alive.
Michelle Butler 18:09
He’s accused of such dreadful things. I really wanted to go find out what the source for that was. And what I found is that Bernardino Corio book that was published in 1503 is pretty contemporary. And what’s really cool is that he’s an eyewitness. He knew the dude, it’s so interesting.
Anne Brannen 18:30
So it’s not just that he’s a contemporary, which is always wonderful and seldom happens, but that he was actually there at the murder.
Michelle Butler 18:38
Yes. Corio was born in Milan. He’s a slightly younger contemporary. He was born in Milan in 1459. He was part of a family that had already by this point, served the Sforzas for 250 years.
Anne Brannen 18:54
Oh, really? Like before they had become the dukes of Milan?
Michelle Butler 18:58
Yes. His family had worked–they’re not servant class, they’re retainers. They’re well to do retainers. The future Duke attended his baptism. He was part of his household. He knew him. I saw accounts that, ‘well, you know, Corio was writing or at least finished the book after the Duke was dead and even after the Duke’s son was dead, and then you know, the next one had taken over, so it was totally fine for Corio to slander the Duke,’ but that’s not really what happens. It’s a complex portrait of him. He talks about the patronage of the arts, the duke’s love of music, the absolutely vast spending on jewels and clothing. But he also says this: “this Galeazzo at so was much subject to Venus and to filthy lust in such manner that his subjects were greatly disturbed by this.”
Anne Brannen 20:01
Carnal sins as his wife will say.
Michelle Butler 20:05
So I think there’s some there there. I don’t actually think that this is a case of somebody just being slandered and then other people repeating the slander. I think we’re in a territory where something actually happened. The duke said, ‘I’m a bit ostentatious, but that is no great sin in the Lord.’ That’s what he was willing to say about himself.
Anne Brannen 20:26
Whoa. Well, and ostentation. That’s interesting.
Michelle Butler 20:30
It’s pomposo. So that word in Italian might have a little bit a different connotation. It’s been translated ostentatious but it’s pomposos so it might be–obviously, it’s connected to our word for pompous. So I found that fascinating–that Bernardino is part of his household. And he goes off and writes this history that isn’t like some of the other histories that we’ve run into that are intended to be kind of gossipy and let me tell you all the worst stuff. Corio is trying to write a history of Milan from its beginnings, up until his own time period, really, and it’s a labor of love. He publishes this book at his own expense in 1503. And he loses money. It becomes, eventually, adopted almost as a state history, but the first printing, he loses his shirt on it.
Anne Brannen 21:20
Does he ever get any renumeration when it becomes more popular or renowned?
Michelle Butler 21:25
No, because he dies in 1519.
Anne Brannen 21:27
Okay.
Michelle Butler 21:27
One of the reasons we know that it didn’t do well is that he has to sell unsold copies to a publisher who then adds some stuff to it, adds an index, adds some new wood cuts, and then when they put it back on the market, it goes through edition, after edition, but they don’t really change the text, they just sort of spruce it up.
Anne Brannen 21:48
Why does it go through edition after edition then? Do you think it’s because the publisher is actually in the business and knows more about how to get things produced?
Michelle Butler 21:58
I’m not sure whether it’s a marketing issue, or whether it’s that by that time, the Milanese are ready to think about their history in this way. And it’s actually also the first known work of Italian history written in Italian rather than in Latin.
Anne Brannen 22:14
Oh, really?
Michelle Butler 22:15
Isn’t that interesting?
Anne Brannen 22:16
I love that.
Michelle Butler 22:17
It’s fascinating, because one of the things that happens to it 100 years later, is that its Italian is seen as kind of backward and old fashioned, and so there’s updating of it that happens. But again, it’s tinkering with it to go with the popularity, it’s not really changing what Corio is actually saying. He loves his city. His perspective is that he wants to be as positive as possible. So what he’s willing to say about the Duke, you know, that he’s even willing to–first of all, he can’t leave it out, because he knows that everybody knows this, but willing to just say this, tells us that there’s probably something to it.
Anne Brannen 22:54
I like it, though, that right after the Duke’s death, for a while there was like he was, he was great. We really miss him. They did that for a while. But no, they knew. Everybody knew better obviously.
Michelle Butler 23:06
As far as I can tell, Corio’s book has not been published all the way, like as a whole, into English translated into English, but I did was able to find–his assessment of the Duke is pretty famous. So I was able to find bits and pieces that had been translated.
Anne Brannen 23:23
So he was there at the assassination. So is he where we get the details from as to how it all happened?
Michelle Butler 23:31
Yeah, he’s the eyewitness account of that. And I think that’s fascinating. We don’t often get eyewitness accounts of our crimes.
Anne Brannen 23:39
No, we do not. Even getting a contemporary account is really exciting. Well, I gave the assassination. Is there stuff that I left out that you want to put in?
Michelle Butler 23:49
No, no. I am going to skip over the burning the church down in 1471, even though I was very excited about it.
Anne Brannen 23:54
That, and who Bona of Savoy was not.
Michelle Butler 23:59
I found some lost plays from early modern England, that touch on the Duke of Milan.
Anne Brannen 24:07
Really.
Michelle Butler 24:09
There is a lost play called the Three Sisters of Mantua from 1578 that deal with the daughters of the Marquess of Mantua, and those sisters are–the first two are engaged to our duke and then he rejects them because the first one has some health problems, and then the second one, he’s concerned that her children would have the same health problems as the first one, but it’s about the sisters kind of like dodging the bullet.
Anne Brannen 24:44
You know, you don’t hear that he treated his wives badly. That doesn’t seem to be the issue. It’s just that, you know, he’s certainly not faithful.
Michelle Butler 24:53
It’s hard to tell what lost plays were about but this one, we have a description of so we know that that’s what this one is about. We know that there is one called The History of the Duke of Milan and the Marquess of Mantua that was done in 1587. We’re not sure about that one. The really tantalizing one is from 1594 and it’s called Galeazzo.
Anne Brannen 25:15
It’s about this Galeazzo and not his son?
Michelle Butler 25:19
The scholar I’m reading here thinks there’s no way to know but he thinks it may be about the villainous life of the wicked Galeazzo Sforza. He can’t say it for sure. But this is what he wants to put out as a possibility. The palace that they built, Sforza castle, that was started by our duke’s father and finished by our duke. It’s still there. It’s a museum, you can go visit. It is so cool. It’s not a 19th century castle. It’s a 15th century castle. It’s got 23 foot walls, it’s a real fortified residence.
Anne Brannen 25:58
It’s near the center of Milan is what I was seeing. So it’s really accessible. And the chapel is still there. The one that he had that he built so that he could get all the singers.
Michelle Butler 26:12
Yeah, yeah. His things are still there. It’s really, really interesting. It’s not necessarily filled with their belongings. It has several art collections. But I thought that was pretty cool that that’s still there. The church he was murdered at the doorstep of is, of course, still there. And one of the reasons we put this on the on the list is that this leads directly to the Pazzi conspiracy, because it’s only a couple of years between this in 1476 and the Pazzi conspiracy trying to wipe out the De Medicis. Whoever planned that one was like, That was a great idea. Let’s just take it one better. We’re actually gonna do this in the church, not on the doorstep.
Anne Brannen 26:54
Well, okay. But it didn’t go well. The first conspiracy didn’t go well for the conspirators. And the next conspiracy didn’t go well for the conspiracies either.
Michelle Butler 27:06
There’s argument that this gave them the idea, though, because you know where he’s going to be, is the thing. You can get a hold of him, you know where he’s going to be. They knew that the Duke was going to be here, because he was going to come to church this day. It was a thing that he was going to do. There’s a series of modern games is the last thing I have for you called Assassin’s Creed.
Anne Brannen 27:27
I have to say that if you go to Google, you have to be very careful because a great deal of the history you get is not actually history. It’s from games. Yeah.
Michelle Butler 27:36
In the Assassin’s Creed game series, it’s the Templars who orchestrate the assassination, which is really interesting.
Anne Brannen 27:47
That didn’t happen.
Michelle Butler 27:48
No. But it’s interesting that they choose that as a conspiracy theory. And they have a reason why the Templars did it–in order to destabilize the relationship between Milan and Florence, because they had gotten together and the Templars did not appreciate that because it makes their life hard for what they’re trying to do. But the Templars aren’t really a thing by 1476, so it’s very much a conspiracy theory kind of thing. The idea is that when you destabilize Milan like this, then the Templars are planning to come and take over the city. This is all made up. The Templars are super gone by 1476.
Anne Brannen 28:29
Yeah, there are no Templars. I don’t want to like put the Templars forth as like some kind of like icon of goodness. Although they’re not nearly as bad as many people think they were. But I don’t think they ever did anything like that, that we know of.
Michelle Butler 28:45
Yes, yes. Yes. I thought that this is really interesting, though, that is in the game like this. I know I am continually shocked by these people. But honest to Pete kneeling, like you’re gonna kiss the ring and then stabbing is naughty.
Anne Brannen 29:03
Yeah, that’s not good.
Michelle Butler 29:04
Because, you know, one thing that we know from the early Middle Ages, is they’re really cognizant of knowing that in order to keep society together, everybody needs to follow the rules that we have established for how we get along with each other. And at this point, they’ve decided to start throwing those things out. And it leads to so much chaos.
Anne Brannen 29:23
Yeah, the changing times are always problematic.
Michelle Butler 29:27
But the castle looks really cool. So that looks really interesting. I’m sad about the lost plays. I’m fascinated by the special effects burning down the church. One of the things that I really find fascinating about that, is that that is a moment of overlap between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In Italy at this point, we are well into the Renaissance really, in some ways, because Leonardo da Vinci is one of the artists that are Duke is patronizing. But you have the plays happening on the feast days with all of the awesome special effects. It’s a play of the ascension. And they’ve got the special effects for the showing up the Holy Ghost. It really emphasized for me that 15th century Italy is not either the Middle Ages or the Renaissance. It’s this moment where it’s a palimpsest of both.
Anne Brannen 30:23
Yeah, changing times. One of the things that I was reading is that the portrait that you usually see of him is not really what he looked like. His nose is is much bigger than it really was, for instance. It’s a nose that was like a symbol for the Sforzas. So that’s not what it looks like. I’ve seen a lot of–what’s the word for it starts with R, the scholarship where you’re trying to–
Michelle Butler 30:43
Oh, revisionist.
Anne Brannen 30:44
I’ve seen a lot of scholarship which is revisionist in that he’s was not that bad. He didn’t do the bad things and that really he was a good ruler, here the reasons. What you’re saying about the contemporary that’s trying to make Milan look good saying here’s the some of the things he did, he was not actually a good person, even beyond being, I don’t know, extravagant or whatnot. He was not really good. He was not really a very good person. He was an OK ruler, but he wasn’t a great ruler. So at the beginning of all this, I said, really, I’d like to give a metal to the guys that actually murder him. That’s if you’re looking at this person who’s burying people alive and stuffing rabbits down their throats and raping everybody he finds. I think it’s okay for them to get rid of him. There’s some reason for that. I can see why the poet thought that they were saving the city. This was kind of succinct. Full of things, but succinct. And so that’s what we’ve got. That’s what we came up with. Sometimes we have things that just go on and on and on. I actually really liked this one a lot. I enjoyed. I enjoy him. I enjoyed it because he was really awful. And yet he wasn’t really awful. And he was a good leader, but he wasn’t really that good. I liked it. And the next time you hear from us, we’ll be doing our April Fool’s episode. For April Fool’s we always like to talk about something that people think existed in the Middle Ages, but really didn’t. And so this year, we’re doing chastity belts because they weren’t there. There’s no there there. But everybody knows about them. That didn’t happen. It just–they make no sense whatsoever. So we’ll be doing chastity belts next time we see you. This has been True Crime Medieval where the crimes are just like they are today only with less technology. You can find us on Spotify and Apple podcasts and all the places where the podcasts are hanging out. And if you go to truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word, there are links there to the podcast, to show notes, to transcriptions. And you can also leave comments and get a hold of us. And if you know of any medieval crimes that you think that we should pay attention to, let us know and if we have done it, and you just missed it, we’ll let you know. And if we haven’t done it, we’ll go Oh, and then we’ll look at it. That’s what we’ll do. Bye.
Michelle Butler 32:48
Bye.
96. Leszek the White, High Duke of Poland, is Assassinated, Morcinkowo, Poland 1227
Anne Brannen 0:25
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 0:34
And I’m Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa.
Anne Brannen 0:37
Today, we are going back into Poland. We were in Poland recently, a few weeks ago. I forget what we were doing, but we were in Poland. Now we’re in Poland again. We’re in Poland in the 13th century, early on in the 13th century, when Leszek the White was assassinated in Gasawa, Poland in November of 1227. It was really very sad. So in November of 1227, Leszek, who was at that moment the High Duke of Poland, called the Council of the Polish Dukes to discuss something or other–we actually don’t really know what they were going to be talking about. We’ve got some good guesses, but we don’t actually really know. But he called this council and they waited for everybody to show up. But not everybody did show up, so they were all going to just disperse. But Leszek and another duke were assassinated, in Leszek’s case rather dramatically, because he was in the bath, and he escaped, and he rode his horse all naked. He got away, only not far, just a little over a mile. Then the assassins caught up with him and killed him. So that’s our crime in brief, but as usual, what I want to know is, how did we get here? How indeed. So all of this is happening during the Polish age of fragmentation. This feudal fragmentation is almost entirely a European sort of thing. It happens when a ruler dies and the realm, rather than getting passed to a new ruler, gets divided up to several new rulers for various reasons, depending on where you are. In Poland, that time lasted about 200 years, from the death of Boleslaw the third in 1138, Boleslaw Wry-mouth, who, in an attempt to keep his sons from fighting amongst themselves over the realm, divided it up into five pieces so that his dynasty would be preserved and peace would reign, which didn’t happen. The preservation of a unified Poland wouldn’t show up until 1314 when WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw the Short managed to rule over various pieces of Poland and became king. So that’s when there’s a king. Up until then, during the fragmentation, whichever duke held Krakow was the High Duke, more or less. That’s pretty much how it worked. So these things went back and forth, and back and forth, and back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth. But there wasn’t a king for all those times because they were just different places that were getting divided or put together or there were going to be alliances, or there were going to be fights. It’s 200 years of this, and that’s where we are. Leszek was born about 50 years into the fragmentation. This was around 1185. His father was Casimir II the Just, who had been the High Duke for a couple of times–because it isn’t just that there’ll be a High Duke and then somebody will take over. No, no, there’ll be a High Duke and he’ll be gone and then he’ll come back and then he’ll be gone, and then he’ll come back and then he’ll be gone. Not only are we not looking at unification, we’re not having a whole lot of, I don’t know, just consistency. It’s not happening. He was about 10 when his father died, and his mother attempted to rule his region. That’s all I found on that. But I just am fascinated by that. How did you think that was going to work, honey, because it didn’t. Leszek’s uncle Mieszko, who had himself been High Duke for a while already, put together an army and he attacked Krakow and that battle went on–there was a couple of segments of the battle–and finally Mieszko retreated. But in 1198, Leszek’s mother signed over control of Krakow to Mieszko. In exchange for this, Leszek got lesser Poland and Masovia and Kujavia. A couple of years later, he and his brother divided those things up too because why not? So Mieszko, the uncle, is the High Duke, but he died in 1202 and his son, and that son–we’re going to hear a lot about him– that was WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw the third, WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Spindleshanks, who was by then Mieszko’s only surviving son and so therefore he’s Leszek’s cousin. He was invited to Krakow and became High Duke for a little while, but the nobles of Krakow didn’t like him and they invited Leszek to become High Duke. So Leszek’s High Duke now but it isn’t uninterrupted reign. No, no. One of the first things he did was put his holdings under Pope Innocent the third as vassal. Okay. So the holdings of the High Duke of Poland are now in vassalage to Pope Innocent the third. This makes a clear distinction between Poland and the Holy Roman Empire, which at that time, though theoretically recognized by the papacy, was at the moment in having a bunch of conflict, which it did more often than it was unified. Leszek was also very interested in relations with the Kievan Rus. He had an alliance with prince Roman of Vladimir-in-Volhynia, which deteriorated because Roman invaded the lands that were held by Leszek and his brother, Conrad. An alliance always will sort of deteriorate if you invade your ally’s lands. We’ve learned that many times in history, have we not, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 6:02
Seems like it’s reasonable to be sort of annoyed about that.
Anne Brannen 6:06
Yeah. It’s not like humans stopped doing it, though, is it? Badly behaved, badly behaved, 1000s, millions of years. Okay. Roman was killed in battle in 1205. Surprise, surprise, there was conflict over the succession. Oh, who knew that that would happen. The Kievan Rus are now having problems over the succession, so Leszek and his brother backed out of the conflict by signing a treaty with Hungary, why not, which avoided war with the Hungarians and let the Hungarians have access to Roman’s lands. The Hungarians were happy about that. Leszek and Conrad both married daughters of the rulers of Kievan Rus. Relations with Hungary remained conflicted even though they had the treaty because basically, one of the main things we’ve learned in the, what is this? four years we’ve been doing the podcast now? Is it four years? Are we in the fourth year?
Michelle Butler 6:58
We’re in the fifth.
Anne Brannen 6:59
It’s been four years and we’re in the fifth. Okay. Well, in those years, one of the things we’ve learned is that it isn’t that treaties are not worth the paper that they’re written on. Treaties aren’t even worth a match to burn them. Treaties, they let you get out the door sometimes, but they don’t give you much space. So they’re having conflicts with Hungary. The border regions are kind of going back and forth between Polish and Hungarian rule. Finally in 1219, Leszek signed a stronger treaty with Hungary. He and Andrew the second of Hungary allied, and they had successes and defeats fighting the Kievan Rus. So they allied, fought the Kievan Rus, back and forth, but they–Hungary and Poland–allied right then. When I say that they’re allied, I don’t mean ‘and that will continue until 1942.’ I mean, for like, a few months, I don’t know, maybe years. Meanwhile, back in Krakow, Leszek was deposed and excommunicated in 1210. Wait, wait, wait. Didn’t he have a strong relationship with the Pope? Yeah, whatever. We don’t even know why this happened. He never could figure it out. Krakow was given by the Pope to Mieszko Tanglefoot, who was one of the sons of Boleslav the third who, you remember, started all the fragmentation, it’s all his fault. The local church was as surprised as Leszek was about all this, and so they supported Leszek. And so this is a difficult situation. There was a synod, there was a synod because they were going to decide all these things. Who’s the rightful ruler? And while that synod was going on, Mieszko Tanglefoot took Krakow. And so he was the high dude because that’s where he was determined. So that’s another way to decide other than just, you know, having a meeting. Okay. I enjoyed this so much. I cannot tell you. Humans. So for a while, like I don’t know, a few months, he was he was the High Duke for a while. After that, a few months, the Archbishop managed to talk the pope into rescinding the bull that he had sent out that deposed and excommunicated Leszek. And so he was High Duke again. That is his fourth reign as High Duke, by the way. This is the one he keeps until he’s dead. Have a little rest here. Ah. Leszek is High Duke. Meanwhile, more stuff. Leszel was very, very interested in making the Prussians Christian. Lots of people were actually interested in making the Prussians Christian. There was this whole thing about all the Baltic states were not behaving on account of being pagan and whatnot. And so the rest of Central Europe, they were going to fix this, weren’t they? Well of course they were. So to that end, though his relationship with WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw the third , Spindleshanks was conflicted, they joined together along with Henry the Bearded, who we’ll also be hearing about a lot. This is another one of their cousins. These are three cousins.
Michelle Butler 9:54
Of course they are.
Anne Brannen 9:56
Because everybody’s related, but they’re not the kind of cousins where you know you like grow up next door to each other and eat Sunday lunch. They are the kinds of cousins where you get together every once in a while and you sit across the table and you say really mean things to each other. Only you’ve disguised them as very like, ‘well don’t you have the nicest hat there,’ you know, things like that. That’s what they are. Not good cousins. So these three, they signed an alliance by which various succession matters were decided. Okay. And there was interest in arranging a mission into Prussia. They’re gonna send Christian missionaries in Russia. And the pope wanted the Poles to be on crusade. That would be good, wouldn’t it? You wanted the Poles to go on crusade to the Holy Land. So Leszek said he couldn’t go. And this is one of the things that apparently, besides the whole getting slaughtered while you’re naked on your horse, this is one of the things that Leszek is most known for. He told the pope that he could not go to the Holy Land, because they did not have beer. And the Pope said okay, and didn’t excommunicate him.
Michelle Butler 10:58
One of the best I can’t go on crusade, please excuse me notes.
Anne Brannen 11:02
It’s a good one, it’s a really good one. Also, they have this idea of making trading centers. Like we’ve got to make the Prussians Christian–how to do this, and they have all these peaceful ways they’re gonna do it. They’re gonna send missionaries, and they’re gonna make trading centers. So they’re gonna make these special trading centers where the pagan Prussians could meet the Polish Christians, and come to understand them by buying whatever the hell the Polish Christians were gonna sell them. I don’t know. That didn’t get anywhere, so they invaded. But the invasion fell apart, too. So I’m just going to take a little segue here, because why not? What’s going to happen eventually, is that the Teutonic Knights will sign a treaty with Poland in 1230, which gives them this territory from which they could then attack the Prussians in order to make the Prussians be Christian, because they had not responded well to the missions and the trading centers. I mean, what the hell are you going to do? Also the invasion hadn’t even worse, so the Teutonic Knights are going to do it. I have to say, do I like what the Teutonic Knights are doing? I do not. But I gotta say they are really good at what they’re doing. That was in 1230. By the end of that century, the Teutonic Knights had conquered the Prussians, they had suppressed their language and their culture, and they had caused them all to be Christian. So that’s what they want. They did it. But it was such a complete suppression that we do not know much about the pagan Prussians. The culture went extinct. There’s some unreliable Chronicles so we are able to see that they had a polytheistic religion, that was not surprisingly related to Latvian and Lithuanian mythologies–all from at the same place. They had things like a harvest deity and an underworld god and gods of water and things like that. Various important things. Suaixtix, who was a god of light and stars. Light and stars. It was like day and night at the same time. I think this is marvelous but it’s all fragments. We don’t really know. Because the Teutonic Knights. They did it. They did it. They didn’t slaughter the Prussians, but they slaughtered the culture, which is a form of genocide as we know. Where was I? Okay. So there’s the Prussians and they weren’t okay, were they, because they were all pagan. They had thunder gods and rock gods and star gods and God knows what and I don’t know, we don’t know if they had the sacred house snakes like the Lithuanians do. I like to think that they did you know. They would have had some kind of tree that was really important and I would like to think that they have those lovely house snakes because I’m very fond of them, as you know. We refer you to our podcast concerning–what was that, the Lithuanian…because I only remember the snakes. Somebody got assassinated. Oh it was the monk. It was the monk-prince. Because that’s where I got to learn about the Lithuanian house snakes. So since the Teutonic Knights hadn’t subjugated them yet–this is at the time where we are, the Teutonic Knights are coming later–the Poles put together, I’m not kidding you, they put together a Knight Guard. Now, this is spelled knight, but those of you who know Game of Thrones will recognize some similarities. They honest to god put together a Knight guard. Some knights from all the provinces are sent to guard the borders. I’m not kidding. And the border watchers all come from the various territories, and but it all fell apart, didn’t it? Because for one thing, they weren’t being written by George RR Martin. They were just being all human, because the Prussians waged a surprise attack and they slaughter bunches of the knight watchers and the commander got exiled. After which they were all humiliated. His people were all humiliated and so they wanted Leszek of Krakow because he should not be hiding anymore on account of the Knight watchers had humiliated themselves. So they invited Henry the Bearded–you remember he was one of the cousins that was going to make the Prussians be Christian–they invited Henry the Bearded to come to Krakow, so of course he did. Why not? Because to hell with the Alliance, who pays attention to that anyway. He tried to have a battle with Leszek, really he did. But things kept happening and so there wasn’t battle. But the alliance obviously is not going very well. Then there was a conflict between WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw the third, Spindleshanks, the other member of the cousin triad.
Michelle Butler 15:42
They have the best nicknames.
Anne Brannen 15:44
I know. They’re much better than English.
Michelle Butler 15:45
This guy’s Skinny Legs.
Anne Brannen 15:48
Yeah, he did apparently had skinny legs. Oh, and the reason Leszek was Leszek the white is that he had blond hair.
Michelle Butler 15:53
And Henry the bearded. You would think that that wouldn’t be especially unusual.
Anne Brannen 15:58
Then there was a conflict between WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw the third Spindleshanks and WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Odonic, who I have not mentioned before, because I wanted to give you a little rest before we got here. But that’s his nephew, who wanted his uncle’s lands, because his uncle didn’t have a successor because he didn’t have any children. So why shouldn’t his nephew get it? Obviously. And also more stuff. The Duke of Pomerania–that’s the Polish region from which the Pomeranian dogs get their name. They didn’t actually originate there, but that’s where they were bred. That’s the Pomeranians. They had gotten allied with WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw Odonic in an agreement to oust Leszek, who, after all, had been in his incarnation as High Duke of Poland, reigning for like 16 years already. And who does that? You need him out, you need him out. 16 years he’s been in there. And that’s not even counting the three other times he was High Duke for a little while. That’s just too much. Because if you’re going to have a fragmentation, you cannot put up with any kind of things going along as they are for a while. So he has to go. So Leszek called the Polish Dukes together to deal with all this hoo ha, and that was in November of 1227. Everybody showed up except WÅ‚adysÅ‚aw the third ‘Spindleshanks.’ He had a lot of skin in the game. So that was kind of weird. So they waited for him for a couple of weeks, but people started leaving and then on the 24th of November–Henry the Bearded was still there, and Leszek was still there. Henry the Bearded was in bed, because it was in the morning and he hadn’t gotten up yet. Leszek was in his bath. Spindleshanks and his men showed up. Yes, they did. They attacked Henry the Bearded but he survived. He was wounded, but one of his knights, Peregrinus, saved him by putting his body over him. He lost his life. Leszek was in the bath and he managed to escape–he managed to get out of the bath house, he ran naked from the bathhouse to where his horse was stabled. He jumped on the horse, and he fled. Still naked, of course, you know, there was no time to put any clothes on whatsoeve. He was in the bath. And he escaped into the snowy forest. But they caught up with him at the town of Marcinkowo and then they killed him. That’s our crime. Yeah. Well, what happened then? Oddly, the Church, which was usually very involved in Polish affairs, did nothing. And though there still was no king in Poland, Leszek had been recognized by the Polish Dukes as the High Duke and has held that power for 16 years, as I say, not counting the three times before, so this was a real break. His son was about a year old, so he’s out of the running for the succession. Conrad, Leszek’s younger brother had a claim, but Wladyslaw the third ‘Spindleshanks’ was Leszek’s successor according to the Treaty of 1217. But Henry the bearded is in this too. About five years later, Henry ends up with the High Duke-ship after it went first to Wladyslaw. And then it went to Conrad. Conrad’s knights had captured Henry at Mass and imprisoned him. So his son took over. Conrad released Henry when he promised to give up Krakow. But since it was under duress, the Pope said he didn’t have to keep his word. Henry and Wladyslaw the third got together to take Poland, only Wladyslaw the third ‘Spindleshanks’ died. He was almost 70 years old and the French chronicler Alberic of Trois-Fontaines says that he tried to rape a German girl and she killed him. This is not believed by everybody. Like maybe it wasn’t him that this happened, that this is a story about his nephew Wladyslaw Odonic. But the Polish chronicler Jan Dlugosz says that he was, in his whole last year of his life, to the disgust of his subjects, fornicating with prostitutes, so maybe this actually did happen. But any rate, he’s dead. So Henry took Krakow and that’s where we’re going to stop that piece of the story, except I have some other things to say, going a little further on, because it wasn’t like the fragmented Poland, which was fragmented for 200 years, kind of like had only infighting amongst itself for 200 years. No, another big thing happened. Henry was called King of all Poland by later historians, but he wasn’t. He simply was not. He was high Duke, but he managed more or less to hold things together. But three years after his death, the Mongols who had already conquered the Kievan Rus in 1238, invaded Poland. And because Poland was all fragmented, that went pretty well for the Mongols. They killed half of the Hungarian people, they love the steppes–honest to God, there were like 2 million people in Hungary, we think, and a million of them died. They took Dalmatia and Moravia, they took some of Prussia, they weren’t able to take any of Bohemia–it has to do with the mountains. Bohemia was safe. And it turned out that the fortified cities were able to withstand their attacks better, which is why Hungary came to have a whole lot of them. So it was the land that was devastated and the people there, but if you were in one of the fortified towns, you were safer,. They built more, they invaded Austria, they invaded Bulgaria. And the Europeans were not prepared for Mongol tactics. They just simply were not. So they learned the advantages of fortification, and they learned the advantages of gunpowder, which the Mongols knew about. And a lot of things changed. The Mongols would be there for a while. And then they left. I’m gonna get to that. But there were some things that became permanent changes, or one thing –the Russians united. Russia was like Poland, kind of like all these fragmented things, and one way to fight the Mongols was to unify. Russia has never since been conquered. I was reading someone saying that Moscow had never been invaded. This is total lie. The Mongols invite invaded Moscow twice. And then there was that Napoleon thing. But Russia itself was never conquered after the Mongols. They were able to get them out. There had been trade routes with the east, from the west to the east. But they had fallen into disuse, and were not good anymore. But they became reopened, there were diplomatic relations established in between Europe and China. There were missions that went to China. There were post stations and rest stops built along the trade routes. Paper money was introduced to Europe. Advanced medicine, which came from India and the Middle East through China, came to Europe. There was paper making, there was silk, there was glassware. Later, the bubonic plague had a nice time going through that trade route. So that was a disadvantage to it. Very good transportation route. But there were some things that actually really changed Europe the same way that the Crusades changed Europe–an influx of ideas from outside. There were three waves of the Mongol invasions, but they left in 1242. They left because the Khan had died. The military leaders had to go to council and vote and so they just left. So they were gone. They got stuff and then they left. And after that, instead of returning west, they went east. Kubla Khan would take the Song Dynasty of China in 1279. We are at some point going to have to really spend some time on the Golden Horde because it’s fascinating.
Michelle Butler 23:49
Yes, yes. That will take some research.
Anne Brannen 23:52
We were talking about them some when we were talking about the Crimean slave trade. Because that was what the Mongols would if you resisted. They were just vicious. But if you went along with things, you know, they were okay. They would let you be whatever religion you wanted to be unless you bothered them about it. They might enslave you, they might take all your stuff.
Michelle Butler 24:17
That was a strategy that had worked pretty well for the Roman Empire. I would think that lapis lazuli made its way along that trade route as well.
Anne Brannen 24:26
Did Europe not have lapis lazuli before?
Michelle Butler 24:29
I thought it came in later.
Anne Brannen 24:30
I’m gonna look this up because I do not know.
Michelle Butler 24:33
I think of it mostly as being a thing in the second half of the Middle Ages. Not the first half. I don’t think the blues show up in, like, the Irish manuscripts.
Anne Brannen 24:42
That’s right. I don’t–yeah, they’re not in my head there. Okay, yes. You’re right. By the end of the Middle Ages, lapis lazuli began to be exported to Europe where it was ground into powder and made into ultramarine.
Michelle Butler 24:56
And of course, Arabic numerals eventually make their way over and make bookkeeping so much easier.
Anne Brannen 25:02
Much easier. Because the Romans had a lot–the Romans were not bad at all organization and whatnot. But the their numbering system not nearly as useful as the Arabic system.
Michelle Butler 25:14
I mean, you’ve read a hell of a lot more account books using Roman numerals than I have. But that small amount was enough.
Anne Brannen 25:20
If you’re watching the TV, and things go by at the end to tell you what year this thing was filmed in, those Roman numerals go byi too quickly. You know, more or less, pretty much what century it was in. So that’s okay. But so this whole thing about the fragmentation I find so–
Michelle Butler 25:34
Once again, we learned that the worst possible thing to be in the Middle Ages is a noble.
Anne Brannen 25:40
Well, either noble or a peasant who’s farming in the route of somebody coming through with, you know, arrows and swords. Very bad. Neither of those is good. One of the things about the forest and the Mongols–the mountains and also the forest. The Mongols could not fight as well in the forest as they fought on the steppes. They needed some space for those horses, and they had the arrow–like they had way better arrows than were going on in Europe. So the forests were a fairly safe place to be. So what did you find out? Did you find a rabbit hole?
Michelle Butler 26:11
Oh, my gosh, I was everywhere. I really thought that because of the conditions of this guy’s death, that there would be more fiction about him. Maybe there is in Polish, but I sure didn’t find any. There is an opera. There’s an opera.
Anne Brannen 26:33
What language is it in? Is it in Polish?
Michelle Butler 26:35
Yes, it is. I had to stop and think about that. Because I did find it. It kind of survives. Let me actually go back over to–so the thing about the opera is, it’s tenuously connected. It’s called ‘Leszek Bialy or the Witch from Lysa Gora. So it’s a mash up of his story with–it’s wild. It’s so wild. The composer is Yosef Elsner. He was one of the first Polish composers to start pulling folk music and folk stories into classical music. So this opera, Leszek the White or the witch of Bald Mountain, mashes up these stories together. There’s a wonderful Polish music site that I’m looking at right now. “Forgotten today, it’s sensational and fantastic plot is very loosely based on historical events.” That is actually a statement about the book that it’s based on. But it’s equally true about the opera. I was trying to scroll down and make sure that it is actually in Polish, because I know the book that it’s based on is in Polish, and it’s not been translated. So that was as far back as I got. I can tell from looking at it that there’s another book it was based on but none of this has been translated. Although, interestingly, the author of the book it’s based on is also credited with having written the first science fiction novel in Polish.
Anne Brannen 28:15
Really.
Michelle Butler 28:16
Yes. And the science fiction novel is delightful. This young Pole takes a balloon and goes to the moon and finds a utopian colony. So pieces of the opera survive. Iit’s from 1809. Pieces of it survive and the music from the first half, not the lyrics. So there’s bits of it that haven’t survived. And we know from reviews of it what the entire plot was.
Anne Brannen 28:50
Where did it play? In Krakow?
Michelle Butler 28:52
I believe that is true. Here it is. “Leszek the White enjoyed tremendous popularity and was frequently performed in Warsaw, up until the turning point in the life of the theater brought about by the entry of Russian troops in 1813.
Anne Brannen 29:07
Things shift. Warsaw. Of course.
Michelle Butler 29:09
He wrote a lot over 100 works.
Anne Brannen 29:13
Wow. How long did he live?
Michelle Butler 29:17
Let me do the math here. 54 plus…83, 84.
Anne Brannen 29:26
So he had enough time to get some stuff done.
Michelle Butler 29:28
He worked mainly in Warsaw. But he wrote all kinds of stuff. He wrote symphonies and chamber music and vocal works, instrumental works, masses, cantatas, oratorios, concerto, ballets. 38 operas. It’s Frederick Chopin that he was the teacher of. And actually, I found a reference to Elsner’s Leszek opera in a footnote for the Boston Symphony doing a work of Chopin in 1906. That, as far as I can tell, is the only reference to Elsner in the US. But again, I didn’t dig a lot for that. And I cannot work out whether the opera is in Polish, or whether it is in–
Anne Brannen 30:17
It wouldn’t be in Latin at this time, would it?
Michelle Butler 30:20
His religious works are definitely in Latin because they’re listed that way. But the opera is listed as Leszyk Bialy, which makes me think it’s in Polish. It’s not given in the Latin, whereas the religious works are largely given in Latin.
Anne Brannen 30:35
Well, what is the plot of this thing? I really want to know because I understand it’s a mash up and I know that Bald Mountain has this all this stuff about witches and but I can’t figure out how you would put them together. And so I want you to tell me.
Michelle Butler 30:48
I’m gonna go back over then to the description of this-
Anne Brannen 30:52
I really want to know this.
Michelle Butler 30:54
–Because it’s way more complicated than I can possibly summarize on my own. So I’m going to go back to the Polish music site.
Anne Brannen 31:01
Like I’m needing notes on the on Polish fragmentation.
Michelle Butler 31:04
It was based on this book, Leszek the White Prince of Poland son of Cashmir the Just, by MichaÅ‚ Dymitr Krajewsk, which is actually a really contemporary novel. It was written like three years before the opera. In the novel, the plot works as follows, and as far as we know, the opera follows the same. So here we go. “Raised by Goworek, the Voivod (Governor) of Sandomierz, Leszek falls in love with Goworek’s daughter, Bożena. The prince’s noble guardian has no intention of encouraging him, but rather wants Leszek to stop contemplating something that constitutes an affront to his princely dignity. With this in mind, he takes him on a journey, so he can examine official matters at first hand. They go to see Ruryk II, Prince of Kyiv, who plans to get rid of Leszek by simulating a hunting accident. His wife, Irena, however, falls passionately in love with Leszek and, with the help of Nikita the courtier, stirs up a rebellion, gets rid of her husband, and hands Leszek the throne,” which of course never happened.
Anne Brannen 32:06
The ‘loosely based’ covers the fact that some of these names are recognizable as people who actually lived but none of the actions, none of the actions whatsoever.
Michelle Butler 32:15
Yes, I think that that would be fair to say. “He refuses, however, and remains faithful to Bożena. With the help of Paraska,” aka the witch, “Irena resorts to magic, while Leszek receives assistance from the ghost of his deceased father, King Kazimerz the Just.”
Anne Brannen 32:32
Okay. Well. Mashup.
Michelle Butler 32:33
“This latter – according to the summary – ” now what we’re doing a quote within a quote– “‘after Leszek’s every good deed, nullifies the efforts of the messenger from Hell’. In the end, Irena shows Leszek an image of the dead Bożena in a magical mirror and threatens to take her revenge–” that’s the woman he had fall in love with originally “–if he refuses her hand. So Irena is trying to extort Leszek to fall in love with her “–Leszek and the Polish knights leave Kiev and unexpectedly encounter Ruryk outside the city. He has survived and is forgiven for attempting to take Leszek’s life. JarosÅ‚aw, the Prince of Galicia, arrives with the news that Nikita has usurped Irena and declared himself the ruler of all Ruthenia. Finally, Bożena reveals herself to be JarosÅ‚aw’s lost daughter and marries Leszek.” So now it’s okay because now she was a hidden noble all along.
Anne Brannen 33:28
There you go. There you go.
Michelle Butler 33:29
“Ruryk is reunited with Irena and returns to the throne.” Yes, yes. We’re not having a lot of connection with, you know, reality.
Anne Brannen 33:39
It’s a lot of fragmentation really, which kind of–that’s thematic. That’s–that’s good.
Michelle Butler 33:47
But I did like that there was an opera. I liked that the author of the book that it’s based on wrote this delightful and supposedly first Polish science fiction novel.
Anne Brannen 34:00
Utopia on the moon. I am so distrustful of utopias, you know, just really I am.
Michelle Butler 34:07
On the moon or just in general?
Anne Brannen 34:09
Anywhere, anywhere, anywhere. We were talking about Thomas More’s Utopia–we were talking about that one of the podcasts. Oh, yeah. Because we were talking about sumptuary laws, and how in Thomas More’s Utopia, everybody is wearing the same thing and looking pretty dreary. But that’s the thing. If you’re going to have a utopia, it doesn’t have the natural chaos that life, that wonderful life really has, which leads sometimes to horrible stuff, but also leads to happiness and joy and art and whatnot. No, I don’t like utopias. But, I don’t know, maybe the one that the Polish author has put on the moon is a really nice one. It could be it.
Michelle Butler 34:53
We have the opera–part of it anyway. There is the statue, there a really nice kind of interesting statue that is in the spot where he was murdered.
Anne Brannen 35:05
Is in a town or right outside of the town? And he’s naked on this, is he not?
Michelle Butler 35:09
He is.
Anne Brannen 35:10
Otherwise you lose the whole point.
Michelle Butler 35:11
It’s actually a really interesting statue because the horse and the man are both white. But the arrow in his back is, it’s black. So it’s a really striking statue.
Anne Brannen 35:27
Nice. I’ve seen the pictures of it. But I hadn’t noticed that.
Michelle Butler 35:31
I find it really interesting. The research that I ended up doing was about his presence, as part of a recreation of Polish national identity, which really ended up, like the opera, having not a whole lot to do with the history, but more to do with–we need to create an understanding of ourselves as a nation. And it’s all through the 19th and 20th century. So you have you have this opera, but then you have this statue, the statue is from 1927. It’s destroyed by the Nazis.
Anne Brannen 36:04
Why?
Michelle Butler 36:06
Because it was a symbol of Polish nationalism. We are in February, I was telling you this earlier, we are in February, and it is our second statue of the year destroyed by Nazis. The first one was Michael Servetus.
Anne Brannen 36:22
Oh, that’s right. The Nazis actually show up a lot for us. I remember we had this whole discussion because we were talking about Mary, Queen of Scots. And the whole discussion about–
Michelle Butler 36:29
She becomes a Nazi poster child in their propaganda.
Anne Brannen 36:33
Why the Nazis think she’s great.
Michelle Butler 36:35
The statue’s reconstructed in 1973. So the existing one is from 1973. You know, the fact that the statue’s created in 1927, and then that the fact that the Nazis destroy it, and then it gets reconstructed. This seems to me to be just evidence of his role as a piece of Polish nationalism that we need to have back. There is a very famous Polish architect and metal artist named Witold Korski. He lived from 1918 until 2003. And he was mostly in Krakow. He, um, he obviously lives through the Second World War, and he is instrumental in this effort to rebuild both the buildings and to rebuild the understanding of Poland as a nation. One of the things that he does–there’s many things that he does–he is commissioned to rebuild buildings that are destroyed after the war, but one of the things he does is he creates a series of commemorative metals that are Polish nobility and kings. I hate to call them commemorative coins, but that’s what they are. And Leszek has one. I found one for sale on eBay, and I will give you a picture of it.
Anne Brannen 37:57
How much was it going for?
Michelle Butler 37:58
$25. There’s a series of 44 of these.
Anne Brannen 38:04
Is that a buy it now? Or is that where the bid was?
Michelle Butler 38:07
No, it looks like a buy it now.
Anne Brannen 38:09
Mostly it is. EBay is not what it was.
Michelle Butler 38:12
On the back of it is him with an arrow, on a horse with an arrow in his back. So I thought that was really interesting.
Anne Brannen 38:21
I’m interested in–there would be other Polish High Dukes and kings who were important to national identity, but I’m interested in Leszek.
Michelle Butler 38:33
I think him being one of the choices for this project of recreating Polish nationalism and pride is an interesting kind of choice because I don’t feel like there’s that much in his career that kind of stands out.
Anne Brannen 38:50
What stands out is the riding your horse naked through the forest and getting killed. That’s really basically the main thing. And the beer, the not being able to go to the Holy Land because of the lack of beer.
Michelle Butler 39:04
I did actually also find, I am delighted to tell you, that there is an actual meme on Reddit that has, in the first panel, Pope Innocent the third saying ‘join us on the eastern crusade’ and then the second panel labeled Polish High Duke Leszek the white: ‘Neither he nor any self respecting Polish knight could be induced to go to the Holy Land where they have been informed there is no wine, mead, or any beer to be had.’ I actually love this piece of the internet, that the most obscure history things are being brought back.
Anne Brannen 39:40
I like that too. I like Reddit in general. I’m really entranced mostly with ‘malicious compliance’, ‘am I an asshole?’ And, ‘oh no consequences.’
Michelle Butler 39:54
Yes, I thought this was wonderful. The excuse for skipping the crusade is a meme floating around on the internet. That’s pretty awesome.
Anne Brannen 40:02
The whole excuse for skipping the crusade sounds like something that would be just a little story that people were saying, that we didn’t have any evidence for. But we have evidence for it.
Michelle Butler 40:15
We do. We have his letter, and we have the Pope’s response. So it’s great because it is, it sounds like one of these things that just is made up and attached to him. But always check your sources, because sometimes the wacky things are real.
Anne Brannen 40:33
Oddly enough. We have an opera and we have statues. We have some paintings.
Michelle Butler 40:37
Oh, we do have some paintings. Yes.
Anne Brannen 40:40
But no novels, you were telling me that you could find. So if there’s novels they would be in Polish.
Michelle Butler 40:45
The one that I found, that is the basis for the opera, was in Polish, so I got stuck there. But I wonder if he gets brought back as part of that nineteenth century–or if there’s a history of telling his story, I can’t find it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not there. It just means that this was actually quite difficult to research. There was not a lot popping up. I did work out that I had to spell his name several different ways in order to find out anything.
Anne Brannen 41:19
We go further and further and further outside of our comfort zones, and we find ourselves less able to handle all of the materials that are available.
Michelle Butler 41:29
Yhat’s true. The Polish painter who did at least two paintings of Leszek–
Anne Brannen 41:36
One is the council, and one is the him dying?
Michelle Butler 41:40
Yes. That’s Jan Matejko. He was a 19th century painter. He lived from 1838 to 1893, and was interested in doing a lot of history, painting from Polish history. He has a great painting of Copernicus.
Anne Brannen 41:58
Oh, really?
Michelle Butler 41:59
I really liked the painting of Copernicus. It’s called Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God, and it is Copernicus up on the roof, figuring out how the heavens work, and it’s great. I really like it. It’s beautiful. Was Copernicus polish?
Anne Brannen 42:16
Yes.
Michelle Butler 42:17
That would explain it. That would explain it.
Anne Brannen 42:18
That’s our discussion, then. Leszek the White. Leszek Bialy who was High Duke of Poland and got assassinated in humiliating fashion, but then became a symbol for Polish nationalism. And so there he is, and the next time that you hear from us, we’re going to go to Milan, a little later–we’ll be in 1476. The assassination of the Duke of Milan. Many of the medieval crimes that we work with are actually assassinations. That’s been True Crime Medieval, were the crimes are like they are today only with less technology. You can find us on Spotify and Apple podcasts, and any place really where the podcasts are hanging out. Our website is at truecrimemedieval.com, truecrimemedieval is all one word. And there you can find show notes and transcriptions and get a hold of us and leave comments and we would love to hear from you. Thank you. Thank you for that. We know there’s a bunch of you that listen to all these things. You are just darling and thank you very much. Bye.
Michelle Butler 43:20
Bye
94. Maddelena, a Circassian, is Bought in Crimea and Sold in Italy, Venice, Italy c. 1428
Anne Brannen 0:00
Hello and welcome to True Crime Medieval, 1000 years of people behaving badly. I’m Anne Brannen, I’m your host in Albuquerque.
Speaker 1 0:29
And I Michelle Butler in Tuscaloosa, where it is the coldest it has been since we got here.
Anne Brannen 0:35
Oh, really? How cold is it?
Michelle Butler 0:36
It was 11 degrees when I woke up this morning.
Anne Brannen 0:39
Now this is 11 degrees Fahrenheit. So it’s not like 80 degrees below Fahrenheit, which it was in Siberia where the pipes were freezing.
Speaker 1 0:50
We had half an inch of snow yesterday when we woke up and every single thing was closed. The University was closed. Community colleges closed. Everything was closed. Because it was also icy.
Anne Brannen 1:04
Because southern ice storms
Speaker 1 1:06
There’s no way to go treat the road or anything. You just have to wait for it to warm up and melt.
Anne Brannen 1:11
Did you have heat?
Michelle Butler 1:12
Yes.
Anne Brannen 1:13
And were there eggs?
Michelle Butler 1:14
Were there what?
Anne Brannen 1:15
Eggs? Did you have eggs?
Michelle Butler 1:18
I mean, we have eggs in the house. So we’re good.
Anne Brannen 1:20
So it wasn’t like being in Russia–
Michelle Butler 1:22
Oh no, we’re okay.
Anne Brannen 1:23
-where there is no heat and there is no eggs. Okay, just asking. We also have heat and eggs in Albuquerque.
Michelle Butler 1:29
And butter.
Anne Brannen 1:31
Oh, yeah. Oh, even better. I don’t know about the butter situation in Russia. But I just knew about the eggs and the heat. And the pipes are breaking in the horrible cold because they’re Soviet pipes and they can’t be fixed because the people that would fix them are off in Ukraine. And they can’t afford the materials to fix them. Because that’s being spent on some stuff that’s going on in Ukraine. I saw this picture of this cloud of steam. The biggest city in Siberia. It’s like the third biggest in Russia. Cloud of steam because this hot water pipe, which was supposed to be heating everything broke. And so then there was ice all over. People were annoyed. Yeah, it’s still sort of wintry around here. We had some snow the other day, but it’s gone now. But it’s still there up in the mountains. And today we are talking about–okay, here’s the deal. We were going to talk about–Michelle said let’s talk about the Crimean slave trade. And I said, okay, and she said, Okay. So it turns out that what we would be talking about, if we really did that, would be the history of the world. We didn’t want to do that because that’s too long for a podcast. So we’re really kind of boiling it down, boiling it down slave trade in the Black Sea. And we’re going to start by talking briefly about in the Republic of Florence, some short time before 1428, Maddelena–who was a slave from the Circassian, she had been a slave in the Crimean slave trade, and she being bought in Venice–and she was taken to Florence by the guy who bought her, who was the father of the child that she had, who was Carlo de Cosmo de Medici. So I was happy about finding that because it’s hard to find people’s names. Although Michelle has one that she’ll mention later, then we’re going to do an entire podcast about her. Madalena is simply an example of one what has got to be millions of people sold in the Black Sea trade from like, the beginning of written history until about 1970.
Michelle Butler 3:42
I really did not know when I put Kaffa on the list, the city that is the center of this…I mean, when I ran across it, this was just–honestly, this was just me and my Eurocentric learned point of view.
Anne Brannen 4:00
We learn many things here, don’t we?
Michelle Butler 4:02
Oh, my gosh, when I read there was this slave market in Kaffa, in Crimea, I thought, well, that’s really interesting. But it never once occurred to me, it was going to be huge.
Anne Brannen 4:14
So now we know.
Michelle Butler 4:15
Enormous.
Anne Brannen 4:17
I was reading things that talked about how little in the West people do know about this. And so I’m glad to have rectified this, at least in our cases, and whoever’s listening to this. Hi. We learned some stuff. We’ll tell you. Okay, here we go. You’ ready, Michelle?
Michelle Butler 4:32
Yep.
Anne Brannen 4:34
Okay. So Maddelena had been bought in Venice. She was a Circassian victim of the slave trade coming out of the Caucasus. The Genoese Republic had held the slave trade for the Crimean markets to Egypt. But Venice had been taking things over by the 1200s. Well, what’s the background? Oh, this could be so–I’ll be brief, brief as I can. Europe had been practicing slavery since–all of history has slaves, slavery written down. And so that’s how long Europe had been doing it. There’s the historical period and in Europe it’d would be people captured in war mostly, or the Vikings were capturing people raiding, you know, so you would capture people. Serfdom actually replaced that, economically. So you didn’t need slaves anymore because you had serfs. I have never–no one has ever been able to explain to me why it is that we don’t call serfs, slaves. Do you know this? Because they look it looks like slavery to me. I don’t know why–what? do you know?
Michelle Butler 5:38
I think that’s a really interesting question.
Anne Brannen 5:43
Apparently, there’s some difference because people say they’re not the same. And I don’t know why.
Michelle Butler 5:47
I am not sure–I mean, I’m sure that the people who study this have some kind of reason, but it looks similar.
Anne Brannen 5:58
Now, the serfs haven’t been captured in war, they’ve just been born into it. Okay. So serfdom replaces it. And criminals could be enslaved also, especially in the Germanic regions. That was legal. But there were some rules about this, though of course, they weren’t always followed. For one thing, the queen of the Franks, Batilde, became Regent after Clovis the second, who was her husband, died. She was regent for her young son. And she had been enslaved and as regent, she outlawed enslaving Christians. Okay. So in the Frankish kingdom, you could not enslave Christians. Of course, there’s other people besides Christians, but at least there’s some here that you couldn’t. Slave trading as a major enterprise–that is, not just capturing slaves and keeping them or trading or whatnot–but slave trading as an economic enterprise, was really founded on selling slaves to the Islamic world and Christians weren’t supposed to be sold to non Christians, although that rule got violated a lot. And so non Christians were the focus of the trade from the pagan areas of Europe, which of course, would get smaller and smaller as time went on, didn’t they? Michelle, you remember this, which is the last place in Europe to become Christian?
Michelle Butler 5:59
Lithuania. I remember.
Anne Brannen 5:59
It is indeed Lithuania. It’s in the Middle Ages that it becomes–late, like the 1400s or something like that. So slaves from Eastern Europe, the Balkan slave trade, that’s where a lot of the slaves were coming from to go to the Middle East. Doesn’t that just make sense? They weren’t Christian. They didn’t count. We refer you actually to our podcasts on that Lithuanian prince-monk, and also, I discussed the Lithuanian grass snakes there too, which are really great. But the Balkans were sort of this buffer between Roman Catholicism and Orthodox Christianity, and they’d go back and forth. The Roman Catholicism on one side, Orthodox Christianity on the other, and Lithuania remained pagan, and they were also politically unstable. So there were a lot of war captives, which you could then sell to Vikings. The Balkan slave trade to Venice ended when the Ottomans took over the Balkans. And so then it was connected to the Crimean slave trade. So that’s the point at which that goes into the Crimeans. The Venetians simply could not compete at that time. And so the Crimean slave trade became the major slave trade of Eurasia. So the Venetians established trading colonies in Crimea, it isn’t like they left the slave trade. No, no, they just weren’t the bosses of them anymore. So they established colonies, and the Circassians and the Mongolians were sold to the slave traders by their families. That’s another way that you could get enslaved. If you were in a poor family, you might get sold. And they could be captured on slave raids, because the Caucasians, they sold Christians. So that’s how Maddelena ended up in Florence. She was captured in Circassia. She’s just one human in a major flow of slavery and enslaving over centuries. The slave trading in the Black Sea had been going on since Grecian and Roman times and continued until the 20th century. So why? Why the Black Sea in Crimea? Because it was a locus of trade routes in between Europe and Asia and the Mediterranean. The Silk Road was one of them, for instance. The boundaries of empires were shifting through it, they go back and forth, and religious boundaries shifted back and forth. With a lot of movement and uncertainty and upheaval, there’s a lot more opportunity for capturing people and going and getting them and selling them. The Greeks etablished slave trading colonies on the Black Sea coast, and pagans from Eastern Europe and Northern Europe were sold to Byzantium, where they would be made to become Christians. Or they would be sold into the Ottoman empire where they would be made to convert to Islam. So you could go either way. The Hungarian Magyars sold the Slavs of Central and Eastern Europe to Kerch on the Black Sea. The Vikings sold the people that they captured as slaves in raids to traders in the Black Sea. Those people were often Christian, but because the Vikings were pagan, they didn’t care. And they were replaced–the Vikings were–by pirates from the Baltics and the Rus. Once the Kieven Rus started to disintegrate, they sold captives from their many disagreements, and they would sell to the Black Sea slave trade traders who are really right there, they’re much closer than if you were in like, I don’t know, Sweden or something. It’s much closer if you’re part of the Rus. The Bulgar Khan captured Russians and sold them to the slave traders because they were infidels–because they were Christians. So you know, that’s all right. But by the middle of the 15th century, Crimea was the center of the slave trade. Most of the income for the Khanate came from slave trading, because it was one of the biggest sources of slaves to the Ottoman Empire, along with the Barbary slave traders, which operated out of North Africa, but we’re not even going to mention them again, because all the other stuff was too big. So there’s Barbary slave traders, also supplying slaves to the Ottoman Empire, but we’re just gonna stay in Crimea. The Crimean Khanate, which regarded itself as the successor of the Golden Horde, which was the Mongol Empire’s sector of the Northeast which incorporated Siberia, Central Asia and Eastern Europe. That was established in 1441. So that’s the Crimean Khanate. Okay. At first the Tatars of the Crimean Khanate just simply tax the Italians, who are the slave traders and they conducted slave raids. Mostly it was just taxation for a while, but they needed more money. So the Crimean Tatars united with the Ottoman Empire, and they conquered all of the Islamic slave trading centers in Crimea, and the Ottomans and the Crimean Khanate then took over the slave trade. Okay, are we are we following this? I found this like, so complex.
Michelle Butler 12:29
I appreciate so much you distilling it because I read a lot about it, and just ended up getting more and more overwhelmed.
Anne Brannen 12:37
I kept trying to make timelines because I understand things by time, which is weird since I have ADHD and we have time blindness, maybe that’s actually why I’m focused on it. Anyway. So that’s what I was trying to do. But boy, is it difficult. There’s so many different boxes, just kind of like sliding all around and having fights with each other. Okay. So we’re at the point where the Ottoman Empire has conquered Crimea. They have all the slave trading sites. Fair enough. So the Crimean Tatars also allied with the Nogai Horde, which was really big on slave raids–really, really big on slave raids. Twice a year, twice a year in the fall and in the winter, the Nogai Horde raided the Caucasus and Russia and Poland– Lithuania, which is now Poland–Lithuania and Ukraine. And they took people to Kaffa. That’s what you would have been seeing.
Michelle Butler 13:37
That was the thing I ran across in the beginning where I was like, Uh huh. Let’s look at this. That sounds crime-y.
Anne Brannen 13:44
So that’s what they were doing. That’s what they did. This is where they got most of their money. They raided this area, which includes the steppes. The major slave port in Crimea was Kaffa, which is now Theodosia, which is from its original Greek name, which was Theodosia. It was a Greek trading colony originally. Okay, so this is Kaffa. And it went on for three centuries. The estimates are based on fragmentary evidence, but it looks like there were like a million people enslaved from Poland, Lithuania, and the wild fields. The wild fields are eastern and southern Ukraine and western Russia. In large part, it’s the steppes, which is flatland. And the societies there were easily raided for a couple of reasons. Many of them were nomadic–even when they were in the cities, they moved around. And so they didn’t have a set place of power. And power was decentralized. They were kind of fractious and fought with each other. There were some sedentary societies made up of farmers, but they weren’t–at least at this time, they weren’t armed. It was really really easy to attack farmers. Michelle, you come from a farming community. You come from a farming community on flat land? Can you imagine how this would be true?
Michelle Butler 15:08
Right by a river too. You could take your boat right up the Mississippi, grab a few people and be gone.
Anne Brannen 15:14
There you go.
Michelle Butler 15:15
Which is essentially what the Vikings did. And these other raiders.
Anne Brannen 15:19
If you were the Nogai Horde, you could just ride your horses across all that flatland.
Michelle Butler 15:24
I think that’s one of the reasons it worked so well on the Black Sea–you can get your captives to a boat relatively quickly and get them away very fast, and their relatives don’t have any kind of ability to trace you.
Anne Brannen 15:39
So it was easy, easy raiding. It was flatland, and a population without much organization or defense. The population of Crimea was 75% enslaved people and the second language in Crimea was Polish from the number of Polish captives that had been taken there. Those were the slaves that made it, because many more people than this would have died in the raids, or died on the way there who weren’t lucky enough to be on boats that were being quick marched to try and get them to where they needed to be sold quickly. If you were weak or elderly or infirm, you couldn’t make it, they killed you. 80% of the slaves in Crimea were women. Because they were the most valuable. Their price was twice that of the men. After 1502, the Golden Horde from which, you remember, the Crimean Tatars have had broken off over 1441– the Golden Horde was over by 1502. At that point, there’s no buffer in between the Crimean Khanate and Lithuania and Moscow. So the Crimean Khanate just did a lot of moving on out. They went back and forth with alliances as it was useful. For instance, they were allied with Russia from 1500 to 1506 while Russia was at war with Lithuania, but then in 1507, they started raiding Moscow because you know, they weren’t really a people that you would make like long agreements with. In 1571, the Crimean Khan burnt down Moscow and enslaved 150,000 people. Ivan the Terrible, by the way, got out because he ran away from Moscow when they were coming in so he was okay. Being enslaved by the Crimean Khanate was a very bad thing. The men were mutilated and branded and forced to work in irons, the women were sold as maids or if they were young as sex slaves. They were given bad food, bad water, little shelter. And as I say, on the way there, they were not treated well either. Many of them died just from that. The reason they’re being quick marched is that the slave traders want to get them–the raiders wants to get them away from where the rescuers might be able to help. So if you were too weak, you just got killed. 1572, the Russians actually won two battles with the Crimean Khanate. That’s it, I’m moving on. There were various kinds of slave traders besides the Crimean Khanate. The Russian slave traders captured Finns and trafficed to them to the Black Sea slave traders. They did that on into the 1600s. This included Swedes in the Great Northern War, which was 1700 to 1721. The Swedish ambassador to Constantinople– they were sold to Constantinople–he, the Swedish Ambassador, got there and he was able to buy a whole lot of them back. But he didn’t have enough funds to get everybody and so some of them were left there. In 1769, during the Russo-Turkish war, the last slave raid was held but all the Russian captives were released from Crimea in 1773. In 1774, all the slaves in Crimea were released, but it took a long time to get everybody home. So 1000s were still there the next year. Crimea got annexed by Russia in 1783 and the Crimean Khanate was dissolved. However, although the Crimean slave trade was abolished, the Circassians were still enslaved and traded to the Ottoman Empire. The slave trade simply kind of redirected after Crimean part was shut down. And it was mostly women. That trade went on until the early 20th century, but at didn’t disappear. In the 1960s and 1970s, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates banned slavery.
Michelle Butler 19:26
Wow, I did not know it was that late. Wow.
Anne Brannen 19:30
I think one thing, also, for us being Americans. I mean, we are very, very clear on slavery. But we think of it, as Americans, as this thing that was going on in America, which is a really different timeframe and a different route, a different set of economic circumstances. So it’s different people. It isn’t this at all. If indeed, people who were enslaved in America had been being brought in from the Black Sea, we would know about it, but we don’t because we’re Americans. We’re not only Eurocentric, we’re really American centric. And so there’s so much we don’t know. But now we know that there was a whole lot of slave trading going on throughout Europe in the Middle Ages, from the beginning of history on for a long time, and it got outlawed in various ways, different pieces of it got outlawed at certain times. And the laws, you know, weren’t always followed. There was slave raiding back and forth, and whatever government changed, which was fairly often really across Europe, it kept on going. The Crimean Tartars, from the Crimean Khanate, they haven’t been doing slave trading for quite some time, and in Ukraine, they are the indigenous people of Ukraine. Russians have exiled them from Crimea a couple of times. And their hope is that when the war–Russia’s invasion of Ukraine–is over, they will get to go back home because Crimea is Ukraine. As long as Crimea is held by Russia, they can’t go home.
Michelle Butler 21:09
This was a big, big topic. I thought that we were getting a hold of something regional here, not something–it’s been a good learning experience of, just because I haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it isn’t a big thing. Oh my gosh.
Anne Brannen 21:26
This entire four years has been a little journey of discovery a lot of the time, but I think this was the biggest of the discoveries. Oh, look at this. Things that I glad I know now. Okay, so you told me, Michelle, that you have a couple of different lists.
Speaker 1 21:44
I have a list of things that I learned that shocked me. Which shouldn’t be too surprising, since I just learned about an entire enormous slave based economy in Eastern Europe and Asia, basically, forever, that I had somehow missed. That’s the first thing that I learned that shocked me–the scope and longevity of the Black Sea slave trade. Really, I should have figured out–it always has perplexed me because you get told the origin of the word slave in English is from the Slavs, but then there’s no explanation of why. Why is that? That’s interesting. Okay, the number–just the sheer numbers of people who were sold, stolen, or otherwise ended up enslaved and how many centuries that went on–is just enormous. We’ll talk about this, I think in a later episode, but also the degrees of enslavement are different when you’re dealing with the Ottomans and this part of things. So I’ll be interested in talking about that when we do the later episode. The involvement of the Genoese and the Venetians was pretty shocking.
Anne Brannen 23:04
I mean, it’s the Venetians who were behind the worst crime of the Western European Middle Ages, the sack of Constantinople. Well, you know, you follow the money.
Michelle Butler 23:17
The Genoese just had taken over Kaffa and were like, Okay, this is our base now. Their fortress is still there. Should we ever get to go tourist in Crimea again, should peace ever return–
Anne Brannen 23:31
May this happen. Yes.
Michelle Butler 23:33
It’s there, you can go see it.
Anne Brannen 23:35
I want to go to Crimea.
Michelle Butler 23:36
I had known that travel in the Middle Ages was dangerous. I had known that. I hadn’t known that one of the cost-benefit analyses of taking a ship versus riding overland is that every once in a while, if you hire a Venetian to take you somewhere, they take your money and then sell you into slavery anyway. There are instances of this that we know of, because those people ended up escaping, and coming back to file a complaint. Who knows how many times it happened, where the enslavement was entirely successful? Good gracious sakes. That’s kind of lousy, take people’s money and then be like, ‘You know what? We can increase the profit on this voyage.’
Anne Brannen 24:22
It’s kind of deeply psychopathic.
Michelle Butler 24:25
We were talking earlier that back when I was an undergraduate, what I was taught about medieval slavery is that in the early Middle Ages, so 500 to the year 1000 roughly, there’s a lot of slavery, capturing people in battle, that sort of thing. And that after that, the church kind of–the light bulb comes on–and says, gosh, we really not should not be doing that. Well, that’s not entirely true. What really happens is that the co-religionist test happens. They just across the board–Christian and Muslims, all of them–decide that the boundary is you don’t enslave your co-religionists, but everybody else is fair game.
Anne Brannen 25:07
Then you can make them convert later.
Michelle Butler 25:08
But then you’re still allowed to enslave them.
Anne Brannen 25:11
They’re still slaves, yeah, you don’t like set them free? No, no.
Michelle Butler 25:16
I found this kind of interesting. As an American, we get taught things like when George Washington died, he freed his slaves in his will, and we’re like, what the heck? Why didn’t you do that in your lifetime? It was interesting to me to find out that that was actually kind of a thing–that if you were feeling a little bad about it, in Europe, then you might grant manumission in your will.
Anne Brannen 25:28
It’s kind of like a deathbed repentance thing.
Speaker 1 25:42
It’s not something that American slavers came up with on their own, that was like the grand tradition of, if you want to be able to both benefit and then get the spiritual benefit, here’s how you do it.
Anne Brannen 25:56
That’s pretty tacky, actually.
Michelle Butler 26:00
I was so shocked about this, not knowing about this. This was the largest slave trade route in the Middle Ages. And it continues. I mean–so really, African slavery, this is what I didn’t know, African slavery is an expansion of what was already happening in Europe.
Anne Brannen 26:20
And happened because Europe becomes more and more problematic, the more it becomes a place where there might be an idea of you’re being European.
Michelle Butler 26:30
The enslavers just expanded their operations down into Africa, where at that point, more vulnerable people were because you still have the smaller political units that you can set against each other. Other things that I learned that I’m less shocked by, but I’m glad that I learned. There is a lot of scholarship now about the history of slavery, and also in global slavery, particularly in the last 15 years.
Anne Brannen 26:56
That was really lovely to see, there’s a lot of work on this now.
Speaker 1 27:00
One of the things that I’m deeply happy to find is that if you look at scholarship from after about 2010, nobody is going to use the term ‘white slavery’ anymore. Thank God, right. Everything about that term is super problematic. I understand what they’re trying to do, but it’s not okay. Because if you put the qualifier of ‘white’ slavery onto it, it implies that slavery is, when it’s standing alone, enslaving black people. Not cool. That normalizes in disturbing ways the idea of enslaving black people. The term ‘white slavery’ is so problematic for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that it tends to show up in scholarship, particularly older scholarship, connected with outrage, like how dare–how dare are the Muslims– There’s really kind of hyperbolic older work about, oh my God, how dare the Muslims enslave all these white Christians? Who do they think they are? Don’t they know it’s supposed to work the other way around. I mean, there’s this, like quivering outrage that, I’m happy to report, does not show up in scholarship from the last 15 years. We’ve moved away from the implicit assumption that enslaving black people well, you know, that was of its time, white people, that was always an outrage. For heaven’s sakes.
Anne Brannen 28:32
No, it was of its time too. It was like a really, really, really big piece of things. It was normal. There’s St. Patrick getting enslaved, and that’s just going across the sea. They didn’t even have to, like go down and sell him in the Black Sea. They just took him across the Irish Sea.
Michelle Butler 28:55
You could seriously pull together enough stories, biographies of people, who had been enslaved in the Middle Ages, who ended up being famous, to have an actual book. One scholar who is particularly well known, and who I find particularly helpful in this area is Hannah Barker. I read a book of hers, it’s very good–let me make sure to tell you the exact title of it. It’s called That Most Precious Merchandise: the Mediterranean Trade and Black Sea Slaves, 1260 to 1500. She also has a website that is really useful, that other people contribute to. It’s called medievalslavery.org.
Anne Brannen 29:42
Oh, great. You’ll give us the link in the show notes.
Michelle Butler 29:44
One of the things that’s really helpful on that website is the links to primary sources. It’s a specifically a teaching website. It’s for people who want to teach but there are two primary sources. So there are bills of sale, for example, from people who got sold as children, by their families.
Anne Brannen 30:09
Like from where, do you remember?
Michelle Butler 30:12
The ones I’m looking at right now are–let me just read this. “The following three contracts come from the register of a notary named Benedito Bianco, priest of the parish of St. Euphemia in Venice. As a notary Bianco’s job was to draw up legal documents and contracts in the correct form.” So then these come from–these are his copies.
Anne Brannen 30:44
So these are people being sold to people in Venice.
Michelle Butler 30:47
Yep. At least the contracts being drawn up in Venice. In one example, a widow is selling her 15 year old daughter, probably because they’re in really serious trouble, the husband having died.
Anne Brannen 31:06
I guess–I’m trying to think this through. You could be in very difficult circumstances and need money very badly. And so that would be a reason to sell a child. But I think that you could also say to yourself, this will be better for my child than starving.
Michelle Butler 31:29
I mean, no good choices–being a widow in the 14th century is rough stuff. I didn’t expect to be bringing Christine de Pisan in but we know slightly later, Christine de Pisan writes about how much trouble she was in the late 14th, early 15th century when her husband died young, and she was left raising three little kids on her own and taking care of her mother too. People kept showing up and claiming that her late husband had owed them money. They were in trouble.
Anne Brannen 32:03
Right. And she didn’t have to sell her kids because she started writing. She became a court writer.
Michelle Butler 32:08
She started out first copying contracts and copying documents, and then ultimately ended up being the first woman that we know of who made her living as a writer, which is pretty cool. But her description of their situation when her husband died is not in any way nostalgic. She lets you know that they were really in danger. She has scathing words for the sort of people who would show up to try to take advantage of a recently bereaved young woman with three kids. I did not find fiction or anything about this, but I think it’s because I just don’t know the right search terms yet. I think there must be. There must be fiction that touches on this. I just didn’t find the right search terms.
Anne Brannen 32:57
Sir Walter Scott must have written something. You know, it’s right up his alley.
Michelle Butler 33:02
I did find that there are proverbs still in existence in Ukrainian, in Polish–
Anne Brannen 33:12
Ukrainian folk songs.
Michelle Butler 33:14
Yes. That remember and reference people being kidnapped into slavery. There are narratives from escaped slaves. This is also Hannah Barker. She has an article about this. This one’s kind of nice because it’s in open source, the Palgrave Handbook of Global Slavery throughout History, and she wrote the Slavery in the Black Sea region chapter. One of the things she has in there is a description of two men who were captured and then later escaped and were able to write about their capture and their enslavement and then their escape. One of them was an Armenian monk who was captured by the Mongols when they invaded Armenia in 1236. His story is pretty interesting, because he actually has to escape. People try to ransom him, and the Mongols say no, he’s too useful. He can read and write, we need to keep him for his skills. And the second–this is fascinating. The second is Johan Schiltberger, who was a barbarian soldier who was captured by Sigemund of Hungary’s crusading army in 1396. And he was a military slave for 20 years, and then he wrote about it.
Anne Brannen 34:34
Men were often captured to be sold as soldiers.
Michelle Butler 34:37
You can find his writings about his enslavement, which is pretty fascinating. He wrote a book called The Bondage and Travels of Johan Shiltzberger, a native of Barbaria, which is pretty cool. That was pretty wild. This was quite the topic. And of course, the jewel that I found last night, that I was like, aha, but I think she deserves her own podcast, is Roxana.
Anne Brannen 35:05
Yes. Roxana.
Speaker 1 35:06
This is just a little teaser for Roxana, who was kidnapped in about 1516 from Ukraine, and ends up with the Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and it is a wild story. So we’re going to deal with her separately.
Anne Brannen 35:29
She goes on to great heights.
Speaker 1 35:32
Holy smokes, I’m so impressed. But I want to do some more reading on her because it’s a story where I want to doublecheck every single piece of this, because it’s so improbable that I want to do some fact checking.
Anne Brannen 35:52
It does seem improbable. I think it really happened. But whether all the details are true is unclear.
Michelle Butler 35:59
So I need to poke at it some more. But I actually was quite shocked to find how many individuals we know for sure for victims of this widespread–as for instance, as you know, Johan Shiltzburger or Roxana or the Crimean monk. There’s little children–this stinks–if you were captured as a child, you couldn’t petition for your freedom until you turned 14. You can’t go to law until you’re at least 14. But we talked before about Olaf Tryggvason. He’s part of this, you know, he gets captured, he gets sold. We talked at that time about how his revenge wasn’t about the enslavement. It was about the foster father having been killed by the enslaver.
Speaker 1 36:22
He was in Russia. So he had been taken on into Moscow. And he ended up in Kiev for a while.
Michelle Butler 36:52
So he wasn’t captured in the Black Sea. But it’s part of this early medieval–and alas, late medieval–slave trade that I had no idea was this extensive.
Anne Brannen 37:08
Cervantes.
Michelle Butler 37:09
Oh, Cervantes is was captured–we’ll put him on the list too, because he was captured by Barbary pirates and ended up spending several years as a slave. That’ll be fascinating. I didn’t know that.
Anne Brannen 37:21
John Smith, John Smith, he got captured in war, and he was sold into slavery in the Crimean slave trade, and ended up I think, in Constantinople, but he escaped and he became this guy that went to what would be become America. There’s some speculation that the Pocahontas story he created out of the story of–what is the name of the woman who we’re talking about–Roxana. That it kind of grows out of what he knows of the Roxana story,
Michelle Butler 37:52
I was really surprised to have this many people named, because one of the things about American slavery is that it’s really quite difficult to find records with specific people’s names. So I really wasn’t expecting to find individually named people who had been victims of this. I was pretty surprised about the big famine at the beginning of the 14th century that I did not know about, but this is as big of a surprise.
Anne Brannen 38:22
The Black Death. But we know all about the Black Death.
Michelle Butler 38:25
Kaffa, where the the big slave port was, is one of the places where the Black Death springboards from.
Anne Brannen 38:33
Oh, I didn’t know that. And that’s probably from the slave trade.
Michelle Butler 38:36
It’s because the Genoese are holding it and they’re being besieged and the people besieging them on the outside are throwing diseased corpses over and the Genoese are like, it’s time to evacuate. So they get in their ships and leave and they take the Black Death and spread it all over the Mediterranean. Thanks, guys. Good job.
Anne Brannen 39:01
The Genoses.
Michelle Butler 39:03
This is such a huge topic. I don’t know. I should have known it was going to be but I did not know.
Anne Brannen 39:10
No, you said let’s do this. And I didn’t know either. I just thought Okay, sounds good. I’d like to learn about Crimea.
Michelle Butler 39:18
And then it makes me wonder–I think back to the children going missing in Hamlin.
Anne Brannen 39:25
I think that was one of the theories, wasn’t it? And it makes sense.
Michelle Butler 39:28
That they might have gotten lured out–just abducted.
Anne Brannen 39:32
It puts it in a different context that makes a whole lot of sense. So that is our brief condensed explanation of the slave trade from Crimea in the Middle Ages, the Black Sea slave trade. There’s going to be lots of links to go look for more.
Michelle Butler 39:47
There are many, many books–many recent books 2022, 2019.
Anne Brannen 39:55
The next time you hear from us we are actually going to be, instead of being like all over the place for hundreds of years, we’re going to be in one place for a short time, except of course I’ll do context which usually goes on forever but the crime itself–one crime–we know where it is. And that is that in 1271 in Italy, Henry de Alman was murdered by the sons of Simon de Montfort. So Frenchmen go to Italy and misbehave. So yeah, so we’ll talk about 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 any place where the podcasts are hanging out. And you can find us at truecrimemedieval.com, true crimemedieval is all one word. And there you can find links to the podcast and show notes and transcripts, we get them in as soon as we can. They’re not usually on the most recent episodes, but we get them in when we can. And you can also reach us through there and leave comments. We’d love to hear from you. And if you have some crimes from the Middle Ages that you think we should pay attention to, we’d love to hear about them. And we will fit them in as we can and please, like we ask you with all our hearts, let them be, you know, one crime in one place at one time rather than millions of crimes over hundreds of years because that turns out to be–that’s harder really to talk about, as it happens. Bye.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai