Dan Snow's History Hit - 2. Story of England: Medieval Invaders

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Great Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, bloodshed at the battle of Hastings, Bubonic Plague and Roland the celebrity flatulist. As dawn breaks, Dan walks the beach at Pevensey where William the Conqueror and his Norman Invaders landed in 1066, but not before getting a quick lesson from Medieval Historian Dr Levi Roach in what’s always been called the ‘Dark Ages'. Next, Dan swings by Dover Castle to Dover castle to learn about courtly life, clashing knights, princesses and jesters and travels east to the Hastings Battlefield, where Dan narrates a dramatic play- by -play of the most famous fight on English soil.In the 14th century, the invaders didn’t arrive in festooned long-boats but on the backs of rats on merchant ships. Dan ambles through York’s iconic medieval streets and with the help of medical historians Susie Edge and Kevin Goodman, they tell the grisly story of how the plague gripped the city and the nation in the worst pandemic the world had ever seen. Produced by Mariana Des Forges, edited and sound designed by Dougal Patmore. Artwork by Teet Ottin.You can take part in our listener survey here.If you want to get in touch with the podcast, you can email us at [e-mail], we'd love to hear from you!

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. On the morning of the 28th of September, 1066, William, Duke of Normandy, looked out over the bow of his ship.

It was called Mora. It was a gift from his wife, Matilda of Flanders. It was festooned with a multicoloured sail. It had a papal banner of white, gold and blue. It had been consecrated in Rome, blessed by the hand of the Pope himself. who had been consecrated in Rome, blessed by the hand of the Pope himself. The ship's figurehead was a child, pointing its right hand towards William's target across the Channel.

England. His fleet of 700 ships. An army of maybe around 7,000 men, ready for a full invasion of the British Isles. They landed here on this beach where I'm standing now on what was then a peninsula, Pevensey on the Sussex coast and it was a bay peppered with old Roman fortifications. William the Conqueror as he was on his way to becoming known had some idea of the country he was invading. After all, he'd been related to King Edward the Confessor, who'd reigned as England's monarch from 1042 to 1066,

the year of William's arrival. And his death is what prompted his cousin's invasion. He'd probably visited once or twice before. One chronicle dates William's first visit to England in 1051, saying Count William came from overseas and the King Edward received him and as many of his companions as suited him. William leapt off his ship into the shallows on this beach and immediately fell over. But he stood up again and, making the best of a bad situation, he claimed that he'd grasped England with both of his hands

and the earth had proved willing. After he landed on the shore, William and his army built a temporary shelter within the walls of an old Roman stronghold. They fortified it even further by cutting a ditch along a small peninsula, making themselves more secure from a surprise attack. The next day, the Norman army marched east on this coast to Hastings, which I can see over there in the distance, and it was there that they awaited the arrival of Harold Godwinson,

the reigning king of England, knowing that he would head down from the north. William's men entertained themselves by pillaging and burning the surrounding countryside while they waited, taunting Harold, forcing him to come down and meet them before he was ready. The Norman invasion had begun. England was on the brink of a new era. I'm guessing you know what's coming,

but before we get in to probably the most famous battle in England's history at Hastings let's talk about the kind of England that William had arrived in. This is episode two of Dan Snow's story of England, an epic road trip around England as I bring you my favourite parts of this country's magnificent history. parts of this country's magnificent history. On this leg of the journey, down on the southeast coast from Pevensey to Dover, we'll be illuminating what's long been called the Dark Ages. We'll be telling the tales of the great Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, their leaders like the mighty Alfred the Great, and we'll be dealing with whether King Arthur even existed.

I'm going to be walking on the Hastings battlefield, giving you a dramatic play-by-play of that pivotal day as the men ran themselves into the ground for king and country. And if that's not enough medieval history for you, then buckle up, because we're also going to be hitting Dover Castle to find out about daily life in a medieval court of clashing knights in jousting tournaments and surviving sieges and surprise attacks.

Then I'm going to finish up on the cobbled streets of York, the epicentre of the North's bubonic plague outbreak. This is going to be one hell of a ride through the medieval world, folks. So get that pig on a spit, pour yourself a flagon of mead, and get ready. To talk me through Anglo-Saxon England, I've gone to one of the best, Professor Levi Roach of Exeter University. Levi, the medieval period, it's a long old period. It's a weird period. How do we define the medieval period? So, typically, we divide the medieval period into kind of three chunks, what we might call early medieval, which is running kind of from the fall of Rome,

around kind of 400 AD up to about the year 1000, or in this country, often 1066 in the Norman Conquest. Then the central Middle Ages thereafter that kind of run up to about 1300. And then finally, the later, later Middle Ages from about 1300 to about 1500 or so. Why do we no longer call that first bit that you mentioned the Dark Ages? Let's get this cleared up. Yes, we've wanted to move away from that term because it's so value-laden. It originally came from the idea that there aren't many sources. So it's dark in the sense that we are trying to piece together little shafts of light to see what was going on. But all too easily, it leads to the idea that people were somehow more barbaric, less civilised, less intelligent, that this was a terrible step

backwards. And really, as historians, we want to understand the period rather than say it was good or bad. Tell me about the kind of Anglo-Saxon setup in, say, call it the 7th or 8th centuries. So one of the crucial changes we see politically as Roman power is eclipsed is intense regionalisation. We see this across the entire Western Roman Empire, but it's most acute where the break with Rome is sharpest, and that happens to be in Britain. So what we see is in place of a Roman Empire that was ruled out of Italy and a very unified empire, we suddenly see a really disjointed political scene emerging, one in which there were probably originally 30 or more Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in what was to become England. And that's before we get into multiple Welsh kingdoms, Cornish ones, Northern British ones, and so on. So we are thinking of average kingdoms at the very start of this period being the size of a modern county, potentially, sometimes smaller, sometimes a bit

larger, but we're thinking that kind of size. And indeed, some of them have given us county names. So places like Essex, the East Saxons, Sussex, the South Saxons, Middlesex, the Middle Saxons, and so on. So we're thinking of these being really quite small entities in those early years, but also often quite unstable entities. These were new political structures that had been erected kind of in the rubble of Rome, and they were in intense competition with one another. What we see is from almost the get-go is multiple layers of lordship and overlordship, rulers of certain regions seeking to conquer those of their neighbours or gain a degree of control and influence over them. So what we start to see

as time goes by is a few really major players emerging from this. So we're thinking of the Mercians, classically in the Midlands, based in the West Midlands. We're thinking in the East, East Anglia. We see a very powerful kingdom emerging there, encompassing most of modern East Anglia. We're thinking in the South, Wessex, based around kind of the middle of the South to the Southwest. So based on Wiltshire Hampshire, but running all the way into Devon. Kent in the Southeast, and then in the North, Northumbria, into Devon, Kent in the southeast, and then in the north, Northumbria, but sometimes Northumbria being divided into two, into a Bernissiana d'Era, so at the time there. So we're thinking of these being then these big players that have created their power partly by hoovering up smaller players at an earlier stage in the competition. It's been likened a little bit to the FA Cup by one scholar

who suggested this is kind of the model where different teams knock each other out and then you end up with the last few standing. And so those are the big building blocks that are left standing once the smaller players have been eliminated. And then archaeology and other objects that survive are reminding us that this was not dark and these people were sophisticated artisans and craftspeople. There was trade and whether it's Sutton who's ship burial in East Anglia or the so-called Mercian Hoard that people might remember being discovered a few years ago. There are beautiful objects being created. These are sophisticated. Yes, absolutely. And that's one of the other reasons why I want to kind of ditch these terms like dark ages, because if you're looking at things like artwork, it's a

hugely dynamic period. There's no loss in quality. Arguably, it's enhanced by these kinds of changes where we see new influences coming in, traditions that the Angles and Saxons brought with them from the continent, but also heavily influenced by their Celtic neighbours, new kinds of approaches to these sorts of things. So no, you're quite right to say, particularly in metal work, we have stunning examples from a very, very early date. We have rather less literature and other things to round that out, but we need to be presuming that these people were telling tales, that they were doing all the kinds of things we were doing, that they had music and the like to match them. And again, as soon as we start getting sources, they do provide some hints of these things. And

the more we see, as a general rule, the more impressed we are. So the Romans left, it's time of great turmoil. This lack of source material has allowed mythology to flourish, hasn't it, Levi? Tell me about probably the most famous and powerful myth in the whole of British history. Arthur, did he exist? Was he knocking around in this period? Well, the simple answer to that is anyone who tells you they know for certain is lying or has misread the evidence. We simply do not have enough sources to tell you that someone didn't exist in that period. But we also have no positive evidence of Arthur's existence. So the first source to name him is the Historia

Brittonum written in the 9th century in Northern Wales in the 830s. This is a long time after the period Arthur is meant to have been active. It's a good three to 400 years after he's meant to have been active. And we have no earlier written sources about him whatsoever. And even the history of Breton doesn't have much to say about him. So the kind of full Arthurian legends, we have the panoply that make him into this number one person resisting Saxon onslaught in the name of the remnants of the Roman Empire. Most of that is the invention of the 12th century. So many, many centuries after. So six, 700 years after Arthur would have ruled.

What we do know from good contemporary sources is someone who appears in the Arthurian legends, Ambrosius Aurelius, we have good contemporary sources for. So Gildas writing in the sixth century refers to resistance to the Saxons led by a chap called Ambrosius Aurelius. And one of the things that seems to happen a bit with Arthur is that as his star rises, Ambrosius Aurelius, poor Ambrosius Aurelius, who was a real person, his star kind of fades and he rubs off a bit on Arthur. So a lot of what we think of Arthur, if there was a historical element to it, is probably things that were being done by Ambrosius Aurelius and people like him. It's out of that tradition of heroic resistance that then the Arthurian legend develops. Christianity spreads throughout these kingdoms. Did that percolate all the way down? Did it change the way that people lived and told stories about the past and worshipped,

do you think? It would have been a very major change, but it's a major change we need to imagine taking place over a lengthy period of time, like all major changes, and particularly changes like this that are being brought in top-, it's one thing for the king to say everyone's going to be a Christian. It's another thing for them to actually become Christian. And so one of the things we note in the first kind of hundred years or so of the Christianisation of England is there's various phases in most kingdoms of what scholars call apostasy, that is people breaking with the faith and going back to paganism. So it's quite clear this isn't just a one-way process. There are people who are losing out, who aren't pleased about this, who are seeking to resist it. And even

where we're not seeing that, it takes a long time for these ideas to really reach ground level, if you will. So older ideas would not have been lost overnight. There would have been a lot of what we call syncretism in the early days, so probably combining elements of both faiths, particularly because pagan faiths tend not to be exclusive. They're not denying that Christ is powerful. They're not saying that the pantheon we have is the exclusive number of gods. They tend to be very happy to adopt additional gods. So one suspects that in some cases people were informally adding Christianity just to the palette of what they worshipped already, or mixing and matching bits of this. We see this probably with the Sutton Hoo burial, where there's some very clearly Christian artefacts in what is clearly

not a Christian burial. The Vikings arrive as raiders. They work out pretty quick that they might want to settle here. They might want to expand into England and perhaps even take over England, as well as other parts of the Isles. How does that transition happen? Yeah, so this is a process we see pretty much everywhere where the Vikings are very active in Europe. We also see it in northern France. And so it's a kind of natural extension, if you will, of the early Viking attacks, which are largely piratical, and they're just seeing an easy way of making some quick money, and often conducted alongside other things. So it's been commented that any trader becomes a

raider when confronted by an undefended port. The question arises of would we not do better off just setting up shop there permanently? And indeed, we can replace the previous lords. And that's really what they want to do. It's a bit like the various groups that took over the Western Roman Empire. They wanted a piece of the pie. They weren't trying to destroy it. They wanted it. They wanted more of it for themselves. And that's what the Vikings wanted. They saw these kingdoms were increasingly centralized, increasingly wealthy, and they wanted in on it. And so that's where we see this large force known as the Great Viking Army or the Great Heathen Army in contemporary sources that emerges in the 860s and starts gobbling up these kingdoms of England. So by this point, we've kind of been left with a

big four of Northumbria in the north, Mercia in the west, Midlands, East Anglia in the east, and then Wessex in the entire south, dominating also Kent by this point. And so Wessex under Alfred, even they come close to being conquered by the Vikings at one point. And Alfred's famously restricted to a couple of little toeholds of ground in, well, near you, buddy, down in the West Country in Somerset. Yes, absolutely. So Wessex itself comes within a whisker of being conquered because these groups have kind of been proceeding steadily.

And although they've lost probably some of their numbers because Vikings have already settled in the East and the North, and that helps Wessex, they're also getting reinforcements from Scandinavia. So it's still a very, very potent force. And they do invade early on in Alfred's reign, and they manage to expel him from much of the kingdom. And he's forced to retreat to Athelni in the Somerset Marshes and leads initially a bit of a guerrilla war there, which is later kind of heroised and stories of him burning the cakes and so on, because he was so concerned about his woes. Reality is that the

advantage probably always lay with Alfred re-establishing himself. It had only been a few months that the Vikings controlled much of his kingdom, and there continued to be considerable support on the ground for him. But there's no doubt that it's a very, very hard-fought battle that he wins at Eddington in 878. It's a close-run affair. And for many years thereafter, the fate of Wessex and indeed of England more widely still hangs in the balance. So the great Viking army, after Alfred manages to kind of expel them, decide they'll do better off in France.

And so they go and they try to sack Paris and create all sorts of mayhem there, eventually leading amongst other things to the creation of Normandy. Yeah, Alfred's offspring have a claim to be as great as him, surely. Edward, Athelstan, his grandson, Athelflad, his daughter. I mean, there was quite the family. And that is the sort of family that helps to forge England as we understand it today. Yes, very much so. And you're quite right. This is a story of three generations of extraordinary rulers. And without all three, you probably don't get to an England that is politically unified. There doesn't seem to be any obvious trend towards this before the Vikings arrive in England. We've had those kind of big

four players, and they actually seem to be something of a stalemate. Every now and then, one is top dog over the others, but they're not in a position to conquer each other. They're not trying to. But because three of the four are effectively knocked out, Alfred's last man standing, and he's then able to, when he's reconquering these, or indeed conquering a new, a fresh, these Viking territories, is able to start creating a much more unified kingdom. And this is something that his son, Edward the Elder, as you say, is integral to. It's Edward the Elder who wins East Anglia and the Northeast Midlands. Athelstan is the first to take the north, but also Athelflaed, his daughter, who'd married into a prominent Mercian family, the family of Æthelred of Mercia, who is the kind of de facto ruler,

semi-autonomous ruler of Mercia under Alfred, that Alfred kind of grants them this special status as this once independent kingdom. And she, after the death of her husband, rules the Midlands in her own name, working alongside her brother. And she helps him reconquer territories, particularly in the East Midlands. So it very, working alongside her brother. And she helps him reconquer territories, particularly in the East Midlands. So it very much is the story of a whole family effort of the Midlands Kingdom of Mercia pulling its own way alongside Wessex in the South. So England is established as a kind of seemingly pretty irreversible concept in the 10th century. It then gets conquered by all sorts of people, but this is the birth of

a nation that's endured. Yes, very much so. And England is a kingdom that is not infrequently ruled by foreigners, but it's ruled as a unified kingdom of England. Duke William of Normandy has just arrived in England and he believes he's the rightful heir to the English throne after being promised it by his cousin, King Edward the Confessor, over a decade earlier. When William gets here to England, Edward the Confessor is dead. He died in January. He's gone. In his place is Harold Godwinson, or King Harold II, who's put himself on the throne. By September 1066, Harold has defeated, well, another Harold, the Norwegian invader, Harold Hardrada, in the battle at Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire. But there's no rest for Harold Godwinson and his Anglo-Saxon army because they get word of William's arrival in the south.

And the army hot-footed it down here to the coast where they're going to take on William just a few miles north of the town of Hastings. No road trip through England's history is going to be complete without visiting the most famous battlefield, fought on the most famous day in English history. I'm now at the Battle of Hastings, fought in 1066, the 14th of October 1066. Actually I'm in the town of Battle, named after that bloody occasion. As you can hear the birds are singing, the wildflowers are out, the wind's tickling through the long wild grass growing on the battlefield, there's the smell of wild garlic, and there's a few lambs and sheep frolicking on parts of the battlefield that are stretched out

below me now. I've been here dozens of times in my career, but few of those days have been as beautiful as this one. It's a perfect spring day, few puffy white clouds, the blue sky and the sun shining down. Seems incongruous now but this was the battlefield on which thousands of men came together hacking each other to death fighting for king and country. Two rival claimants to the same throne. Two different visions for one country. Now it's very much changed. A lot of landscaping took place after the battle. And as I stand up here on top of the famous ridge on which the English army stood, I look down across a field grazed by sheep. And that gives you, I think, a little bit more of a sense of what the battlefield would have been

like. It would have been scrubby ground, marshy, damp at the valley floor. But where I'm standing now, a towering ridge blocking the road to London. The perfect defensive position for King Harold to try and deal with this pesky invader. On the evening of the 13th of October 1066, the night before the battle, the Norman sources tell us that their men spent the night in silent prayer and contemplation while the English got wildly drunk on the ridge where I am now. However the men spent that night, they knew that the following day there would be a terrible battle for control of the kingdom. terrible battle for control of the kingdom. It was two weeks since William had landed and now King Harold was here with the English army ready to drive his invader into the sea or die in trying. Harold had defeated Harold Hardrada up at the Battle of Stamford Bridge outside York. When he'd heard about William's invasion he'd gallop south but as a result his

men were weary, they were battle weary, they were fatigued from the journey and Harold refused to stop in London for very long. He collected a few reinforcements but he marched south. He wanted to strike at William as quickly as possible. As the sun came up on that autumn day Harold aligned his troops where I'm standing now, at the top of this ridge, in a strong defensive position. All the men on their feet, shields locked, the Dragon of Wessex flying above King Harold's position. His line stretched for perhaps half a mile, men packed tightly together, shoulder to shoulder, pretty much impervious to William's cavalry because horses will not charge a hedgehog-like wall of shields with sharp spear tips and swords sticking out between them. But it did mean that they were rooted to the spot. They had only one plan and that was stand on top

of that ridge and fight until sunset. On the other side looking down this ridge where I'm standing now in the valley floor would have been Duke William. Now he did quite a different army. He had archers in front then he had his infantrymen on foot and behind them he had his mounted knights who were highly mobile. William's army had his Normans but he'd also attracted men from across Western Europe lured by the prospect of loot, of adventure, and of everlasting life, if it all went wrong, as William's army was blessed by the Pope. We think both armies were between something like 5,000 to 7,000 men, pretty large forces by the standards of the day, but we can't be sure.

This battle is so fascinating because it's a collision of two different military cultures. This battle is so fascinating because it's a collision of two different military cultures. You've got Harold and his men fighting on foot with swords, billhooks, spears, axes. And you've got William with his cohort of mounted knights, elite warriors, who use their horses to carry them around the battlefield and deliver devastating attacks. These knights were superb warriors, but so in their own way with the Englishmen they faced. This would be a battle between two very different types of warfare. Now about 9am we think the battle opened with, the sources tell us, the terrible sound of trumpets on both sides. The Normans made their way up the slope towards where I'm standing now.

The English stood rooted to the spot behind their shield wall. Their tactic was to wait, let the Normans tire themselves out, marching up, carrying their weapons, heavy helmets on their heads, male shirts weighing them down, and then when they got to the top of the ridge, doing battle with the English waiting for them up there. Somewhere where I'm standing now, the two lines met and there would have been a terrible press of men pushing, shoving,

the rear ranks trying to get closer, the front ranks squashed against their opposite number. No room to wave your sword around or your battle axe, just quick, sharp darts in and out, perhaps with a knife. Terrible wounds being inflicted, the dead and the wounded falling to the ground and being trampled underfoot by the living, the desperate men struggling for their lives. As the press of men loosened the English for their part would have tried to deploy some of their axe men, these gigantic double-handed axes being wheeled by professionals, they're capable of chopping the head off a horse we're told with one blow. And all the time we can imagine the Norman knights hovering looking for opportunities,

looking for anyone wavering, looking for that chance to intervene decisively, galloping in on your horse and bringing down that weight of man, horse and metal on a wavering enemy. We think the first big moment of the battle was a rumour that went through the Norman and their allied forces saying that William had been killed or wounded. As a result many of them fled back down the hill in panic. Now this is an amazing dramatic moment of battle. William pulled back his helmet, you can see this bit on the Bayeux tapestry, pulls the helmet off his head, he gallops along the line shouting, look at me, I live and with God's help I shall conquer. He wanted to show that he was still very much alive. Now some of the English

had been a bit too enthusiastic and actually chased the Normans down the hill and with William rallying them the Normans seemed to have turned round, regained their composure and decimated those English troops who'd been stupid enough to run down after them from this ridge. As the sun tracked to the west overhead, the Normans continued their assault against the Englishmen up on this ridge. Time after time, like the tide ebbing and flowing, they charged up this hill and time after time it seems they repelled down this hill. And it was a bloodbath. The Bayer Tapestry gives us an idea of what that battle

might have looked like. It shows the English troops locked in that shield wall repelling charge after charge but of course it can't capture the horror, the shrieks, the bloodshed, the bodies of both men and horses strewn across this landscape as far as the eye could see. The bodies of both men and horses strewn across this landscape as far as the eye could see. By the afternoon, I think the men would have been exhausted, hungry, many of them broken. In the last moments of daylight, the Normans made a final assault up here to take the ridge. The sources vary on what happens next, but it's clear that Harold, King of England, was killed. Some say that he was struck in the right eye by an arrow, but others, a slightly more gruesome account,

which scholars now think might be more reliable, is that he was cleaved to death, hacked to pieces by an elite squad of Norman knights, sent by William himself to assassinate the English king. As Harold fell, the Anglo-Saxon monarchy died with him. In the gathering dusk, Harold's men saw that their king was dead, his banner trampled into the ground, and they fled, or they sold their lives in suicidally brave and hopeless resistance. The English had lost the Battle of Hastings.

The day ended but a new era dawned. After his victory at Hastings, William marched on London and he was crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066. Crowned King of England in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day 1066, the conqueror and his Normans would change the very fabric of English life, from language to religion to law. And one of the ways in which we still see the impact of the Normans in England today is the architecture. During his reign, William and his nobles embarked on a castle building spree across the whole country

to lock down this newly conquered kingdom and fortify Norman power. Now, one of my favourite castles in England was a castle that was built on a site on which William the Conqueror built one of his first castles in England. It's one of the best examples of a medieval castle anywhere in the country. It lies about 50 miles east-northeast of here. It became known as the key to England with its massive keep, its incredible walls surrounding it, and that is, friends, you know where I'm going, Dover Castle,

perched atop those dramatic white cliffs. This has to be the next stop on my medieval adventure. Let's go. The top of the spiral staircase which takes me to the roof of the keep of Dover castle, one of the most magnificent castles we ever had on the route. It is the best place to see all of England's history. I'm looking at the buildings within Dover Castle and I can see the three-story Roman lighthouse, the Pharos, which still stands at the center of it.

You've got next to that, it's Anglo-Saxon church from a thousand years ago, built before Hastings. Then you've got the more modern stuff, Napoleonic 18th and 19th centuries and over there in the distance on a hillside you can still see the radar towers that mounted the cutting-edge world first radar of 1940 that ensured that Britain would win the Battle of Britain. It is an epic epic view it's a wonderful place to be and this castle has been described as the key to England. I guess it really became that in the high medieval period.

A time that we associate, if you like, with the jousting crusades. Henry II, the Plantagenets, his son Richard I made great additions to this castle. The story goes that Henry II was kind of embarrassing that the French king arrived here for a pilgrimage going to Canterbury and there wasn't really a suitable royal fortress here. So from around 1179 to 1189, only 100 years after Norman conquest, Henry II went bonkers and spent a fortune building up this castle making it probably the most advanced castle in Europe at the time and he turned what had been an Anglo-Saxon defensive structure and a castle built by William

the Conqueror, he turned it into a palatial hilltop residence and stronghold. In the 12th century that meant Dover Castle was the place to be, the place to be seen. And tell me all about it, I've got two English heritage experts, Sally Parker and Dr Matthew Philpott. So guys, thank you very much for coming and talking to me. How would a castle, they feel quite intimate. The lord and lady of a castle, the king and queen if they were here, would they have been rubbing shoulders with everyone

or would the big official spaces have been kept clear for them and the servants would have been beetling around below stairs? It's really, yes, there are individual spaces kept for them and in the case if the queen accompanied the king then she would take a separate chamber our guest chamber here specifically at Dover it would usually be given over to a visiting dignitary but certainly the queen or another member of the family if deemed the next most senior would take that room where the king had a chamber above the highest furnished level higher for higher status reasons

and what about everyone else where do they sleep beyond these walls or sometimes sharing space within for instance um the inner ba, the courtyard that surrounds this building, it contains buildings now that range from the 17th to the early 20th century, but they're built on top of 12th and 13th century foundations, which suggests there was further accommodation and further working space beyond these walls. And you had enough space to pitch tents and pavilions as well. So that's the thing about castles, not just over but elsewhere, is you think of the surviving stone buildings,

but there would have been so much temporary accommodation and wood and canvas all round, and it would have been a real tainted city. Certainly, yes, yeah, very much so, yes. And particularly here, you had the space to not only do that, but also to stable horses, drive livestock onto the site, things like that, yeah. Didn't they have felt very busy spaces, Sally?

Oh, absolutely, yes, bustling, bustling. During the day, it would have been like probably a modern equivalent of a shopping center you know people everywhere doing all their pieces of work strikes me if you're a servant here you're working long days oh absolutely yes if you i mean there were different levels of servant and you have your higher status trusted confidants who would be perhaps from a noble household they'd come here to learn how to fit in in courtly life and then you could have people right at the bottom being your greasy hard-working servants and then somewhere in the middle you'd have your stewards and your butlers things like that but everyone would be in the livery of the lord or the lady and it

was very very sought very sought-after job being a servant at a royal household because you were guaranteed clothing, accommodation, meals. So, yes, even if you were a lowly servant, you would be very busy all the time. Downtime would be limited. You would be at the beck and call of the lord and the lady. For some reason, when people think medieval, they think jesters.

Is that a thing? It is a thing. Yes, it is. It is. Our particular favourite here was a gentleman known as Roland Lepetur. It was Roland the Farter, is how that translates. And his skit for Henry II was to fart musically.

And he performed it so well that he was given land as a result. He was given about 30 acres of land, and that was held in trust for his sons as well. So certainly a thing, yes, but entertainment would vary. So for Henry II, yes, very earthy forms of entertainment. His wife Eleanor, the Duchess of Aquitaine, brought a very sophisticated court with her that valued things like poetry, storytelling,

the playing of new musical instruments as well it's amazing that henry and ellen didn't get on very well surprising given their tastes yes indeed yeah there is evidence to suggest that they genuinely did love each other but the personal always being political at that time at that level of society meant that they became increasingly dysfunctional yeah entertainment was a huge part of it yes of course four hours of telly last night they didn't have that option. But a jester would have to be a very quick-witted, clever person to be able to appease the Lord, as well as seeing how far they could push, taking the mickey.

But I do worry about poor Roland the Farter. I mean, the poor man must have had a dreadful condition that meant he could guff on demand. I mean, perhaps he was a victim of long-term Gardia infection, but it would have meant all year round he would have been in terrible discomfort, all at the whim of the people who wanted to laugh at him. And unfortunately, that was a huge part of courtly entertainment, was getting people with physical disabilities, mental disabilities, and having a good old laugh at

them. I mean, even execution, as we know, was a huge part of entertainment in courtly life. So Sally, you've got a great storeroom on the ground floor. Would that have been filled with food the whole time? What's the trouble? It gets spoils, it goes off, does it? It would. And particularly in winter, it's thought that there was very few places you could store food. So they would have a lot of salted meats, which would then be jazzed up by the cooks. They would spend a lot of money on spices, very valuable spices, to make the food palatable even over winter. But at Dover particularly, there wasn't much royal hunting,

so they would normally have to buy food in from the town. Of course, being close to the sea sea there was no end of fish and a lot of the time they would have fish instead of meats but you had your pantry where you would store your bread so your pat the larder which is where the meat was stored for the lard and also the buttery but that was where they would store the butts of wine. And so your butler was in charge of keeping the lords and the ladies stocked up with wine, a lot of which was imported from France. But we had a very good wine industry in England at the time. It's thought that the climate was that little bit better back then, so it was easier to grow grapes. So yeah, the wine industry thriving back in the medieval era. And no Plantagenet ever tasted a potato or a tomato.

Weird thought. They were missing out. Or chocolate. Chocolate, no, absolutely. But it doesn't mean they didn't have an amazing feast. Every time they wanted to have a good old party, they'd throw a lot of balls. They were political alliances rather than just having fun.

You'd throw a lavish feast for visitors and then they would in turn do the same for you, but you would show off. Show off your wealth with all your spices and your meats. Some very exotic meats, ones we wouldn't eat today. Swan, heron, stalk, crane, porpoise. Porpoise, yes. Whale.

So yes, on special occasions, sometimes they would take the head of a pig, pack it with spinach to make it look green and spiky, and then place smouldering embers within its snout. So they were bringing in the head of a dragon for everyone to eat that night. Yummy. Much is about the presentation, isn't it? Oh, very much so. Yes, absolutely. Do we have any idea of numbers? How many people is the court and how many servants are required to maintain it? It's very, very difficult to put an accurate figure on it.

Before the king would arrive here, you would have a garrison and administration headed by a constable of about 150 people. When the king arrives, you can bump the population of the castle up by several hundred at least, but it's very, very difficult to put an accurate figure on it. We do know that a court like Henry II would take up literally miles of road in travelling from one destination to the next. And with that constable you mentioned, are they laying in stocks of food in case, you know, smoked hams and flour and stuff, in case the king turns up?

If you've got word, yes, if you've got word ahead of time, and there were such people as chamberlains and the like who would come and prepare the ground, as it were. They would prepare the exclusive chambers ahead of the rest of the retinue arriving with the king so yes that's certainly true and a constable is administering the property on behalf of the king in his absence anyway so he's responsible for mounting the guard if necessary defending the castle in times of siege as well right which did happen here as well it certainly did yeah i mean that's the fascinating thing so isn't it we talk about castles like. They're both sites of farting and feasting and romance, but deadly,

serious warfare as well. Warfare, yes, absolutely. I mean, the castle here was used as a prison during the Spanish War of Succession. There's a lot of graffiti giving evidence of the kind of people who were kept here as prisoners. But down at Constable's Tower, there were executions happening in there. There was a little chamber below where people would be kept prisoner and then hauled up to be tried and then executed there and then. Dover Castle, the keep, was only ever really designed as a huge show-off bed and breakfast. It was a status symbol, really, but it was also a just-in-case kind of defensive building as well.

But it's built concentrically. Lots of people did try and invade, but it never fell. And so the defences of this castle, you say concentric. There's the keep, which is very powerful, but the walls, lines of walls outside the keep the french did manage to breach one of the walls once didn't they but still yes absolutely yeah in the siege of 1216 at the end of the reign of king john the high summer of 1216 they undermined the tower of the old main entrance gateway to the north so they managed to dig saps

up to that position and then undermine a tower of the gateway itself and bring it crashing down the defenders actually managed to throw the attackers off the wreckage and then threw up a temporary structure, threw up a palisade to hold them back. So yes, they came very close to getting in, but they didn't get in at that time despite that effort. Is the point about a castle you don't have to pay lots of people to stand on the walls constantly because the walls themselves are so strong? How many defenders do you think it would have been for a castle like this? Again, probably a garrison of around 100 to 150 men. Which is not many.

It's not very many. It depends on the siting of your military architecture. It's about economy of effort. We have an example here, for instance, called Averanche Tower, cut down in an age of gunpowder to clear lines of fire for cannon behind. So originally of three stories, now of two. And you would defend that with just a handful of crossbowmen. For instance, it had such a wide overlapping field of fire

that you defended that with perhaps as few as three, perhaps at a maximum six to nine, which you're moving between different slots or loops to loose crossbow bolts from cover. And it has a very, very wide field of fire. And that's just one example of one tower. Just a handful of men. And there could have been a whole army outside.

Yes, indeed. A much bigger army outside attempting to invest the entire site in siege. So, OK, so if you do manage to break through one line of defence, what's waiting for them at the next line? It's another line of defence. It's similar towers. But one of the clever things about it was that if you had a tower such as Averanche Tower, it's open-backed.

So when you as a defender are falling back and they are occupying that space, they're then in turn under fire from the next line of towers. I always think with some medieval castle and siege warfare, sometimes you care for what you wish for, you think you break in, you think, oh, we're doing well here, and you turn a corner and actually you're in a much worse position. Absolutely. Places are designed to be killing grounds, yes, so that you're not really gaining anything by being in that space.

And Dover is so unusual as both a palace and a battlefield, though, through our history. Yes, indeed, yeah. Designed as very lavish at its heart and then more cutting edge in terms of its military architecture for its time the further out you go, yeah. This is Dan Snow's story of England. More medieval invaders after this. no story of England. More medieval invaders after this. On Gone Medieval from History Hit, we set out to solve the biggest mysteries of the medieval age. So many of these travellers who went out looking for Presto John, what did they think they were hearing? Using science to identify our buried ancestors. Genetic signatures found in presentday Ashkenazi Jewish populations were shared by the genetic ancestries we found in these individuals. And reveal the answers to centuries-old riddles.

I stand up straight in a bed, I'm hairy at my base and I make the ladies cry. The solution is an onion. I'm Matt Lewis and every Tuesday and Friday you can join me to travel the medieval world in search of the stories you haven't heard and to get under the skins of the ones you have. Gone Medieval from History Hit, twice a week, every week. Listen and follow on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say,

don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Up to now, medieval England faced attacks from the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the French, the Welsh, even the Scots, piling over the border several times. But a threat even more deadly was yet to come. And it wouldn't travel in dragon-headed longboats or on horses. It arrived on the back, or should I say in the fur, of rats. In the 14th century, England, and the rest of Europe, would see its population decimated

in a way that made people believe the world was ending. In 1348, the bubonic plague arrived. By that point, England had become a relatively rich, powerful nation, but that wouldn't keep it safe from the Black Death. The disease attacked rich and poor over the next two years. Three million people, almost half the population, would die. The plague arrived, well, by sea, obviously.

It arrived on the south coast of England at Weymouth, a port teeming with fishing boats and merchant ships. On vessels carrying goods from Europe, probably wine from France, the plague lay in wait, already having infected the sailors on board, though they didn't know it yet. As they offloaded their cargo and checked in at the customs house,

they would have showed few signs or symptoms. As they mingled with the locals, the disease began to take hold, and within days it tore through the town. As goods and people travelled around, the plague travelled with them. It spread inland, ripping through Dorset, Bristol, Colchester, and by the end of November, it was in London, the heart of the country's commerce and headquarters of its monarchy. By February 1349, it had penetrated the city walls of medieval York, a city built in such a way that it enabled the plague to flourish. Fascinatingly, in July of 1348, about a month after the Black Death had first arrived on English shores,

no lesser person than the Archbishop of York himself had written, The inevitable, pitiless death which spares no one now threatens us. It took around a year to arrive in York and to learn more about York York I have come to that great northern city itself it is actually one of the best places to think about the Black Death in the 14th century because unlike many of England and Britain's cities much of the medieval footprints of York survives of course it's remarkably complete walls around the edge of what was the

medieval city and then you've got these wonderful alleyways, these markets I'm walking through now, a crush of people. For those of you listening abroad, if you want a sense of what this part of York looks like, I hate to say this, but think about Diagon Alley in Harry Potter, particularly this little street I'm walking onto now, which is called the Shambles, which is a picture-perfect medieval street.

The gables of the houses almost touching at the top. Back then, the cobbles I'm walking on now would have just been open sewers running down the middle of these little alleys. It's called the Shambles, and that is derived from the Old English word for meat market, slaughterhouse, basically butcheries. So not only is this area full of human beings, life packed together, but also a gigantic number of livestock, sheep, cows, pigs, brought in from out of town and paraded up the shambles to be slaughtered,

butchered and sold at one of the many establishments that lined this little cobbled street. Nowadays it's all chocolate shops and smelly candle shops, but back in the 14th century this would have been an even busier thoroughfare with people jostling alongside animals on the way to the slaughter i do not need to describe to you listeners that this is the most ideal environment imaginable for the transmission of disease you've got animals being brought in from across the region you've got people packing together crushed in together you've got blood flowing through the gutters at my feet. If you're a flea or a louse this place is like Disney World

and it became a hotbed of disease transmission. So even though York had its vaunted defences, its encircling walls built in the decades leading up to the Black Death, those defences would prove utterly worthless against Yesenia Pestis, the Black Death. Some believed it was a punishment from God. Others believed that foreigners, or those who followed a different religion, poisoned the wells. The idea that bad air was responsible was suggested, and some even thought the positions of the planets had caused the plague.

Now, of course, we understand the science of what was going on inside the body that caused people to suffer and die in such an unpleasant way. Susie Edge is a medical doctor and a historian, and she really gets into what it was like to have bubonic plague. And as a heads up, you can bet it's pretty grim. The plague is a disease that comes from the bacteria Yersinia pestis. It's a gram-negative bacteria which likes to hang around in rodents and likes to be moved about by the biting of fleas. So a flea might come along and nibble on a rat and get a lift and find itself near a human being, and then it would start nibbling the human being.

And then while it was doing that nibbling, the bacteria could move across into the blood of the human, and there it's nice and warm, there's lots to eat. There's lots of opportunities to replicate. And it can really go to town and make itself known. So plague then starts moving through the body. The lymph system is what moves the immune cells around and anything that the immune cells try and destroy, like the bacteria. And the bacteria easily finds its way into the lymph nodes. And that's what we know in bubonic plague as the lymph nodes swelling and becoming these tense, painful buboes.

If somebody had this bacteria inside them, their body would want to fight back. So the first thing that they would feel is this malaise, flu-like symptoms. They look very pale because the blood moves away from the skin, goes towards the important organs to try and fight off the infection. That's where they'd start. They'd start to feel nauseous. They'd want to vomit, maybe some diarrhoea because they'd want to try and expel this bug inside them.

That's what the body's trying to do. They'd feel headachy and their pulse might start to go up a bit. They might start to breathe faster. And this is all the body just trying to kill the infection. The buboes are just these little sacks of lymph nodes that are full of pus. And if you were to stick a knife in them and drain that pus out, they'd have all the remnants of the bacteria and everything that the body was trying to kill. It would take between one and six or seven days.

So it's very, very quick, the progression of the disease, from the first feeling, the flu-like symptoms, to the death at the end. So in the final stages, day six, seven perhaps, everything would start to shut down. The hands and the feet would be blackened, maybe blotchy purple. They would be sacrificing the hands and feet and the peripheries to try and keep the blood in the internal organs. In the end, the heart and the lungs, they just couldn't keep going anymore. Up and down the country, doctors desperately tried to find ways to cure the sick and dying.

Kevin Goodman is a medical historian. In the medieval world we had a hierarchy of health care at the top with the physicians. Now they were university trained so you're never going to see one of those unless you're really really rich. That only served lords and princes and really wealthy people. Next down on the pecking order, we have the surgeons. Now, the surgeons, they were tradesmen. They trained after several years of apprenticeship. That's why today we call surgeons Mr. but physicians Dr.

So they're going to do the hands-on stuff. So they're going to be doing the cutting, the lancing, the bleeding, the cupping, any operations that need to be done. Then next down, we've got the barbers. Now, the barbers, they can do bleeding, might set broken limbs, might pull teeth, but they're limited what they can actually do. And then we've also got the hospitals,

but the hospitals are not what we imagine them to be. They're frequently attached to religious houses, such as convents or monasteries and they're not about using medicines. They're about interceding with God on your behalf through prayer and making you better like that. And then we've got, of course, empirics, the local wise men or women

who've been using really a lot of foul cures, but we haven't got any records of these people from the medieval period. Yeah, they would have existed, but we really don't know what they would have done. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War.

You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. So what treatment you'd end up getting really did depend on which healthcare professional you saw. But across the spectrum, the understanding of the human body wasn't exactly what it is now.

Everything was seen through the prism of the four humours. This originated with the ancient Greeks and it's still been believed up until the mid-19th century with the discovery of germs when we had that in 1850 by Pasteur. What it was, it was a way of viewing the body. So you're made up of the four humours, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile if your humours are equal they're in balance you're healthy if however you've got too much of a particular humour or not enough your humours are out of balance and you are ill so the whole point of diagnosis was trying to find out which humour you had an excess of or a deficit of.

And they would do that by looking at symptoms, behaviour, complexion, pulse. There were a variety of methods, some that we still find familiar today. Lots of questions. And then they would decide what humour we needed to correct. They might recommend a diet, a change of diet. They may recommend purging, so bloodletting, or a medicine. So what's going to happen is the medicine would have to be made up by an apothecary using a prescription. But bloodletting, anything like that, is going to have to be done by the surgeon.

So the surgeon may get his flims, a little knife, so you cut into the vein, open it, and then you'd let how much blood you believe that you needed to get rid of, and then put the finger on it to stop it bleeding. Other methods they had for treating the black death were to lance boo bows. So they'd do that with, again, a fleam. So they'd cut into the fleam. This time they'd use a cupping glass. They'd heat up the cupping glass glass place it over the cut and as

a cupping glass cooled it would draw out all the humus another way was using a cauterizing iron so you'd heat up the cauterizing iron in a fire and then basically you could press that into the boob, burst it. I mean, and also cauterising could be used just by trying to raise a blister. So you'd heat one up, put it just above the skin, raise a blister, and pop it. There's always the risk

when you're penetrating the human body. You've got no idea of germs. So, would things have been sterilised? I doubt it. When you're treating somebody who's got the plague, their immune system is already compromised.

So, if you're going to pierce the body with anything, you're going to get germs in there, so that's going to cause further problems. Did it work? We don't know. We know a lot of surgeons used to brag about, this is something I used with such and such a patient,

and it worked, but what we're on about there is self-publicity. They need to talk about how good they are. As Kevin says, these were businessmen, as well as physicians and doctors. They didn't just treat anyone, only those who could pay. And you can bet they made a tidy sum of the plague. But it was a risky way to make a living. So what we do know, there were guidelines for entering houses. So what would happen is, where the patient was,

the windows would have to be open to let fresh air in, drive any humours away. There had to be incense burning or fresh herbs burning or strewn over the floor. When the surgeon approached the patient to examine, he would be holding a bouquet of herbs to his nose again to present the bad air the miasma and when he examined the patient the patient would have to turn his head away so the surgeon would not be

breathing in any of the miasma coming from the patient. And then he would, at a distance, examine the body. They were putting themselves at risk, especially if there was a case of pneumonic plague where the person was coughing and spluttering. But the problem is they didn't understand everything that's got to be done within the framework of miasma and bad air. So what was the best advice a doctor could give a plague patient?

Brunne far, brunne fast. Between 1347 and 1352, over 25 million people across Europe died from bubonic plague. people across Europe died from bubonic plague. It's still difficult to say exactly what caused it eventually to subside. Expert theories point to a couple of reasons. When the plague started, as Kevin says, many thought it was caused by an angry God and they looked to religious leaders for a cure. But as the church was unable to offer any good answers, people began to look for more scientific reasons. Scientists at the time turned to dissection, the study of blood circulation, to find ways to combat the spread of plague. Some also believed that over time the bacteria lost some of its power, whilst human bodies evolved to be more resistant.

What we do know is that England after the Black Death was a very different one to the England that had preceded it. Whole communities were wiped out, and as a result, it reshaped labour and social mobility. With less workers around, peasants were able to move about a bit more, find work where they could command a higher wage from desperate landowners. Land that had once been farmed was left for pasture, which helped to boost the cloth and wool industry. Almost half the country's priests died, accelerating the decline in church power.

And perhaps it was also a general disillusionment that religion had provided no protection or cure. The country had been through a huge upheaval, and more was to come. I'm in the York Museum Gardens now. Another day has come to an end. Another successful road tripping history adventure. The birds are chirping, the light is golden on the new spring leaves on the trees.

And it's time to go to the pub. You know what they say about York? It's a city where the gates are called bars and the bars are called pubs. So we're going to go to a pub right now, me and the team. That's how we roll. But we're not going to get carried away because this road trip is only just getting going. Make sure you look out for tomorrow's episode because Team History, we're heading back down to the Midlands

to take on the next chapter in this country's great story. It's your favourite. It's the crowd pleaser. It's the Tudors with the War of the Roses and little Cromwell Oliver obviously sprinkled in so make sure you subscribe to Dan Snow's History Hit wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss an episode this is the second in a series of five podcasts bringing you some of my favorite bits of English history it's a special project for me so I'd love to hear from you you can email us

at ds.hh at historyhit.com as, the producer was Marianne Desforges and the editor was Dougal Patmore. See you tomorrow from within the crumbling walls of the castle that endured the second longest siege in England's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes.

Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.