Dan Snow's History Hit - Lockdown Learning: The Middle Ages

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

In this week's Lockdown Learning episode, I was delighted to be joined by medieval historian Marc Morris. We discuss broad themes relating to the Middle Ages - what were they and which periods did they come in between. We ask whether many of the clichés about the Middle Ages are accurate.Many thanks again to Simon Beale, who's put together a worksheet for students to fill out while listening to the episode. You can download it here:https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dwbcPc4qmHIfuIQImt4nfp1cPWfJSoFd/view?usp=sharing

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. We've got another lockdown learning episode for you today. We're releasing them every Friday.

Last week, we had the brilliant Anna Whitelock talking about the Tudors. That was at your request. We asked history teachers what they could use a bit of help with. This week, we've got another brilliant friend of history hit, Mark Morris. He's a medieval historian.

He's just written a gigantic, fantastic book on early medieval England and Britain, the Anglo-Saxons. You are going to love that book when it comes out. We're going to get him back on the pod when it comes out. But in the meantime, he's here just taking us on a very kind of brief overview. What were the Middle Ages? What were they in between? What were they middle of? And are many of the cliches about that medieval period fair, or are they the product of the fervent imagination of later generations as with the episode last week the very brilliant simon beale who's a wonderful history and politics teacher

here in the uk he's produced a worksheet for students that they can fill in as they listen to this episode i'm hugely hugely grateful to him for doing so the middle age is a bit of a tricky one it's a huge subject. We've got ones coming up on the Russian Revolution and the New Deal. So we'll try and keep those a bit more focused. But please, everyone, go and have a look at Simon's worksheets. I'll also be tweeting those out.

I'm at The History Guy on Twitter. Mark, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's always's always a pleasure dan you've got the most difficult we've been asking history teachers what they want what they need from us and they've you know the new deal you know there's quite particular things you know medicine the 19th century lots people said the middle ages so i thought well mark morris knows the middle ages it's only about a thousand years of history it's incredibly complex what do you think we mean in schools and teachers and even just general people on the street mean by the Middle Ages? In the UK, when we talk about the Middle Ages, there's a tendency to assume that it means after the Norman conquest. So anything from 1066 to the late 15th century. And that's one possible definition.

and that's one possible definition and I think that's kind of because you know institutions like English heritage talk about the Anglo-Saxon period before 1066 and then the middle ages after 1066 but properly speaking the middle ages is a term that's been since the renaissance and it was coined in the renaissance so say in the late 15th 16th centuries and the question to ask is what do we know what does what does the middle ages come in the middle of and in the re 15th 16th centuries and the question to ask is what do you know what does what does the middle ages come in the middle of and in the renaissance they they were congratulating themselves that they had rediscovered the the the arts that have been lost of ancient rome and ancient greece particularly ancient rome so they'd recovered the latin language and latin literature they'd recovered the architecture that had ended with Rome and so the middle ages or the middle

age as they call it in Europe Moyen Age was the bit between Rome and the Renaissance and so as you said about a thousand years if you kind of you know accept that Rome fell at some point in the 5th century and the Renaissance began at some point in the 15th it's a whole millennium between circa 500 1500 so that's the the middle ages or the middle age. It's a whole millennium between circa 500, 1500. So that's the Middle Ages or the Middle Age. They've got a funny reputation, the Middle Ages, haven't they? People think of them as violent, somehow primitive, divided. The power was all divided up into sort of local warlords. Is there any truth to those cliches? Well, I think the first thing to say is that from the first, so when it's coined the term medieval in the Renaissance, it is a pejorative

term. So it wasn't, they weren't sort of saying neutrally, oh, this was the bit in the middle. They were congratulating themselves on their rediscovery of classical learning and classical culture and saying this bit in the middle was by implication worse. It was barbarous. This was the time when people were running around, you you know painted blue with their bottoms hanging out and of course that pejorative meaning of medieval carries forward right to the present so if people talk about you know they you know as a lazy journalist's kind of cliche they will say things like oh this is kind of medieval economy or medieval famine or a medieval plague or i'm going to get medieval on your ass and these are

all bad things is there any truth in that well medievalists would start to kind of cavil at that and say no or not entirely because they would say that the achievement of the renaissance is overstated and there were lots of big leaps forward in the medieval period itself particularly the 12th century when lots of these things really that you can argue that the 12th century the renaissance of the 12th century was much more important than the the renaissance with a capital r of the 15th century so lots of things like classical architecture roman style architecture was being um rediscovered in the 12th century and that's why you get romanesque in the 11th century indeed to answer your question more fully though there's i

there's no doubt in sort of the my mind although people will argue against it that after the fall of rome there was a considerable dip in living standards for a lot of people that there was a lot of violence and a lot of chaos and of course you know rome was this kind of as you say a super state a great empire that stretched all the way from Britain in the north to sort of North Africa in the south, from the Atlantic in the west to Arabia in the east. And a huge kind of free trade zone, you know, where armies and goods could be moved around very quickly and efficiently. And for a lot of people, the standard of living was higher than the period that followed particularly in western europe in places like um gaul and um and britain in the period that comes after rome sort of fifth sixth seventh eighth centuries i think the it's the i don't want to sort of say the cliche of the middle ages is true but there was a lot of violence and chaos and upheaval from which

the successor states to Rome eventually emerged and there was more stability so you have you know the emerging kingdoms in Anglo-Saxon England, Wessex, Mercia, Northumbria, East Anglia and what become the nation states of Europe eventually in Francia and Italy and Spain. So short answer to the question is, yes, I think the Middle Ages is unfairly pilloried throughout the sort of the period from the Renaissance onwards, but there's a hard kernel of truth, especially for the early period, that it was less sophisticated, if that's a perhaps more appropriate word, than the Roman Empire that preceded it. You think of the Middle Ages, you definitely think of castles. A's a reflection of of how sort of big

empires had been replaced by powerful local lords there's certainly there's certainly nothing of course on the scale of rome but when you every time when you said well there's nothing on you know there's no there are no big empires i'm thinking well there's the carolingian empire and there's the angevin empire which was put together by Henry II. And the objection against kind of regarding those as empires is you say, well, if they don't compare to Rome in any way because they're ramshackle assemblages, certainly in the case of the Angevin Empire, that's a modern coinage to describe this kind of consortium of lands that's put together by Henry II and his sons. consortium of lands that's put together by Henry II and his sons. In the early period, say after the break with Rome between Britain and the rest of the empire in the early 5th century, it seems fairly clear that what happens in Britain is you have a galaxy of new states.

You have kind of initially a sort of complete collapse of society or of Roman order and warlordism and chaos. And out of that, by the time you get to the mid or the late 6th century you have the formation of kingdoms but these are very tiny kingdoms in the first instance so you know every it might just be a you know a few hundred square miles or even smaller and it's not until we get until to theth century that we see the emergence of kingdoms like Kent, East Anglia, Mercia, Wessex, etc. So, yes, initially you get smaller polities. But in the case of, let's stick with Britain for a minute. By the time you get to the 10th century, in the case of Britain, you've got the emerging Kingdom of England.

So all these lesser Anglo-Saxon kingdoms have fused or been fused together by military coercion from the kings of Wessex they've become a large state England which as states go is fairly big you know I mean England in the 10th century is more or less the same shape and size that England is now it's fairly centralized as a state so it has institutions based around the monarchy which is increasingly by the 11th century resident at Westminster so it's got and it's got sort of a uniformity to it as well so it's got you know England is divided into shires shires are divided into hundreds there's one coin that runs throughout the whole kingdom with the king's head on it minted to a universal standard there

are states England may be exceptional and precocious in the way it um in terms of its unity but there are states in the middle ages starting to emerge um so i don't i i take your point that there there's a lot of um local power as well let's keep talking about power kings really matter don't they you think about william the conqueror henry the second edward the first of england their personality their strengths their weaknesses they can have a big effect on the country they're ruling yeah i mean the personality of the king that the king matters great deal i mean it's often a question i it gets put to me is you know what makes a good king or what do people want out of a king and i think the best answer is you look at what they made a king promise to do when they swore him in or whether when they made a king

which is a king is made from 1066 onwards by the coronation that's the sort of a constitutive act and when a king is crowned when a king is created that he is made to promise first of all to defend and protect the church to abolish bad laws those kind of things the other thing that is not in the coronation oath is to um defend the realm to kind of you know protect people sort of with the might of his sword so you look at what people at the time wanted and why why certain kings are judged to be good or bad take a king like edward the first he was considered good although you know considered considered bad in later centuries, judging him by sort of, you know, modern yardsticks, or indeed judging him if you are a

Welsh, Scottish or Irish perspective, because those are the countries he went to war against. He's the villain in Mel Gibson's Braveheart. But contemporary Englishmen regarded him as a great thing precisely because he wore down his Celtic enemies and because he reformed government at the start of his reign, which government was reckoned to be corrupt, particularly local government, because he taxed his people lightly. So, you know, the kind of key things are being a strong leader in war, clearly very important. It's very hard for medieval kings to sort of um the only other model is kind of to be sort of very pious and saintly sort of like edward the confessor and whilst there are some kings that try that model um big fan of edward the confessor is edward's father henry the third it's never as successful they're never regarded as successful as kings like henry the second henry

the fifth edward the first who are warrior kings. Doing good justice is also very important. I mean, keeping the majority of your subjects happy and making them feel that their grievances are being redressed. And this goes right down to the level of the gentry, but it's particularly important for the aristocracy. If you kind of be with people, you're doing a good job and you're fair and reasonable. And that's something that King John managed to screw up royally, is the sense that, you know, he was seen to be sort of favouring cronies or

charging people large amounts of money for judgments. And in general, just if you want to avoid the situation where more than 50% of the people think you're doing it badly, you cannot busk through in the way you can as a modern political leader with kind of 30% of people thinking you're great and 70% of people complaining about you. You have to have an overall majority of people thinking you're doing a good job. How about rebellions? Does it feel like there's a lot of rebellions in the Middle Ages? The peasants revolt famously in the 14th century, lots of lords always kicking off. What causes rebellions it's very difficult to generalize about rebellions and uprisings and you know sort of to lump them all together doesn't really do them justice i mean i think

there are occasions where i think when you have successful uprisings against the king they tend to be broadly based so a king is unpopular let's say because his policies are causing uh misery across a you know a broad spectrum of people so it's not just aggrieved peasants who in if if the aristocracy is doing okay and the peasants are revolting then the aristocracy might aid the king in suppressing that revolt the revolts that tend to be successful tend to be uh not just plainly aristocratic or just you know the people at the bottom of the tree. But but a regime is unpopular across all of society and various bits of society from, you know, the quite low down. What I'm trying to say is that the aristocracy, if they're aggrieved, maybe you will be able to rally people to their cause and raise armies and say we must have regime change at the top and they will

be cheered by people beneath them so that's uh you know you can think of examples like king john's reign where that happens there are other occasions of course where people further down the the social pecking order don't really have any skin in the fight so if you take something like the wars of the roses that seems to me to be more um aristocratic squabbles about who gets to wear the crown and you get that all the time of course um in in a system where it's notionally hereditary, but there's a lot of wriggle room, especially if the king doesn't have any direct heirs. You get people saying, well, I ought to be king. And then if you can convince enough people of your right, then, of course, you can raise arms against the king.

One thing I would take issue with, though, is though is that of course looking back from our perspective it seems that there's rebellion all the time in the middle ages and it to go back to what we were talking about at the beginning it can seem like it can seem like anarchy from this distance and you develop this pejorative kind of shakespearean or walter scott view of the middle ages where everyone is fighting all the time and of course the majority of people in this in any period are by their standards probably by our standards kind of quite sensible and they know that in order to kind of like enjoy i mean to take aristocrats they're normally persuade portrayed as the bad guys the famous robber barons of the middle ages but in order to enjoy the fruits of the land in order to get you know to raise rents they don't they can't oppress

their peasantry the whole time and terrorize them they have they have to have to have a productive peasantry they have to have productive fields they have to be able to cream off a surplus so they're not forever going around burning each other's crops and making war on each other and someone asked me i did my doctoral thesis on the earls of norfolk in the 13th century and i i always took umbridge with the suggestion that they were forever rebelling it was kind of like well this one rebelled against King John and this one rebelled against Henry III and then this one rebelled against Edward I and I would point out that those each of those rebellions were 40 years apart so it's like sort of pointing to my family in the 20th century and saying oh gosh the morris family were forever fighting the germans first there was 1914 then there was 1939 to 45 you know it's like you can't sort of the tendency

with the middle ages is when there's nothing happening there's not much reported in the chronicles what gets reported as the rebellions and the civil wars you know so there are great periods of the middle ages 99 of the time where england was much more happy and bucolic and sort of merry england and that tends to get forgotten if you just concentrate on the narrative of kings and revolting peasants you mentioned peasants the vast majority of the the population i suppose were peasants and can you just talk a little bit about what their life would have been like how tied to the land how and and and presumably overwhelming percentage of the land how and and and presumably overwhelming percentage of the population of england farming yeah i think i mean i guess again it's not really the the the uh the thing i'm hottest on in the

middle ages but my understanding is 90 plus of the population are involved in agriculture so peasants peasants of course the word mean is pays and it's from the french word pays so it's um it's people tied to the land. And yes, until the until the advent of industrialisation and mechanisation, that was true right up to the 19th century. The majority of people worked the land. So the landscape would have been, you know, when we sort of drive through the landscape today and we don't see anyone in the fields, you would have walked everywhere you walked or rode in the Middle Ages. You would have seen hundreds of people working all the fields one of the things that's always interested me is is the sort of change that's brought about by the norman conquest and one of the great changes that happens in england but sort of as a result of the conquest is prior to the conquest in lots of places in england um

the peasantry were slaves and this was not the entire peasantry but say the bottom 20 percent of the peasantry were likely to be slaves and as a result of the norman conquest the normans in short introduced or banned slavery and and and preferred their um their peasants to be serfs and you might say well there's not a huge amount of difference between being a serf and a slave but the difference i think at the time was was considerable although not although underreported because slaves in pre conquest britain were like slaves in the classical world they could be families could be broken up so you were regarded as just the chattels the property of your master your lord and they could say well i'm selling your daughter now or i'm going to sell your sons you know to this other person or sell them out of the country into the into the hands of slave traders after the norman conquest that doesn't happen or at least it fades away in a couple of

generations and although people are tied to the land and their lords have rights over them and they can make them work certain days of the week on the lord's domain that kind of thing they can't be broken up they can't be as individuals. And they can't be killed either with, I mean, slaves, as I say, they're regarded, they don't have rights. They don't have any more rights than the beasts in the field. So they could be killed if they offended by their lords. And that was not illegal. It might have been considered immoral because the Bible says thou shalt not kill. But it wasn't a crime to kill a slave in pre-conquest England. It would have been after the conquest. So although they don't have many rights up until the Peasants' Revolt of the 14th century,

their rights are improved as a result of the conquest. Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows

or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit.

Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. What about the church?

The church looms large in the sources for the Middle Ages, partly because the churchmen wrote most of the sources. Yeah, and that's, again, something I sort of always cavil at a bit, is that people will say, oh, well, the church was always complaining about this, and they're always complaining about... King John is the prime example in the stuff I've done people say well you know King John wasn't as bad as people think because he he annoyed the church he fell out with the Pope and therefore the church

hated him and I always point out well yes that's true but so did everybody else because one of the fallacies of the Middle Ages which you still see in school textbooks is that the only people writing things down were churchmen and that's just simply not true there are lots of secular voices you can point to from the middle ages very very famous one that's that's now people always say he's unknown but now he's sort of the most famous unknown man in medieval england is william marshall uh the the great courtier of the angevin kings who rose to be regent of england Henry III. I mean, the history of William Marshall, the only, the earliest rather, biography of a layman we have who's not a royal,

that's written by a layman, that's written by a troubadour poet. And that also says terrible things about King John, what a rotter he was. So the point one is that we have not just church sources, we have lay sources as well um telling us about the middle ages but yes you're right the church is hugely important because initially at least the church is the the literate class is the clergy to be a cleric or a clerk that the two things are synonymous if we talked about a clerk these days you just think of someone who was able to write but clergy and clerk come from the same root and meant the same thing. If you had a little clergy, it meant you could read Latin and you could therefore claim privilege of clergy, which is to be tried in church courts.

Tell me about chivalry. What is this sort of this sort of the warrior code? And how much of that is stories that these men would have told about themselves? And how much is that sort of rooted in actual practice in this period? This society since the fall of Rome, that to be successful meant you had to be a successful warrior. So if you go back to the Roman period, Roman aristocrats are not armed. They're not required to be soldiers. Rome has a professional army and, you know, you has professional soldiery that's paid for by the state. When Rome collapses, the people in charge are, are warrior rulers. So the, the, the barbarian rulers who succeed Rome, the Anglo-Saxon kings of England, if you like, they're, they, it's a, it's a warrior aristocracy. And to get on in life,

you have to be able to kick yourself out and be armed and be able to raise armed retinues. So in a sense, there's a, there's a sort of, you could say, well, the deepest roots of chivalry go back to that sense of, you know, whatever honour there is amongst these warriors. And you could look for, say, proto-chivalric attitudes in something like Beowulf. There are, however, other elements in terms of chivalry. Chivalry proper, I would say, kind of begins

round about the 11th, 12th centuries. And some part of it is the limitation of violence so if you look and there's no sense in say beer wolf for example of uh you know perhaps we should kind of limit the bloodshed it's all kind of like you know it's better to sort of you know die fighting and there's a sense of sort of almost a sort of you know like the sort of the viking idea of kind of like this is the way you kind of live and die and the more blood you spill the better almost by the 11th century particularly um uh in frank here in the 11th century there's this emerging idea that like well you should spare your enemies and you shouldn't kill your enemies uh make war on them but when you capture them or

when when you defeat them don't immediately hack them to pieces but imprison them if they promise to be very well behaved then perhaps release them in term in exchange for a ransom or the surrender of their land so an attempt you might say kind of led by the church i think the church has a role in it certainly you've got a thing in the 11th century in francia called the peace of god movement which is the church trying to limit the violence among aristocrats but also i think between aristocrats themselves just the sense that if you know you can't have this endless cycle of eye for an eye tooth tooth for a tooth violence so it's they see the sense in it again that's something that's introduced to england after 1066 by the normans and it does last a long time this so so this sense of not executing people when they're

on their knees begging you for mercy and that it only starts to disintegrate i think in the late 13th early 14th centuries ironically just at the time when kind of the sort of chanson de geste and sort of the tales of chivalry are at their height. So I suppose there's an argument for saying later medieval chivalry in the sense of poems you're talking about. That's to some extent a tinsel to kind of, you know, disguise a society that's becoming more violent. But chivalry is such a nebulous term, it's such a broad term. You know, if you talk about chivalrous society,

it's a society that's taking its cue from an upper class caste that celebrates its martial prowess. So it's stained glass windows, you know, with heraldic shields in heraldry everywhere, heraldry on tombs, heraldry in churches. So I say chivalry is very difficult to pin down. It can mean anything from like, you know, from the Dark Ages, quote unquote, up until the 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries. We'll talk about chivalry. Laying a cloak in a puddle can be considered chivalrous. But I think it's a use... My sort of more narrow definition is not killing people

after they have surrendered to you. And that's something that's ushered in in the 11th century and disappears in the 13th. Mark Morris, thank you for coming on and sharing so many wonderful insights with everybody. You've written some fabulous books. You've just got a new one on the Anglo-Saxons coming out soon and you're going to come on this podcast and do one I'm going to grill you about that because I love that book looking forward to having you on soon

As I say, always a pleasure, take care Dan All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished and liquidated. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity.

Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold.