Dan Snow's History Hit - Medieval Myths and Legends

Episode Date: May 19, 2022

Various legends, characters and myths are associated with the medieval period. The British Isles is filled with prehistoric monuments - from Stonehenge and Wayland's Smithy, the archipelago of Orkney to as far south as Cornwall, Snowdon and Loch Etive, and rivers including the Ness, the Soar and the story-silted Thames - Britain is a land steeped in myth.Dr Amy Jeffs is a historian specialising in the Middle Ages. Here to offer her retellings of medieval tales of legend, Amy joins Dan on the podcast. They discuss the characters of Brutus, Albina, Scota, Arthur and Bladud, and retread the paths where the medieval myths and legends of the British Isles first sprang to life.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Doing something a bit different today. Today, rather than trying to penetrate the myths that obscure early English and British history, we're going to embrace those myths. We're just going to go with them. We're going to enjoy them. We're going to learn what they are.

What does a medieval Brit think Stonehenge was? Or where the word Britain came from? Or why England and Scotland were different countries? Well, Amy Jeffs is here to answer. She is resurrecting medieval British myths and folklore, talking about things like the creation, Noah's flood, King Vortigern, Arthur, Merlin, Brutus, the giants. It's a really fun look at a bit of history that I often regard as kind of white noise, bit of a nuisance. I take it all back. Amy has re-educated me. She's schooled me. That's what I love about this podcast. It often happens. Amy is an art historian and printmaker.

She is an expert in medieval art and literature, and she's a very brilliant communicator, as you'll hear. If you wish, after listening to this, to actually go and find out what we do know about Stonehenge, King Arthur, the arrival of the Saxons, Anglo-Scottish rival, that kind of stuff. We've got plenty of podcasts where you can do just that. And they are all accessible without the ads at History Hit TV. It's our digital history channel. It's the world's best history channel, in fact, as nominated by me. You simply follow the link in the description of this podcast, and it takes you to get a two-week free trial. Head over there and do that.

We are doing a very interesting bit of World War I archaeology on the Western Front this year. All of that is happening because of you and because you're subscribing. So I'm incredibly, incredibly grateful. But in the meantime, folks, here is Amy Jeffs. Enjoy. Amy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for having me, Dan. It's lovely to be here. This is such a great idea. I read my kids Greek myths, I read them Norse myths,

I read them Chinese foundational stories. These are the British myths, the canon that we've forgotten to remember. It seems almost too good to be true that we've got this opportunity to rediscover these stories, and they are known within university circles, definitely. The reason I encountered them was that I was working on a PhD. I was doing it in history of art, medieval art specifically, and I was focusing on a manuscript that contained the brute legend, this origin myth of Britain. And there's quite a lot of discussion about this story within academic circles. I went to a talk by Alex Bovey, who works on the giants of the brute myth. And she really convinced me of just the sheer narrative value of these stories. And also

when it came to illustrating them, just realising how good they are. I think when you're going down a completely academic track, you almost forget the simple enjoyment you can get out of medieval source text or source text from any discipline. I know we are very nervous now about talking about the scientific revolution from the late 17th century onwards, but before the kind of rise of empirical thinking and modern scientific inquiry into where we all came from and where it all began, if I'd been standing around in 1500, are these the stories that everyone would have known about where we came from? Well, that's a very interesting question. And I think it touches on the issue of folklore versus myth. The main text that I use as a source is the brute legend. It was the history

of the Kings of Britain, written in about 1136 by Geoffrey of Monmouth for an elite audience. And it's preserved in manuscripts, which for the most of the period of manuscript productions, a thousand years, for all of that period, these are things that were really only accessible to the wealthy. And so we get from that a sense of what was of interest to the ruling classes, to people who were politically engaged and maybe had some political influence. And it has elements of folklore. You've got these stories of giants, of necromancers, of wizards like Merlin. They're not called wizards in the text, magicians. But what that really tells us about how an ordinary person viewed their own history is harder to establish. What it does tell us is that anyone with an education would have learned the

brute legend. They would have been told that Britain was founded by exiled Trojans led by a man called Brutus who was descended from Venus and Aeneas, the legendary warlord from Troy, and Aeneas, the legendary warlord from Troy, and that he was sent there at the behest of the goddess Diana. And when he arrived on this empty island, he found it to have a colony of giants, indigenous giants living there already. And he and his right-hand man, Coroneus, defeat them.

He names Britain, Britain after himself. So his name is Brutus. So giants, is it Gog and Magog, or is that one person? The first time he appears as a character is in this History of the Kings of Britain from 1136, which was translated and re-translated into vernaculars, into verse and prose through the Middle Ages. That name seems to stick together two names from the Book of Revelations. Gog and Magog are these two kind of apocalyptic tribes that come and destroy all things. And so it may be in creating this character, because it seems that Geoffrey of Monmouth had quite a lot of artistic license

in making his history of Britain, he deliberately invents a name that is loaded with apocalyptic menace. That was the definitive origin myth of Britain until this quote-unquote Age of Enlightenment. I love it. I love the fact that there was a battle between giants and a Prince of Troy. I'm not surprised that's what the Brits all told themselves. So where does Arthur and his battle against the Saxons

kind of fit in? Does Geoffrey of Monmouth manage to weld those two different traditions together? How does that all work? Yeah, so Geoffrey of Monmouth manage to weld those two different traditions together? How does that all work? Yeah, so Geoffrey of Monmouth, he provides the first kind of full treatment of Arthur's life. Before that, it's generally just the odd mention of a king called Arthur in an annul. And he offers a story of his conception, the rape of a woman called Igraine at Tintagel. She is the descendant of Joseph of Arimathea. And he offers this story of Arthur rising up as a great king who then beats back the Saxons. He

doesn't completely get rid of them. Once they've got their claws in, they stay. That's what Geoffrey does. The history of the kings of Britain is a kind of genealogy starting with Brutus and running through all the legendary kings of Britain. We don't just see Arthur, we also see Lear and Cymbeline, characters that reappear in Shakespeare. And it goes all the way up to the kind of arrival of the Saxons proper when the British kings lose their dominance. The kings are sort of the forefathers of the Welsh. And Roman presence in the Isles is sort of ignored? There is a period of Roman supremacy in Geoffrey. The Romans, they marry within the British line,

so that it allows the British to really claim Roman descent as well as Trojan descent. And of course, Brutus marries a Greek woman when he's exiled and looking for what will be Britain. He ransacks a Greek city and marries the princess there, Inogen. So he gets his revenge on the Greeks and marries a Greek princess. So that labels the British to claim descent from Romans, Greeks, Trojans, all of the big names. It's the ultimate mashup. Exactly. And what about the overlapping and competing traditions in the Isles, Irish, Dalryartan, Scots, you know, Gaelic? Presumably, as we've seen already talking about Geoffrey of Monmouth,

these stories are overlapping and interacting with each other. Yes, so the British origin myth, when it was written down by Geoffrey of Monmouth, or slightly invented by him in some ways, it was of immediate political utility to the Norman ruling classes. And you see this especially about 100 years, 200 years later, in the reign of Edward I, with his claim to overlordship of Scotland. And he actually asks his abbots to go into their monastic libraries and find historical evidence that will support his claim to Scottish overlordship. And they come back with the brute text and they say Brutus had three sons. When he died, he divided the territory of Britain between them. The eldest, Locran, received the territory that will become England. And then Camban, Albinac receive Wales and Scotland respectively. And what they said is the crucial information

here is that Locran, who received England, is the eldest. And so all those who sit on the throne of England are heirs to Loughran and can rightfully claim dominance over the other two by dint of his age. This was put in a letter to the Pope. This was a major story to support his campaign. And it kind of worked for a while until the Scottish come back with their own origin myth, which unfortunately completely bypasses the British one. So their story came via Ireland. In the Middle Ages, the Scotty is a term for the Irish, and the people inhabiting Scotland were very conscious of their Irish roots. They sort of assemble this myth in the early 14th century that's from Irish sources about a princess called Scotta, who is the daughter of Ramesses II, the same pharaoh to have vied with Moses over the fate of the Israelites. She marries a Scottish prince called Gaethelos or Gaedil.

And when the plagues come to Egypt, when Pharaoh's drowned in the Red Sea, there's an uprising among the Egyptian peasants as well as the Hebrew slaves. And Scotta and Gathelos flee to the West at the same time that the Israelites are going off to wander in the desert. They are wandering in the West and they spend some time in Spain. And then ultimately, they make their way to an island in the sea, which becomes Ireland. And it's named after Scotta and Gaethelos' son, Hyber. It becomes Hibernia. Hyber also gives his name to the Iberian Peninsula and the Iberian Sea.

And the people that are descended from them become known as the Scotty after Scotta. And the language, Gaelic and Gaelic is derived from the name of her husband Gaethelos. They eventually migrate into Scotland and so that's the myth that the Scottish presented in a sort of rebuttal to Edward I's myth of the supremacy of Loughran. They said it doesn't matter whether Loughran was the eldest of the three brothers, we have nothing to do with those three brothers, We are descended from Scotta and Gaithilos. We came through the Atlantic via Spain, via Ireland to Scotland, and we won this land through our strength, and we will never submit to foreign rule. You listen to Dan Snow's History hits, I'm talking about mythical Britain.

More coming up. Did Edison really take credit for things he didn't invent? Were treadmills originally a form of corporal punishment? And would man have ever got to the moon without the bra? got to the moon without the bra. You can expect answers to all these questions and more in the brand new podcast from history hit Patented History of Inventions. Join me, Dallas Campbell, as I uncover what really sparked history's most impactful ideas. Each episode, I'll be recruiting the help of experts, scientists, historians, and even a few real-life inventors.

Subscribe to Patented History of Inventions wherever you listen to your podcasts. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. Isn't it just so fascinating that our forebears, clinging to the edge of Europe,

clinging to the edge of the known world, this rainy, wind-battered archipelago, trying to access the great stories and the great kind of dominant cultures that they've been reading about and hearing about. Troy, Egypt, Greece and Rome. It's so extraordinary, isn't it? I love it. Yes, it's a real claim to connection to those great cultures of the Bible and of the classical canon. What else have you got for me? Which other ones are you resurrecting?

I really enjoyed the story of the origins of Stonehenge. So supposedly the throne of Britain was stolen by a usurper called Vortigern. And he's a big character in the brute legend. And he's the kind of archetypal bad king. He's stolen the throne. As a result of that, the two rightful claimants, Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther, at this point, they're young boys, they've had to flee to Brittany. Vortigern allows Hengist and Horserin, the founders of the Saxon race, and falls in love with Hengist's daughter, even though she's a pagan, and he marries her. And so he rejects his faith for the sake of a woman. And he also makes an enemy of the Picts. And Hengist and Horsa are trying to get more and more land, and he's slowly letting them. And he tries to get the Britons to

make up with the Saxons, and he holds a feast, and the Saxons massacre the Britons at the feast. It's this horrible scene where they're all sitting alternate Saxon Britain, Saxon Britain, and the Saxons suddenly pull out their daggers and stick them into the bowels of the British nobles. And it's like the whole cabinet being massacred in one fell swoop. It's a really shocking moment in the story. Only one nobleman escapes and Vortigern, and Vortigern flees to Wales. He builds a tower for his own protection. He ends up burning to death in the tower. And this is predicted by the child Merlin. This is where Merlin first enters the stage, as it were. He is called upon by Vortigern to predict his fate.

But he stays then. He stays and he stays as an advisor to the kings. And when Aurelius and Uther come back from Brittany and Aurelius takes the throne, he's the elder of the two, he has Merlin as an advisor and he says to him, I want to build a monument to the massacred British nobles that will stand forever. And can you think of anything? And he's already had carpenters and stonemasons and all the craftspeople of the land come in and they can't think of anything that will be a fitting memorial to these massacred nobles and Merlin says, at this point he's still a child, he says, oh I know somewhere, it's a stone circle called the Giant's Dance and it stands on Mount Killeraus, it's a mythical mount, in Ireland. And the stones were brought from Africa by giants many, many centuries ago and placed on the mountain because of their healing

virtues. And if you could bring those stones over and put them at Avesbury, which is where the massacre took place, then they will stand forever and they will be a fitting memorial. And at first everyone laughs, but then they're convinced that this is the best plan. And so they go to Ireland, they really upset the king there. They steal the stones with Merlin's help. So at first they can't lift them, but Merlin then, it says he prays, or maybe he just says some words, it's not really clear, but then suddenly it's possible to move these stones and they rebuild them on the Salisbury Plain and they stand as a memorial. But then what's, I think, very interesting is that not only are they a memorial to these

fallen Britons, but they become the tomb of or the grave marker of Aurelius Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon. So I like to imagine when you're going down the A303 and you go past Stonehenge and you're inevitably stuck in traffic because everyone's rubbernecking. And we look at them and we think of Neolithic man and sledges or rollers or the different technologies they might have used to bring them there. We think of the solstice, we think of great feasts. But then imagine you're that person in the 15th century from Bury St Edmunds who's taken a long journey west and you're looking at it and you think,

it's the Pendragon's grave, the grave of Aurelius Ambrosius, King Arthur's uncle, and the memorial to these massacred Britons. And that is a symbol of what happens, that massacre is a symbol of what happens if the wrong king is on the throne, and if there's a sinful, selfish king on the throne, and why it's so important to preserve the goodness in the land and baronial unity. And so that's something I've really enjoyed is putting on medieval goggles for prehistoric sites or a multitude of places around Britain and seeing the stories that would have been told about them. This is the most lovely guilty pleasure of this podcast because I spend most of my time on this podcast like laughing at Geoffrey of Monmouth and trying to get that out the way because we're trying to get to the actual story of Stonehenge or of 5th century AD England

and Wales and now I'm doing completely the opposite which I'm embracing it and just going with the story and it's brilliant it's. And I'm completely enchanted by it. Let's do one more before we wrap up. On the subject of Geoffrey of Monmouth's value, this isn't my original thought. This has been published elsewhere. But his treatment of female rulers is really interesting. He was living through the dispute between Empress Matilda and Stephen over whether or not she should have the throne of England. And his treatment, for instance, of Cordelia, another character of whom we've all heard. She is the daughter of King Lear in Shakespeare's eponymous play. But in Geoffrey

of Monmouth, which is where Shakespeare got it from, she doesn't die just in order to fulfil her father's tragic potential. She reigns for five years after his death. And Geoffrey says that she's a good monarch. She rules justly. There is peace. But her nephews incite a rebellion against her. And the reason they give people for objecting to her place on the throne is that she's a woman. And she goes out and meets them in battle. And eventually she's captured, she's imprisoned, she's put in a dungeon,

she's given just enough food and water to survive. They take the throne. And she's left down there. And very, very sadly, she commits suicide in that dungeon. And she is the pathos of her character i mean i think we need to stop trying to view jeffrey of monmouth as a source of historical facts but more as a real insight into the kind of emotions that the controversies of his age inspired in him as an author cordelia i think is such a moving character and it's worth remembering that version of her story as well as the Shakespearean one. Yeah, rescuing Geoffrey of Monmouth from sort of being in the tradition of historians like Bede and stop trying to work out what he's telling us about the past and just enjoy his storytelling,

right? Well, Gerald of Wales is a sort of generation after Geoffrey of Monmouth. And I think he would agree with you. There's this wonderful bit in either his journey through Wales or his topography of Ireland, when he says he's met a man who, whenever he sees anyone lying, he sees little demons dancing all over them. He's got some kind of spiritual condition that means he can see this. If that person touches the gospel, the demons disappear. But he says, if he touches a copy of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, there are twice as many demons. So he obviously thought that it was a load of rubbish too, and that was only a few decades

after. But I wouldn't agree with him. Well, it might not be factually accurate, but it's obviously wonderful stuff. It's like Geoffrey of Monmouth was writing Braveheart a thousand years before Mel Gibson. Okay, so thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast. What is your wonderful book called? It's called Storyland, A New Mythology of Britain. I've been reading it to my daughter. We've been enjoying it enormously, so thank you very much. Such a wonderful idea. Well, make sure you go buy the book, everyone. Thank you very much for coming on the podcast, Amy. Thank you for having me. I feel we're having history on our shoulders.

All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favor here at

History Hit, I would be incredibly grateful if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Please head over there and do that. It really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please head over there and do that. Really, really appreciate it.