Dan Snow's History Hit - Mythbusting Medieval Buildings

Episode Date: July 15, 2021

From spiral stairs to tunnels leading to pubs and brothels, to witch markings; join us as we find out the truth about medieval buildings. Matt Lewis, from our sibling podcast Gone Medieval, is accompanied by archaeologist and architectural historian James Wright to debunk the myths.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I have just been put in a priest hole, a secret cupboard-like nook and cranny built into many 16th century houses where grand Catholic families hid their priests. Being a Catholic priest, being a Jesuit in particular, was punishable by torture and execution, so they hid them. They hid them all over the house. So in Britain we have these little things called priest holes in these big old houses. And I've just been forced into one by a fellow history hit employee. We're here in one of the medieval hotspots of the UK,

a place so riddled with medieval ruins and houses that you can hardly walk around for bumping into one of them. We're about halfway between Stratford and Evesham. Earlier today, I was at the battlefield of Evesham where Simon de Montfort's force was obliterated by young Prince Edward. You know what? If you go for Edward Plantagenet's family, you'd best not miss. His dad, Henry III, I mean, I can see that. Simon de Montfort's going to have a pop at Henry III, take his power off him, marginalize the king. I get that. You know, Henry III, you can see that happening. But Prince Edward, no. So Simon de Montfort's force was annihilated at Evesham. His body was mutilated. His head and testicles sent to his wife, and he was buried

in Evesham Abbey. So I've just been to see that battlefield, see the remains of Evesham Abbey. I'm feeling very medieval here. I'm feeling very medieval here i'm feeling very medieval well of course i guess the priest holds sort of early modern but let's not fall out about it so that's why this episode downstairs history we're going back into one of our sibling podcasts and i'm bringing you one of our gone medieval podcasts this one went viral didn't just go medieval it went viral so lots of people listen to this one and seem to enjoy it so i thought we'd bring it and give it an airing on the main feed our brilliant presenter matt is joined by the architectural historian james right to debunk the myths of medieval buildings you know these myths spiral staircases tunnels to pubs witch marks graffiti all this kind of stuff you're gonna hear the

myths get debunked right here on this podcast so please enjoy listening to good old matt lewis talking to james wright if you don't know why i've been crashed into a priest hole by my colleague and visit the medieval battlefield at evesham then the answer is i'm making a new documentary for history hit tv we're talking about this part of the country talking about shakespeare talking about the forest of arden we're just luxuriating in the 16th century here folks so please head over to our history hit tv channel when you have finished listening to this podcast it's got all of the back episodes this podcast on there it has got hundreds of hours of history documentaries it's got it all it's got it all so that's historyhit.tv but in the meantime here's matt and james talking about medieval myth busting spiral staircases in castles now everybody knows that these tend to go clockwise to favour

the right-handed defender it's a very common story i i'm a castle specialist myself and i work in a lot of these great buildings across the country principally in lowland England, and it is something that I encounter time and time again. It's a story which I've certainly heard since I was a little boy, and I hear lots of dads telling their little boys this story as well. It seems to be something you learn from your dad or your granddad. It a sort of a boys toys kind of story and so yes the story that spiral staircases all turn clockwise to advantage the right-handed defenders so that their swing of the weapon is not impeded by the newel post going up the center of the spiral staircase is a very common one and it is represented in the literature it's in guidebooks it's on

interpretation panels it is repeated ad infinitum by tour guides it's a tour guide's favorite and so it's no wonder that you've picked upon it yourself because it is an established part of the truth of medieval buildings and because of that it's rarely ever questioned and i think it probably gets a bit ingrained as well because you you stand on a medieval spiral staircase and you think oh yeah i get that now i can stand here and think yep there's my right hand you know someone coming up the stairs is gonna have to use their left hand or or be really awkward or get the in the way so you can almost feel like it feels right when you're on a staircase? It makes perfect sense. It makes architectural sense because, as we all know, castles are militarily defensible fortifications.

Unfortunately, there is a problem with that thesis as well. Namely, that realistically, since the very late 70s, but especially gaining ground in the late 80s and early 90s, that is also something which has been hugely questioned by castle specialists and for the last 30 years the consensus has become that castles are primarily enormous buildings to impress the power the prestige the lordship the status of medieval aristocrats and And this goes right the way back to the early period of castle building

in the 10th and 11th centuries and is still current in the 16th century. So they are there as stage sets, theatrical backdrops to lavish displays of power and patronage. That's their primary function. After that, they are very, very posh and elaborate and flamboyant residences with all the mod cons you could possibly expect for the medieval period.

And then there is an aspect of defensibility to these things. But sometimes, and in fact, quite often, in fact, most often, if we're being honest with you, the defensibility of these sites is either an afterthought or it is in fact symbolic of this power and prestige because you get your power as a medieval aristocrat from wielding a big sword and not being afraid to use it. You're not afraid to use your big sword as a medieval aristocrat and that becomes symbolic so anything redolent of militarism becomes a symbol of your lordship but you can go and look at things which are apparently related to defensive castles such as the crenellations on the wall tops the up and down merlins and krennels or the machicolations the galleries that overhang and are supposed to be used to throw unpleasant things on your enemies at the

foot of the wall but in most of these castles they don't work functionally at all so a lot of this castle architecture is symbolic and this is a long preamble of a way of saying basically that we should stop thinking about castles as primarily fortifications this is 30 years of research that's gone into this from many many different corners of the world and as a result we need to rethink what spiral staircases are all about. And are they military? And are they aspects of fortification? And unfortunately, the conclusion is a resounding no, that they're not.

So it sounds like castles kind of become this, almost like a signpost to say, I'm here, just so everybody knows that I'm here. And then you've also got a Lord thinking, but this is where I've got to live. So I want it to be comfortable for me and my family to exist in it. But we almost need to give this afterthought appearance of it being impregnable and we could defend it if we had to, rather than a Lord walking around with his mace and talking about, we need a staircase going this

way because we might be attacked at any minute by the local farmers being upset about tithing and taxing and all that kind of thing that's largely the case here um and the people that have really looked into spiral staircases and written 100 000 word phds on it i'm thinking particularly here of a chap called charles rider who wrote his phd in about 10 years ago for the University of Chester and he concluded that a spiral staircase is nothing more than a high status way of accessing an upper chamber but he did also come to the conclusion that spiral staircases are only ever found in lordly structures so you're not finding them in the towers of town walls you're very rarely finding them in fortifications, for example, in the Holy Land built by the Templars, for example.

We are only really finding them in the secular context, in high-status, lordly suites of rooms, and they are a means of accessing one posh bit of a building to an even posher bit of a building. Now, yes, you find them in churches and cathedrals, but they're there for quite a different reason there, because they fit into a narrow space, which you would require in a church tower, for example. But in the secular context, they're only there in the very, very high status areas of the building. So it's a means of getting from one floor to another

however it is quite a posh way of doing so there is a reason why the myth grows up though castle studies comes along quite late in archaeology and it appears in the or the mid-19th century and you start to get people like Vialet Le Duc who's a military engineer in France looking at castles for the first time in the 1850s 1860s and gradually the English get hold of the ideas as well and you start to get people like G.T. Clarke looking at castles in the 1880s and castle studies starts to grow momentum around this time. And a lot of these people are fairly militaristic in their viewpoints. It's the age of empire and conquest. So people are thinking about military action.

But it's surprisingly late when the idea of the spiral staircase as an aspect of defensibility emerges. And it comes from quite an unexpected quarter I would say as well. So the first iteration that I've been able to find of the spiral staircase myth and I use that word very confidently because I think we're clear that it is a myth is 1902. Prior to 1902 we don't have any citations of the myth whatsoever and it is apparently invented by an art critic called Theodore Andrea Cook and Cook was writing a book about spirals so spirals in nature and art was the name of the book and it was preceded the year before by an essay called The Shell of Leonardo looking at spiral staircases and in particular one which is apparently designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Now on top of his real interest in spirals and spiral staircases

Cook also has a beanie's bonnet about people who are left-handed. Despite being right-handed himself, he is of the opinion that left-handers are the best at whatever they try and turn their art to. Here we are with this guy who's interested in spirals, he's interested in left-handers, and I think the reason that Cook is interested in left-handers in particular is because he was also an enormously keen amateur fencer so he's involved in sword play just to give some examples of that he founds oxford university's club he is the fencing correspondent for the daily telegraph he is on the amateur fencing association committee and also he sits on the panel which selects Olympic fences for the Olympic Games in the first decade of the 1900s.

So he's got form, basically. He's interested in spirals. He's hugely interested in left-handed people. And he's interested in swordplay. And I think the reason that we can link the swordplay to the left-handed aspect is because I've spoken to a lot of fencers about this and it's very difficult to beat a left-hander

if you're a right-hander yourself because there's so few people that you can train against. Whereas left-handers are fighting against lots and lots of right-handers. So they tend to become very proficient. They're very difficult to beat. So there's a man who's got all of these ideas washing around in his great big brain lots and lots of right-handers. So they tend to become very proficient. They're very difficult to beat. So there's a man who's got all of these ideas

washing around in his great big brain and he comes to what is apparently a very logical conclusion. The problem being is that it doesn't hinge on the reality of the medieval world. It's hinging on the reality of Theodore Andrea Cook's world and his influences and inspirations to all intents and purposes.

All of his interests matched together to come up with this story that this must be what these were for. Absolutely. And what happens is that his decision to promote this idea has an aftermath. an aftermath and within a decade or so there's a journalist called Guy Cadogan Rothery who picks up the idea in a book which he directly references back to Cook's book and then it's picked up by a castle specialist called Sidney Toy in the 1930s and he writes a number of very popular, very well-selling books in the period of the 30s and the 50s and his books gain a lot of attention and they're read very widely by people of all ages all over the world and because he's written it because the written word is considered to be real it's not challenged and so it gets repeated and I think also around the time that Toy is writing, we also get filmic representations such as Basil Rathbone and Errol Flynn running up and down the spiral staircase in the Robin Hood movie from 1938.

And so you put two and two together, you've got the Robin Hood movie in 38, Sidney Toy's book in 39, reprinted in the 1950s, and it just becomes lodged in people's minds and at that point it becomes something which the father tells the son and then we have to deal with the the aftermath of it but it's repeated so frequently you can go to colchester castle and see it in the guidebook in the interpretation you can go to arundel Castle and see it in the interpretation there. So the written word becomes very powerful in this context, but it's based on oral stories which are related and usually consumed by very young people. And we don't like admitting that our parents might have been wrong about something.

So there's an emotional quality. So just one of those kind of stories that sprung up and then solidified into a truth that we just accept and i guess maybe another example of of those ones that live on all over the country is the idea of underground tunnels so particularly monks you know tunneling their way to the pub which often forgets the fact that monks had more wine than most other people did in their monasteries. Tunnels between castles and monasteries, between monks and nuns, I don't know, all of these things. Every time someone turns up something underground, it seems to be a medieval tunnel that connects something to something else.

So are there any really famous examples of those? Are any of them actually medieval tunnels, or are they generally something else? I suppose trying to get at the truth of this particular story is understanding how ubiquitous underground tunnels and secret passage and subterranean stories are. So most people will have heard a story, but it's usually very, very localised. So just to give you some examples here, there are very localised examples in my own hometown hometown which is stone in staffordshire where there is apparently a tunnel which runs for almost two miles and it goes from the site of a medieval priory in stone across the landscape 1.8 miles to the site of aston, which is a moated medieval manor house.

We could look at places like St Albans, where the abbey is supposed to link to the nunnery at Sopwell in Hertfordshire. There are many stories connecting Canterbury Cathedral to various pubs and also a reputed brothel in the town. Literally every hamlet, every village, every town, every city in the land has at least one of those stories. Some towns just, if the stories are to be believed, are absolutely riddled with tunnels. Guildford being a real case in point here. It's surprising that Guildford is still standing because if its subterranean stories are to be believed it's just one giant cavern underneath the town. So I think getting at the truth of this one, this particular legend or group of legends, is just understanding that every part of the country has them. And that also, a bit like the Spiral Staircase story, where it's related to maybe a father to a son,

we've also got this aspect where the story tends to have an element of hearsay to it. So when it's relayed, the story will generally be, oh yes that that tunnel does exist um my neighbor's grandfather's son's uncle's auntie went there uh in the 1930s and you know it must be true therefore and again there's this kind of distance to the story distance time, distance in place, distancing from the person who's telling the story. And I do wonder if that distancing is maybe a tacit admission that it's possibly a load of hooey and it's not true at all. And now I used to work for a local authority in Nottinghamshire and pretty much every month we would get somebody calling us up to say, oh, we found the secret passage. And if you look down, it definitely, it's a line to the

castle on the hill and it must be going to the pub at the end of the road. And there seems to be, firstly, in people's minds, there's usually an element of scandal and skullduggery about the tunnel, that it can only be there for secretive purposes and that they must be slightly scandalous i.e it's there for the lord of the manor to sneak out for a crafty pint of an evening but it's never really explained why the lord of the manor needs to sneak out to the pub in his own village that kind of thing is never really articulated so there's there's a you know an element of this kind of sort of quite romantic um you know this this sort of enjoyment of the darker aspects the more gothic side of life

with these tunnels and do you think that's partly as well because they quite often relate to monasteries you know monks and everything else getting up to some kind of naughtiness but it's underground so no one can see it so it's kind of that that suspicion that we think monks are up to something, but we can't see it. So it must be an underground tunnel that takes them to the local brothel or to the pub or something like that. To an extent, yes. And I think a lot of these stories grow up in the 18th and 19th century as a result of often the wild fantasies of antiquarians and folklorists. Now, there's nothing wrong with that. It helps to tell us a lot about what was important to those people at that time and how people were

thinking about the historic built environment. So in many respects, the stories help us to capture an aspect of psychology and emotion during an earlier period in time so there is a real value to these stories as a researcher of folkloric history you know i can certainly appreciate that also i think there's a misreading of that historic built environment as well i'm a buildings archaeologist and have been for over 20 years i'm perfectly used to mucking about in historic buildings i understand the practicalities of construction I understand what features which might look mysterious in some historic buildings are actually for and the truth is usually desperately prosaic and so when secret passages

inverted commas are discovered it's usually I'm afraid a misreading of the evidence and the vast majority of these things when you really analyze them are drains and they're drains which have maybe been broken into from the top and they look a bit secretive but it's nothing more than a sewer or a conduit sometimes it's a misreading of cellars where they've been knocked through or just sighting of a blocked door in an underground or a half basement space oh well where does that door go ah must be a secret passage leading somewhere when in fact it's probably just a chamber that was no longer needed and they've walled up the doorway so the vast majority of these things are based on, you know, misreadings. But also there is a there's another aspect as well where there is a genuine culture of subterranean excavations in this country.

Yes, we do have passages underground, but they are usually there for, again, very prosaic practical purposes. for again very prosaic practical purposes so if you go to ashby castle in leicestershire there is an underground passageway it links the kitchen tower to the great tower it was probably constructed during the siege during the british civil wars and it's a service passage firstly so your servants can get the food to the great tower during bombardments but also probably to give a board garrison something to do so yes we do have underground passages but they're rarely there as inverted commas escape tunnels or secret passages they're they're there for perfectly normal everyday practical purpose yeah yeah i wonder how much that springing up of myths during the particularly the 19th century coincides with

where i live. We're peppered with mine shafts everywhere. There's suddenly mining works going on. So, you know, every house has to have a massive survey to make sure you're not on top of half a dozen mine shafts. So I wonder whether those discoveries coincide with some of those maybe old disused mine shafts that people have forgotten were there or... Yeah, I think there is a connection with with with mines and mining

and i think i mentioned guildford previously i think i think that the stories of tunnels in guildford do come from um quarries underground quarries where they're actually quarrying the local chalk for building purposes it's very soft obviously and there are genuine medieval quarries there racks close is a medieval quarry there's a slightly later one at foxenden quarry so there's these stories the knowledge of these spaces they were in the mid 20th and certainly in the 19th century they were accessible to all that could rummage around in them. And this leads to the stories of, well, these tunnels must go somewhere. And by the way, did you see that large drain or that cellar underneath the high street?

Well, I bet it connects to that, doesn't it? And you get this sort of fevered imagination. Of course, once the story is passed on, it becomes real. And the direction the tunnel's going, I know there's a castle four miles in that direction with no consideration to why someone would dig four miles underground exactly and also that aspect of mines and mining and the um the the skill of mining should really be taken into consideration more when relaying these stories the story that i referred to in my own

hometown of the tunnel linking the priory to the Manor House. Firstly, it's 1.8 miles, which is a ruddy long way. Also, it passes underneath the River Trent, which is quite a sizable barrier to tunnelling. And the quarrying of a tunnel underneath a river going through river gravels would baffle even the most hardy of Cornish tin miners in the 19th century, let alone a medieval sapper. So we do have real problems with the practicalities of these things. Where would the spoil go? It would lead to enormous mound of spoil. How would you keep it secretive? How would you keep it ventilated and drained? These are questions which are rarely asked when the secret passage stories emerge. And do you think there's many instances of where these tunnels appear to be kind of lined with what might be medieval stone,

that this is maybe drains being built with reclaimed stone? So I'm thinking dissolution of the monastery, lots of things are knocked down and all of that material is reclaimed and used somewhere else. Does that kind of give a bit of authenticity to things that aren't necessarily medieval tunnels well i think to be honest with you there are plenty of genuine medieval underground features such as you know as conduits and sewers and monasteries were big builders of these things so the recent story at tinton that cropped up very recently about a lost medieval tunnel, as it was cited in the media. There are perfectly well-known, well-understood tunnels as such, which are in fact conduits and drains for the monastery monasteries require huge amounts of water passing through them for washing for cooking for cleaning and also for flushing out the loos as well so there is a perfectly well understood

system in all monasteries across the country whereby you take the water from the river you you take it through the monastery allowing the the cleaner water to be taken first and then the dirtier water last. So that's how you actually arrange your buildings in the monastery to make sure you've got the water passing the kitchen and the laundry first and the toilets last. That's how you do it. So the Tintin story was, I think, a knee-jerk assumption that because there are underground tunnels, in a sense, connected to monasteries, that this must be one of them. In fact, it was actually a post-medieval watercourse relating to local ironworks and was probably 18th century and 17th at the earliest. So, you know, yes, there is this built environment which does relate to monasteries and to, again, to large high-status buildings such as castles.

So we do have these spaces and when they get found, again, sometimes it leads to a misinterpretation of the evidence. This is an episode of Gone with the Evil on Dan Snow's History Hit. We are talking about myth-busting medieval buildings. More of this. 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. and i think one other thing that people might be quite familiar with spotting as they tour around old medieval buildings is what we might lump together rightly or wrongly as witch marks so these these kind of etchings or even burn marks on stone or on wood that most people would think are there as a kind of ritual form of protection from evil. Does that kind of myth stack up at all?

A decade ago, you probably wouldn't have even heard that story. There really wasn't much in the way of research and certainly not presentation of graffiti in archaeology at all. It's been a very, very rapid rise of interest in graffiti, which has only really kicked off in the last decade and has become a fundamental part of archaeological research. There's huge amounts of clients demanding graffiti surveys now. There's lots of community surveys going on and people have become much much more aware of graffiti on the historic built environment

and I suppose every October there will be a new press release about something slightly spooky that's been found on the walls of a building somewhere. And I've been involved in these myself, hands up, guilty, 100%. There are marks which are left on the walls, which are probably there to have an apotropaic function. Apotropaic means to ward away or to turn away from. And it's from an ancient Greek word. And essentially, these are marks which have been interpreted by archaeologists as being scratched or burned onto the walls to,

in a sense, bring protection from the perceived threat of evil, potentially to bring good luck to a building, but also to avert bad luck. That might be the best way of looking at these things. And they do exist. We have marks such as rosettes, circles with six petals within them, which are found in a practical context as well. They are found as drawings which underpin and underlie medieval proportional geometry, for example. But they also seem to be a stand-in for the cross

as well this is based on some pretty good recent research by matt champion for example the graffiti specialist and this is seen as a kind of a holy symbol a holy sign it has powerful attributes to the medieval mind and it is carved in a medieval context and it continues in a post-medieval context. It is there to ward away evil, but also to bring good luck to a building too. So there are many of these marks carved on the walls. I think there has been some misinterpretation of them, certainly with the name Witchmarks. You might have noted that I was quite careful in how I described these things previously. I was quite careful in how I described these things previously.

The word witchmarks was invented by the mainstream media about a decade ago. As we started to get press releases which involved graffiti stories, and there was an understanding that about a quarter to a third of graffiti was related to this apotropaic function, the media weren't happy with an ancient Greek word, so they had to invent their own. And they thought, well, these are marks, and they're related in some way to evil, and witches are evil, so we'll call them witch marks.

Also, we've heard that word somewhere in the deep depths of our mind as well. And of course, witch marks was something that 16th and 17th century courts were interested in can you find the witch's third teat for suckling the devil and as a result it's a it's a completely inappropriate term to use so it's a very problematic term but it's one that gets trotted out by the media every year and they assume that the general public are completely and utterly foolish and will need to have something spelled out to them in words that a

reader can understand and of course it goes off completely wrong and takes the story down an inappropriate route not least because these marks well we don't know that they were absolutely being put there to drive away witches. They could have been there for repelling demons or evil spirits which are also considered to be problematic at the period in time as well and also because we're not completely certain that they're there to necessarily avert bad luck or evil that they might also have an aspect connected to good luck as well. So we have to consider this quite holistically but also we have to take each individual example in and of its own merits when interpreting these things yeah kind of

oversimplifying them to lump them together and at risk of oversimplifying it again it sounds something like a medieval equivalent maybe putting up a horseshoe in your home for good luck or is that being too simplistic no i don't think it is i think that the traditions of horseshoes and uh throwing salt over your shoulder and even hanging christmas stockings all have this apotropaic function there's a long tradition of hiding boots and shoes around houses it seems to be a builder's tradition. They are found in large numbers during conservation and remodelling projects. Quite often they are associated with the chimney space and there seems to be a potential that they're being hidden around the building to act almost

like a decoy to attract the evil spirit trying to possess or enter the building with something of humanity. So it goes for the boot rather than the building, because obviously the boot is so redolent of the human being. And so we find these things hidden all around the building. And I think hanging the Christmas stockings over the mantelpiece at Christmas to, in a sense, appease the spirit coming down the chimney is a very very old tradition we can certainly see it in ancient northern European mythology in the Icelandic traditions of the Yule lads who one of them is called the window peeper so another portal into the building and he is appeased in the lead up to Christmas by putting a shoe on the windowsill and he puts the treats

into that so much like father christmas it's a very ancient tradition and this is connection between boots and shoes and portals into rooms so it's often it's not these traditions are not just signs scratched or burned onto the walls but they're also physical objects it seems like an odd connection as well to have them in the the chimney uh quite often when we think of bar the christmas coming down the chimney if anyone still has open fireplaces it's an odd connection there because we we would think santa coming down the chimney is a nice thing because we're going to get presents but it sounds like they were wary of the chimney as like you say a portal into the building through which evil could enter and it needed to be protected

you've only got to go and look at European traditions about the gift bringer. And those traditions are usually not benign spirits coming down the chimney. I mean, think about Krampus, for example. And then the traditions revolve around some of those, you know, sort of really quite scary traditions, particularly in the Northern European context.

The Yule Lads at Christmas in Iceland are deeply sinister characters. They're there trying to steal the food from houses. They're there to scare the children into submission. They're not this benign, jolly old character that was more or less invented in the 19th century. They're very, very different. And the idea of spirits travelling through the air is a very old one. It's contained in literature of the early modern period, describing spirits travelling through the air and entering wherever there's a draft. So wherever there's a portal into the room, there's a danger that there'll be drafts with spirits travelling on that. So we can be thinking of doors, of windows, of chimneys.

And those are the areas where we do tend to find solid, deep distributions of ritual protection in buildings. Yeah, fascinating. It's amazing how these things kind of get tied up into other stories involved in the Christmas story and all of those kinds of things. And we can trace it all back to something that's really completely different. One of the other things I wanted to have a chat about is the idea of

arrow stones in churches. So are these a real thing? What might they have been for? If they weren't arrow stones, what could they really be? So the story of arrow stones is, again, a very, very ubiquitous one that almost every village in the country will have its medieval church or a bit of its medieval church surviving. And on the stones, usually on the exterior of the building, but not always, usually on the

exterior and quite often in the area of the porches will be these grooves worked into the stones and the story is usually trotted out that this is the result of archery practice which was made mandatory by Edward III in the mid-14th century because he wanted to make sure that he had a large army ready to go to fight the French. And so everybody was trotted off into the village buts to practice their archery. And it was something that was required of you. And of course, when you're practicing, you're going to need to sharpen your arrows. So therefore we get these grooves on the parish churches

and that's what it is. And there seems to be usually usually a then a connection made between sometimes the battle of Cressy but more usually the battle of Agincourt to to really interconnect and it's a way of making these big nationalistic stories localized so you pull down the story that everybody's heard in the school the battle of Agincourt October 1415 the great English victory the the I suppose the mouse defeating the lion and we have this situation where it's a story to be proud of it's very nationalistic and it's a way of making that local to your village that people from your village went and fought at either that battle

or battles like it and that's that's the kind of the iteration of the myth that that is repeated time and time again the thing that makes it fall down though is that firstly 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. history hit. There are new episodes every week. These grooves on churches exist all over Europe and it's only the English that actually relate it to archery practice. So you can find these things in Ireland, you can find these things in Poland, you can find them in Switzerland, but the stories are different. And so we have a single practice,

apparently a pan-European practice, but the stories that are told about them are different on the continent than what they are in England. So it seems to be linked to a localised national tradition of storytelling rather than a kind of an archaeological reality. Do we know what those marks might be? Is there any consistent reason or cause for them that we can kind of point at that might link them all? In terms of the folklore, there's different iterations of it. So if you go to Italy, quite often it's the devil's claw marks, which I particularly enjoy.

If you go to Poland, some of the stories that are told there is it's the, again, claws, but it's the souls of the damned trying to claw their way back into the church. So I think some of the stories are great, but when you actually get down to the practice of what's going on, what helps to explain the process, explain the archaeology, I think we have to firstly look to ethnographies and anthropologies and some of the 19th century iterations of this story where people like Charles Rau, an American archaeologist, was traveling on the continent, he started asking people about this process that he was still observing happening in European villages in the mid-19th century, in the mid to late 19th century, should say because people were still doing it they were still scratching into the walls of the churches but what he found all over europe in in sweden

in germany in switzerland in austria is that the walls were being scratched with a knife blade and then the powder the stone powder was collected in a vessel and was then mixed up with holy water and consumed as a cure, mainly for fevers. And so this was published in the 1870s, 1880s in a number of quite well-respected journals, including Nature. and we can actually then look to English history, and we can find documentary accounts of similar practices in the medieval period. So there are references to pilgrims going to the short-lived shrine to Simon de Montfort, the guy who was killed at the Battle of Evesham, and his very short-lived shrine at Evesham Abbey received visitors who, in the medieval contemporary moment, are referred to as scratching the stonework of the shrine to then take away for use in potions. And the story is also related at the shrine of St Hugh at Lincoln Cathedral as well. at the shrine of St Hugh at Lincoln Cathedral as well. So what we're seeing in the late 19th century seems to be a latent version of something which was also occurring in the medieval period

and the nationalistic archery myth comes along later. The other, I suppose you'd say, death knell for the archery myth is that when practicing at the but medieval archers didn't use sharp arrows they used blunts which a minor detail as you say they did use sharp arrows in the battlefield you know the bodkin points were often quite quite sharp and also the the tanged hunting arrows for bringing down horses or beasts of the chase were also sharpened. But when you're actually at the butts, you use what's called a blunt, which has a rounded tip. So there's no need to go around sharpening your arrows at all. Also, a lot of these archery practice butts were at significant distances from the village church.

And you'd have a long walk you know maybe half a mile in some cases to get to them so again there's not a close connection and then finally if you really really wanted to sharpen your arrow literally everyone in medieval england has a whetstone it is one of the most common archaeological finds on any site is a whetstone. And it's there in a hunting manual of the mid-16th century called Toxophilius. And that includes reference to sharpening arrows using whetstones. So unfortunately, the story doesn't stack up. But it's one of these cases where I genuinely think that the truth is until the 18th 19th century was still ongoing i think is a much more

fascinating backstory for those marks than thinking it was people you know sharpening arrows that they didn't need to sharpen the truth is sometimes so much better than the fictions that we get handed down isn't it well it's not alone in that because there's also another phenomena which is recorded very, very widely. And that is these tear-shaped burn marks on timbers, which you find in lots and lots of buildings around the country, sometimes at places like Gainsborough Old Hall

in their hundreds, if not thousands. And they're usually explained away as being unattended candles. You know, some servant had left a candle and it touched the wood and it burnt it slightly. But again, the truth is so much more interesting because when we do find these tear-shaped burn marks, they're again ritualized practices. What we're seeing is almost certainly candle magic. What we're seeing is almost certainly candle magic. So there are close connections between the use of candles and driving away the devil, which are connected to particular times of year, especially Twelfth Night and Candlemas, where there are blessed candles, which are specifically given the power to get rid of satan from the world and people are taking these home and it's not a big stretch to then imagine they're touching them to their buildings there was a huge fear of fire setting malignant fire setting of these timber frame buildings in in the medieval and early

modern period and quite often this is attached to satanic folklore as well. It's the devil bringing fire through lightning to strike your building. And the idea, I think, is again, sympathetic magic. So you burn your building a little bit using the holy candle, and it acts almost as an inoculation against much more catastrophic fire setting. And again, it's one of these situations where the reality behind a very prosaic myth is genuinely more interesting far more fascinating yeah so could that also be a case of people taking this the special blessed candle at candle mass and burning part of their home with it to kind of prolong that one night of protection so it lasts all year so there's a bit of that candle in their home to provide that protection from the devil all year round well it's a bit like the yule log isn't it where you use a bit of the previous year's yule log as the kindling for the

next year's yule log it continues that magic from year to year to year and yes i do think that we could be seeing repeated episodes of burning of the timbers uh over time and you maybe go back to that special place year after year. I mean, there are other interpretations for candle marks on buildings which occasionally reference things like healing practices, also just out and out ritual protection. There are other interpretations available, but it's just interesting to note that there is this tradition within the perfectly mainstream Catholic church. Also within folkloric traditions there is an idea that if there's a blue flame, you get a blue flame on the candle, that's symptomatic of there being a spirit within the space. And it's interesting to

note from experimental archaeology that I've engaged in myself, that there is a point when burning a piece of timber just before it really chars that you get a perfectly pale blue flame forming on the timber. And then that gradually dies and you get a rise of smoke from it. And I do wonder whether or not that aspect is linked again to this idea of spirits in the world. that aspect is linked again to this idea of spirits in the world. Kind of a spiritual explanation for a physical phenomenon that they didn't quite understand at the time. And on the question of timbers, while we're on that, an ideal one to move on to, I think, the idea that ship timbers were frequently reused, particularly in pubs and things like that. And so a lot of the timbers that we can see on the outside of old medieval buildings

are reclaimed ship timbers. Is there any truth in that? There is. However, it's not quite as straightforward as you might want it to be, or proponents of the myth might want it to be. No. So, yes, there are instances where we can definitely say that there are timbers that have 100% come from ships, but I cannot begin to express just how vanishingly rare and unusual

those examples are. A bit like the secret passage stories, if proponents of the myth are to be believed, literally every timber frame building in the country has been created as a result of somebody ripping up a ship or a boat and recycling the timbers. Regardless of where the timber frame building is, there's quite a lot of these stories are relayed, you know, 70, 80 miles inland. It just seems a bit unlikely to me that people are hauling these great big timbers on terribly bad roads from ship breaking yards in ports however there are no examples known from medieval architecture of the genuine use of ship timbers in the medieval period the genuine use of ship timbers in the medieval period. I've got one stray documentary reference to a bit of Dover Castle being built using ship timbers in the 1220s. Otherwise there's no physical

evidence from any building that they were using ship timbers in the medieval period. It starts to occur in the early modern period, particularly in the 17th century now this is usually explained away as the problem of woodland management so that the woods have been worked out they're exhausted of timber and this is partly because of the rise of the english navy later British navy and that also there is a concomitant rise in the industrialization of the country so that there's lots of charcoal usage and that essentially that there's been mismanagement of the woodlands and so we don't have very much timber surviving and that's not really borne out with reality because woodland is very carefully managed resource during this period and you hear complaints about the lack of woodland because clear felling is a much more dramatic

visual than the slow regrowth of the tree over hundreds of years because it takes 150 to 200 years to mature an oak tree for example so actually the woodlands weren't being worked out and there was no real reason for carpenters to have to rely on second-hand ship timbers also because carpenters wanted to use green timber it works a lot better it's not twisted it using seasoned timber is like you know hitting bell metal you know it's going to blunt your chisel, it's not a good product to use. So there's not really an incentive for the use of ship timbers. However, in the later 18th century, there is genuinely a shortage of English building timber. And that's essentially caused by the rise in industrialism so we see huge numbers of oak trees being felled as a result of the need for the tannins contained in oak bark

to use in tanneries industrial tanneries what are called bark mills and this leads to a wide scale deforestation and as a result we see lots of imports of timber coming in particularly from the baltic softwoods for buildings so you see lots of 18th century buildings 19th century buildings their roof structures and floor frames are built with softwood rather than the english hardwood because the industrial revolution has taken its toll and at that period you do start to see a slight uptick in the use of ship timbers however again it's vanishingly rare and it's usually only within a very small hinterland of ports and ship breaking yards so the city of london for example has quite

a few buildings or rather structures with ship timbers in them they are the intertidal structures of the wharves keys piers etc etc and we also see them in in some houses as well and agricultural buildings particularly lower status buildings daniel defoe tells us that in the 18th century there was quite wide scale use of ship timbers in the Norfolk coastline and it's probably a reaction to the great storm of 1703 where there was a lot of ship timbers lying around on the beaches after this huge storm which took about 300 ships off the Yarmouth roads and it tends to be used as Def tells us, in pig houses and pale fences and the outdoor lavy and that kind of thing.

It's not in good quality building at all, but it does get used. There's a nice example in Waxham Barn in Norfolk, which is what looks to be a mast or a great spa, which has been used as a repair to a 16th century building. So, you know, these things do exist, but they are vanishingly rare. Yeah, it happened, but it's kind of been blown out of proportion a little bit. And I gather you're writing a book on medieval building myths to kind of compile all of these together and to rid us of some of these mysteries.

How's the book going? When can we expect to see a copy? Well, it's a work in progress at the moment. I've written about, well, just slightly over half of it. I'm going to write nine chapters and I've written five of them to date. It's been put on the back burner for a while, though, as I've got to finish my own PhD thesis. And also I've got some of my archaeological consultancy work has really come back online. So it's something that I'm not doing full time.

It's something that is a work in progress and I tend to dash out a chapter every couple of months so we're probably not looking at publication until probably 2022. Equally we've also you know I'm also devoting a bit of my time to writing this blog on medieval building myths which i try and put something out every couple of months as well and you can find that on my uh on my website i'd run a company called triscally heritage and you can find my blog uh attached to that website which i think there's there's half a dozen myth busting explosions on there at the moment yeah and you've been very busy in lockdown as well with some lockdown lectures on a thursday evening that you've been doing to keep people

occupied and busy and some of those have been really fascinating they seem to have gone down really well yeah thanks thanks for the plug for that we've only got four of those left actually I started them in January at the beginning of lockdown three I kind of wanted to give something back to people who are interested in heritage and history and archaeology and so I just thought well we'll run a series of lectures expecting maybe 50 or 60 people to turn up I would have been thrilled if that was the case but actually we've been getting three four hundred people every Thursday I've been an archaeologist for 20 odd years now and sometimes quite literally 20 odd years and one of the things that I've discovered that I really really enjoy

there's two things. Firstly, just being on my own in a historic building with my notepad and a camera and just really trying to come to terms with the archaeology of a structure and understanding its phasing and using it as a mental puzzle, to be honest with you. I really enjoy that process, just spending the time. Hopefully I've got enough time to do it and I can spend a long amount of time unpicking the history of the building and I'm completely happy doing that the other thing that I really enjoy doing is outreach so things like podcasts things like my lockdown lectures but any opportunity to communicate and to infuse people about the study of the past there is simply no point doing archaeology unless you tell someone what you found. You may as well not do it. There's no point being a gatekeeper of the knowledge. Communicate it. And I've grown to really enjoy doing stuff like this. So I was

really thrilled when you invited me onto the podcast. I thought it was a really great opportunity, again, to spout off about history and hopefully people will find that interesting. Noel, thank you so much for joining us. It's been absolutely fantastic to have you, James. I feel like I've learned a lot from that. I've had some of my preconceptions and things that I thought were true very easily shot down by someone with James's knowledge. It's amazing how much there always is still to learn.

I feel we have the history upon 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, everyone. That was an episode of Gone Medieval. It's History Hits New Medieval podcast by the brilliant Matt Lewis and Kat Jarman. They've got a big canvas.

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