Dan Snow's History Hit - The Middle Ages in 5 Facts

Episode Date: December 20, 2023

Where is the grave of King Arthur? What was the worst year in human history? Who were the most fractious royal siblings? What were the origins of humble pie? Which monsters pre-occupied Medieval minds?In this episode, Gone Medieval’s co-hosts Matt Lewis and Dr. Eleanor Janega delve into some of the big Medieval questions, obscure facts and bizarre stories featured in History Hit Miscellany, our fascinating and entertaining new book published this month.The History Hit Miscellany was published on September 28, visit historyhit.com/book to order from your favourite book shop.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past with exclusive history documentaries and ad-free podcasts presented by world-renowned historians from History Hit. Watch them on your smart TV or on the go with your mobile device. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History. It's that joyful time of the week where we share a sibling podcast of ours. This time it's Gone Medieval. We're going to be listening to an episode they ran recently, looking at some of the biggest questions, the things we get asked most of all here at History Hit about the medieval world. Where is the grave of King Arthur, for example? Did he even exist? What was the worst year in human history? Who were the most fractious royal siblings? And that, friends, that was a competitive category. What are the origins of humble pie? And which monsters preoccupied medieval minds? Co-hosts Matt Lewis and Dr. Elna Janneger delve into some of the biggest medieval questions, obscure facts, bizarre stories. Many of them are featured in our new book, of course,

History Hit Miscellany, which you can go out and buy now from all good bookshops. But enjoy this episode. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. You might have heard some trailers buzzing around for History Hit's shiny new book. Today, we're going to take a look at some of the medieval stuff that we've managed to pack into it. So yes, this is a little bit of a sales pitch, but via the medium of interesting medieval history. Kind of a few reasons why you might want to go and buy History Hit's Miscellany. It's published on the 28th of September, but you can pre-order it now from Amazon by searching for History Hit Miscellany or visiting historyhit.com forward slash book to order it from your favourite bookshop. We thought we'd drag Eleanor along as well, from the start of the week to the end of the week, to have a chat about some of the great

facts that you can find in the book. How's it going, Eleanor? Are you enjoying Gone Medieval and are the audience being good to you? The audience are being very, very kind to me, which is great news because I'm enjoying it a lot. So if they weren't, we'd be at a bit of an impasse. Excellent news. It's good to hear we're being good to you. And welcome to the back end of the week as well. Thank you so much. From the shiny, hopeful start of the week. Look, I'm a Friday girl fundamentally, so it's my time to shine, really, right? Perfect. Yeah, so we're publishing this miscellany book, which is kind of a collection of random stuff. Interesting bits and pieces, snippets of information, statistics, maps,

all sorts of stuff from all across history. So we thought this would be a good chance to talk about some of the medieval stuff that we've managed to cram in there, which is hopefully fascinating. There's stuff that maybe wouldn't make a full podcast episode on its own, but which is nevertheless really, really interesting in a snippet. So I thought we'd go through a few of those today. And I think maybe a few of them caught your eye. Okay. Too many caught my eye to do just one podcast episode. This was a whittling down process, let's be honest. There's tons of great medieval stuff in there, but I think we've come up with a top group. One of the things that I absolutely am obsessed with is the grave of King Arthur, which is very allegedly in Glastonbury.

I mean, there is literally a sign in Glastonbury Abbey that says this is where the grave of King Arthur was. You know, so who am I to disagree, right? But let's cast our minds back to where King Arthur is supposed to be the king of, and usually one would think Wales. So there are all these kind of like connections between King Arthur and Welshness more particularly. And that's why to me, the grave of King Arthur being at Glastonbury is useful and interesting because you know me, I love my propaganda. I love my medieval propaganda, right? So you go to Glastonbury Abbey, there's King Arthur's grave. And that's not innocuous,

right? This is a really specific idea of cultivating King Arthur as actually something that is more British or more English. And the idea that English people have a claim to it as well. Yeah. And I think there's at least three things going on with Arthur's grave being found there. It's found off the back of a load of research that's ordered by Henry II. Henry II was not pouring through library books himself, desperately trying to find the grave of King Arthur. At the end of Henry II's reign, we get all of this fuss around, we need to find the grave of King Arthur. And for me, that's around Henry II wanting to co-opt a Welsh national hero. He's having trouble with the Welsh. Henry's great at conquering pretty much anyone that gets in his way,

except for the Welsh. He really, really struggles there. And they kind of cling to this idea that Arthur is a Welsh national hero and that he might still be alive and that he's this once and future king. He might come back one day. And so Henry is really kind of keen to rip that away from the Welsh. So I think that's one of the things that's going on. And as you said, all of the things that are going on really are propaganda with a little bit of money thrown in. There's always some money involved when there's propaganda, right? And this is actually one of the things that is unsung about Henry. I think we always talk about what a good conqueror he was because it's hard not to.

But he's got this really keen idea of what it means to be a monarch of a place, what cultural institutions mean to people. So it's kind of a masterstroke to be like, oh, the guy that you think is going to ride out from underneath a mountain and save the Welsh people, A, he's dead, and B, he's dead in England. This has nothing to do with you anymore. It's done. It's over, right? Yeah. So Glastonbury Tor becomes the Isle of Avalon. The monks report finding this grave with the body of this humongous guy in it. He's obviously some kind of six foot eight Adonis with massive thigh bones and all of this sort of stuff

buried with a woman's skeleton. And the plaque on the inside of it says that this is the grave of Arthur and Guinevere, his second wife, which is another odd fact that they throw in there that Guinevere is Arthur's second wife. I've never seen crop up in any of the stories of Arthur that he was married before. Yeah, Guinevere is the second wife. I've never seen that within a theory generally. Yeah, it's such an odd thing. And then, I mean, just to round it all off, they find a sword in there as well, which obviously Arthur's sword is Excalibur. And we know what happens to Excalibur because Richard I takes it off on crusade to the Holy Land with him, which sounds great, you know, take Excalibur because Richard I takes it off on crusade to the Holy Land with him, which sounds great. Take Excalibur to the Holy Land to win it back. But then he gives it away to the King of Sicily. He's like, you know what? I don't need Excalibur. I don't know whether he's like, yeah,

I mean, who needs Excalibur? I'm already a brilliant king and a great guy. I don't need a sword to prove it. I mean, there's some suggestion that he meant it to be given to his nephew, Arthur of Brittany. He was going to get married to one of the King of Sicily's daughters and it never happened. So there was some sense that he'd left Excalibur there for Arthur to come and collect, which is quite a nice little thing. But it just seems such a weird idea to give Excalibur away, having held it up as this big symbol of English identity and a power sword. God bless the fact that Richard was Eleanor's favorite. We're all aware of that. But I just, every time I see one of these kids doing something, I'm like, gosh, from Henry and Eleanor to Richard, the guy who's like, oh, this old thing, just leave it in Sicily. It's going to be fine. This has no meaning at all whatsoever. But I guess at the same time, it really kind of

underscores how Henry, again, has this idea of what his empire is, what it means to be English, how you conquer people. Richard, I always kind of liken him to sort of like a rugby lad. And he doesn't really care about England that much. He's never in England. He's always in France or on pilgrimage or doing something somewhere. So his connection to or understanding, I think, this deeper meaning of Excalibur, it just isn't there. He doesn't have the political news or now that his dad has. And I think that this is just one of those perfect encapsulations. When we think about this family, where are they paying attention? How are they playing the

political chess that needs to be played in order to keep a bunch of really disparate kingdoms together under one angevin empire? Not that they thought of it that way, but how do you try to subdue the Welsh, keep everyone in happy and go on crusade? And fundamentally, not very easily is the answer. So you get one situation where Henry really understands why you want to control the story of Arthur. That doesn't mean it passes down to his sons. Yeah, that's a really good difference between the two of them, I think, in their understanding of what was going on. And I guess the other thing that's going on in Glastonbury

is that a few years before this grave is found, the Abbey had burnt down and they needed lots of money. And what's the best way to get money? You get some pilgrims to come and visit a site. So Henry II, once Arthur found, we can dig up some bones and tell you it's Arthur. And then the pilgrims can all come and pay money to rebuild the Abbey. So incredibly cynical. And that's crazy, right? I love it when everyone just finds a skeleton suddenly like, oh, I can't believe it. Or, you know, I think probably my favorite ever was, oh, look, it's the true cross. That's probably my favorite relic ever found. But yeah, this when you suddenly need cash, there's a skeleton somewhere. Yeah, absolutely. Just perfect timing. Great for them. someone pointed out to me once that is probably going on with this, is that lots of the pilgrim routes out of Wales go via Glastonbury before they head east towards London and Canterbury. So you are catching all of the Welsh people who are heading that way and just reinforcing that point that Arthur is dead and he's English and you can't have him and he's not coming back to

save you. So everyone that comes out of Wales is kind of getting that message. It's like a big billboard on the motorway that they're driving past. Just make sure you get this newsflash. He ain't coming back. Oh, it's such a jerk move. I love it. I just genuinely do. What a terrible cultural crime to do to a group of people who just don't want to be subjugated. But I think it's a great example of the ways that medieval minds and power and propaganda and all of those things worked that we see kind of hilarious. They think they found the grave of King Arthur, but there is so much going on in the layers beneath that story that talk

about the ways that Henry II wanted to conquer Wales, the ways that he exercised power, the ways that monasteries were willing to tap into these things to make cash for themselves, and the ways that, they say, the cultural injuries that are inflicted on people who don't do what you want them to do. Yeah, that's absolutely the case. And when we look back at medieval people and say, oh, haha, isn't it funny? They just managed to find the skeleton out of nowhere. There's two things going on. There is that political machination that's happening behind the scene where people are quite cruelly doing these things. And they don't think that this is Arthur, but they think they can probably get away with it. But that understanding is happening to one side. At the same time,

we're a sincere belief, a sincere sense of a desire for an understanding of self and determination and cultural identity are rubbing up against each other. And it's very difficult, even if you are aware that the leaders are probably putting this on. It's very difficult to stem that tide because what's your answer in return? It's very difficult to stem that tide because what's your answer in return? It's very difficult to prove the negative there. Yeah. I guess it reinforces the power at the very top, doesn't it? That you don't have a way to counteract this. They can say this is the truth and you have to accept that that's the truth. And this is the thing about power and who gets to write history and who makes these stories. And fundamentally it comes down to the people with

money. So that was depressing. I feel like we've done a huge disservice to King Arthur, Henry II, Richard I, monasteries everywhere, and have developed a newfound sympathy for the Welsh medieval people of the 12th century who were walking past this huge billboard saying your hero is no more. Although I have to say, for those of you in the 21st century who might go through Glastonbury, absolutely highly recommend visiting the Abbey. Really beautiful. Still some polychromia on the walls in there. You can see the paint. Whole nine yards. I absolutely love it. Yeah, last time I was there was the day after someone had broken into the Abbey at night and dug up some ground in front of the high altar and tried to bury some animal bones in there,

which is not cool. Yeah, not good. I was there on the summer solstice this year in a most appropriate way, really digging it, having a nice time. So yeah, just always love to kind of tap into these cultural ideas about what a place is. So I was there giving it the most. We should probably move on to something else that caught your eye in the miscellany, maybe. Yes. Fractious royal siblings. Oh, this is my favourite. I love it when they're fighting. Oh, the boys are fighting. There's so many of them, right? I mean, it's proper medieval soap opera gossipy monks sitting there illustrating Hello Magazine for us. So there is an article in there on fractious siblings, which covers after the

medieval period as well. People don't stop fighting their siblings at the end of the medieval period, but probably half the people in that list are medieval siblings who didn't get on very well, which maybe talks a lot about the period and what's going on there. But it all goes all the way back to Harold Godwinson exiling his own brother Tostig, who then goes and fetches Harold Hardrada to come and, you know, it's like going and getting his mom. I'm going to tell mom on you. I'm going to go and tell Harold and he's going to come and beat you up. And then, you know, Tostig gets killed by Harold's army at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. I mean, you don't get much of a bigger squabble to start off with than that. Yeah. I think that this one is such a great example too, of how people kind of understand

familial connections as well, because it's like, I'm getting mum and it's like, Harold, okay. You know, so they have these really different ways of conceiving of kingship and power where to us, it doesn't really make sense to fight with your siblings in the same way. It's like, well, I would never betray my brother in this way, even if he really annoyed me. And it's like, well, they have these networks of kingship. They have these ways of seeing family and they're kind of seeing themselves as not necessarily brothers, but as, I guess, the rightful holders of power. So where does that power flow? Who can help you out with it?

I'm ready to conceive of a whole new family structure if it does that thing for me. And I guess it talks to that idea that all the way up the feudal kind of pyramid, that next level above you is kind of a father figure who offers you a family. The way that they maintain their power and their position and they expand their influence and authority is by creating a family that they look after. They'll look after you if you serve them properly. And so Tostig almost sees Harold as a new dad who I can go to and who will fight my corner for me if I serve him well. Yeah. And I think that is also a way that people were really encouraged

to view kingship generally, is that in this way, the king is a father for a kingdom more generally. And so, hey, you could just go get another one of those. People are getting new fathers all the time in the medieval period. And I think that also underscores the difficult relationships a lot of times people have with their brothers, right? Because you might have the same father, but different mothers, and there might've been another mother in between there. The dad's on wife four, this is your brother. You've met him twice because you were both sent to different places to get fancied up a little bit. And he went to court here and you got sent off with the monks. So there is less of an idea, I think, of a cohesive family unit than we have.

Whereas there is more of an overarching understanding of what family is meant to do for you politically, I think. Yeah. And I think my favourite story in the Fractious Royal Siblings article is William I's children, William II, Robert Curhose, and the future Henry I, when William and Henry dump a full chamber pot on Big Brother Robert's head. And clearly this is, you know, the bucket of water over the door kind of thing, but they do it with a chamber pot, which is next level. And Robert goes and tells his dad and his dad doesn't really do anything. And I kind of imagine William the Conqueror laughing behind his hand at Robert covered in poo and wee dripping from his hair. This is such a medieval practical joke too. This idea that was like, well, we could do this.

But with we, that would be hilarious. And for them, obviously, it's still gross and everything. But they just are like, oh, what would make this practical joke next level is if we just get really scatological very quickly. And these are supposed to be the fancy guys, right? Please take us seriously. We are a new dynasty, like chamber pot over the head. Like, sure, sure. And then we've already touched on a little bit about Henry II's children who, you know, hated each other's guts most of the time when they weren't ganging together to hate Henry's guts.

And I think the one of those four that probably gets overlooked the most is Geoffrey. He's the one the chroniclers describe as a son of perdition, which is a great way to go down in history. And I think lots of the chroniclers often viewed Geoffrey as the one who was stirring the pot the most and kind of playing the brothers off against each other and winding them all up against their dad and that kind of thing. But I think because he dies quite young, he kind of gets forgotten in lots of the big histories. But yeah, you know, they clearly didn't like each other very much either. I mean, John and Richard is one of the classic rivalries, isn't it? Oh gosh, yeah. I hate to keep bringing it back to the Angevins over and over again, but they really do give great drama, don't they? And with all of those boys, whether it's the young Henry or Richard and John,

they all have really different contrasting understandings of what it is that they're meant to do. And Richard is such a mama's boy. John was his dad's son, dragged around at an early age and really encouraged to kind of latch onto his father in this particularized way. Of course they were at odds. Eleanor and Henry's relationship is incredibly complex. It's difficult to kind of narrow it down to any one thing. But if you grow up at court in France with mom, who's like, you're trash dad and his new girlfriend, whereas John is being patted on the head, taken around by Henry and like, oh, you like that castle? I'll just take that castle from your brother and give it to you. You know, it sets up this rivalry and this disappointment in each other that is pretty obvious. This is one of those things where,

of course, they hated each other. There's almost no way they would have ever got along. I say this as 104. I'm talking to you, Alex. So they always get away with it, right? The youngest ones are always getting away with it because right? The youngest ones are always getting away with it because everyone's always tired. And that's what John is, right? Everyone else, their mom is, okay, you've got to be better. You've got to be smarter. You've got to be ready. You're going to be Henry. You're going to be the king. And Richard, since your brothers are in front of you, you're going to have to scrap for everything you get. And then here's John, where his dad's like, you'll be fine. I got you covered, sweetie. Oh, who's my little prince? I think Edward IV gets an honorary

mention in there as well for executing his brother George probably reputedly by drowning him in a barrel of Malmsey wine, which is a heck of a way to go. Do you know what? If I must be drowned, everyone, please make a note of it. That's how I'm choosing to go out. I wonder how far down the barrel George would have got before he drowned. How big a barrel are we talking? There's barrels and there's barrels, right? I don't know. I wonder about the logistics of it. Did he go in head first? You know, were they asking him to crouch down in there while they put the lid on? Were they dunking him? This is kind of what I always think is this held by the legs sort of situation and in you go. Think of a swirly, but in a barrel of wine. Yeah, I think it must have

been that because there's no way you clamber inside a barrel and have the lid put on and then sit there and drink wine. He got told it's a drinking contest. Go on in, dunk your head in and then oops. Yeah. There's a crown at the bottom

of the barrel, George. Keep going. Bobbing for crowns. It's fine. Yeah. It's normal. This is what siblings do, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And then I think, you know, the article continues then with some of Charles II's illegitimate children, Edward VIII's stuff, some George VI's stuff. There is non-medieval

fractious siblings as well, but it's nice how many of the medieval royal siblings get a little nod in there. If there's one thing that they know how to do, it's be drama queens. We can certainly say that.

They know how to hate each other. 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. because that brings us on to one that i absolutely love to think about which is the year 536. This is getting real deep into medieval nerdery, right?

Because 536, very early in the medieval period, what haters who don't understand that the term dark ages refers to a lack of sources and not intellectual decline, may call the dark ages. But here's the thing about 536, often called the worst year to be alive, because it genuinely fundamentally was very dark. There is like a lack of actual physical light. Yeah, this is a literal dark age for a little while. 536 is in the book because it gets pitched as this worst year in history. We should maybe qualify that with worst year in human history because dinosaurs might argue that there was a worst year, for them at least.

To some extent, this is the beginning of a bad period rather than necessarily being a really bad year in itself. It's not great. There's at least one volcanic eruption and there's suggestions that there's like two or three, perhaps around the same time. So big problems, big dust clouds being chucked up into the air and we get the sun being blocked out. So it's almost dark. Science is really helping to

understand these periods now. So endocrinology and all of that kind of stuff and ice core science is shedding new light on it all. And there's a suggestion that the temperature in Europe dropped by two and a half degrees in the space of that year, which is kind of halfway to an ice age. And that causes all kinds of problems. It causes famines and all of that kind of stuff. And then the dust clouds continue to be there. So we get a Byzantine historian called Procopius says that it was a most dread poor tent. And we get a Roman senator, Cassiodorus, who writes a couple of years later that the sun seems to have lost its wanted light and appears a bluish colour. We marvel to see no shadow of our bodies at noon and feel the mighty vigour of its heath wasted into feebleness. It's a pretty morbid

summing up of what was going on. It was kind of cold, it was dark, crops aren't growing and I guess it must be hard to have hope I've also seen this year talked about as a little bit about that idea of the frog in the heating water you know that people wouldn't necessarily have thought in the middle of 536 crikey this is the worst year to be alive but it's the chain of events that follow after that with famine and crop failures and stuff and then a few years later 541 you get you get the Justinian Plague, the precursor to the Black Death kind of sweeping across Europe as well. So you've got kind of a quarter of a century there when it was pretty dark. Yeah, there's so much to consider. And I think this is one thing in the kind of post-industrial world.

We are really disconnected from what, quote unquote, bad weather means. Right. You know, much has been made here in the UK of the fact that it's rained a lot this summer. Well, it didn't drop by two and a half degrees overall, did it? And it wasn't dark. And I can remember from my own childhood in the 90s, I grew up on the West Coast of America and Mount Pinatubo erupted in the Philippines. And it was pretty dark all summer and it just rained and it was really chilly. And if you think about what this kind of means for Europe, when a big volcano erupts in Iceland, this means that, yeah, okay, you don't have your nice little summer holiday. Sure. That's

all well and good. But if your crops don't grow, this is a problem. There is no saying, oh, well, that's all right. Well, we'll get them in from South America, right? There's no way to get these things if you cannot grow them in your backyard, right? We don't have a way of doing international systems of food production. So if your crop fails, that's it. That's your winter done. And it does mean death. There's this immediacy, even among individuals like Cassiodorus who are at court. They know what that means. And they'll be fine.

You know, if you're really rich, you'll be fine because you can simply marshal every peasant into giving you what it is you need to survive. But for people on the lower rungs of the social hierarchy, this means death. And I think this often gets pitched against or alongside the 14th century in Europe as well, which is kind of often pitched as the worst century in human history to be alive. It's a weird thing to compete for. It's a great slander for those of us who are 14th century specialties, but hey. I think it's striking how, like you say, we tend to think a bad summer is the end of the world. for those of us who are 14th century specialties, but hey. I think it's striking how, like you say, we tend to think a bad summer is the end of the world.

And I think in 536, people might well have thought this could be the end of the world, actual literal end of the world. I think that's certainly true. You know, we have to understand that in a particular Christian context as well, right? Christianity is a linear religion, right? There's a beginning, middle, and end to it. And one of the things about Christianity, especially in the earlier medieval period, and indeed in the antique period, people were like, Jesus is coming back at any moment. Just set your watch because homie said he's going to be down the pub, so we've got to be ready, right? So whenever you have these huge events happening, they're like, oh, there it is. And it is one of those things that is brought up in the apocalypse or the book of Revelation.

This darkening of the sky, this idea of the sun being obliterated is in there. And famine is, of course, one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. So these are very immediate symbols in a world that is built on belief and faith. And it's really easy to go along with that narrative if it's something that's happening to you. Yeah, absolutely. I think we forget how ordinary people very much had to try and live through this. And you do get some sources talking in 536 in the years that followed it about people eating horses. Possibly you get some reports of people, families, couples eating their children kind of thing just to survive. It's that horrendous,

that horrific, that close to the end for humanity. And I suppose that is one of the things there, right? Is what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to be a person and not just an animal and how society works, how we take care of each other, the idea of family, notwithstanding your royal sibling, you know, but we are the sort of animal that does not eat our young. Right. And indeed, we try not to eat each other. That's not something that's big in our books. We're not pigs. Right. So when these kind of systems break down and you're choosing between your own life and death, that really gets to the core of our psyche. And again, of course, you're going to believe it's the end of the world if you've been told the end of the world is coming at any moment and cannibalism is on the rise. I feel like we need to go somewhere else and lighten it up a little bit now. We've dealt with some pretty horrific stuff there and maybe we should leave that aside and see if we can get to something a little bit lighter. Okay, so I've got one lighter for you. There's still kind of some light medieval ranking involved, but how about the origins of the term

humble pie? Yes, yeah, I like this one as well. And so this stems from the medieval hunt, which we all know is a big aristocratic day out in the park. But the end of the process, if you catch a stag, you get this process called unmaking the deer. So this is cutting it apart, butchering it effectively in the field, making it ready for the table. And it does that. But it also, as you said, it reinforces a whole load of social hierarchy while you're out on the hunt. So it's described in the book of St. Albans from the 15th century. And this talks about the stag. First, its genitalia and all of its organs are removed and stuck on a pole to be carried in front of everyone on the way home, which is odd.

And then the right hind hoof was given as a prize to the person of the highest status, whether they were a man or a woman. So if the highest status person on the hunt is a woman, they get that right hind hoof. The stag would then be skinned and the hide is used to collect the blood and also to wrap the meat in. It's then butchered into pieces. So the rear haunches, which are the prime cut, are kept for the top table. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonaga. 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. The left shoulder is given to the forester as his payment for caring for the land and providing a good stag to hunt, I guess. And then you get the kidneys, the intestines, the windpipe, and all of that blood that's been collected are mixed up with bread and fed to the dogs. So that's their reward for finding the stag. And also, I guess, you know, makes them want stag blood. And they're held on leads. It says they should be held on leads by their masters as well while they eat so that they associate that with a reward for the hunt all of that meat is taken back and the top cut goes to the top table and then as you work your way down the social ranks you get

a slightly worse and worse and worse cut until you get to the offal and the entrails which were often put into a pie and they were called the umbles. So you're literally eating umble pie if you're the lowest ranking person at a feast. Now I'm a sausage enjoyer, so it's not like I haven't eaten some entrails in my time, but there's a real difference between lovely sausage and yeah,'re the worst person here's organ pie you're like oh yeah what you don't break your tooth on a bit of hoof that might be in there it's a tight turnaround from hunt to table as well so you get all of this back to the kitchens and they're like go gotta make a pie gotta do this that and the other so we're not talking about cultures who really enjoy organ meat and stuff like that now where it's like you soak the tripe in milk for three days none of this is happening this is gamey right i hope you like

the taste of the forest you know and then at the same time you need to eat it because if you turn your nose up at it then oh you're too good even for humble pie is it it? Who are you? Yeah, there's two things then. You're insulting your host and you're also, what else are you going to eat? That's all you've got. Do you know, I got to say, for me, as someone who would be low ranking, come on, I'm peasant gang, obviously, so I'm not getting invited to the hunt in the first place, but it would make me less likely to wish to partake in a hunt. So it's like, oh, here you go.

You've been out all day riding and doing violent blood sport and your reward is the nastiest dinner you've ever had. And I think to some extent at the top and the bottom, people probably knew where they stood. You know, you're in the Lord's Hall and peasants know they're peasants. And I wonder how much competition and maybe disappointment is going on in the middle when everybody's seated at various tables and served various cuts to think, hang on, I thought I was a right shoulder kind of guy. Turns out I'm a left leg. No, that would be really sad though, wouldn't it? I suppose it could work the other way. You can be like, oh, right shoulder gang. Okay. I'm coming up in the world. Right.

And I suppose that if you do really well in the hunt, maybe that kind of nudges you up on the hierarchy a little bit, these sorts of things. And certainly there is, I think, a kind of thing among nobility where this is what they like to do. They're so mad for hunting. If they had their way, they would just hunt all the time. So there is a way of making yourself indispensable simply through being quite good at hunting. But man, I don't know if I want to risk it. I'm not a gambler by nature, right? I'm just assuming I'm getting the worst. And I think it's a very public and a very personal reinforcement of your status for

everyone else to see as much as for you to understand. We don't really have that today in the sense that we'll all be sat in a room with this is the order of precedence in society throughout the room. We tend to avoid doing that today, but this is a case in which they deliberately do that to reinforce everybody's very particular place in the order of things. Yeah. We think that we have a class system now. Ooh, baby. Sometimes your life is literally owned by others. And I do think that we can forget about what these systems are. And part of this, I think, comes from the fact that, again, because history is often funded by rich people. And so we write about the things that rich people want. Everyone imagines themselves

as a king. When they think about the medieval period, they're like, well, I'd be Richard the Lionheart and I'm the one taking the stag down and I'm having the haunches. What a lovely time. Everyone loves to be at the feast, but the meaning of a feast can really depend based on where you are in society. And it's all the people that we don't get to hear about that are on the receiving end of a lot more hardship, opprobrium, and sometimes just gross meat. Yeah. When a disgusting pie is the least bad thing that's happened to you that day. Oh God. All right. Have we got time for one more? Do you reckon? I think we could do a very quick one just because I want to talk about my favorite guys who are medieval monsters. Matt, who's your favorite medieval monster?

Quick. King John. Yeah, okay, word. I'm kind of fond of the monopods. So they're always pictured in manuscripts and stuff. They have one big, thick, long leg and one massive foot. And they always seem to be pictured in manuscripts

lying on their back using their foot as a sunshade. And no one seems to allow for the fact that getting sunburned on the sole of your foot is really painful. Why would that be an evolutionary thing? That's a really good point. And imagine, so you get your foot sunburned and then you've got to hop about on it because it's not just walking, is it? It's literally hopping if you're just one of them. Yeah. Yeah. What about you? What's your favorite? So I want to shout out a thing that everyone forgets is a monster, but unicorns. They're a monster. A unicorn isn't a horse with a horn on its head. A unicorn is a goat lion. And medieval people are intensely aware of this. You look at medieval unicorns,

they've got the little goat beard. They have a mane. They have little goat hooves. And yeah, you see them with maidens and it's my little pony time. No, no. They're with maidens because maidens are the only people who contain this bloodthirsty monster that you cannot even hunt. And they're incredibly violent and really dangerous. So I'm always trying to remind people of the fact that a unicorn's a monster. A unicorn isn't a nice guy. It's not a horse. And you don't want to corner it. That's all I'm saying.

Public health warning if you ever encounter a unicorn. Yeah, you go back in time, guys, don't do it. Don't meet that unicorn. Never meet your heroes. One monster that also gets a mention in the book are the dog heads. So they appear everywhere. You know, they look a little bit the book are the dog heads. So they appear everywhere. You know, they look a little bit like werewolfy kind of things. I love them. And we do talk a little bit in the book about how much of that might have been fed by kind of

Scandinavians, Vikings, who often wore wolf pelts as the berserkers, you know, they would wear wolf pelts or bear pelts to charge into battle. And so you've got this terrifying thing running at you and all you can see is a wolf's head running at you on a human body. Does that feed this idea that actually there may well be monsters out there? And the reason we can't defeat these people is because they're not people. They're horrific monsters. Yeah. I'm really interested in the philosophical debates about them because it is generally accepted. You know, it's like, well, you know, someone saw a berserker once maybe, and then they're like, yeah, there's some, ooh, the dog headed people up there. And I like all of the philosophical debates about whether or not they can be saved. Can they be Christianized?

Is it possible? Are they humans? Well, they've got a dog head, but they've got a human body. So can they be reasoned with? And I like that philosophical idea in comparison with the Viking-ness, you know? Well, I don't know. Can Vikings be reasoned with? Can they be Christianized? It's a great question. Do we prefer Vikings or dog heads? So I wrote this article in the book and in the introduction, I talk about how I think these images that we see all over manuscripts that look kind of crazy and a little bit frightening are often used to start conversations around, are these monsters human? What is the nature of humanity? Do these things that are part human, part monster, or an amalgamation of different monsters, are they part of God's creation?

Do they have souls? Should we preach Christianity to a dog head? Does it have a soul that can be saved? Is it something that God would love in the same way as a human, or is it something other that we should push outside of our Christian society? Yeah. And I think that it's also a great way of establishing where the lines of humanity are drawn geographically, right? Because one of the things that we certainly see in medieval maps is the dog heads start up around by Scandinavia. And then by the time you get to the 14th century, the dog heads are hanging out in Mongolia when you get to other places. Because as we Christianize further and further, we're like, oh, no dog heads up here. Well, they must've been over there. And then there's the question. So what lengths are you prepared to go to in order to do this Christianization? When you've got Franciscans

and stuff going out there being like, we're doing it, everybody, we're going to make the Connates Christian. You know, you're kind of prepping for getting to the dogheaded people eventually. And what are the decisions that we're making by the time we get out there? Well, I'm conscious that we are A, running out of time and B, we don't want to give away too much of the book because we quite like people to go buy the book and have a read of it. But hopefully that's whet people's appetites a little bit. I mean, we haven't even talked about the Tower of Butter at Rouen Cathedral, the 15th century church tower that was built by selling dispensations for people to eat butter during Lent. You know, I mean, just buy your way

out of the requirements of the church as usual. Take my money. I want the butter. That's it. Yeah. Take my money. I want butter. We haven't talked about the fact that Time Immemorial has a date, a date in the diary, which if you buy the book, you can find out what that date was and why it was set there. And I guess we ought to give a nod to the fact that this isn't just a medieval history book either. There is loads of ancient stuff in there that's been kind of curated by Tristan, the brilliant host of the ancients. There is lots of 20th century stuff and many things in between. I mean, a couple of my favourites. So there's the story of Lord Minimus, who was around in the 17th century. He was like an 18 inch tall guy.

He went on all of these adventures. He was a servant to Charles I's wife, gets abducted by pirates. He's having a civil war. He's a captain of horse and all that sort of stuff. And at one point he grows by a whole load of inches. He comes back from an experience with some extra height, which you'll have to read the book to understand how he acquires that extra height. There's the story of Syndrome K in World War II, which is when a load of Italian doctors kind of invented this disease in order to protect

Jewish people in the hospital. They terrified the Nazis by saying they had this contagious disease called Syndrome K, which if the Nazis caught it would kill them all. So the Nazis wouldn't go in and round up the Jews. You know, they saved lots of people's lives by lying to Nazis, which is great. I loved a lot of Nazis. That's my favourite thing to do, so. There's stories of female pirates in there. There is a list of the longest sieges in history.

If you read this, you can find out the longest siege in history and I almost guarantee it's longer than you think it was. But thank you so much for coming across to the end of the week and joining us to talk about the Miscellany book, Ellen. It's been great to speak to you again. Matt, any excuse. Thank you very much. Any excuse, any time. History Hits Miscellany hits the shelves on the 28th of September. It's great fun and it's packed with snippets of information all pulled together to make you

look even cleverer down the pub than you already do. It might make the perfect Christmas present for anyone interested in history as well. It's available to pre-order now and is in the shops and online from the 28th of September. There are brand new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join Eleanor on Tuesday for the next one.

Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you get your podcasts. It really does help new listeners

to find us. Anyway, I guess we'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and Eleanor has been Dr. Eleanor Yarnagher. And we've just gone medieval with History Hits. you