Gone Medieval - A History of Britain in 50 Documents

Episode Date: August 6, 2022

How do you go about finding your way around the history of a nation and a national identity? For the barrister and author Dominic Selwood, documents are the perfect window through which to watch a country develop and change. His new book Anatomy of a Nation: A History of British Identity in 50 Documents explores more than 950,000 years of history by examining those documents that tell the story of what has made Britain unique.In this podcast, Matt Lewis talks to Dominic Selwood particularly about the Medieval documents he’s chosen, including the Magna Carta, Joan of Arc’s letter to King Henry VI, and the emergence of the stories of King Arthur.The Senior Producer on this episode was Elena Guthrie. It was edited and produced by Rob Weinberg.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. How do you go about finding your way around the history of a nation and a national identity? Well for Dominic So, documents are the perfect window through which to watch a country develop and change. Dominic's book Anatomy of a Nation, a history of British identity in 50 documents, explores almost a million years of history in the British Isles

and Dominic joins us today to talk about the medieval element of that story. Great to have you with us Dominic. Hi Matt, thanks very much for inviting me. It's an absolute pleasure. What inspired anatomy of a nation? What made you want to write this book? I think actually it was a deep frustration, not with our island history, but with our insular history.

Of course we are an island. We're an archipelago of 5,000 islands actually. But I often get a sense that we have quite a... a parochial history. And I just really wanted to write about how connected we are to the world around us, how forged we were really by that medieval world, that legacy of Romanitas that all the countries around us also shared. And then as I was thinking about all of that, the Brexit debate started to happen. And as I was listening, I thought in lots of ways, these are different views of our past. And then the culture wars and the statue wars came around. So I'm intensely aware

and was when I was thinking about this of different visions of Britain. So that really came together to shape the book. And in fact, the Brexit ballot paper is one of the final documents in the book. And did you find documents a good way into trying to understand both our history, but also what we think of our history, our identity as a British Isle? I really think so, because documents are so intensely personal. Obviously, archaeology and architecture are incredibly rich, but documents, they tell us a really individual story about the author or about other people they're talking about, sometimes with incredible detail. In the book we have plague graffiti from 1350 from Sir Mary's Church in Ashwell and that's one person's response to what's happened and rather than just

a line in a chronicle saying the plague struck. This individual talks about how it was pitiable, savage, violent, only the dregs of the people survive and you really get a sense of that person's sense of abandonment and loneliness in this context or Joan of Arc's letter from 1429 to Henry the 6th again unlike a more formal chronicle. It's really personal and you get inside the head of really quite a troubled person. So I think what documents have the ability to do is to really take us so close to the action. And that really helps us understand identity and how people are viewing the world. So yes, I think all sources are incredibly valuable, but there's something particularly intensely vivid about documents that makes them really fun to work with.

And when we get to the medieval portion of your book, King Arthur is a figure who kind of runs strong through much of the medieval period in Britain and in the development. And in the development, of Britain's sense of identity. So can we see him moving through and emerging from some of the documents that you look at? I think absolutely we can. Records in the period are sparse in the really early Middle Ages in the sub-Roman period coming out of that era, but they're not non-existent. And if we think of the context of other people from that age, like Cadmon, the earliest poet,

he only actually comes from one section of bead or Gilders. Better on the depredations of the Anglo-Saxons. Again, deeply obscure character. It's not uncommon to only have a couple of sources about someone. And with Arthur, we do have sources. There is a historic Arthur from the 400s and the 500s when the Christianised Celtic population of Britain is facing the arrival of a new Germanic peoples coming over. And then we have the later literary, high and late medieval Arthur, the quote unquote matter of Britain, which is all of the wonderful sort of literary cycles of Arthur, which are clearly fabricated and fiction. But that doesn't

mean that we can't see the real historical Arthur behind all of that. And as long as we can separate the two out and realise that the historic Arthur, which isn't the same as the author of Geoffrey of Monmouth or Thomas Mallory, that historic Arthur from that early period is a fascinating character. And there are really exciting references to him in the early documents. Yes, I think we can see him move from that very early period all the way through the high middle ages and late middle ages and actually even into the modern world. We're still talking about Arthur and writing stories about him. And what do you think it says about Britain at the time that Arthur does go through this transformation? So he moves from being this potentially a historical figure in the aftermath of

the Romans leaving Britain. And he turns into this almost magical, hugely significant figure with a real focus for British identity on Arthur and Camelot. What does it tell us about what people are thinking about their history and about people in history and about what history means to them? You've highlighted exactly the point, which is that it's about people's perception of Arthur rather than who Arthur was. So I think the earliest mention of Arthur in the Godotvin in the poem, he is a historical character, and the poet, possibly Anirin, says of a warrior in that battle, the Battle of Catrath, probably at Catterick, that he was no Arthur. So already, by the late 500s, we have a sense that Arthur was this figure that needed no introduction that people already knew about. And also that he's the measure against which other people are judged. You know, he's no Arthur. He's the pinnacle that you should be aiming for.

Absolutely. And then he evolves. He becomes this literary character, who in the high Middle Ages becomes a philosopher king. Then Victorians becomes this incarnation of courtly virtues and chivalry. And then to modern age becomes almost a new age and neo-pagan figure. In terms of identity, we project onto Arthur what we want from him in any given age. But you're quite right that that original poem of Arthur, he is being held up by a Nair. who says that he wrote it and he was the only one who came off the battlefield, held up as the gold standard of the warrior. And then in the later text, not that much later, in the history of Britonum, the history of Britain, possibly written by the Welsh monk Neneas in Gwyneth around

the mid-800s. He lists Arthur's battles, the famous battle list of Arthur. And he lists the 12 battles, and he's quite precise and quite specific about it. He doesn't call Arthur King. He calls him leader of the battles, the Dukes-Beloram, which is really interesting because he is being framed, not as a ruler, but as a battle leader. He's also being framed as a Christian, which of course is really important to remember when the Anglo-Saxons and later come over and go back to Hagen Germanic culture.

Actually, there was this window of Christianised Celtic culture in the sub-Roman period. And in the battleist, they talk of Arthur carrying an image of the Virgin Mary into the Battle of Gwynion Castle, and he lists Mount Baden, and at least half of the 12 places in those battles are identifiable. So that, by any measure, is a really interesting historical source. And it's early.

before the literary one. And then there's some slight, one other kind of major, again, what I would classify as the historical sources, is the Annals of Wales, the Anales Cambrii, which were written in Duffeth, probably in the mid-900s. And they again refer quite specifically to Arthur carrying a cross into the Battle of Mount Baden in 516, to the Battle of Camlarn, where Arthur and Medrout, who is presumably the precursor of Mordred in the later stories, fell in 537. So when you compare to some other historical characters for a period, I feel actually we have more of Arthur than we do of many of the others. So I think that those who want to say there is no Arthur, they need to deal with these sources.

And of course, it's always possible to say later interpretations by scribes. You can say that of anything. But the fact is they are fascinating and they are early. And so I think it is entirely legitimate to talk of exploring a historic Arthur. And it's probably Geoffrey of Monmouth when we head into the 12th century who crafts the Arthur that we would begin to recognise as that kind of more mythical figure with Camelot and all of his knights around him. and he almost becomes a figure of the high medieval period who'd lived a thousand years ago and you get all these blurring of the lines and magic starts to make its way into the story.

But from then he develops into a really important national figure. You think of people like Edward III, who really takes the story of Arthur and the Roundtable to heart. Is that when we see Arthur really becoming another central figure in British identity in a different way? so he's been this pinnacle of the historical warrior war leader, he's now becoming a magical, mythical, national emblem? Yes, and that definitely is what's happening there, because in Geoffrey of Monmouth, who's writing in the 1130s, we suddenly get Merlin, spells, the round table,

we're getting the author that we think of now. And that's really interesting, because Geoffrey is recycling lots of older stories. So Merlin comes from older Welsh stories, but he's bringing them together to give a backstory to Britain. And of course, medieval authors love doing this. They loved writing how it was Brutus of Troy who founded Britain, and that's where the name Britain comes from Brutus.

They love making these connections and trying to stitch things together and giving it all sense. And of course, they're doing it in a quite formal, ecclesiastical framework, even though they're writing literary stories. So Arthur, of course, has to be a deeply Christian character. So the old pagan magic of Merlin gets me. mixed with all this Eucharistic imagery of the Holy Grail. And you get that wonderful conflation of the two, which really is about identity at the time,

because clearly these are the strands that go towards making people's sense of popular culture and what they're really interested in. And it's very British. It really does come from Britain and from Wales. And that battle we were talking about with the Nairn at the beginning, that was Dinneddin, which is Edinburgh. So we're thinking about Celtic Britain. And so even in the medieval ages, they're bringing all of those strands together.

and not only the British people, but also when the three matters are declared, the matter of Britain, the matter of France and the matter of Rome. The matter of Britain is the Arthurian literary cycle in that sense of Arthur as a character. The matter of France is Charlemagne, who of course is one of the greatest sort of figures in the birth of France, and the matter of Rome is sort of Greek and Roman mythology, which gives all of the history to them. So the fact that Arthur is identified as the central figure of the matter of Britain, I think is really important. And as you say, when Edward III, days of the Hundred Years' War, founds the Order of the Garter, 1348. This is explicitly an Arthurian homage. This is an Arthurian creation. And so that the King of England has taken on board this

idea that Arthur somehow embodies the values and the history that he wants to project. It's fascinating. And I think super important when we realise as well that it's through the process of the Hundred Years' War that England becomes England, that the kings stop speaking French and they start speaking English, that Parliament, that the courts take up English. which has been there all the while as this sort of not very prominent language, suddenly comes to the fore again. And this non-French English identity emerges. And I think it's really interesting to see how Arthur actually feeds into that. And I guess Arthur's story reaches its pinnacle with Mallory's Mordaitha right at the end of the medieval period. And I think that's the author that most of us would recognise today and probably doesn't change too much from then.

So from the start of the medieval period, we've gone from an almost historically accurate figure appearing in Chronicles to this story that revolves around magic and religion and folklore. Does that speak to the way medieval stories develop? I'm always quite interested in the idea that a lot of, especially later medieval history, is written in terms of allegory. So it's all got a moral underpinning and a message rather than just relating history. So those early stories are keen to tell us about Arthur the warrior. The later stories are keen to tell us about Arthur and what he tells us about being British, does that make sense? It does, and I think those segments are there. In the earliest sources we talked about, it's a warrior. There's no sense of anything above and beyond that.

It's just a description of a Christian warrior who was very important in winning those battles, and those were significant at the time. But there's no wider interpretation of what flows from that. The high medieval Arthur of Geoffrey Monmouth, and even going off to Christian of Troy and the sort of the French adaptation of it, suddenly becomes really about so many of those allegorical preoccupations of the lance and the grail and the Eucharist and those ideas that are just coming into theology at that time as well. And then by the time we get to Mallory, which is two years before the end of the Wars of the Roses, where the country has really seen incessant warfare for centuries, from the anarchy through the Hundred Years' War into the Wars of the Roses, his Arthur is, I think, the perfect blend

of the two. He absolutely is the warrior king. Battles are a really important part of it. the knights and their struggles and the wars that they lead are really central. There's no doubt that he again is that Dux Beloram, the warrior leader. But Mallory brings in all of those magical and other symbolic elements. Of course, Mallory, he's a renegade MP who's banged up in Newgate prison and probably writes it while he's in Newgate prison using the library across the road. So he's a layman writing, drawing on these historic sources, these sources written by ecclesiastics. And so, yes, it all comes together in that period. So by 1485 when this comes out, you have this incredible melting pot and kaleidoscope of different identities. Already, Arthur has been all those different things. But Mallory is identifying this as a certain kind of Britishness. And of course, Kackston goes on to publish it. It's one of the first books that Kaxston publishes. So again, he's realised that this is saying something that people want to read. This is saying something about Britishness. It may be slightly worrying that even at this early stage, part of our British identity is about lying to ourselves a little bit. Yeah, the allegories, as you

you say and going back and seeing all these different foundation stories for Britain, or take other examples, foundation stories for the medieval orders of chivalry that they used to come up with for themselves, all trying to tie themselves back into something very ancient and very venerable. I think that's a medieval mindset. It's a medieval view of understanding and unpacking and then reassembling the world. I don't think it's particularly British, but yes, we're at it as much as everybody else. So in terms of a British identity for the medieval period, do you see that as something that you can identify, or is it something that is fluid, that varies and that develops throughout the period? The medieval era often feels really monolithic, doesn't it? If in Britain we take it from the

Roman departure in Forte, all the way through to the mid-1500s, that's a thousand years. That's the biggest block of our history that we've got. It's only been 500 years since then. And it sometimes feels a bit monolithic the way it's presented. But actually, once we really start splitting it down, it's really not a continuum. And then when we think of the different cultures, and actually, She also is quite good for the sub-Roman and the Celtic bit, then the Anglo-Saxon bit. But then, of course, we have to think of the later things like the Vikings, and of course the Vikings ruled Britain for a while. Old Norse was the language at court.

Then the Norman Plantagenet influx, then the evolution of the English identity coming out of the 100 years war. And then the humanist and the Renaissance, the courts, the Tudors, before the medieval world, that really is over. That is a very culturally dislocated group. And I think those breaks and changes, they are cultural, they are linguistic, They're about international alignment as well. The Viking, very Scandinavian. Leaders like Knut, they're sitting in court in Westminster, but they're really looking to Britain as part of an Anglo-Scanadian empire.

Then with the Normans and Plantagenets, it becomes much more French-focused. Then after the Hundred Years' War, it really retrenches and looks in on itself again as England. And we can actually take that beyond medieval and start talking about the empire and the way we think about being part of the Anglo-Sphere. So I think we have had many different identities that have led to real cultural breaks and they're almost different countries with a richness and a vibrancy that's really quite unique to all of them.

But one constant, I guess, is the English language, at least from the Anglo-Saxon time. Old and Middle English, and then coming through into Elizabethan and Jacoby in English, that's the one real survivor. That's almost the connective tissue that has held so much of this together. Even when not in official language, it's still there.

We still have The Dream of the Rood and Bear Wolf, and then we go through to the great medieval epics or the fun poems, the owl and the nightingale. That linguistic story, strand, I think is probably one of the few things you can say that is continuous, at least for a very large part of the medieval period. But around that, so much else is changing. Did you know that some of literature's greatest characters were real people? It's so fascinating, isn't it, that some

of the Three Musketeers are also based on real soldiers? That Sir Walter Ralee wasn't all that he's been cracked up to be. Chemist, poets, scholar, historian. in courtier, he could have been great in all these different things. And that if your name is Dudley, you better watch your back. For the tutors, each one of them took something from the Dudleys, either by working with a member of the Dudley family or, of course, by having one executed. I'm Professor Susanna Lipskin, and I'm learning all this and much more bringing you not just the tutors twice a week every week.

Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The English language, as you say, move through old and middle English. Is that almost sort of an act of subversion? It's always there. It's a little bit naughty. It's not the official language. It's not what the ruling classes are speaking necessarily,

but it survives and it keeps going and it keeps telling all of these stories. So whilst England and Britain and Britishness changes throughout this whole period, there is this, as you say, connective tissue of language that manages to maintain its way all the way through. And it's quite surprising that it survives, because if one looks at the story, for example, when the ancient Jews were carried off into captivity in Babylon, very quickly they stopped speaking Hebrew and took on Aramaic,

which is the language of the Babylonian Empire. When one thinks of more recent invasions, for example, possibly under the Islamic expansion, again, Arabic very quickly becoming the dominant language. So it's entirely possible that when the normal, than Plantagenets arrived, that actually English would have been extinguished. But it wasn't. And that speaks to the really small number of elite who were speaking and using Norman French and Angevin French and the large degree of ordinary people who were still speaking Anglo-Saxon.

And we used the phrase mother tongue because it's the language that's learnt from the mother. And there was significant amount of intermarriage as well with Anglo-Saxon women. So Old English or Anglo-Saxon, but we refer to to to it old English these days, is preserved as a language. So it's not an accident. that happens demographically, but it is fairly unusual. And yes, I think to a degree there is a bloody-mindedness to keep this language alive, because it is so rich, it is an extraordinary language. Even before the arrival of the Normans, if one thinks of Anglo-Saxon literary culture, the books that were being produced in England, the Bibles that were being produced, the secular books, the books of science and astronomy and so on. English bookmaking, British bookmaking, and

include Ireland and Wales and Scotland as well, was absolutely world-class. The level of of production and the quality of production really is one of the defining things of Anglo-Saxon Britain. More books, more valuable books, more vivid, intense books or more subjects coming out of Anglo-Saxon Britain than any other part of Christendom at the time. And so there is a linguistic heritage that I think people are genuinely trying to preserve. Because all of those books are not only in Latin. We have Gospels in English. The Lindisfarne Gospels even has a gloss with the Old English written underneath it. So Old English is a language that's being used not only by the people, but also by the church. And that kind of really helps its survival.

You mentioned that the transitions in the people who were ruling England and the kind of nation that England was throughout the medieval period. Is that cultural change also matched by a religious change in development through the period that affects the sense of what Britishness is? I had to do a bit of thinking when I got to the end of the book. What can we say defines Britishness over all these really different periods and cultures? And one of the answer I think is humour, not taking ourselves too seriously, which is quite different to what people sometimes think about the stiff upper lip and so on. in a medieval sense, and actually, really, up until probably the last 150 years or so,

I would say being quite intensely religious is something that's very British. And one could even argue that now our sort of militant secularism is that same fervour, but just being applied in a different way. Because yes, the Celtic Christians remained Christian, and we saw in those stories of Arthur, at least in two sources, and it was so important to them to say how he carried the cross or he carried the image of the Virgin. These are quite intense expressions of faith. The Anglo-Saxons come over and of course their paganism is very important to them. We look at things like St Dunstan's tomb and we can see just quite how that Germanic religion is expressed with fervour. But then when they become Christians, that's almost the apagorean.

Anglo-Saxon Christianity is really intense and is really full-on. Anglo-Saxon England becomes a saint factory. The number of saints that are proclaimed by the Anglo-Saxons is really quite extraordinary. The link with Rome is hugely intense. Kings like Alfred going over on pilgrimage to Rome and so on. The Anglo-Saxons see themselves as one of the foremost Christian nations. Britain becomes Mary's dowry. There was a real fervour about Anglo-Saxon Christianity.

Then, of course, the Viking pagans come again. We don't know much about it because they don't write too many written sources, but the Vikings Christianise. And then the Norman Plantagenet sort of English, typical medieval Christianity. And we get more information on it so we can see cracks in it and how people are sometimes just paying lip service to it. But again, it is, in principle, a profoundly religious culture.

It is medieval society as a theocracy. And so it was. And then after the Reformation, it's not that religion gets junked. That fervor gets plowed into Protestantism. And so much so that for the next 200 years, we have all of the disruptions, putting to death, hangings for treason under the Tudors, under Elizabeth. And it goes through, it's 200 years of struggle.

Oliver Cromwell, Jacobites, Civil War. It really doesn't settle down until the early 1700s in the Hanoverians. And then we have that. very muscular Christianity that marches around the empire and teaches the world Bible songs and so on. So yes, I do think that religion is something that Britain has done with real intensity, and we see that particularly in the medieval period. I think it's easy to forget sometimes that perhaps one of British history's most famous documents in Magna Carta takes place, is created and sealed against that background of, as you mentioned,

John's reign of initially being at odds with the Pope and excommunicated and all of that. but then John effectively hands England over to the Pope to make it a vassal state of the papacy, which technically it remains until Henry VIII's Reformation then. So for the rest of the medieval period, England effectively belongs to Rome, although Rome doesn't do a great job of keeping hold of it very tightly for very long. But, I mean, that must speak to an idea that the British felt that they were special in religious terms as well. So they were directly linked to the Pope. They had a hotline to God through all of that.

Maybe that plays into this idea of the intense religiosity that you mentioned, the Anglo-Saxon Christianity, but persisting through the idea that we are a vassal state of Rome. And that sits alongside, you know, one of the most important documentary sources in the whole period. That's right, actually. We're glad you raised that because Magna Carta, pretty much the first thing it says is the English church shall be free. So it's not even about any of the things that we think Magna Carta's about. This is actually about the status of the church in the country. Super important, you're totally right. and negotiated, mediated by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who really put it all together.

But the church comes out as foremost. And if we think about that ongoing relationship with Rome, we have an ability to see things in simplistic terms often. So Henry VIII is seen as the great Protestant reformer. Henry VIII, of course, was not Protestant. Henry VIII was profoundly and deeply Catholic and died a profound Catholic, just one who believed that he could run the Catholic church in his country rather than the Pope. But his faith, sacramentally, in terms of dogma, in terms of of what he believed, was 100% still purely Catholic. He had no interest in any theological reforms of dogma or creed. And of course, earlier on in his reign, the theories of Luther were being taken up around Europe. It's Henry who writes the defence of the seven sacraments and says

that Luther is a pernicious villain and his theology is all poison. Henry is staunch in defending traditional Catholic views. And the Pope rewards him with this title of Defender of the Faith for defending the Faith against Protestantism. So yes, we have this ability to I think forget about everything that came before the Protestant Reformation. We see Britain, and it's quite a Whig history view, as this progression from barbarity to civilisation. We see ourselves as different and Protestant, and that's what founded the ability to go and create the Anglo-Sphere and the links with America and so on. And we forget and we airbrush out the intensity of the Catholicism beforehand, even with that liminal transitional figure, Henry,

who himself was profoundly Catholic. The Whig view of medieval history in particular always fascinates me in that I think it still has such a grip on what we think of the medieval period, because as you say, Whig theory likes to see this progression from barbarity to civilisation. And it's almost like we still classify good kings and bad kings and good things that happened and bad things that happened in terms of their contribution to that creation of Britain. And I mean, in Whig terms, that's moving towards empire. So if you didn't contribute anything towards the progression towards empire, you were a bad king. Henry I contributes the exchequer. So he's great because he makes that pro. And I'm always struck by how much that still has a hold on our idea of what's good and bad and important through the medieval period.

I completely agree with that. And I think it underpinned linguistically as well, because we still use terms like for high medieval architects. Gothic actually is intended as an insult because it's about the barbarous trimes that wrecked Rome. We still talk about the dark ages. Medieval historians don't, but as a general society, we still talk about the dark ages. But actually, very few other countries have an equivalent phrase. You won't find it in French or German or Italian. That's a particularly British way of thinking about the medieval world. And one of the reasons why I think we think it's dark is because the Protestant Reformation did destroy about 97% of existing art in this country, by which I mean statues, windows,

illuminated manuscripts, all these things were hammered off the churches and thrown onto bonfires. And so it is a little bit dark in a way because we've managed to destroy a lot of the colour, because we have physically made it disappear. But even the term medieval, quite regularly in the news, if an atrocity is happening somewhere in the world, it will be described as evil actions or medieval barbarity. So I think this Whig history, I totally agree with you,

has a lot to answer for in colouring our view and suggesting that everything before the Reformation was barbarous and something we'd like to gloss over. And we even pick up kings like John and say, when he said no to the papacy, he was being a proto-protastent, great guy. That was one of the trailblazers and Henry was able to use that as a precedent. Yes, I think it informs and colours our sense of history hugely.

And I guess just to end on, do you have a favourite medieval document that you came across while you were researching the book? I do. It's the owl and the nightingale, which is a lovely poem. And it's in the style of those debate poems. The medieval world loved these contradictory arguments, whether there were disputations in the law courts or in the universities or the theology schools. So they had these disputes between water and wine and they would pick one thing against another. So they picked the owl against the nightingale. And it's delightfully done. It is in early old English, a century earlier than Chaucer. So you can read it and understand it. And it just conjures up this wonderful world of the countryside. It's not about the court. It's not about the

church. It's not about important people. It's about ordinary people. And it's their lives in the countryside. And the owl is saying that the owl is a good, honest, reliable, dutiful creature that cleans out the churches of mice and is useful to mankind and when he's dead, man can stick him on sticks and scare away the birds and look after their crops. And the nightingale is saying that actually the owl is useless and is dark and only flies around by night, whereas the nightingale is light and sunlight and encourages love and lust in the countryside. And it's this wonderful sort of really quite exuberant, earthy discussion of life in all its shades. And they have this great dispute And it just brings out the level of fun and frolics and excitedness and real people and the real world.

And we can leave for a while all of those chronicles of the anarchy and of the 100 years war and all those sorts of things. And just get back to how ordinary people in the countryside, how are they living their lives? What are their priorities? It's having fun. It's hanging out with friends. It's loves. It's romances. It's all the normal kinds of things.

It's a wonderfully humanising document of the medieval period. And it's got not only humanising, but great humour in it as well. Thank you so much for joining us, Domit. It's been wonderful. Thanks Matt. It's been a very great pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. Dominic's book, Anatomy of a Nation, a history of British identity in 50 documents is available now. So you can go and learn more about all of these documents that Dominic thinks are important throughout our history if you go and grab a copy. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval.

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