Gone Medieval - How the Middle Ages Influences Music Today

Episode Date: March 18, 2023

In our modern and digital age, contemporary music has many influences: heartbreak, war, even climate change. But what about the Middle Ages? Has the artistry and literature of the medieval period had an influence on music today?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis speaks to singer and songwriter Elanor Moss - who studied seventh to tenth century literature at university - to discuss how her interest in medievalism has influenced her songwriting and whether we can see themes and imagery from the medieval world feeding into the work of modern musical artists. This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday 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. We're going to explore something a little bit different today. I'm joined by Eleanor Moss, a singer and songwriter, whose degree is in English and related literature with a focus on the 7th to 10th century. So she's right in our medieval sweet spot here. We're going to talk about Eleanor's studies and about one piece of fascinating literature in particular, but I also wanted to find out how,

medievalism has influenced Eleanor's songwriting and why we can see imagery and ideas from the medieval world feeding into artist's work today. So thank you very much for joining us, Eleanor. Oh, no, it's a pleasure. Thanks so much for having me. It's wonderful to have you on Gone Medieval. Where did your interest in medieval literature come from? Was it an interest that came out of doing your degree or was it something you went into your degree particularly interested in? Yeah, so I didn't have a huge amount of context for it until my degree. I think in my first or second year, we were sort of required to take another language module and we had

choices of Old English, Old Norse, French literature, things like that. Yeah, Old English really caught my interest and it was introduced to me through my studies and a natural curiosity grew out of that. Interesting. It was one of those odd coincidences. They just happened to pick this one. Yeah. But found it interesting, having done it, that's always great when it works out that way, because you can always pick a thing that's not so interesting. Yeah, exactly. What was it that fascinated you about that 7th to 10th century in particular? Why did you feel yourself drawn to that?

So I think it's because of it being a period of transition. The transition I was most interested in in that period was the change from paganism to Christianity and the conversion effort that was made and particularly the mechanisms by which that happened on a structural level. And along with that came another transition from the oral tradition to the written tradition. And I didn't have as much to do with that

in what I was looking at, but it was this very sort of dynamic period where actually a lot of the writing that we have from the period is from the 9th century and then the conversion began in the 7th century. So it was just a very interesting transitional period. And you particularly, you mentioned when we were speaking a little bit earlier that you did lots of work with a poem called

Wolf and Edwesser. Am I pronouncing that? Not butchering that too much. I've heard it a lot of ways. I'm pretty sure it's Owdwatcher, is how you would say it, and it means property watcher. Owdwatcher, Wolf and Outwatcher. Yeah. Did you find that influencing your view of medieval gender and politics and things like that? Yeah, so the main lens through which I was looking at that poem was the movement from paganism to Christianity. But there are a huge amount of feminist readings and there's a great piece in a book called Women's Songs, Women's Language, Wolf and The Welfth and Alwaffe's Lament. And if you're interested in it, it's by Bellenough and you can find that online. But because it's one of a collection of poems from the perspective of women,

you can find a lot of reading about it online. It's an unusual piece because we don't have a huge amount of evidence of poems from the voice of a woman. And it's a very slippery poem. It's widely contested as to what the actual translation of it should be. And so there's a lot of different translations of it. The language in it has this quite unique thing that has made it very difficult to translate, where a lot of the words can be translated to mean two completely opposite things. So that has obviously made it a very difficult piece for people to interpret.

But it's from the point of view of a woman and she is in a huge amount of distress and pain because she has been forcibly separated from her lover. I'm going to read you in English, quite a common translation of it by Elaine Trahan. It is to my people as if someone would give him a gift. They will consume him if he comes into their troop. It is different with us. Wolf is on an island, eye on another. That island is secure surrounded by fen.

There are bloodthirsty men on the island They will consume him if he comes into their troop It is different with us I pursued in my hopes the far journeys of wolf When it was rainy weather and I sat sorrowful Then the battle-bold one laid his arms around me Too was joy to me in that Yet it was also hateful to me

Wolf my wolf my hopes of you have made me sick Your rare visits A morning mind And this is not at all from lack of food Do you hear me outwatcher A wolf bears our wretched whelp to the woods that may be easily separated, which was never bound, the riddle of us two together. So, that is one translation. It's very mournful. Sometimes it's interpreted to be a riddle,

because of that specific linguistic trait. A lot of the words just don't directly translate to one thing at all. You know, in that first line, the word gift, so it is to my people as if someone would give him a gift, can also be translated to favour, sacrifice or battle. And so opposite meanings there. And it comes up a lot throughout the rest of the poem. So yeah, sometimes people interpret it to be a riddle. Because of the very little context that we get for the story, a lot of people would argue that it was a story that was probably really well known by the general population.

And so you didn't need to give a huge amount of context. You would say, Wolf, and they would immediately draw to mind a specific cultural figure that was relevant. And same with Owdwatcher. There's three characters. There's the speaker, who's the woman who's lost, some lover who has been forcibly separated. There's Auldwatcher who is directly translated as a property watcher and Wolf is directly

translated as Wolf. And it's sometimes interpreted that Outwatcher and Wolf are both lovers, that Outwatcher's a husband of hers and Wolf is an extramarital affair. So that's the general story and it was the 9th century and it was in the Exeter book, which was the 10th century. I often wonder whether lots of that ambiguity that can be in that language is partly because this most likely came from an oral tradition so people would tell this story. And if you allow enough ambiguity, it can kind of be moulded to your audience or it can mean different things to different people or if there's a particular local story that plays into that trope, you can kind of mould it around that to make it appeal to your audience more. Yes, that's such a good point.

And it was one of the things that fascinated me about myths, really. My main focus really was looking at how myths were conduits for the conversion from paganism to Christianity. So they provided this infrastructure through which to deliver a new ideology to people. So exactly what you were just saying of like, you know, if it exists in an oral tradition, you can insert any character to it in some ways. And with myths and stories like that, they often, seemed to rehearse whatever code it was by which they were living. So in that period it would have been the heroic code of your king and your, I don't know what the word would be now,

but like it was serfs and fealty to, etc. So it was rehearsals of a certain code of living. And then when Christianity was introduced by Pope Gregory and the 600s, there needed to be not just a change in festivals and things like that and ways of celebrating. religion, which you saw, but also the cultural stories and things that were told were being changed at the same time to deliver this new way of living. I think early Christianity was quite good at absorbing lots of those influences, wasn't it, and turning them to Christian stories. They absorb festivals and things like that, you know, Easter and Christmas and all of those kinds of things are really pagan festivals with Christianity layered over the top. And I suppose

there's evidence here that perhaps the same thing is going on with popular stories. Yes, exactly. exactly what I was interested in. And because the poem, Wolf and Outwatcher, has so little context and it's so difficult to translate, there have been certain suggestions from different scholars to say that the different characters represent common myths that were existing at the time. And I think that there's certain evidence to say that this difficult to translate poem is a representation of a myth called Waylon the Smith, which was a pagan myth. and it was a way of showing that the old ways, the pagan ways, were unfavourable and that the new ways of this Christian God were favourable by showing the protagonist as someone who had suffered at the hands of living a pagan life, essentially.

The festivals were sort of overtaken, and so were the myths. So on sort of every structural level. I've got a really good quote from Pope Gregory. So Pope Gregory wrote to Abbott Meletus in the United States. July 601 about his conversion effort and how he thought his missionaries should be going about things. He said, the temples of the idols among that people ought not to be destroyed at all, but the idols themselves, which are inside them, must be destroyed. So he wanted to keep the temples. He sort of recognised that it was important to keep some familiarity of

religion there, but to replace what was inside the temples with this new thing. It's supposed like branding Christianity as like a cuckoo, isn't it? You know, take the nest that's already there, push the eggs out and take control of the home. Yes, exactly. And that was happening in the stories, which is so interesting. So I was looking at this one particular myth that I mentioned called the myth of Waylon the Smith, which was this pagan myth. And looking at how the presentation of that myth, before the conversion, during the conversion and after the conversion, how that presentation of it was changing ever so slightly in order to change the central method. of the myth and replace the pagan coding with the Christian coding and morals. I can run you through that Waylon the Smith myth. It's quite a good one. I was just going to say if there's an example of, I mean, I don't know the myth of Waylon Smith either, so this is all news to me. So if we can see what it is, and perhaps if we can see how it's changing to reflect Christian views a little bit later, if there's a good example of that, that would be great. Yeah. Okay. So

the myth of Whalen the Smith can be found in the poetic edda, which, is an Old Norse collection, but there's a lot of evidence to say that it was in a sort of British cultural consciousness. It's a really good myth. It's like a lot of the old Norse myths were absolutely brutal and this one is no different. But quite importantly, again, there are a couple different versions of this myth. The fullest versions date to the 13th century, but we have evidence of them in more fragmented senses. We have got versions of them from much earlier, so like the 6th, 7th century. And there's a couple really key differences regarding the female. She's not a protagonist in this story, but she's a protagonist in some other versions

of the story. So she's called Beada Hild or Bada Hild, and he's called Wayland. Wailand was a goldsmith to the gods, to the pagan gods. And he was famous for creating the most beautiful jewels anyone had ever seen. And he was married to a Valkyrie. And Valkyry were these really powerful warrior women, who often had wings and things. He lived with his brother, and they were both married to Valkyrie women, and the Valkyrie women had to fly away for war.

And Wayland made a ring, a golden ring for every day that his wife was gone. And while he was making these rings, he was kidnapped by an evil king called Nithad. And his chest of rings was taken as well. And so he was kidnapped and he was taken away to Nithad's kingdom. And he was isolated and trapped on an island. And he was violently hamstringed, which means his ankles were sliced so that he couldn't run away. And he was chained to a forge.

And he was forced by King Nethad to make jewels and gold and expensive trinkets for his guests. And importantly, during this period, and this is one of the lasting things, a king's reputation was dependent on his gold, his wealth, his ability to gift other kingdoms large, extravagant gifts. And so essentially in kidnapping the goldsmith to the gods and forcing him to make gifts for himself and his guests, he was upping his status massively as a king. But he was doing it in a way that was by our standards today, but also by standards back then. it made him an evil king because he was being duplicitous. His wealth, it wasn't his, really. So here we've got Wayland, he's in this forge, he's really injured, he's being forced to make all of

this gold and trinkets, and he's worried that when his wife returns from war, he's not going to be there, and she's going to be worried that he's run off with someone else, all of these other things. And so Wayland plots his revenge. Now, this myth is something that I put into a category of myths that you can call Myths of the Revenge Feast. So there are lots of other myths throughout history where a character is really badly wronged and they get their revenge

through this communal setting of the feast. There's lots of examples of myths in Shakespeare, the retelling of the Medea. So you've got Medea, she gifts her husband's new bride, poison robes carried by their own sons, which kills the brides and the sons, which is a very important.

violation of this tradition of gift giving, which was meant to be sort of a show of fealty and loyalty. So that sort of loosely fits into the revenge feast, but things that are actually feasts, you've got sort of a lot of cannibalistic things that involve killing children and serving them to their parents as a form of ultimate revenge. Atreus's revenge on These Deist's for sleeping with his wife, in which he serves his two sons for dinner, which is pretty gruesome. And then metamorphoses, you've got Philomela, who is avenged by Philomela's sister by cooking and serving her husband's child to him. So you've got a lot of these like really gruesome sort of revenge feast stories. This sort of falls into that category. So Wayland plots his revenge.

He lures Nethad's two sons into his forge and he makes them look inside this chest that has all the gold rings that he was making for his wife. And it's a very heavy chest and he gets them to look closer and closer and closer and he says, you can pick any one of these gold things and I'll melt them down for you and make you something beautiful. And then he drops the lid of the casket on the boy's heads and it decapitates them. And it's really gruesome. He fashions chalises out of the boys' skulls and gifts them to King Nithad. And they're these sort of prized golden chalises that the king would be, you know,

toasting everyone with and filling with wine. And the feast was the centre part. It was the beating heart of the king's loyalty and a lot of the focus of his power was at the feast. And so it was a form of undermining him in a really big way. That was part one of his revenge. And now part two of his revenge, there are a couple different versions of. And it involves his daughter Baderhild. So in one version of the story, he lures her to the forge and he gets her drunk on wine and he seduces her,

which of course, by any standards would be rape and impregnates her. And all the while he's been fashioning these wings out of feathers that he's been finding. In one version of the story, he finds the feathers and another version of the story, the feathers are delivered to him somehow by his brother who strangles these birds and gives them to him. But either way, in both versions of the story, he fashions these wings out of feathers and flies to Nethad's castle and tells Nithad, I've killed your sons, I've slept with your daughter, and I'm escaping. That completed his revenge.

In another version of the story, Baderhild falls in love with him and he falls in love with her. I looked really closely at this when I was studying it because it's really important to how we understand Baderhild as a character, obviously, as to whether or not it was a violent assault or whether it was a relationship or whether it was both. No one's really looked at whether or not it could have been both. I'm not sure what the evidence is for that. But yeah, in one version of the story, the Bader Hill chooses to leave her father to be with Wayland. So that's the story as we understand it in its fullest forms, but those versions are from the 13th century.

But when you look back to the 8th century, you can see some of the earliest shadows of it in Anglo-Saxon culture. And now this is where the stories are staying the same, but the message is changing, in the same way that the festivals were changing, the staying the same, but the message was changing. So if you go to the 8th century, we've got a really interesting artefact called the Franks Cascot, which was a very ornate sort of box and you would keep religious artifacts in it, like really expensive religious artifacts in it. And interestingly, this illustrates perfectly what we were talking about.

It is an 8th century reliquary and it has panels across all the sides and all the panels show on one side a pagan. rehearsal of a myth, which is generally understood that it's Wayland the Smith. It shows his story. It shows that he was kidnapped, that he gets revenge. It shows a chalice, the skull chalice, and shows him giving a chalice to Baderhild, which would suggest that in this version of the story, it is a violent thing, it's a rape. And then on the other side, it shows the Eucharistic chalice is not how it's always interpreted, but certainly there's a lot of interpretations that could say that there's a chalice on it that is interpreted to be a symbol of the promise of the Eucharistic feast in Christianity. The Eucharistic feast being in a Catholic mass when

Catholics believe that during the celebration of the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ is turned into the body and blood of Christ in a literal sense, which again draws to that sort of body and blood thing of the feasts of pagan times, of a different type of feast where the body and blood of children was shown as a form of revenge, a rebalancing of the scales, whereas in the Eucharistic feast, it's the opposite of revenge. It's presented as a self-sacrifice that sort of saves the people who accept it. So it's a casket that shows very, very cleverly the stories, shows the Eucharistic feast on one side where you've got a representation of a good king, and then on the other side you've got a representation of a bad king, an evil king, Nithad. On one side, you've got the route to

salvation that missionaries and the conversion effort was trying to show us ineffective, which is that revenge route of, right, well, I'm getting revenge, I'm saving myself, I'm taking down this evil king. And then on the other side, you've got the new way that they're trying to hustle in through using examples in old myths of revenge is not the way, self-sacrifice and fealty to the one true king of Christ. So yeah, it's a super, super interesting piece. And if you're in London, you can see it at the British Museum. March 2020-3 marks 20 years since the start of the Iraq War. The war was waged to rid the world of a brutal dictator, yet it would end marred in controversy.

So why did the Iraq War go so badly wrong? And what legacies has it left behind today? Well, I'm your host, James Patton Rogers, and every Monday on the Warfare podcast from History Hit, we're exploring a different aspect of this tumultuous period in history. We'll be asking, what was the role of the UK government and Prime Minister Tony Blair? Could the Secretary of State legally order British forces into Iraq? And could British forces follow that law? And how did ISIS rise from the destruction left behind?

But ISIS, this peculiar strain that we all came to know very well in the mid-2010s, really got its start because of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Join me, James Patton Rogers, on the Warfare Podcast from History Hit, as we look back on one of the most controversial conflicts in recent history. But obviously, medieval literature didn't grab you so much that it's what you do with your life now. You are a singer and songwriter. I am. Do you find influences from your medieval studies appearing in your work?

Is that something you consciously do, or do you find it subconsciously follows you? I don't think consciously, I think about it a huge amount. in the creative process of writing. There's lots of interesting things in old English poetry, like there's quite a famous device that they used called Kennings, where you throw together two words like Sea Wolf or Orsteed to mean something else entirely and imbue it with a metaphorical meaning. But no, in terms of my writing, I don't really think about it that much.

The thing that has stuck with me is the thing that we've been discussing, which is how cultural myths and the... The stories that get told again and again in culture are conduits for ideology and the way that we see the world. And so imagery and iconography and things has always been interesting to me off the back of that. And that's the bit that stuck with me. I guess it must play into exactly what we've been talking about before, that messages change, but the ways that you deliver the message can be the same. They can often be wrapped up in the same sort of way.

And I guess music is the same thing. You know, lots of these stories that we've been speaking about would have been delivered orally as a poetic reading or perhaps even something lyrical and musical. And what you're doing is the same thing. So I guess you must be conscious that you have this power to deliver messages in ways that people may not be expecting them or to take a familiar trope and put a new spin on it. Yeah, that's so true. Like a common phrase that is thrown around in songwriting quite a lot is that

There are no new ideas under the sun. Every story has already been told. And most ways of telling that story have also been told. The exciting thing is finding a new spin on something or a new way to tell a familiar story or to use a familiar story to make a new point. It's one of the enduring challenges and fun things about writing songs, I think. And why do you think we see a growing interest in a medieval kind of aesthetic. We were corresponding about this a little bit earlier and what we might talk about. You were particularly pointing out a kind of really strong witch aesthetic in lots of music that's going on at the moment. So Florence and the machine and Ethel Cain and Phoebe Bridges and people like that. What is it, do you think,

about that that attracts artists to work in that medium? Yeah, I am really interested by that. And it's like a cultural thing that I've noticed creep in over the past sort of five years. It's been around for longer, but it was more fringe before. And I think it's creeping into the mainstream or alternative mainstream in a really interesting way. But I think, again, it comes back to that thing of using old images to deliver new messages. I have this sort of inkling that a lot of women are drawn to old images of persecuted femininity or persecuted womanhood. like our sort of medieval characters like Vedah Hild. Not that I've seen anyone use her yet,

but our witches and our Joan of Arc martyr characters where they were persecuted in the past and their voices were not important, they were not listened to, and they sort of died in these gruesome ways. And then to use that image and reclaim it and to use the image to tell your story, what used to be an outsider image is becoming a,

symbol of strength and perseverance. And historically there was a lot of fear around the secret power of women. The witch thing was a manifestation of that fear. And I think as feminist theory and conversations are becoming more central to the cultural imagination, these images that historically surround it are probably having a resurgence as well. Florence and the Machine's new album, the concept for the album was about something called Coriomania, which was a sort of illness or madness that took some people on where they just danced maniacly until they dropped. And so her album dance fever was lifted from that. I also think

there's probably just, you know, like I was saying with the Wolf and Outwatcher poem, it's a woman from 2,000 years ago talking about something in such a way that we can still relate to. It's so relatable still. The heartache and the pain and the authenticity of that. that feeling remains, even though a lot of the context is lost. And I think that there's something quite powerful about that. Poems like that are really interesting, because you can reach back 1,500 years and see people feeling what we feel today. Yeah, exactly. And I think things like the influence of witches is fascinating. I think, I don't know whether I'm fascinated. It's taken this long to kind of come around because there's such a symbol of the patriarchy of male fear

of women, of the othering of women and the mistreatment of women that we look at now as obviously that was what was going on. Whatever the reasons were at the time, you know, we've had Gemma Holman on the podcast before talking about royal witches when prominent women are accused of witchcraft as a political tool to remove them from the scene or even to damage their husbands and things like that. So I think you can see witches very much as that kind of sense of women having been othered and held down for such a long time that they become like feminist icons. We know they were wronged today. The politics of the witch hunt exists today and actually is really interesting because the idea of a witch hunt has been co-opted and taken on

by a certain faction of right-wing ideology that thinks that the Me Too movement is a witch hunt and thinks that the Me Too movement is a resurgence of that, which is baffling because, if anything, it's starting to shift slightly and the Me Too movement is evidence of that. And the whole witch-hunt thing, men believing that they are victims of a witch-hunt because they're being called out for predatory behavior. It adds this other interesting element to a lot of women identifying with this whole witch thing at the moment because it's a turning of the tables a little bit. It's historical and slightly detached, but also not a million miles away from Me Too in the sense of that women are forced into this position by men in positions of power.

It's almost a vehicle for delivering that same message, isn't it? I wonder whether the Me Too movement has partly connected women with witches in the past in that kind of way. I don't know. Yeah, except it's the men that are feeling like they are being witch hunted. They feel like, oh, you know, I'm just being thrown on to the pyre of the feminist witch hunt for men who've wronged them, which is a way of sort of trying to nullify the argument, an ineffective way. But it's sort of an attempt to take something, to take a term that doesn't really belong to them in terms of like the witch hunt thing. It's not for you.

You weren't hunted. You weren't witch hunted, how many years ago it was now. But it's a powerful thing to take that image and to identify with it in that way. I think there's something quite powerful. and it also speaks to how long a lot of these issues have been around for. They're still here and we're still like plugging away at them. Absolutely. I often say we tend to think of the medieval world as a completely different place, but there's so much of it that is still relevant and true today.

We're still living in a massive patriarchy where women are treated relatively horrendously compared to men and other groups are treated horrendously based on the ability of people to do that. We haven't moved on in the centuries that have followed. And I think sometimes things like this, the influences that appear in your music and those other artists that we've talked about, are a really great way of connecting those dots and highlighting the fact that this is an issue, but it's not actually a new issue. Yes, exactly. And also, like, it's a great moment from the outside and internally in the industry, there's still so much work to do. But there is so much more visibility. There's still work that needs to be done.

But certainly there are more women who are in the public eye making music that is about their lives. lives and is telling their stories and is speaking to injustice, but in a way that is like, here's a story about my life that will speak to you, a fellow woman who is a survivor of something or another or like just speaks to their experience, whether or not it's traumatic or normal or not normal, there's no normal experience, but there is more of it right now. It's a good moment for that. And I think lifting up people's voices, which is historically what has not happened and even with the Wolf and Aid Watcher story, we know it was a woman because the pronouns and the

pronouns and the language at the time and the little context we do have, we know it's a woman speaking, but we don't know anything else about her. We're getting people's stories. We're getting women's stories now in a way that we really need. It's interesting that you talk about your music and other music in exactly the same way as we were talking about Wolf and Outwatcher earlier, that it has enough ambiguity that you can put yourself into that story, that it can speak to you about your experiences because there is that ambiguity. and we're talking about people putting that ambiguity into their work 1500 years ago, and it sounds like that kind of thing is still happening today

to make room for it to be relevant to as many people as possible. Yes, but the thing about songwriting is, depending on how you write a song, you can exclude people from it. You can invite people into it. It can be for some people and not for others. But yeah, the mechanism is the same. Before you go, I guess, what are you working on? And where can people find you?

So I am going on tour this month, actually. The tour starts on the 23rd of March in Bristol and finishes on April 1st in Leeds, but you can find tickets for that on my website. I've also just released an EPU called Cosmic, and you can find that. Also, on all the streaming websites and all the normal places. Yeah, that's sort of what's going on for me at the moment. Wonderful. Well, thank you so much for joining us.

It's been fascinating to chat through some of these ideas and how they relate to life today and to the music that you're writing and creating. today. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thank you so much for having me. It's been a blast. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell 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 listen to podcasts,

including Spotify. It really does help new listeners to find us. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hit.