Gone Medieval - How to Spot Magic in Medieval Buildings

Episode Date: September 8, 2023

In the Middle Ages, people made marks and concealed many objects in their buildings to protect themselves from harmful magic. Dead cats, horse skulls, hidden shoes, written charms and protection marks were all used widely as methods of repelling, diverting or trapping negative energies. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis finds out more from Brian Hoggard, author of Magical House Protection: The Archaeology of Counter-Witchcraft.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > http://access.historyhit.com/checkout?code=medieval&plan=monthly You can take part in our listener survey here > https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK 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. I recently gave a talk at Tanner's wine merchants in Shrewsbury. It's an incredible building that they've got there and as you venture further in to find their function room, it only gets better. The Clive Tanner Room originally dates from the 15th century and has old exposed beams everywhere. It was pretty distracting actually to try and talk in a place that was so cool. I was talking to the brilliant,

and Alex Fontana, who says that she's a listener, so hopefully she'll hear this shout-out, about caring for such old buildings in the middle of urban areas. Alex recommended that I speak to today's guest, Brian Hoggard, who is an independent researcher with a particular interest in apotrapeic marks and objects. Brian's book is called Magical House Protection, the Archaeology of Counter Witchcraft, and it's out now in paperback. And he's joining us to talk all about how to spot medieval buildings and the challenges of preserving them in the modern built-up environment.

Welcome to God Medieval, Brian. Hi there. Thank you very much for joining us. I started off by referring to that room at Tanner's Wine Merchants in Trusbury, which I think you know quite well too. What can you tell us about that room and that part of the building? Is its history documented? Are we fairly sure how old it is? I haven't seen any documents specifically about that building yet, but you can identify certain features within it that are quite clear if you've seen this kind of thing before.

It's a crux construction, so it's a massive piece of oak essentially that goes up the trunk and then along the one of the limbs and it's been sliced into and those two parts have been opposed to each other to form a brace which is a crook construction it's got two of those at each end about 75% of crux were built in the 15th and 16th centuries so that's normally a fairly safe bet as to when they were constructed some of the much more massive crux were built earlier but this one is more of a medium-sized crux so it probably does fit with the 15th and 16th centuries it is a fantastic building, as you say, and it's had a kind of mezzanine put into it at some point as well. Who knows exactly when that was put in. But yeah, a fantastic late medieval, early modern kind of

era construction and lovely to see it. And a real surprise because it's hidden within the complex of buildings there, isn't it? As you walk through, you have kind of no idea of what's coming and then you walk up into this room and you're just amidst all of the ceiling's beams because that mezzanine floor has obviously raised the level up and you're sort of in the middle of all of those huge beams in the ceiling. It's incredible to be there. Does that kind of construction give us any idea of the building's original purpose or what it might have been used for? It's a bit of a tricky one because that form of construction can occur in simple cottages, right up to giant tithe barns. So it's basically a form of construction that can be used for any kind of purpose,

really. So you can't really establish the purpose just from the form of construction. One of the things I wanted to try and get to is for listeners who are visiting a fairly modern urban area, are there any tips for how they might be able to spot what is a genuine medieval building? Are there giveaways that we can look out for? There are many signs and you gradually learn what those signs are and after a while your eye gets good at spotting them. But first of all, if you're looking for a medieval building, you're obviously looking for natural materials. So it's going to be stone, wood or plaster. Thatch as well is obviously a thing that crops up quite a lot. Medieval buildings, typically the proportions are a bit smaller than modern buildings as well. So you're looking

for a building that has a kind of smaller scale, usually not that tall, maybe two or three floors, not usually that often a lot bigger than that. Windows is another good clue, so where windows often have mullions between them, which are the vertical wooden or stone partitions between the panes. So that's a really good clue because that style of creating windows just didn't occur later on at all. So mullions is definitely a good thing to look for. Often they could be carved details to wooden door surrounds and stone door surrounds. You can also a thing called jettying with timber frame buildings where the upper floors project out over the lower floors and that's a good sign as well particularly with timber frame buildings yeah there's all

kinds of signs really and obviously with woodwork and stonework that is medieval it will tend to show some clear signs of age as well lots of bumps chips marks on them if it's wood it'll be quite aged oak for example can be quite bent and twisted as well can sometimes deform as it gets older and also the grains become much clearer as erosion takes place between the grains, that kind of thing. So yeah, that's some of the typical signs if you're just looking it structurally. So it's kind of picking from a whole sort of recipe list, put all the ingredients together and you may well have a medieval building. Yeah, for sure. And it needs to be confirmed with a look at the interior as well.

If it looks old on the outside, it should look old on the inside too. There was certainly a big ponchant during the 19th century and went into the 20th as well of creating sort of fake Tudor buildings, that kind of thing. And with those, the scale is much larger. Ceiling height is much higher. Usually there's more of a mix of materials when you look around the back or when you look deeper inside the building, you'll get a lot of crisp brick and shiny tiles and things like that.

All of those things were things that were used in the medieval era, but they tend to be very aged and faded in a genuine medieval building. And like I say, the proportions is the big giveaway. And can any of the features that we might see in a building help to date it more specifically, or do things tend to be fairly generic through the Middle Ages? There are building styles. and one of the methods of building construction already, the correct construction, which there are certain facts about that, there are certain age ranges that tends to fall into.

And there are other styles of building that tend to occur in specific periods as well. And as you get more experience with spotting buildings, you get better at identifying what those things are as well. So yeah, so you've got like Gothic features, Romanesque features. So if, for example, you were in the ancient city of Lincoln, which is incredibly blessed with a great range of ancient buildings, you can actually find shops and secular buildings from what we call the Norman Romanesque era.

And those are round-headed arches instead of pointed arches. And it's very rare to find shops and dwellings of that era. And Lincoln happens to have quite a lot of them, whereas another 200 years later, and the arches have become pointed, and then you go another couple of hundred years later, and you start to get square doorways, but with pointed arches within them,

and lots of very fancy ornake details in the corners and things like that. So gradually, these building styles, they come in phases, and you gradually get to recognise what those phases are. I was going to ask as well, what's the best way to spot a later building that's pretending to be earlier, but I guess it's some of the things we've touched on about the proportions in particular. Yeah, I don't live terribly far away from Birmingham. And there's quite a lot of really large pubs built in the Tudor style

on the corners of main roads. And they're really impressive, large, half-timbered, buildings. So there's stone lower floor or brick lower floor with very impressive timber framed buildings mounted on top of them. And if you only had a passing interest in buildings, you might easily think this could be a medieval building or a building with really early origins. But often you look into it and they were built in 1920 or something like that. And the floor plan isn't medieval at all. It's very much to be a pub. Whereas most really old pubs weren't built as pubs at all. They were buildings that were built for other purposes and later became pubs and so the floor plans

reflect domestic needs that have been adapted to be places where you can serve alcohol, whereas one of these early 20th century mock Tudor pubs is very much laid out as a pub inside and is designed to have a bar going all the way around one edge and seats everywhere. So you can start to tell after a while. But I think it's flattering to certain periods of history that other more modern eras want to copy them and they like the style and want to look apart. It's fun to learn about them. Yeah. And if we think about maybe more the inside of these buildings,

are there kind of marks and things that we'd be able to find inside that can tell us a bit more about the building? So I'm thinking initially of masons or carpenter's marks and things like that. Are those things that we can look out for? Absolutely. If you're in a medieval or early modern building, in fact, I've got to be honest,

some of these marks, you can find them right up until the early 20th century. But yeah, the most obvious kind of marks that you'll find inside a building would be Mason's marks. that's in a stone building obviously. And it was always thought that the masons would mark their work, basically, so that as the building was being constructed, they could go to the master of the building, essentially, and get paid proportionally, depending on how many of the stones were theirs.

There's some debate about that now, about whether that's exactly how it worked or not. But certainly, we do seem to have some unique identifiers in some buildings. There are other buildings that have zero Mason's marks, and it's really peculiar, and then you go to, say, certain cathedrals, and they're everywhere. So it seems to be that there's different rules. and different sort of terms about how these masons use their marks.

And then on timber frame buildings, we obviously have carpenter's marks. And these are less about identifying the carpenter and more about the assembly method. Carpenter's marks tend to be numeric. And essentially, you'll have on a timber like a V11 for the 7, and then on a timber that slots into it also 7. And this is so that the carpenter can lay out the frame of the building on the ground, which then gets hoisted up into position using an a-frame, that kind of thing. And so it's really just about matching the right timber to the right socket.

And that's generally what Carpenter's marks are. And then another type of mark we sometimes get, but particularly in churches, is merchant's marks. So traders would have their own little unique identifiers as well. And usually these marks included some kind of crucifix, but then often some other letters or some other little V signs or W signs, and there were little monograms essentially and it seems that these merchants sometimes would put these marks

into their local churches as graffiti and it looks like they were maybe trying to hitch a ride on some of the holy energy in the building to try and draw some luck or some blessing into their businesses by putting that mark inside the church and of course some of these merchants also used to make donations to churches as well

because maybe they felt like they owned part of the church and they were putting their mark in the church for that reason too. So that's just three of the sort of legitimate that kind of marks that you can get in buildings. And then in churches and houses, any old building, to be honest with you, we also get a wide range of other graffiti. So you can get people doing little drawings, people writing their names,

sometimes people writing bits of musical notation even. All of these things can crop up in buildings. And another really common image in the graffiti world is actually a ships and boats. And people seem to be so fearful of the sea. And they had so many fears about going to. to see that again they would often put a little picture of the boat in the church in the hope that maybe some of the blessing would come from the church onto the little image of the boat and then on to the real boat and so it's a little bit of luck that they were hoping to draw into their world and then

the other kind of marks that obviously we find quite a lot of what we refer to as aperture pay at marks which is largely the subject of my book there's a very big chapter about these marks in my book and these are essentially a marks that were designed to ward off evil or to bless certain areas and by doing so that would also then ward off evil. And they're divided into a few main categories really. In timber frame buildings we often find a type of mark called a deliberate burn mark. Some people refer to these as taper burns but I'm not a fan of that term myself because those burn marks can be made just as easily with a candle as opposed to a taper and so I'm like, why are you picking on taper when you refer to that mark? I just call them deliberate burn marks. And John Dean and

Nick Hill have demonstrated in a paper from about 2016, I think, in the vernacular architecture journal, that to make these marks, which basically look like flame-shaped burn marks on a wall, and you would think instinctively, oh, that's just where a candle has fallen over and singed the wall, and someone's then going to put it out. But you can tell after a while that there were no fixing holes beneath these marks. Yep. So there was never a lamp in that position or a candle holder in that position. So someone's come along and deliberately burnt to the surface of the wood. And then John Dean and Nick Hill demonstrated that the only way you can get these deep burn marks, which is what we find everywhere, is that you have to scrape

away the carbon layer and re-burn and do that about 10 times, which then creates this deep flame-shaped mark, which some of them are so deep you can fit your thumb right inside them. And it's this burning, scraping, burning scraping, it's clearly a deliberate act. And there's a bunch of different theories about them. We find lots of these. And in fact, fact there are quite a few, I don't know if you noticed them, in the Clive Tanner Hall at Tanners, and that's really their main. I didn't notice them, actually. I'm going to have to go back and look. I was probably too terrified doing my talk in there. Oh, right, yeah. Yeah, so basically on the main crack timbers on the left as you go up the stairs, there's quite a few burn marks

just there, so it's a really good example of it, actually. Initially, people think that this might be some form of inoculation against fire, so a bit like a vaccine. You're giving the building a little burn so that maybe it won't then have a proper burn later. You can understand why people would think that. But then also some of these buildings, we find so many burn marks that is really is a fire hazard. You're really clearly exposing yourself so much greater risk by putting all these burn marks in there. And so what I think it is, is that where the surface of the wood is burned away, you've essentially got the ghost of a candle flame. Yep. So the shape of the candle flame now exists on the ethereal plane, if you like. It sounds very spooky, I know. But of course,

people in the past used to very clearly believe in magic. And they really definitely thought that there could be supernatural forces moving around, and they've all felt, unless they were particularly skilled in magic themselves, very vulnerable to any kind of dark or evil forces that might come into their house. And just about any kind of bad luck or illness that could happen to a person

would often be explained as something that happened supernaturally speaking. So people have multiple ways of protecting themselves against evil. And if you can imagine, obviously, at night, you've got these little flickering candle lights, and then when you go to sleep, The idea is you want this little candle flame that you're burnt onto this wood to still be shining on the other side, producing a bit of light in that area and more ethereal playing where these dark forces might be gathering.

And so essentially this is like a little pool of light keeping those dark forces away, stopping them from gathering and being potential harm to you. And that sounds far-fetched when I just say it out loud like that. But when you look at how people thought that all of the other objects used to work like dried cats and the bent pins and all that kind of stuff, people are clearly having this. idea that you can kill something, it flips it over into this plane where the magical stuff happens and can potentially stop it from getting to you. There's this kind of magical thinking at work with these marks. So that's the burn marks. And then you've also got things more Christian or more devotional kind of marks. So we often get these things that a lot of us refer to as marian marks. So these are marks to do with the Virgin Mary. Now some people disagree with this

theory, but I've seen so many of them that I totally go with it. And I think that there are these Marian marks. And what we're finding is that you get these overlapping Vs next to each other. And sometimes it's upside down, so it looks more like an M. So instead of the W, it looks more like an M. And when you find them singly on their own, I would say that they're not initials for people's name in that case. And what a friend of mine, Timothy Easton,

who started this whole subject off, really, the subject of studying these protection marks, he had a Catholic friend who said, oh, that VV could stand for Virgo Virginum, or Virgin of Virgins, like an invocation to the Virgin Mary. And we quite often find that mark, particularly on chimney lintels, and sometimes around doorways as well. And it seems like people were saying,

Virgin Mary, please bless this place, please come and protect this place from any evil that might be passing through. And again, sometimes you get it the other way around, so it's more like an M. And the M mark, I found examples of that in Prince Arthur's Chantry in Worcester Cathedral, for example. And you would think there's no need for any kind of protection there because they're monks praying for this person's soul forever in theory. But then someone has drawn these M marks on part of the stone ornamentation around the tomb there.

And they're not just ordinary M marks. They've got these kind of tapering legs that taper out in curves. And that's exactly what you get on the palm of your hand. If you look at the palm of your hand, you've got this M mark with the curving, tapering legs. And I think that people very clearly felt that the sign of the Virgin Mary, M for Mary, or Maria, was right there on the palm of your hand. And you could hold your hand up, and that would be your sign. to stop your protection as well.

And there are some churches in Gloucestershire that have hand outlines on the front door with this M within it. And it's clearly there as a sign for protection. I'm just going to say, before you carry on, I want to know how many people who are listening are staring at their hands right now. Because I am.

I hope it's quite a few. I'm going to see if I can see my M. We also get what we call Christograms or Christograms, which is just a letter I with a cross through the middle, which again, it's just a little invocation to Christ because that used to be a little shorthand way of saying the word Christ.

The thing with both the VV and the I with the cross through it is that they can both also be a W and an I. So it's about the context. It's about where you find it. If it appears to be protecting a portal and it's there on its own, it's not like an I with an M or something or an I with a W or something. It's not clearly someone's initials. Then there's a good chance that it is being used in this way. But one of the other marks which I like particularly is circles and another type of mark which I call Daisy Wheels. that some people call them rosettes

and some people call them compass-drawn flower patterns. But essentially, if you get a compass and you draw a circle and then you put the point of the compass on the edge of the circle and draw another circle, and where they intersect, put the point of the compass and draw another circle until you've gone all the way around the original circle, you'll end up with a pattern made of seven circles

that creates a six-petalled flower. Now that is called sometimes a hexfoil, sometimes a rosette, but I still call it a daisy wheel, because that's what everybody called it when I first started researching this topic in the late 1990s, so I'm just used to calling it that. But essentially, this symbol, you can find it scratched onto church coffers. You can find it integrated into tracery, gothic tracery. You can find it on doors, even tiny little window mullions. I've recently found an example right inside a sash window, right where the rope goes,

just right behind there. It was the size of about a 10p. But then you can also get some of them that can be a couple of feet in diameter. And you can also get lots of them that you have a daisy wheel and then rotated a bit another daisy wheel and another. So it appears to have something like 18 petals instead of just six. And you can get multitudes of them as well. For example, the barn at Bradford-on-Avon in the main entrance there. There must be 30 or 40 of them there, just within that one entrance. And it appears very clearly to be a protective symbol. And the earliest examples of it, you can find from about 1600 BC in Egypt and around the Mediterranean. And then you can find it throughout Europe. You can find it in America, you get migrated to Australia, you can find it in

North Africa, Russia, Siberia even. You can find it across all of the world, basically. It seems to be virtually universal. And generally speaking, where a culture still has it as a living symbol, they refer to it as a solar symbol. And so it appears to be that when people were putting it onto surfaces, they wanted the light of the sun to be keeping the darkness away. And so it's protecting against the evil in that way. And I think that those burn marks I was mentioning earlier, the idea of this sort of ghost candle flame is thought to work in exactly the same way. So it's producing light.

I was going to say that matches that candle idea, isn't it? Leaving a light on to keep the spirits away kind of thing. Exactly. And talking about the burn marks, there's a room in the Clankajak Fowar, which is a lovely 16th century manor house in Wales named Mertha Tidville. And there's a dormer room above the front door.

And on the, it's almost a crux brace inside that little dormer. And it has over a hundred of those burn marks just in that one little room. and so the person in there must have really felt terrified to have felt the need to put so many burn marks in there and directly below that room as well they also found a dried cap concealed under the floor between the ceiling and the floor

so multiple methods of keeping evil away in that particular building but yeah the daisy wheels they are my favourite symbol and I think that the circle is if you like the primeval version of the sun it's the simplest possible version of a solar symbol And there's also a lot of more recent folklore suggesting that witches are bore circles, they hate them. And they say the common explanation is that there's no corners for them to hide in. And this is why they hate them so much.

But I think actually the circle, it comes from their sun. And that's where it really comes from. But some of the aperture bear marks are carved so subtly that you can't find them unless you're shining a torch directly across the surface. Hello, host of Dan Snow's History hit podcast here. History isn't just dates and facts. It's about the incredible stories that shape our world. Three times a week on my podcast, my expert guests and I bring you extraordinary stories of heroism, discovery, mystery and power. Expect tales of lost tombs, daring escapes, power-hungry rulers and those determined to bring them all down.

If you're a history lover or just looking for a good tale, you want to check out Dan Snow's history hit, wherever you get your podcasts. Does it tend to be that windows, doors, chimneys, any kind of opening is the best place to look for those? because that's where you'd want to ward evil off from getting into your property. Those were definitely their main places for protection. The truth is you can find these marks anywhere. So when you're surveying a building, looking for a building, you have to look everywhere. Because sometimes people will, for whatever reason, feel that a particular area is worthy of more protection. So you've got to imagine a house lit by a candlelight and that maybe there are some rooms used less frequently than others

that people get a bit spooked by or a bit scared by or just feel a more vulnerable. for some reason. Although it might not be by an entrance or a fireplace, in the past, in certain kinds of light, that would have been a spookier room, one that's a bit more worthy of protection. So usually, yeah, doorways, fireplaces, thresholds. And voids is the other thing. We get a lot of objects in that where buildings are modified and it creates little voids, little staircases that have been sealed off or old chimneys that are no longer used. Those kind of things often are the focus of protection as well. But more often those are with objects rather than mark. And you mentioned objects and that's kind of a focus of your book as well.

It's something like you mentioned before someone had a dried cat under the floorboard. Is that the kind of thing you mean by an object? Yeah, there are so many different types of objects. But there's in broad categories, you've got witch bottles, which are these bottles that was a specific way of warding off witchcraft or protecting against witchcraft? And then there's also concealed shoes. They were really common. that's probably the most common object that there is finding old shoes stuffed up a chimney or inside a thieves of a roof or something like that.

Usually just a single shoe, not very rarely a pair. I think it's about 10% a pair's, but I think it might be slightly less than that. Sometimes you can find huge hordes of shoes. There are examples where I found over 100 shoes in one building, showing multiple generations all depositing one old shoe. And then we also have things like dried cats, which there are hundreds and hundreds of. If you know anyone who's involved in the work of repairing or doing up old buildings, and you mentioned to them dried cats and old shoes, they'll tell you that they've probably found a few. And dried cats very definitely regularly included in roofs and also sometimes under thresholds.

I'm finding a pattern of quite often you go into a front door and immediately above you, the ceiling. In between that point and the floor above is quite a common place for a dried cat, particularly in an early modern building. I've got a friend called Dr. Petra Shad, who spoke at a conference organized in York in April, and she's an expert on dried cats in Germany. And so she's been looking at them in medieval German timber frame buildings, and she's found one example of cats laid across each other crosswise under floorboards.

And so there's clearly a very strong tradition of concealing these cats. Obviously, when they're concealed, they're not dried. We find them as dried cats. Originally they were just dead cats. And I've got examples in my book from as far away as chilly with that. It's a very peculiar practice. And then we also find things like horse skulls, which are pretty huge. Sometimes lots of horse skulls together.

There's a place called Staunton-on-Wye, not far from where I work, at Goodrich, actually. And they found 24 horse skulls screwed to the underside of the floor in that building. And there's another example from Peter Churchill, also in Herefordshire. There's a similar number found underneath floorboards in a private hall. there's all kinds of objects. It's fascinating how those things can unite people across kind of time and distance that no matter where they were, they still believed something very similar that made them do very similar things to protect themselves

from what they perceive to be threats. Yeah, and there are different theories, which I explore all of them in my book. Some of the theories I've come up with, having looked at so many of these objects over the years, there seems to be a kind of magical thinking going on, which seems to tell us about the psyche, if you like, of the past, that it was actually really normal to have magical beliefs and really normal to feel that you needed to protect all of these zones within your house.

And that there were certain methods of doing this that everybody knew would be useful. And horse skulls, for example, where we find them throughout northern Europe. There's an example in St. Petersburg Museum, which is of a horse skull protecting beehives from pests and hazards. So you've got the same bit of an animal doing a protective function, not exactly the same as we're finding it in England, but very similar. So some of these practices and these ideas seem to be almost common to the human condition, really. It's such an incredible window into the thinking of the past, the way they viewed life and the other world and the threats that they felt they were under, on a day-to-day basis, really, that they felt they need to do all

of these things to protect themselves. It's real insight into what they thought, I think. there's these common threads, and even X symbol, the Soltire Cross, we find its use as a form of protection in buildings throughout Europe, especially in this period. It's fascinating how these ideas seem to spread around, and how we find similarities and slight differences as well as we move around. But the thing I mentioned earlier about witch bottles, that seems to have been an idea that was a specifically response to the period of the witch trials, around about the middle of the 17th century. And that seems to have been a specifically English creation, which then got exported. First of all, it went to America. We've got some examples in Ireland as well.

And then a couple of hundred years after it started, we're finding examples turning up in Scandinavia and France and Belgium as well. So that idea is quite interesting. And that's where you would weed into a bottle. And then you would add some bent pins and also a lock of hair. And it seems like you were creating a little trap. It's almost like you were baiting the bottle. with elements of yourself that an evil force coming in to attack you might then think was you and it would attack the bottle and then there were these pins that you'd deliberately killed by bending them before putting them in the bottle which now of course on the other side are this vicious trap against any supernatural energy so it plunges down to get you and then gets impaled

on the pins itself and the pins are made of iron of course and everybody knows that iron is good against witchcraft so this is this little trap going on so that again the earliest example of that were made using a type of bottle called a bellamine, which has a big face on its neck. It's quite an anthropomorphic bottle. So you think you've got an anthropomorphic bottle, you've filled it with elements of yourself, so you're really trying to fool somebody into thinking it's found a person, you, in fact, and then it dives in and gets impaled inside. In a way, the shoes were meant to work in the same way because they took the shape of the wearer, but the time you wanted to get rid of it, it was uniquely yours, a bit like Cinderella's

And so any negative forces coming into the building would attack it thinking they'd found you. They would therefore attack a decoy instead of you and hopefully burn out, if you like, by doing that. Yeah, fascinating. And just to round off, almost coming back to where we began, how do you find a balance these days between preserving medieval buildings and heritage in urban centres, which I guess have to function in 21st century? Does the listed building system help or does it hinder to some extent? Are there things that we could do better to help protect our heritage?

Yeah, I'm a massive fan of anything to do with heritage and history, right? So I would absolutely prioritise preserving old buildings. From the point of view of just ecology and recycling, I just think we should maintain these buildings. I think sometimes the rules prevent us from making them insulated buildings, but I certainly think we should protect them all, but they should be a little bit more flexible about how we do them up and make them more ecologically useful to modern life. Yeah, so in broad terms, I'd say that listed building rules help, because we want to preserve as many of these buildings as we can.

And when it's gone, we can't just get it back. Let's keep as many of them as we can and adapt them for modern purposes if we can. Yeah, I only ask because I sometimes think, although as a broad stroke, the listed building thing is helpful, sometimes I wonder whether it puts people off because it makes it so expensive to care for a building and so restrictive in terms of what you can do, that it ends up sort of forcing the building out of existence because no one will pay to keep it up because it's so problematic.

And then the building's lost anyway. Yeah, I understand what you're saying. And it's interesting because I've done a lot of work over the years with SPAB, the Society of the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and they do lots of really good courses, many of which are free or cheap, which can easily teach people how to repair their houses in a good, sensitive way and how to do them up so that they are ecological. They're looking to find solutions for people,

not to create barriers to using the houses. And then at the same time as I work with them, I often meet people who are in old houses, who say, oh, I'm going to do this, and then they do it wrong and then they pay the price later. Basically, if you want to live in an old house because you like the way it looks, you've got to learn a little bit about the materials and how to sensitively modify the house.

You are allowed to make modifications to buildings. And as long as you can put up a really good strong case for why you want to do something and prove to people that you're doing it in a really legitimate way, in a really sensitive way, then people do understand and they will allow you to do it sometimes. I think we should all work together. And we should work with the spab mainly because they're going to be. They are really the experts, I would say, on living in old houses. Yeah, I'm going to look them out and see what I can find out from them.

Sounds interesting. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Brian, and sharing some of that information. Hopefully it's given people an idea of what to look for when they go looking around at old buildings now. Oh, I hope so. And Brian's book, Magical House Protection, The Archaeology of Counter Witchcraft, is available now for you to go and grab if you'd like to find out more about some of the fascinating things he's told us about. There are brand new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday. and Friday, so please do join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. 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'll better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval. with history hits.