Gone Medieval - Lost Towns of Britain

Episode Date: March 19, 2022

It's hard to imagine the familiar places around you disappearing forever. But all across Britain, there are once inhabited towns and buildings that disappeared under the sea, were decimated by plagues, or simply abandoned - leaving no trace of their existence. With discussions of the horrors of climate change, young archaeologists buying entire fields on a hunch, and hidden medieval wine cellars along the south coast, the lost history of Britain is slowly uncovered. On this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt is joined by Matthew Green to discuss this fascinating phenomenon as featured in his new book, Shadowlands: a Journey Through Lost Britain'.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Gone Medieval 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 from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. We're blessed in the UK with the amount of history that's all around us, staring us in the face, and that does create the danger that sometimes will take some of it for granted. But what about all of the history that we don't see so clearly? Matthew Green's fantastic new book, Shadowlands, A Journey Through lost Britain is a stunning tour of what we can't see so well, what's been lost, what's been hidden

and abandoned or snatched away from us. It's part history, part tour guide, part personal journey through the UK. It's also a cracking read and it highlights forgotten history that's quite literally often beneath our feet. So welcome to the podcast, Matt. Thanks for joining us. Thanks. What inspired you to write this book, I guess, to start off with, like I say, It's part historical. It's part tour guide around the UK. What really gave you the idea to write this book? It was a television documentary. I had a bit part in it.

And they suddenly mentioned this place called Donich, which I sort of was vaguely aware of, but didn't really know so much about it. And doing a bit more probing, discovered it was this kind of sprawling medieval city built on a cliff, rather foolishly, and the vast extent of it is now mouldering beneath the rippling waves of the North Sea. And I was inspired by it and began to wonder how many more of these places

there might be around Britain, not just lost cities, but ghost towns and vanished villages and things like that. And at the same time, it felt like the whole world was in transition because it was that, you know, Trump had been elected. Brexit had happened. I was going through a period of bereavement and loss. And it sort of just felt timely for those reasons. And also not least because, to my surprise, so many of these places seem to have been washed away with a sea, and it therefore gave it kind of uncanny

parallels with the present, and some of it does actually read a bit like an awful premonition of the future. So that's what inspired it. I did my research, and I narrowed it down to about 10 places, even though there's actually thousands, and then just got stuck in and went on this bizarre itinerary

of destruction. And it does cover a wide range of history So it starts before our gone medieval period and it continues way after our gone medieval period. But we're going to talk about some of the examples that sit within our own time period. So the first one I'd like to talk about is Trelech. It seems to be a very particular story

that's all about its location, a moment in time, a purpose that it was created for, which all sort of conspired to cause its sudden appearance, but then its downfall as well. What do we know about how Trelech came to be, how it appeared in the spot where it was, Trellick is in the Welsh marches, that kind of shadowy borderland, sort of between England and Wales. And it was split up into these kind of warring principalities.

They were sometimes known as, where the invading Anglo-Normons sort of et into the territories to the west of Offers Dyke. And it looks as though a, well, initially a village, but it grew into a town, was established there for the purposes of iron mining. So they would mine iron, smelt it in the forest of Dean, then it would be hammered out in the forges into these sort of weapons and shields and munitions, which one particular warlike family called the Declaires would harness for their campaigns in league with Edward I, to crush the wild Welsh as they saw it.

But it's a real puzzle, because if you go to Trellek today, and this is the thing about the book, when you go to so many of these places, they're just sleepy villages today. They're kind of spectral echoes of what they were and their medieval grandeur. And it's really hard to square that with the kind of archival evidence from the late 13th century, what are called Burgage assessments, which show that in terms of the kind of rent assessed

and collected and all the plots, this was one of the biggest, if not the biggest towns or even cities in medieval Wales, which rather begs the question what happened to the rest of it, because there's very little trace of any of that today. and that's where the moles come in, so you don't normally expect moles to make great historical discoveries, but it seems like they did because in 2002,

a farmer living in the village of Trelley, notice that these moles seem to be digging up, these little shards of what looked like medieval pottery in a certain field. And so convinced was one archaeology graduate by this. He used his life savings and bought the field, and he's like, I'm convinced that beneath this field

lies the heart of the lost city. A guy called Stuart Wilson. He's been digging ever since, and he's discovered and not everybody agrees because other people say that it could never have been this vast city because it's on a landlocked plateau. It's very high up. It would have been a weird place

to put it. And people say that he's probably digging in the wrong place. But he has found substantial evidence of streets and manor houses. Elsewhere have been found, you know, these of iron forges. So it looks It looks as though it was in fact this behemoth, or at least considerable urban settlements, but one that just suffered an almost satanic decline, which we're not quite sure why,

but it looks as though it's because the patrons, the Declare family, this Marshall Warlike family, were wiped out. The line became extinct at Banachburn in 1314, just as this place was being attacked by the Welsh. And then, of course, it was a sitting duck for the... plague epidemics a bit later, and it seems to have largely sunk beneath the soil. When you read 17th and 18th century newspapers, it's just referred to as a little village, which is quite at odds with this sort of giant weapons factory that it must one day have been. And it's moving, I cycled all the way through the Forest of Dean to try and find this play, which was an insane thing to do, because it was a lot further than I was expecting. But there's just a sort of atmosphere of such peace and tranquility.

There's a wishing well and there are these sort of bronze age stones and this sort of wonderful villagey pop. And it's quite at odds with what this place must have been. So I find those kind of juxtapositions really compelling, you know, between what the place once was and what it's been reduced to. It must be hard to imagine cycling through a peaceful forest and quiet countryside that one time in the past, this was a centre of industry with mining and hammering and furnaces and hundreds of maybe thousands of people. living and working there, creating, you know, it was a factory of destruction, a munitions factory, as you said. It was a boom town, we think. That can only be why this absolutely meteoric rise in population happen within such a short space of time. But yes, totally relate to what you said. It was in Congress, this kind of mice cycle through the forest. But I did

underestimate how much it was going to be sort of downhill, whereas, in fact, it was largely uphill, and I was of cycling with a backpan. I was absolutely excited. I thought my heart was about to explode. So I did have some of that kind of like horror and angst that we might associate with a sort of like war factoring, even though I was just trying to cycle to find this place. And you come across the sign is extraordinary. It looks like a sort of homemade cake display, like at a village fate, like saying this is the cakes that is, this tiny little green sign saying Trellack in the undergrowth. You barely notice that you've arrived anywhere and in a way you haven't. You've arrived to where somewhere used to be.

Exactly, yeah. And has the archaeologist that owns that film, I mean, he's literally put his money where his mouth is, a pretty terrifying experience, I'd imagine, for him. And I get the impression from the book that he's sort of fighting more established archaeologists, I guess, who have a very different opinion. And it's part of the issue with some of these places

that when there's not all of it remaining, so much of it is open to interpretation. We don't really know how big trellicle was. We don't really know exactly where it was, why it was, or anything like that. So it does leave that room for interoperations. that someone can step into and fill in any way that they feel? Oh, yeah, that's absolutely right.

And what you see again and again with this particular subject is that by definition, there's an empirical void. You somewhere like Donetsch, or the parish records were swept off the cliff along with much of the city. Places that have vanished, by definition, sometimes don't leave that much of a historical trace, not always, but sometimes. But into that void myths flow, you know, I'm sure lots of people listening would have heard the myth about how you went to hear the drowned church bells sounding from the deep. And with a lost

city, it's like this kind of empty space of the mind into which you can project. It's funny actually, because this story of Trellick has been followed quite closely by the mainstream media. And if you go and read sort of Guardian and Telegraph and even Daily Mail articles, like beneath the line, people are really gunning for this guy. They're like, you know, he's followed the strength of his own convictions. he's ignoring what the so-called experts say, and he's discovered this kind of utopia hiding in plain sight. And a lot of people are like, well, it's just like Brexit. And so they want to make it something that speaks to the present day.

But it is true that has actually been quite a lot of archaeological digs by various professional archaeologists that the Howells, in particular, in the decades before that. But they didn't have quite as much liberty because their funding would dry up. They'd find some highly significant things, but then they'd have to move on to other projects, whereas this archaeology guy, he owns the field. And he says what he's dug up, he reckons, there's only like 1% of everything else that's down there that's going to consume the rest of his entire life. He's something of the sort of Balzacian monomaniac about him.

But he's actually a very down-to-earth guy. And as one of the articles put it, he really is an expert in his field. In his very own field. You mentioned Dunwich there. So can you tell us a little bit about what happened to Dunnich? Why is that peering in the book? Well, the original title of the book was a city that fell off a cliff, and that gives you quite a good sense of what happened to Donich,

but perhaps made it sound a bit too sort of tragedy comic. But this was once one of the principal new towns of the early Middle Ages. Obviously, the Romans introduced towns and cities, but it took a while before, really, not until Alfred, until the great burgs were built, began to sort of pave the way for this later kind of efflorescence of towns and towns, cities, many of which are still with us today, particularly during the reign of Edward I. And Dunnitch was one of those earlier towns. It was big. It had seven parish churches, not 50,

seven, and it had a population we think of around 5,000. And in physical size, if not population density, it wasn't that different from the city of London. And it grew. It became one of the principal sort of ports of East Anglia doing lots of trade, including sort of the fish trade with Iceland, until it really rather gets stopped in its tracks by an absolutely calamitous storm on Near's Eve, 128. And this took everyone unawares. And it swept off, about an eighth of the city was sort of swept off into the sea overnight. And there would have been absolutely harrowing scenes of the sea clawing away row upon row of

houses of the timbered beams that were the warp and weft of medieval houses becoming battering rams and sort of smashing into cattle and huge. humans, people actually sort of falling backwards off the cliff in the middle of the night in their beds as they slept. Churches plunging into the water. And then the next morning, this is actually evoked quite well in a book called The Rings of Saturn by Seabold, the sort of survivors came down and they would have seen this sort of great muddy swirl, a pitiful waste of humans and cattle and roof tiles and hawks and all the rest of it, just through the haze of salt spray. So a real apocalyptic scene, but obviously they hoped that was a one-off. It was not because it was followed up by a second calamitous storm in the early 14th century. And these actually precipitated a process of coastal erosion, which meant that more and more of the city got plunged off its cliff.

If you'll forgive me for straying into away from your time span. By the time the horseback topographers arrived in Queen Elizabeth's reign, half of it was drowned. John Stowe goes to chronicle it, and half of it's gone. half of all those parishes are underwater. And this only gets worse and worse until there's just one gaunt church tower left, the sole surviving church tower, all saints. And postcards in the early 20th century show this as a jagged silhouette and the twilight. And the cliff is getting ever closer. The church is inching closer to the abyss. And then finally in 1922, that toppled off and joined all the other underwater ghost churches and all that we find there today with the ruins of Grafeyrha's

monastery, one sole surviving grave, and a leper hospital, which for obvious reasons was built a lot further in land. So there's very little to see, but there's a lot to feel. You know, a sense of sadness hangs in the air like the salt spray. And as Henry James says, the minor key is struck with such felicity, it leaves no sigh unbreathed. He said it's impossible really to be disappointed with anything at Donwich because it's so desolate and exquisite, and it sort of puts your own troubles in perspective. And it's a cautionary tale as well, because lots of historians would say that these storms were, if not directly caused, but certainly a function of medieval climate change. Yeah, so we move from the medieval warm period into what's known as the Little Ice Age,

which sort of lasts for several hundred years up until the 19th century, really, where we see a lot of storms around that swapping of the climate, not dissimilar to the situation that we find ourselves in today. You know, in the UK, we've just suffered through batterings of several storms in a row over a period of a week or so. And we're seeing this happening more and more and more. And you get the sense that perhaps at the end of the 13th century, people were beginning to see that happening more and more as well

and physically watching buildings and places drop into the sea in a way that must have felt utterly terrifying if you didn't understand what was going on. Yeah, indeed. Apocalyptic scenes and a sense of powerlessness, although much of it, of course, would have been seen as an expression of divine disgruntlement. But yeah, it's thought that this transition from the medieval warm period to the Little Ice Age was accompanied by unusually tempestuous weather. And as you mentioned, there were a remarkable cluster of storms that put pay actually not just to Dunwich, but other places I look at in my book as well. And people are sort of like what caused medieval climate change. And it's an interesting question.

As far as we know, it wasn't man-made, so there was a big difference. The last thing I'd want would be for people to read my book and say, oh, well, you know, they had climate changes, so there's not really any point in us doing anything about it. Because the key difference is that medieval climate change, its thought, was caused by an upflare and solar radiation and a subtle change in the tilt of the earth. I'm not entirely sure how that's been proven, but it's the consensus. And it was stormy weather had a sort of deleterious impact upon the map of Britain. You look at a map of Britain in 1225, very different from a map of Britain today, just as a map

in 1275 will probably be quite horrifyingly different from one of our own times. So yeah, it was something that I would call one of the major mediums of oblivion. You might have plague, you might have war, but medieval climate change is certainly a powerful one. The Ides of March, the 15th of March, it's perhaps the most famous, or shall we say infamous day in the ancient history world, because it was on that day in 44 BC that Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, was assassinated in a Senate meeting. But what do we know about the events of the aides of March 44 BC? Did Shakespeare get anything right? And what happened next? Well, every Sunday, this march on the ancients from history hit, we're going to find out. This is the time for our special mini-series of episodes,

all about the aides of March, the events of the day itself, the legacy of this day in ancient history, some of the characters involved, and so much more. So make sure you tune into the ancients from history hit every Sunday for our special Iads of March mini-series. I think looking at climate change from a historical perspective and thinking about where we are today, the Earth has always undergone climate change. That's an absolute fact we know that. And it was undergoing climate change in the 13th century, as we've just discussed. So yes, it's undergoing climate change today that may have a natural element to it. But the fact is that it was undergoing climate change. that we're here making it worse now.

So if we don't learn the lessons from what was happening six, seven hundred years ago when cities were falling off cliffs, we're now getting a worse version of that because we've added to a problem that already existed. We may not have created it, but we've made it worse. And I guess Dunnich offers this kind of, as you mentioned, it's almost 600 odd years. It takes to eventually disappear and slide into the sea altogether.

And does that create its own story in that it's not like an overnight thing where the whole thing is gone and disappears? there's centuries of watching this place slowly drift away out into the ocean and be lost. That must create a slightly different impact in the national consciousness, if you like, of what that means to watch it disappear over centuries rather than this just one horrific night of loss. Yes, exactly. It was a long, drawn-out process of stagnation. And if you just imagine what that must have been like by 200 years in, and where was once the marketplace, churches, graveyards, monastery, just a sheer drop.

It's the cliff. And yet people didn't give up. There's one case of someone remarkably signed a 500-year lease on a new house when it was just teetering on the very brink of the cliff. So some people just do not give up. But yes, it did, because it was such a drawn-out process, it generated a whole mythology and such as obsession and fascination and people were kind of drawn to it. whereas other places were much more immediate.

They disappeared relatively in the bloody click of the fingers rather than this centuries-long drawn-out process. But we should be wary of drawing direct lessons and saying, this is how they didn't deal with it, this is how we did deal with it. But it just can give us perspectives on just the fragility and precarity of many of our own settlements, particularly coastal ones,

places like Fairborn in Wales and Sikipsey in the East Riding. are already slipping into the sea. And I mean, I've seen some horrifying studies saying that it's quite likely that vast swaths of London will be underwater by sort of the middle decades of the century. Yes, it can make for chilling reading. But then it is a relief to some extent to see that these places are remembered even centuries later, sometimes in quite imaginative and creative ways.

Yeah, because I think we have this idea that the world around us is a fairly static thing. So the towns that we live in now, the cities that we visit, the places that we go have always been there and will always be there. But this book kind of gives you very clear indications that that isn't the case. There have been places that aren't anymore. And we may be in a place right now that won't always be here. And I think it gives you that idea of the transitory nature of it all where we, I guess we tend to take it for granted, don't we? We're living in it. It must be here forever.

Yes, it's kind of a rebuke to our sense of hubris and invincibility. and it's, I think I said in one of the chapters, it's Warren Percy, which we'll probably talk about a little bit later on, the place that vanished in the wake of the Black Death, but not because of the Black Death. I was, why are so many people drawn to this place? It was the endless stream of visitors, and you can sort of sense that aura of transience

and almost feel the turning of the earth and the sense that, you know, one day these could be our streets that are sort of faintly penciled into the earth, and no one likes to imagine their favourite street or favourite city as a wasteland, but it could be. I don't want to be too doom and gloom, but, you know, like, it's a very real... I mean, London was a practically ghost city for hundreds of years after the Roman withdrawal and before King Alfred came and re-invaded it.

And when I was walking around in lockdown, the allocated half an hour exercise, I used to love walking through the ghost city of actually looking across at the city of London, completely stilled and deadened, and thinking maybe that's what the inhabitants of London Dennevik, which was like the open-air metropolis where Covent Gardeners today, when they had looked across at this kind of shell on the horizon, it was like a sense of history looping back. Yeah, and I guess in cases like Trellick, it's man-made thing. We created it and we abandoned it and let it be.

But in so many of the other cases, it gives us that real sense of perspective and our own smallness, I guess, that it completely necessarily beyond our control. So Dunnich slips into the sea. And Winchellsea, I guess, is another good example of this. So Old Winchellsea is also claimed by the sea. Can you tell us a little bit about how old Winchell Sea disappeared and what happened in the aftermath of that? Winchell Sea, it is a contrast in some extent

because that is an instance where they do actually try to do something about it. The king will not accept the fact that the city's lost and they actually resurrect it elsewhere. But just to go back to the origins, the beginning of the story, basically Old Winchell Sea was a Sussex port, fairly sizable, And it was built on a shingle spit. Now, that might sound like the most insane things to have done. But when we say shingle spit, it was pretty promontory would probably be a better word.

And there were quite a lot of medieval cities were built on shingle because it gave immediate access to the sea. It was great for fishing and vegetation would have grow on the ship. So it didn't look particularly precarious, but then you never know what's around the corner. And a series of storms in the middle of the 13th century, which are so memorably evoked by the monk Matthew Paris, talks about the kind of the furious sea rising up and a pitiful waste of humans and fires that blaze black and fishermen actually sort of shivering and fear in their beds

at the roar of the sea, much like we all did the roar of the storm the other day. It basically, the spit on which it was built gets irrevocably breached. So it's a sitting duck and people begin to abandon it. They see the games up. In one proclamation, Edward I says, Old Winchell Sea is hopeless long to stand. And those words proved prophetic, because in 1287 to 88, there was a triple whammy of storms which sweep what little remainder of it into the sea. And Old Winchell Sea has never seen again. It was the first British town to have been drowned

since the beginning of recorded history and certainly wouldn't be the last. And the mystery, no one really knows where it was. The sea swept in. The whole coastline was completely transformed. So no one really knows where it was. And there were these kind of later reports, some centuries later, a fisherman kind of anchoring there on the ruins of this lost city.

And it's kind of almost a romantic image to imagine it all sort of out there, all the kind of graveyards and well shafts and streets and ports and churches. But that seems to have just been a fisherman's tale, like a work of fantasy. To this day, no one knows where. and no one has actually found any of it. But all was not lost because Edward I decided to

rebuild, to translate it, as I would say, he salvages as much of it as he can. Then they scout out locations for New Wynchal Sea. And they settle upon the hill of Iam, which was this hill overlooking the breed estuary. And it shared this tidal harbour with Rye, which I'm sure many of your listeners will be familiar with Rye. And it seems to be. like this was the perfect solution because it was completely safe from the ravages of the sea. There's no chance that's going to be washed away because it's on a hill. And it could still perpetrate all its trade with all over Europe because it's got this harbour. And he lays it out. And there's an extraordinary document, the rental rolls from 1292, probably the most extraordinary

rental roles you'll ever see from this period because you see that the whole thing was divided up into quarters and subdivided. And it was forged really unusually for this period to a rigid checkerboard layout. It was like a gridiron street plan like a kind of medieval Manhattan with first street, second street, third street. And they all kind of intersected. And I can't help but feel that this like orderliness was meant to be a manifestation of man's taming of the very nature that had laid it low. Also, they thought everything looked so good. It seems to have been rather successful. And when you go to Winchelsea, even to this day, one of the reasons for that becomes immediately clear, because you see these little sellers sort of leading down away from

the streets into these kind of dark, dank spaces. And inside those places were sort of stored and served. What many people saw as liquid gold, one of the most valuable, kind of widely traded commodities in the whole of medieval Europe. And that was, of course, wine. So this is what I love about new winchelty. It had such swagger in its step, and it was fuelled to such a significant extent by this absolutely delicious light pink frothing wine that would gush in from Gascany in these vast transshipments that would come across every year. And Gascany was a dominion of the English crown for a long time ever since Eleanor of Aquitaine married Henry II and 1154. And that whole Bordeaux-Dillain country in Aquitaine, too, became the

this great vast wine monoculture. And all the grapes were kind of squelched and everything put into their barrels and transported across up the gillandestri in the narrow season. Periless voyage, horribly prone to attacks by pirates. And the men of Winchell Sea were the very worst of them all. It was known as one of the most piratical, if I've said it, I don't say that word very often, but it was seen as a kind of nest of pirates. And so many captains would have this experience of seeing almost like a

floating crucifix emerging from the mist and before they knew it their ship had been boarded by the Castilians or by the French and they were flailing around and the icy waves as these pirates were piercing the barrels and spraying it down their throats and go forth. A lot of this wine ended up in Winchelsea and

to this day there's about 30 surviving wine cellars but it's thought there may have been as many as 70 in its heyday and they would have been amazing places full of lute music and candlelit gargoy oils, people trying the wine, people buying it. And I'm sort of interested in how it was perceived. And just at the time New Winchosey was wiring to life, there's this wonderful book, the Liber Divinness, that says, wine is the creator of the world's happiness. And it says

it removes sorrow from the soul. And although there were a few sort of religious denunciations, and of course, Chaucer says that wine could be the sepulchre of a man's reason, there was no real sense that drinking a lot of it was a bad thing. And even babies were fed wine. There's this alarming tract from, I think, like the late 13th century, to a wet nurse that says, if you can wean the baby off wine soup after six months, then do please try. So we said they were giving wine to baby. And of course, it was a drink of the elites. You know, this was for knights and notaries, and it wasn't really for ordinary people. But nonetheless, so much gushed into Wintersy sell it. It really gave it this cosmopolitan atmosphere because you had vintners from all parts of Europe, drinking the wine, tasting it down there, and really gave it much of it.

So, which rather begs the question, what happened to this? Have you been to Winchellsee yourself? I haven't actually, no. People often give it a miss. It's not really on the map for good reason, but it's the most haunting place, as if you go there, there's just a sense of sadness and lingering loss. and you can still feel the vast sweep of this grid layout, but the whole thing feels very rustic, almost like a one big sort of Sunday afternoon stroll.

There's no sign ominously of the tidal estuary. It's dwindled this pathetic little stream, which you can almost step across. You could skip across it. The gates are sort of still in place, but you see that so much of the church in the middle, St. Thomas's church is just a gaunt ruin. and then you look for the other church, St. Joe,

and it just doesn't seem to be there at all. But then what really chills the soul, as if you go into what used to be the southern quarter of Winchal Sea, and the whole place just melts away, and before long you find yourself in these kind of lonely green fields covered with these kind of dips and grooves, which are the ghost streets. So the cellars and the first floors have been built over,

and they're in the earth's cold grip. Then you come across these sort of hopeless shards, which look like they've been fired. from space and sort of crash landed in this field. That's where the monasteries used to be. That's where the hospitals used to be. And the most harrowing sight of all is one of the main city gates, Newgate, which once led into the city. It's now just literally marooned in woodland. And it looks utterly out of place. So, you know, what on earth has happened? Like, how could this possibly have gone wrong a second time? And although it suffered many misfortunes,

it was attacked by the French and the Castilians. There was some horrific massacres commemorated with this twisting alley called Deadman's Lane, which actually followed the contours of all the dead bodies that were dumped there. And it was suffered in the Black Death, of course, but places bounced back from that kind of thing in the Middle Ages, but what it couldn't bounce back from was its second defeat at the hands of nature. So the very sea that had once inundated it gradually began to regress and recede. And that meant that the tidal harbour narrowed and narrowed and narrowed, which meant that ships could no longer get in. There was a new accumulation of shingle, which was exacerbating this process,

and people were dumping ballast as well, which didn't help. And shriveled, reduced, hemorrhaged population faster than wine gushing out of a hogshead. So much so that in 1722 Daniel Defoe visited, and he said, nothing of the city but the destruction of it seems to remain. but it's still a very moving place to visit, particularly if you're aware of its earlier tragic history. I was going to say a sobering lesson, but maybe all of that talk about wine, sobering is not the right word.

Well, possibly not. I mean, some of the accounts suggest that people, monks, were drinking up to five pints of wine a day, is there? A hell of a lot. I wonder what they were praying for after that? I don't know. A good question, I don't know. The invention of aspirin?

Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah, it would have just been this sort of low-level drunkenness all the time. And actually there's not much wine on the menu if you go into the one pub that's left in Winchellsee today. They don't have any of these medieval brands of wine like the winter cherry wine and the wine in which gold has been quenched, which is meant to restore your youth. And black wine they had, which was just incredibly strong wine, which we probably wouldn't be palatable to us today. That's the story of Winchell see. I guess quite a lesson in there about if Edward I felt like he defeated nature by simply uprooting his town somewhere else, building it somewhere that nature couldn't get to. to it and having this whole structured, rigid plan to defeat nature that nature then has other

ways of defeating us. Well, I know it's deeply worrying because it's like, you know, Winchester got sacked loads of times by the French because they'd come in and burning bits of it down. And even other English cities would sometimes come and attack it. And then, of course, you have this terrible pandemic whose death rate was approximately 50%. That's fine. You know, it can deal with that. But when nature conspires against you, that's it. And I think we should be worried about that. Yeah. And you touched on We're and Percy earlier and you mentioned pandemic then. So that's another one of the medieval settlements that you discuss in the book, its fate that was shared by a startling number of other towns and villages around England that you identify. So what can you

tell us about the particular history of Ware and Percy? Why is that the one that you picked for the book? Well, it's in the Yorkshire world, so it's got this sort of upland splendor, a wonderful walk actually to get to. You just see this rather pathetic signposting, deserted medieval village. And before you know it, you're going down a bumpy track. And there it all is in front of you. I was intrigued as well because it's one that people know about. If you mention ghost towns, abandoned villages, people do, on the whole, bring that one up, perhaps more than any other one. So I thought it would be a really interesting case study of why people are drawn to these sorts of places, because it may seem like a bit of a morbid pursuit just at first glance.

And then to my delight, I'm not delight, to my horror, as I was writing it, we had our own pandemic. So there were parallels there as well. And it often gets described as somewhere that was wiped out with a black death. And that's not technically true. I would say that it met its oblivion due to the kind of indirect economic consequences of the black death, which goes to show actually that the profound consequences of a pandemic sometimes don't become clear in the short term. You have to leave it a while. And essentially because one and two people died, very hard to talk about mortality rates with the black death

because we don't know how many people were infected. So, you know, it's thought that the population of London was reduced from 80,000 to 40,000. but then if the death rate was 50% and it reduced by half, then that must have meant that almost everyone was invented. That doesn't sound quite right. But because one in two people were no longer extant, let's put it that way, labourers could demand higher wages or wages. They weren't that much higher,

but they seemed like daylight robbery to the aristocratic landowners. So it became more cost effective for the landowners just to convert the land, enclose it, change it from arable to pasture, evict all the tenants and replace them with a shepherd or two. And that's where you get all this imagery of man-eating sheep in the works of Thomas More and others coming in and eating the tenants. And obviously it didn't literally happen, but the sheep did replace them. And at the time, of course, the price of wool was going up as well. And believe it or not, about, as far as we know, around 3,000 English villages, It's just in England alone vanished in that way.

They're called sort of deserted medieval villages. But if you're looking for places that were wiped out by the black death itself, then you can only really find about 20. There's a place called Tussmore in Oxfordshire. You do occasionally find places like that where it says, you know, the complete rental relief is offered because there's just no one left living there. But usually the survivors did go back and they rebuilt and they regathered. But Warren Percy is visually.

incredibly striking. There's the church of St. Martins is the most harrowing part of the ruin and it actually looks like a, to me, like a beast has sort of chumped it open. It looks, but it's got this eerie other worldly glow as though it's from some other dimension as well. You find morose

fish pools and then just the streets just scorched into the earth and when we had the drought, summer of 2018, I think it was, people would fly across Britain and look down and you'd see almost as one paper called it like the doodlings of giants,

all these kind of street layouts from vanished places would reappear because of the drought, but then vanish again when the rains reappeared. So I think it's for that reason. War on person has obviously got residents now with pandemics, which we've just suffered, but also because it's just become this kind of signature abandoned place, which just has such metaphorical residence

about sort of transients and loss and the hubris of thinking we have permanent, settlements that are going to endure. My first abandoned place is Scarabre, which, again, is not in your temporal catchment area, but that was one of the first settled communities in the country, one of the best preserved Neolithic villages in Northern Europe, at a time when humanity was abandoning this kind of nomadic hunter-gathering life and putting down roots, having settled communities sustained by agriculture, and that sort of sets the tone for all these other permanent settlements that I've looked at, which have been lost. And then you go to somewhere like Warren Percy or St. Kilda,

where I went to as well. And it's almost like an apocalyptic vision of the future, like what we might sort of regress to if we exhaust all the resources of the planet, or if an even worse pandemic breaks out. So again, cheery stuff. Fantastic. Wonderful. As we mentioned, the book talks about lots and lots of other places as well, before the medieval period and well after. What do you think this collection of stories has to tell us about our relationship with the places that surround us, their transients, our ways of remembering them, our relationship to the planet, I guess, the planet that gives but can also take away at any moment? Yes. I think one of the most kind of perhaps poignant truth to take away from it is that

people very rarely realized places rarely that they were in the shadow of annihilation. People living in Old Winchell Sea, living in Donetsch before those first storm struck, that would have just been completely off their mental radar, the idea that their city was going to end up underwater. Ditto the places that were wiped out by the Black Death. Now, there are a few places where it's kind of obvious what's going to happen, the little Welsh-speaking village of Capul Caelan, Liverpool just announced it was going to drown it under a reservoir.

So sometimes you know, but most of the time you don't. And that does bring into focus just the fragility and precarity of many of our settlements. The lesson of Winchell Sea teaches us that man-made woes can be overcome, but natural ones often can't be. But these places sort of challenge our sense of indifference and carelessness and neglect. and you sort of realize that there's probably quite a lot more we could be doing to make our settlements sustainable and safeguard them against these sorts of disappearances that have happened.

And just the sense that the map that we have today is going to look completely different, probably from the maps of the future, or indeed the maps of the past. But it's not all doom and gloom. I'd say that there are some sort of upbeat messages in the book as well, not least the kind of the beauty and the sort of emotional tranquility that can be found in these remains. I mean, sometimes the aesthetic pleasure one gets from looking at a sort of wind-swept priory in Donich or just staring into the ghostly reservoir in Capul Caelin.

Looking at that stranded gate in the fields at Winchell see, there's a beauty there that's so often quite at odds with the kind of suddenness and violence of their fate. And these ruins give us a sense of time in abeyance. Time is almost on hold. And it's true, they perhaps prognosticate our kind of likely ruin, but they also comfort us in the presence. And by meditating upon these ruins, it can be quite a salutary and uplifting experience. And it's not just me who's found that writers and artists have been thinking this,

actually, ever since the mid-18th century or even a little bit before, like Daniel DeFoe has drawn all these sorts of play, the romantic authors, and even sort of as late as people like Henry James was absolutely obsessed with Donich. So there is a sort of comfort and tranquility that can be found there. And remember, I'm looking at the places that failed, you know, the places that imploded inwards. I put in the introduction, I'm interested in imploding topographies, not exploding, because you could say Lundinium was a lost city. You could, you know, for a while, Ba'ath was considered like a write-off. But a lot of these places, particularly the Roman towns and cities, did become the nucleus for later settlements. They did get absorbed.

They didn't quite vanish altogether. So there is that. But on my itiner of destruction, it's places that have shriveled and just looking at the ruins, basically, of ruins and relics and vanished places. So there is hope elsewhere. I can definitely vouch for the fact that the book is not all doom and gloom. It's an absolutely fantastic read. and something of a tour book that will give you ideas for places that you can go and visit that are a little bit different from the things you may go and see on a day out under normal

circumstances. And as Matt said, there's a very strong sense that there's lots there to reflect about and to think about in the piece of a place that used to be but isn't any longer. So thank you so much for joining us today and sharing those stories with us, Matt. It's been fantastic. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. And Matthew's book, Shadowlands, A Journey Through Lost Britain, is available. makes the perfect preparation for exploring as the weather hopefully gets a little bit better. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another fantastic brand new episode. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts from

and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please drop us a review or rate us wherever you listen to your podcasts, including on Spotify now. It really does help guide new listeners to the podcast. If you're enjoying this and you are looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life, then do subscribe to the Medieval Monday newsletter. Just follow the links in the show notes below for some thoughts from me dropping into your inbox every Monday

if that isn't too much of a horrifying thought for you. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.