Gone Medieval - Medieval Apocalypse

Episode Date: February 12, 2024

In the early 12th century, when England was suffering wave after wave of Viking invasions, many wondered how God could allow their kingdom to be ravaged by pagans? The Archbishop of York Wulfstan had an answer: the apocalypse was coming. What did that mean to people in the Middle Ages? In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega talks to Professor Matthew Gabriele, about how medieval people understood the end of the world, where they got such concepts from, and whether such a belief could actually be a hopeful one? Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. 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. Some time between the years 1010 and 1016, Wolfstan, the Archbishop of York, knew the Kingdom of England had a problem. The people were suffering as wave after wave of Viking invasions terrorized the land, and countless English people were carried off and enslaved. How, many wondered, could a god-faring kingdom like England be allowed to be allowed to be ravaged by pagans. Wolfstam had an answer, and he hastened to write a sermon for the English

people as a whole, which explained it. In it, he said, beloved men, know that which is true. This world is in haste and it nears the end. And therefore, things in this world go ever the longer the worse, and so it must needs be that things quickly worsen, on account of people sinning from day to day before the coming of Antichrist. And indeed, it will then be awful and grim widely throughout the world. Understand also well that the devil has now led this nation astray for very many years, and that little loyalty has remained among men, though they spoke well. And too many crimes reigned in this land, and there were never many of men who deliberated

about the remedy as eagerly as one should. But daily, they piled one evil upon another and committed injustices and many violations of law all too widely throughout this entire land. We have earned the misery that is upon us, and with truly great deserts, we must obtain the remedy from God. If henceforth, things are to improve. All of this is to say that the Vikings were a,

symptom of the real problem, which was that the English themselves were simply too sinful, and God had decided that the world itself needed to be brought to an end. The apocalypse was coming. This might seem strange to us now, but Wolfstown's desire to explain the events of his time as a part of the end of the world was a perfectly understandable expression of medieval Christian thought. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanga, and today on Gone Medieval from History History History History, I'm joined by Matthew Gabriel, a co-author of the book The Bright Ages, A New History of Medieval Europe, a professor of medieval studies and the chair of the Department of Religion and Culture at Virginia Tech, who is, like me, a specialist in all things apocalyptic.

We'll be discussing the meaning of the apocalypse in Christianity as a whole, the texts that medieval people use to try to understand it, and why thinking about the end of the world can actually be kind of hopeful. Matt, thank you so much for making time for me today and coming on. My pleasure. Happy to be here. I am very excited to have you because we're going to talk about one of my favorite things and yours today, which is, of course, apocalypticism. Everybody likes to think about the end of the world, don't they? I'm sure. That's what I've heard anyway. Everybody does think about the end of the world. Whether they like it or not, that's an entirely different thing.

Some people certainly do. One of the things that I think is quite noteworthy when we talk about medieval apocalypticism. People ask me, why are medieval people so obsessed with the end of the world? And I'm always trying to explain to them, yeah, that's baked into Christianity and in a largely Christian society. Of course, they're going to be thinking about this. But do you want to explain why Christians would be thinking about the apocalypse all the time? Sure, yeah, I'll try. Lots of people have tried over the last couple thousand years.

It hasn't taken yet. Maybe this will be the time. Who knows? One of the issues is that there's an inherent endpoint to Christianity, right? That's baked into the theology, is that there's a beginning, there's a creation, you move across time, and then there's this big thing in which God becomes man, he comes down to earth at the quote-unquote midpoint, and then there's an end. And the varieties of what that end means, that's where you get into the fuzziness or some of the debates, and there's varieties of different texts, both canonical within the Hebrew Bible and the Christian texts as well, and then some extra canonical texts as well. But within that, there always will be an end, which is really a transformation, because I think that's one of the things that we oftentimes forget about the apocalypse or thinking about revelation is that revelation is really about transformation. It's about literally the unveiling of a greater truth.

Because when the last judgment happens, when the end comes, is that's the beginning of eternity afterwards. That's when the separation of the good and the bad heaven and hell happens ultimately for everyone. And then you spend eternity after that in wherever you're so designated. But you have to reach that point. Jesus will return within the Christian cosmology. He will pass judgment upon those who have been bad and reward those who have been good. And then the heavenly Jerusalem will descend if you think about the book of Revelation itself. And then afterwards, then there's a great eternity which is outside of time.

So the time that we have spent here, it is part and parcel of every Christian understanding of the world that our time here is finite. That's the thing is that we're on a time. line and there is going to just be this point where we eventually hit the end. So I suppose this leads into an interesting thing to talk about. So say you're a medieval Christian. What are you using in terms of texts in order to analyze or think about what the apocalypse is going to be? I think it varies by time and I think it varies by place. And it also varies by like class, right? Is that, you know, medieval peasant is going to understand, I think. And I think we too often say that they didn't really understand what was going on. And I don't think

that's fair because these people were smart and they were educated and they talked to people and they understood things and stuff like that. But if you're lower class and you're existing sometime in the Central Middle Ages somewhere in Europe or something like that, you're going to have a sense that time moves in odd ways, if you will, is that there is a finite kind of sacred history, right? There's the beginning, the middle, and the end. But then within that, there's cycles that recur and not exactly, right? So the easiest one, of course, that you would talk about is the cycle of the season. You plant your crops, you harvest, and then you do it again and stuff like that. They're not idiots, though.

They understand that every year is different than the one year that becomes before. From a very basic level, like the water is different. You might have a drought, or your cow might have died the year before or something like that. But the overall substance kind of recurs. And I think, actually, for most medieval Europeans, even intellectuals or nobles, like the more educated classes, like they understood that as well, is that there's a certain pattern to the world as it kind of moves in a circular looping way. and ultimately that looping pattern is going to end, but at the same time, you need to get there

and you don't necessarily know how you're going to get there or when it's going to happen. The reason for that is because of the text, and that gets to your question, is that there's the Bible, the Christian Bible, in which there's the little apocalypse in the Gospel of Matthew, and then there's all the Hebrew prophets or the Israelite prophets, people like Daniel, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Ezekiel is a trip, man, like, Ezekiel's a weird prophet. Anyway, and then there's all the minor prophets and stuff like that. And then there's the big book, the Book of Revelation. In Western Europe, the Book of Revelation was really important. Not so in the East as well. It wasn't a canonical book for, I'm pretty sure not even to today. It's a canonical book. But in the Western tradition, the Book of Revelation is very important, which it details the important events that are going to happen right at the end. And then beyond that, there's all these supplementary texts that are built up over a number of years. You have thinkers like St. Augustine, and then you have books that we know of as the pseudometheus, who was supposedly a 7th century. Syrian writer who is responding to the Arab invasions, but he pretends that he's a much older

church father and stuff like that. And then there's all this other things. So that's one of the really interesting things. I think about studying apocalypticism is what the hell are they reading? What exactly is going on in these guys' minds? Where are they getting ideas? Because on top of all of that is you have commentaries on all of these books, which are created along the way. So it's not even, oh, they're pulling from the book of relation. It's which commentary are they reading? Are they reading extra canonical sources, is there some sort of folk understanding of these periods as well? So it's a lot. You've hit on one thing that I think is really important to, which is when you think about reading the Bible and just a side note to listeners, I recommend that all of you go have a look

at the Book of Revelation. It is a trip. It is a great time. It's really fun. It's like a blockbuster Hollywood movie. There's a lot of monsters and you will get through it in no time. I swear to you, go read it. But one of the things about it is a great time. a medieval Bible as opposed to what we expect from a Bible now is it has what we call a gloss around it. So imagine you've got a book and then all around in the margins that are blank now. It has notes. So it'll say, oh, yes, okay, St. Augustine said that this monster means this. Or it will say, here is biblical scholar who had this to say about it. So depending on what part of the Middle Ages you're living in, it could be more or less. So for example, if you live

in the 14th century, you might have a gloss that includes Thomas Aquinas and what he thought about things, but you need to live after he was alive and that kind of thing. So no one is ever just reading the Bible on its own without some kind of input from outside sources. You don't just pick up a Bible and think about it on your own. You're always bringing these things in. So we've talked about the Book of Revelation as declared to St. John the Divine. So that is one of the big places that you get the big story, which is the stars falling from the heavens. The sea is going to turn. into the fire, the faith will be oppressed, all these things. But you've also, Matt, mentioned very quickly there, the little apocalypse, which we find in the Gospels themselves. And these are things

that Jesus talked about, right? Yeah, the little apocalypse, like, it's just a few verses, the one that people refer to oftentimes as in the Gospel of Matthew. It's basically just a signal that our time here on Earth is going to come to an end. There will be justice at the end of time. Jesus, I will return in glory, and your suffering will be rewarded. And he emmer. emphasizes you don't know when. And this is the big thing is that, and this is from, this is the word of God, this is the gospel, it's words supposedly spoken by Jesus himself. And so that's the big thing that kind of animates apocalypticism or understanding or thinking about the apocalypse, not only through the Middle Ages, but for any time, is that speculation about when these things

will happen is always really fraught because you don't know. You're not supposed to know, because that truth is only revealed to God himself. One of my favorite things from the little apocalypse too is Jesus says that many will come before this time and they will say I am he, which is to say they're going to say that they are Jesus. And this is flagging up my boy, one of my favorite characters in the apocalypse, the Antichrist, who I'm really obsessed with because a lot of the preachers that I've worked on, they specifically think about Antichrist all the time. Do you want to tell us a little bit about your friend and mine? The Antichrist. Yeah, the Antichrist is. a really interesting character. I mean, because he's, it's always a he. And there's such an accreed

kind of weight of tradition that kind of builds up around him. One of the ones that I'm most familiar with is the legend of the Antichrist that develops by Adso of Montierre-Andère, who's a 10th century monk who's writing specifically in response to a request from the French queen about what's going on, is this the end times? And he's trying to reassure her by saying, oh, the end is coming and it's going to be really terrible. And it's going to be this guy who's the Antichrist, he's going to be Jewish by birth, but he's going to convert the world, and he's going to do all these terrible things to you and me and everybody else, but not yet. Because again, we can't know the time or the hour.

And in fact, because he is, if nothing else, a very good courtier and knows how to flatter people who are better than him, he says, because of the dignity of the French royal line, you are holding off the arrival of the end and holding off, in fact, the birth of the Antichrist. And so as long as the Franks hold power that keep the imperial authority of Rome going, in the Central Middle Ages, don't worry about it. Now, her husband dies and his son doesn't take the throne, and so the French Rail Line dies like in the next generation. So then it becomes really problematic, but he's trying his best at that moment. But the Antichrist himself is literally like just the opposite of Jesus in those ways, is that instead of rewarding the good, he punishes the good

and rewards the evil. He persecutes people. He's a tyrant. He doesn't listen to anything. He creates fire, devastation, and flood and warfare and things of that. All those really interesting things. because of those associations of those events, some of which are pulled from the Book of Revelation, some from other texts as well, is this is where you get a lot of the apocalyptic speculation, not just in the Middle Ages, but in the modern world as well. So anytime these events happen and they seem to be widespread, maybe the antichrist is at work in the world. It's interesting how often Antichrist pops up. And there are times when one can expect it. For example, in my favorite century, the 14th century, ask anyone. Antichrist is here,

there and everywhere, and you can tell that the end times are coming because the black death is happening. Was there not a great famine? Yes, there was. And of course, you've got things like the Hundred Years War going on, all kinds of rumbling. So things are really terrible and surely antichristis in our midst. But then you also see attempts from particular people to flatter courtiers. As you're seeing, the preacher I work on a lot of young Milage of Gromarjeeh. He says, oh, it's the Holy Roman Emperor Charles VIII. He is the guy who's keeping all this back. And we need to listen to the Pope and we need to listen to the emperor, because if we don't listen to them, then all is lost. An Antichrist absolutely will come.

But I suppose this sort of key that I'm always really interested in, which is this idea of what we as scholars call millinarianism, right? So this expectation that things are going to end and a kind of desire to talk about it. So how would we define that? That's really the key is that where does the Antichrist appear specifically? So at the beginning or the end of this millennium, because in the book of Revelation, but states that the devil will be chained for a thousand years and afterwards he'll be released to do his thing for a certain period of time and this will signal the event at the end.

And so there are certain medieval thinkers and modern thinkers, of course, as well, and ancient thinkers too, who take that thousand years literally, and that's where the millennium comes from. That's where a millinerian comes from. But the location of that thousand years doesn't happen after the rebel and Antichrist and the end events are beginning or is it the immediate thousand years before the events of the end will occur and then any of the price will appear at the end. That's where a lot of the debate ends. And so what happens in that thousand years, is that a thousand years of peace to prepare you for the tribulation of the end? Or is it a thousand years of tribulation that will signal

the ultimate peace of the end where the good will be rewarded and stuff like that? For example, like in the 19th century, historians were looking back, and there's certain medieval text which kind of talk about this. There's a historian by the name of Roth Gaubert, for example, who details all the terrible things that are going on in his own world around the year 1000. And he says, this might be a sign that the millennium is upon us, that the devil has been loosed upon the world and stuff like that. 19th century historians looked at this, especially French and German ones, and said, oh, this is proof these stupid medieval superstitious idiots, just like Ralph Baubair thought that this was literal. And we're going to call this the terrorists of the year 1,000. This has been a totally debunked idea that it wasn't chickens running around with their heads cut off medieval Europe.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't sources and lots of sources, or at least a fair amount of sources. that talk about how people are worried about what does that 1,000 years really mean, especially when you have a calendar system, which counts 1, 2, 3, 4 all the way up to 1,000, and then you're at the year 1,000. Is that important? Maybe it is really important that we're 1,000 years after Jesus's birth. And then when nothing happens, the end of the world doesn't come. Maybe it's 1033,000 years after Jesus's death.

And then maybe it's 1,000 years after this event or that event or something like that. Some of us are old enough to remember Y2K when that nice round number at the end happened and everybody thought that all the computers were going to crash and the planes were going to fall from the sky and yet nothing happened. And then we just pushed it to 2012 because that was the Maya apocalypse. So it's infinitely postponable, but it's always in round numbers, oftentimes related to 1,000. One of the things I like the most is the sort of pushback that happens on the part of the church's legal structure, so the papacy, right? and various Christians at other levels of society who are really into attempting to predict when the end of the world is going to be. Because the church is constantly saying, like in the first place, A, Jesus said you're not going to know, all right? Like, how much clearer does Jesus have to be when he says, you don't know the day or the hour?

And in the second place, if you go around making predictions about how the end of the world is going to happen and then it doesn't come true, you make us all look stupid. it. And maybe people will start thinking that the end of the world never will come, which I think is really savvy. I think it's this really smart response to it, actually. I think that is one of these things that is difficult sometimes for modern people to get their heads around. I think that people are really used to seeing the church as necessarily a bad guy. And I'm not here to defend the huge legal structure that he did some bad things. But I think that sometimes we're a little to easily led into just condemning anything the church does as saying, oh, this is completely cynical. And to be fair, there are times when the pop's kind of kick a kicking as a result of things like

Antichrist prophecies. So, for example, any time you get an anti-Pope, which happens during the great schism where you've got a pope in Rome and a pope in Avignon, and sometimes one in Pisa for good measure, hey. But occasionally, emperors fall out with the pope, and then they make their own pope, and then their Pope will say that the Pope is Antichrist, but then the Pope will say, no, the Emperor's Pope is anti-Christ. And you get a lot of back and forth about that. And to be fair, it's very politically confusing. And one can understand why in a social milieu where everyone's Christian, everyone understands that this is a part of belief and a part of how the world works. I also really understand the desire to basically put things in a narrative, right? If life just keeps sucking, which when you're a

present, a lot of the time, things are difficult in the middle ages. But if you can then put yourself into this grand narrative that say, this is about justice, and this is about the fact that eventually at the end of the world, things are going to improve for me because I am a good Christian. There's a real temptation there, right? Yeah, and it also runs into a theological problem, which you mentioned as well when we're talking about the little apocalypse. It's like, before me come, Jesus said, before me comes false prophets, who will talk to you about the end. And so, what do you do then? If the Pope or something were to say, we're 100% sure, and it's going to come on in this next year.

And then it doesn't home. Is he the Antichrist then? Like that runs into a real theological problem. And it sets you up because the flip side, as we were talking about like good courtiers who are flattering people about holding off the Antichrist is that after the year 1,000 or so, like in the 11th and century, and then certainly into the later Middle Ages, you've got lots of people accusing other people of actually being the Antichrist, the Holy Roman emperors, the popes, other people like French kings and stuff like that.

These guys are talking about the end. They're bringing famine and war and discord and fire and stuff like that. So like they become problems. So in one way, you could say it's a little bit cynical in some ways to make sure that especially in the later Middle Ages, the institutional church is trying to tamp down these ideas. They do a terrible job, I should say, by the way, because everybody in the later middle ages is so freaked out about the coming in. But it is a little bit cynical because they're trying to equal power.

But there is like a real pastoral, like a concern for the soul. Like you don't want people speculating because that could lead you into damnation. that could lead you into trouble. And so the church is concerned about its actual people who are under its care. Yeah, I think that you're bang on there. And I think part of what we see, for example, when we hit the Reformation, is you see rather a lot of millenarian thinking, for example, I'm thinking Thomas Munzer. He's like a very radical Protestant who thinks that the princes need to be overthrown.

And Luther spends much of time trying to distance himself from that. But he's always saying, oh, the end is coming. And you know what? Luther talks about that as well. And of course, my favorite people, the Hussites, love to talk about the apocalypse because they see themselves as rebelling against a completely immoral world order. And so they're saying, we're the people who have to trigger something to get this onto an even keel. That's the great allure of apocalyptic thinking, be a medieval or modern, is it offers hope,

ultimately, that something will come of this, that the bad guys are going to get theirs and the good guys are going to be rewarded. That's, I think, the kind of enduring allure of that is that when political, cultural, social structures seem to have broken down and they're not providing the justice that people deserve, they look to something supernatural, often through the structure in the medieval Christian tradition of the institutional church, but sometimes even outside of that. One of the big vectors, if you will, of apocalyptic thinking in the later Middle Ages, of course, was what we call heresy. people outside of the institutional church who were doing theological work or thinking theologically, which ultimately, after long, complicated issues, it comes to the progress of reformation and stuff like that. But these people were oftentimes, the heretics that pop up in the 11th, 12, 13th, 14th, and so on centuries are apocalypticly inclined because the world isn't functioning as it should. And so this might be a sign of the end times. And we need

to either hasten it or in some ways retard its movements in order to get the justice that should be hear that we were promised as good Christians. I think that this is one of the interesting things when you're thinking about apocalypticism, because a lot of times what is considered fine, an okay level of apocalyptic versus heresy, heresy being essentially more or less anything the church says no to, are you trying to reform? Are you trying to take an extant structure like the church or like the local kings and make that better, then that's okay. That's all right. Or are you saying, all right, everybody, that is it down tools because it's all about to be over tomorrow, in which case that's unacceptable.

And one way to look at crusading, particularly in the taking over of the Holy Land is, oh yeah, this is a reordering. This is a reorganization of the Holy Land in a way it, quote unquote, should be, which is Christian. Yeah, and I think that's really interesting too, is that oftentimes I thought of the apocalypse was always something that you wanted to stop, that you didn't want the end to come. But it's really interesting when you actually look at these people's writings as best that we can peel through oftentimes hostile sources towards these movements, but even the institutional church, as they're thinking about the coming end, is how much they want to hasten it, because this is a period of, again, of justice and reward. Like, this is the time, it's not the

ultimate end, but it's the time that you won't get to eternal salvation at the end of it. And so I think there's moments there in which just by changing the way we think about things and the relationship that we can see the apocalypse at work in lots of different ways. Along with a friend and colleague at St. Andrews, I published a book about apocalypse and reform, like reform movements within the church, trying to end corruption and clerical marriage, which was a big sin for them back then, things like that. Those are apocalyptic, if you look at them in a certain way, because it's ordering the world in the way that it should be. But there's also the flip side of that, which, there's a lot of violence because we need to make the world Christian before the end comes. And so that means,

killing Jews and killing Muslims from the Christian's perspective. So a lot of crusading, for example, should be and could be seen and really needs to be seen in an apocalyptic context as well. One of my favorite examples of this is in the late 12th and 13th century is that there's lots of merchants who are becoming increasingly wealthy and they're very concerned about their wealth. Is there a path of salvation for them? There's lots of messages in the Bible about the need for distribution of wealth, the whole eye of the needle and salvation in heaven and stuff like that. But some of those late preachers end up being condemned as heretics. They committed themselves to poverty.

They gave away the money. They preached kind of the message of the gospel. Some of those guys like Peter Waldo, who founds of this group called the Weddentians, like it's condemned as heretics. They're persecuted for centuries thereafter. And then other late preachers become saints, like St. Francis of Assisi. There's not a lot of difference, really, when you think about it, between what Waldo did and what Francis did.

Francis, however, stuck within the strictures of the institutional church. And again, I don't think we need to think about this entirely cynically. And we shouldn't think about entirely cynically because there are important theological points here. But he did something that was more about reform, like you were saying. And he ended up becoming one of the most beloved figures in Catholic and Christian history. I think that that's a really good point. I guess that the way that we tend to relate to apocalypticism now, anyone who wants the end of the world to come, that is a worry.

And we no longer have the structures of medieval Europe. We aren't all exactly the same religion. We aren't all more or less kind of muddling through as peasants. We have a lot of different sort of things going on and we see the world as a big complex interconnected place. So now apocalyptic expectations are just rather dire, aren't they? But I think that we have to be very careful when we're looking at apocalypticism in the past not to say, oh, this is exactly the same thing. Or this is an expression that means the same thing because medieval people are working in a really different social context. You're absolutely right. I think that there's something dangerous and I think justifiably frightening

when you see apocalyptic speculation, like in the American context, for example, or even in the British context, because there's something desperate about it. Like some of the speculation around 2012, some of the religious speculation there, like it led to a bunch of suicides and people dying or selling off and like being left destitute because they got built by scammers or things like that. There's something really terrible about that. And we tend to think that this is entirely cynical or it's misguided or we use the word cult or something like that. And I think there's a real danger, like you said, about thinking the medievals were the same. There certainly were scammers and milkers and something desperate and dangerous about apocalyptic thinking, but there could also be

something different that was going on because they lived in a very different world, not just physically, but also intellectually as well. I think what is nice about it, though, is this is, as you say, an intellectual movement. Whereas now, these are really complex ideas that we've cast by the wayside because since we quite rightly don't want to think about the world as an inevitable place that's going to end, we've sometimes stopped paying attention to it. So it's interesting that here is a real intellectual problem that everyone in medieval society is grappling with. And it just goes to show how rich actually things are. And how much we know about the period. People were writing about it. There's artistic representations. There's material remains. There's

textual remains. There's just tons of manuscripts. Like, commentaries on the book of Revelation are like everywhere. Like, they're so common that they're not even cataloged in archives because it's like in the 19th century that these guys were cataloging and creating the archives were just, oh, God, another one throw out in the pile. So sometimes you go into an archive and you're like, oh, can I see your commentaries on the book of Revelation? And they're like, oh, do you want to see the cataloged ones or are these other ones? And you're just like, and nobody knows they existed. And so they're really interesting. So yeah, so this is something that's going on. And there's lots of ways that we can know about this period and what people were thinking and how these thoughts impacted people's lives.

Like how do we think about what rulership means within the context of a divinely appointed ruler, if we really think that we're near the end, is either the Antichrist or God's divine. Like that, those are your choices there. So do you follow the sky or do you resist and with everything you have? That impacts how political order is structured in the Middle Ages. I think you're bang on, but I also have to admit, yes, I like it as an intellectual problem in an intellectual movement, but I'm also just here for the monsters. There's lots of cool monsters, and we didn't talk enough about the monsters, and I apologize about that. People are complicated. We can think multitudes.

That's true. Matt, thank you so much for coming and making sure that everyone knows we are very intelligent indeed for thinking about this and not just fans of monster stories. My pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much, as always, for listening. And thank you to Matt for joining me. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. And if you liked what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast, and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, you can drop us an email at gone medieval at historyhit.com. Otherwise, I'll be back again next Tuesday for another episode, and my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back on Friday.

Until next time.