Gone Medieval - Medieval Humour at Christmas

Episode Date: December 18, 2023

Just like us, medieval people loved a bit of entertainment at Christmas. But what did they consider funny? How did humorous stories spread in a world where most people could neither read nor write?In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega finds out more from Kleio Pethainou, who specialises in medieval comedy and storytelling, and also offers an authentic and bizarre Christmas Day story from the middle ages.This episode was produced by Rob Weinberg.For more about Kleio Pethainou, her podcast The Court Jester and books, visit: https://kleiopethainou.com/ **WARNING: This episode contains examples of medieval humour that some may find challenging to modern-day sensibilities**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. As we edge closer to Christmas, you like me, might be starting to feel pretty festive. Now, of course, we have our own Christmas traditions that include decorating trees indoors, watching Christmas films and making mold wine, and of course, listening to Wham songs. But how did medieval people mark their own Christmas festivities? Well, the answer is they They liked a bit of entertainment, just like we do, and we're quite fond of a Christmas comedy

themselves. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yonika, and today I'll be speaking with Cleopithenu, a historian specializing in medieval comedy and storytelling, to find out what the medieval equivalent of love actually was. We'll think about what comedy actually is. Consider the ways that medieval people circulated and traded comedic stories. Think about the idea of humor and what it can tell us about a society, and of course, We have a funny Christmas story to share as well. And the sharing here is important

because medieval comedy was very much something that was done for and with groups of people. It might be a trained troubadour or a specialist jester performing for a group of refined courtiers. Or it could be a traveling singer with some ribald stories to share at a Christmas market. In a world where most people can't read and write,

performance was incredibly important. And the major way that jokes and comedic tales spread. There were also comedy plays that could be put on by professional troops of actors, the local guild, and sometimes even clergy. These could happen at any major festival. But Christmas, when the nights were long and no one needed to be out plowing their fields, was a perfect time to revel in comedy. After all, a festival isn't a festival if you can't have a few laughs.

A word of warning, though. Medieval humor is extremely different to our own, and it can often be highly violent, quite sexual, and very sexual. scatological, all of which we'll be referring to in roundabout ways. But hey, the fact that it's sort of weird to us is what makes it so interesting in the first place. So get ready to laugh and probably be a bit puzzled as well. Today on Gaughan Medieval from history hit. Cleo, thank you so much for being here. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. You know, I'm so excited about this topic because I think that people, when they think about the

Middle Ages. A lot of the time they think it's quite stuffy. They think that this is like a really sort of serious and very godly period of time. But the work you do shows that that's not necessarily the case, right? It is a godly time, but that doesn't mean that it can't be godly with a lot of ungodly humor. And that's the thing, right? Is that humor is this really interesting way of looking into medieval society because you sort of expect to see, oh, I don't know, like a punch and Judy show or something like that. But the ways that medieval people express themselves through humor a lot of the time, I guess they're kind of in relation to how wholly everything is. It's like, okay, if we're going to be in mass all the time on Sunday, like we're going over the top right now,

you know? I'm glad you mentioned mass specifically because a lot of the examples that we have actually are sermons. It's a huge discussion, humor in the Middle Ages, in general, but one of the most interesting bits about it is that if you think about how social structure was created at the time, your Sunday Mass was actually a very social event

in most places in the world, the Christian world. During my research, I came across one example that I have in mind just now, where someone was preaching against adultery, and the priest said that, it's a sin, you shouldn't be doing it, and so he had to be emphatic about it. So you shouldn't be taking other people's husbands and wives,

and he definitely shouldn't take other people's wives. Husbands, we can negotiate, but definitely not the wives. And then he kept on piling up on that and saying that it's bad. It's really bad. You shouldn't be doing it. I'd rather have 10 virgin girls than have one other husband's wife. Okay. Oops.

Are we putting it in an order, sir? Yes. And the punchline to that was the rest of the congregation agreed with him very strongly and vocally. I love this too because sermons are this kind of, really underappreciated form of communication too in the Middle Ages, right? Where this is like mass communication for the Middle Ages. If you've got an idea or you've got something that you want to get out there, one of the big things that you do is you can write a sermon, right? Because you can preach it to a couple hundred people. And then, you know, other preachers can have a look

at what you wrote down and they can go do the same thing. And so you can get across these ideas. And here we have the same thing working for humor, right? Yes. So you're finding multiple copies of it. So this is like a hot option, right? Like this is a classic tale to be told. It became one. It ended up also in print. Oh, wow. So this one particular, yes, this makes it into Poggio in 1470s. It gets printed. So this is like a classic of the genre.

It became a classic. These collections of jokes start to get printed at some point in the late 1400s. And whoever gathers and publishes them, they do not really assign times to the ones that don't already have authors. So you have jokes about Julius Caesar. You have jokes about every possible personality. that is famous at the time, but you also have a lot of jokes that happened here and there

in one village or the other, and those are not dated, but they keep being repeated. You know that the court dress that I'm talking about the Fabliot, a lot of the Fablius get retold in a different version and find themselves in printed version,

and in fact, they were like two, three hundred years old by that time. Let me just stop me there, and can you tell our fabulous audience what a fablio is? A fablio is a narrative poem. These are comic stories created to make you roll over from laughter. 13th century, they died by the end of the 14th century.

They don't get made anymore. They were in rhyme because it makes it also easier to remember because they were part of an oral tradition. So people would memorize them and then perform them for an audience. And that could be any audience. So we originally considered Fabrio to be not targeted to the aristocracy, but that's not what we think now. It could be done anywhere from the pub to the castle.

And that's one of the things that's quite interesting about your work too because you're sort of obviously working with written sources because how else are we going to find out about the jokes, right? But at the same time, by their very nature, all of these humorous things, they're like routines. You're telling a story to a crowd. It's like doing stand-up in a medieval way. Yeah, it has very much a performative element.

And I started looking at this because I was looking originally at funny pictures, but you can't really establish that. that a picture is funny unless you can tie it to something. So I ended up talking about the relationship between text and image and textual humor or verbal humor of some type and how this was translated into image. And so the written sources are anywhere from absurd to obscene. I think that's really interesting. You know, again, we're like, oh, the Middle Ages.

It's all fair maidens and knights who save them. And medieval people are like filthy. They like their jokes dirty. is one of the things that I always find interesting about them where they are not afraid to go blue. They're ready to do sexual humor. They're ready to do like toilet humor. And for them, they're like, oh, somebody farted.

This is the funniest thing I've ever heard in my life, you know. One of the very interesting takes about this is that the entirety of the West, as we understand it, changed a lot after the Reformation. Pre-reformation, everything was intensely physical. People want to have sex, but they want to have sex a lot. it's unrestrained. They cannot control any of that. When they want to eat, when they crave for something specific,

like a very rare delicacy, the lengths that they will go to get that bit of bacon, you have no idea. And then when it starts becoming about toilet humor, it's never someone has a bit of a diarrhea. They have the worst kind of explosive diarrhea that you can hear two villages away. It's intense.

It's incredibly physical, very much in the body. And especially in the fablius, and then in the all Fablio-Relior-related type of humor, you have this physicality that remains, and I don't think I have found this in this intensity later on. That's interesting, too, because your podcast does this, you know, talks about court gestures.

And, you know, one of the ways that there is to kind of be a court jester is to do physical comedy, to do kind of like condortions and acrobatics and things like that. And then at the same time, you're telling these really embodied stories, you know, stories that are about what the limitations of physicality are, right? So there's kind of like two things going on with performances here.

The court jesters are a separate chapter altogether when we talk about physicality, because you cannot talk about that bit without also mentioning the fact that traditionally, they were also physically exceptional in some way. Very often in the sources they are described as deformed or in a different type of way. By the 15th century, the word courtful, court jester, is basically interchangeable, and it generally describes people who either are disabled birth in some way or in some other way extraordinary. So you have dwarfs, but that doesn't mean that they suffer from dwarfism. It could be any kind of physical difference. A head being a bit bigger,

a limb being a bit shorter, someone being a hunchback, for example, or that kind of particularities in someone's physicality. And they had to be physically exceptional in some way as well. And that goes way into the Renaissance. We have Isabella Desti. She's writing about her dwarf that is

tiny, exceptionally tiny, such a small creature. And the proportions of her limbs are so extraordinarily beautiful just because they're unusual. So when you bring the physicality into the gestures, you have to talk about that too. But then in terms of humor,

There is this performativity element, whether it is the gestures or any kind of performer that is just jumping on the top of the table in a pub and starts telling it. They would be very physical in their representations as well. I can't imagine people telling those stories and not acting them out. They're basically built allowing pauses for audience interaction and for your movement and for things to do, which is something I found fascinating when I started performing them. So, you know, these are intensely performative things. And for medieval people, there is this sort of expectation whenever you get together in a group that there's going to be storytelling. If you have a festival or a holiday or something like that, you might have a sing-song or something like that.

But banquets are not just, oh, we're sitting here eating. You know, when we think about things like the holidays now, I guess we have Christmas movies. And I guess we have Christmas pantomimes. There is this thing here about like maybe you'll go to the panto. You know, in America, we didn't have anything kind of like that when I was growing up. But for medieval people, they'd be like, you call this Christmas? Like, where's the incredibly filthy story, you know? Okay, so my location of focus has been France, largely.

And there, when we talk about Christmas and humor, you cannot have this discussion without talking about the feast of fools and all the weird stuff that's been happening over the 15 days of Christmas. Let's stop. What's the Feast of Fools? The Feast of Fools, as a festival, let's use this term as an umbrella term, to cover things that happen in the 12 days of Christmas. You have different accounts about different things happening in different places in France.

But common themes include inversion, the world coming upside down, the world order coming upside down. They include people swapping positions also in hierarchy. So the lower clergy swathing. shopping places with the higher clergy, but also they include festivities in the cities. So groups of people go around very much like caroling, but a bit more brutal. It's more like a mugging, like a jovial mugging, yeah. You go around and part of some of the things that we have on record are that there is a leader of the feast, the Domino's Festi.

This leader of the feast has some sort of staff or a club or something that gives him the air of authority, and that person can use this club to punish or to encourage to do whatever, but they lead the things happening in town. The things happening in town could be anything from going door to door, bringing wishes and inviting people out to come and share a drink with everyone, or to stage something that is more communal and it's something like a street performance. We have evidence of all this happening in different places, in different times. We also have this inversion happening inside the church where you have versions of inverted mass being sung. This also exists in a manuscript.

We have it written. It's the Office of the Circumcision. It also includes liturgical plays that are supposed to be biblically themed, but they do have snippets of humour inserted in there. So you have people talking to their animals and the animals talking back. You have every role in the play being played by the deacons, and that includes the queens and the... seductresses, and it's written in the script of the play that the person who wrote this

is aware that it's being performed by a bearded-tonsured man. They're talking about how this queen is strong like a good man. So that gender inversion happening on stage is also noticed and used for fun. But the best bit of it in the performativity sense that is not happening in the church because that was also something that became a point of contention. you can't do too much inside the church because the church authorities will not like it so they will ask you to stop what you're doing

or take it out of the church. And one of my favorites is, I think it's 1444. They had a couple of churches that were putting together plays and then there was a new bishop in town and the new bishop did not like what was happening. So he asked them to stop. One of them stopped, the other one did not stop

because who are you bishop to tell us what to do? So not only did they put up the same festival the same time next year, but they also managed to stage a specific play that was a mock, a parody of the consecration of the archbishop. Spicy! And it had characters that were hypocrisy,

falseness and false prisons that were crowning the bishop. They didn't simply double down, they just took the order and went to town with it. Like, this is just direct kind of parody. Yeah. Oh, you don't want to have fun, guess what, buddy? Yes. Like, the fun's going up to

11. Yeah. We're having the You just got here. We've been doing this for a while. There's these assumptions people make that, like, everyone in the Middle Ages, whatever the church says, they just do it. And if your bishop comes in, well, then you're going to have to listen to it. And it's like, no, not only are we not doing this, I'm going to make fun of him while I do. Yes, exactly. And the funny thing about the feast of fools is that statements like that

suggest that it was so much of a community tradition that generally most of the information we have about the feast of fools is for people who try to somehow regulate it. and the people who tried to regulate it were people who were not from there. An outsider comes in, is exposed to this, and they're like, what? You're doing what now for Christmas? No, that can't be right. It's one of those interesting things, right? Because it's so difficult sometimes to find out about ordinary life because it's like the air that people breathe.

I was like, well, why would I bother writing down the play that we do for the Feast of Fools at Christmas every year? Everybody knows it by heart. And off we go and we're going to do this. Or maybe people aren't even necessarily literate. and they're doing it, right? And then you find out about it because someone comes in and is like, what's all this then? You know, it's very much like getting busted for having a good time, right? And then we get to see it. It's actually a way of showing us that there's so much more of this going on than we can ever possibly really know because it takes you to get busted a lot of the time.

I don't think these were written down for the consumption of anyone of the citizens. It was held in the cathedral and it's one of two or three, I think, versions that we have of this. So it's very rare. It wasn't naturally in that age you weren't writing anything down for public consumption. But it does give some sneak peek into other things that were happening. Yes, not when the church was not looking, but I guess because the church was looking, they were there most of the time. It's just that we don't have that perspective when we look back to the Middle Ages. We don't have that insight most of the time. Right. It's interesting too because we were seeing clergy members participating in this. And I know that we see a lot of also attempts on the part of the church

structure or church higher ups to try to crack down on that. Even if it's just stuff that is relatively tame, like mystery plays, which are like religious edification. We're all going to learn about the Bible now. And you know, you'll see bishops and things be like the priests are too into it. You're not an actor. You're a priest. Get off the stage. Get off the stage and get back into the pulpit. But the same thing is also happening with like, Like they're comedic dreams. And, you know, who wants to play the queen this year, you know, kind of thing. Oh, my God.

I found that I can't remember for the life of me where the reference was. But there was a reference about a church somewhere in France where they wanted to stage a passion play for Easter. And they had a problem with Jesus because he was really liking Magdalene and he had to only be wearing a loin cloth and be on the cross and he was getting betrayed. Oh, who, who, ho, ho, ho. So they had to cast for a new Jesus because this Jesus was. really called for Magdalene. Oh no, not horny Jesus. You can't have that. I love medieval people. I love

them. They're so wild. The fact that they wrote this down. Yeah. This is what I like. Where they're all like, Jesus couldn't keep it in his loincloth. Oh, right? It's like, let's get that on the record. Like, this is the thing I need to write about right now. Let's save this one for posterity. Yeah. It's very humanizing, right? Like, that kind of gossip is something that they're like ready to pass down through the ages. That comes up a lot in the Fablios as well. The marvelous thing about the Fablios specifically is that they talk about everyday people who have everyday needs and they have all the needs at the same time.

It's the kind of stuff that you won't find in courtly love and romances, the kind of love that no one talks to you about because it's not love, it's just sex. Yeah, and that's the thing is like the reason that I come up in my own work with a lot of humor is just because it's so sexual. It's just like so over the top. And it tells us a lot about what people, you know, well, certainly think it's funny. Like if people are talking about sex for, you know,

comedic purposes, again, it's going to be over the top. It's going to be like all of the sex. It's going to be, you know, like the worst thing that anyone could do. And then we're all going to laugh about that, right? But it does also tell us what imaginations are kind of thinking about when they're thinking about sexuality, right? I mean, in the Fablio, it's a bit more... She's like, I don't know.

There is that. So I'm a bit conflicted here because, as I said before, you have the Fablio and then these stories and the spirit of the stories is carried forward. Even if they stop being produced by the end of the 14th century, other things that are being done are either retellings of some stories or new stories that are very much in the same spirit, but because they're not in rhyme, they're a different thing. So you see that changing a bit. So in the Fabliot, generally what's happening is that people want to have sex.

People of both genders want to have sex. A lot of women want to have sex and know it. A lot of women want to have sex and don't know it, but they're very happy to find out that, yes, they very much wanted to do that. Men generally want to have sex, that's it. They're simpler creatures, apparently, to the medieval mind. And then when you start talking about fantasizing, you're already, in my experience in the 15th century,

where you have more new ones coming into the sexual play. But that doesn't make it any more sophisticated, if I'm wondering. Look, what is sophisticated, right? Because if you're doing this for the queen, then that's as sophisticated as things can get. And sure, yes, I know that a lot of this is happening at street level. Or, like, you know, out in the marketplace, in a church at the local banquet, but it also happens at court, right? It does, yes.

In a mixed audience, though, I couldn't say that this is exclusively a female or an exclusively male audience for the Fablio, we can assume a mixed audience. So this is a huge discussion about female audiences within a mixed environment, because if you are in a mixed environment, essentially you are in a social setting where you have to perform your gender. So if you are especially a woman of status and there is a requirement on your behavior, you may be listening to those stories and have a reaction for the public to see. but who's to say that when you are with your besties and you hear the same story, you're not giggling in a completely different way. That is a type of information that we don't necessarily have access to, and I'm hoping to have the opportunity to dig him.

Well, okay, speaking of, I asked you to dig us out. A nice little Christmas story. I was wondering if you could regale us with such a lovely tale. A Christmas story. I'm going to mildly disappoint you because it's not exactly. Christmas theme, but it is happening on Christmas Day. It is the story of the three hunchbacks. Apologies for the complete disregard of anything having to do with sensibilities and sensitivities about physicality and blah, blah, blah. And it starts by describing a person that we will not talk about

again, and that is a very good man who everything was fine about him and the best thing about him was his daughter. His daughter was a miracle of nature that the author will not spend any time describing because if you try to describe her, you wouldn't even believe him, so just take my word for it. She was amazing in every way. I can't even start telling you how great she was because you will think I'm lying. Moving on, there is that girl who is amazing in every possible way and she's, as usual, in need of a husband. There is also a man in the mix. This man, we will describe, because he was hideous and more. He was a hunchback, but he also had a series of other problems, as in his head was too big for his body and then his shoulders were too big for his head and his neck

was too small and generally it was like nature through a mountain and a mountain and created a human being that was ugly as sin and he was also as sinful as he was ugly because of course these two are related this very ugly man that lived a life of sin mostly because he was incredibly badly managed and very focused on making money managed to make that money so he lived in a house near a bridge that crossed the river that was a very deep and very cold river so you had to use the bridge and because he lived near the bridge he was collecting tall so he made a fortune he was ugly he was rich he needed a wife he went to the good man at the beginning of the story and petitioned for the hand of his daughter and because he was very rich the father thought she's going to be having a

comfortable life let's do this she's never going to go hungry so yeah you too go get married So they get married, the girl is not at any point objecting to this, and the husband, after the first couple of days, starts thinking that there is no way that this is going to work. I am too ugly for her, she's too pretty for me, she's way out of my league, she's never going to love me, if she gets out of the house, she's going to cheat. If I lock her up in the house, the priest is going to have to come. He'll be coming to hear her confession once, twice, there'll be besties, then the priest is going to take my wife's So this is not going to happen. I'm going to lock her up and she's going to have no visitors

and she's going to stay there alone forever. Okay, so that's what's happening. Marvelous life this girl is living, buried alive in a house. And he was keeping very close reins on this. So if he was not in the house or on the bridge where he could look at the house, he would be outside the door monitoring who's going by to see if anyone's lingering a bit longer. And that was the case also on that Christmas day. And he was sitting outside the house looking at passerbys and minding his own business. when he saw three hunchbacks coming down the street and the three of them were performers

and they were on the way from one place to the other and when they saw him they started waving hey you're like was we're hunchbacks you're a hunchback we must be family it is a sign we're going to spend Christmas with you because this is what God intended and it was a very well played approach by them because they managed to get into his heart and he thought you know what look at that what are the chances of that. It's obviously a sign. It's also Christmas. Come on in, guys. He went into the house, locked his wife upstairs, because there's only so far his charity can go. Got them in and they feasted on roast chicken and on bacon and peas and all the good stuff. They had food, they had songs, they had performances, they had music, all the good things. And then he told them, okay, guys,

this has been fun. Here's 20 gold coins for your performance and for your company. Now you're going to go. And I don't want to see you anywhere near this place again. And if I do, I'm going to throw you in the river and you're going to die a miserable death. I promise you. Get out of here. Never come back. They had been fed.

They had been whined. They got money. They left. And he felt satisfied. When they were gone, he thought, I'm going to go back to my bridge. And he went back to the bridge to do his usual toll taking on Christmas Day. Meanwhile, the wife had been upstairs all this time. She's been hearing all this noise and music and merrymaking

and she heard him leave as well and she thought maybe I can get them to come back when he's not here. As he left, she ran out, waved them back, they came back, she gave them more wine, they started singing merrymaking for her and she was very happy. And of course he decided to come back to check. So she saw him approaching and uttered the most frequently said words since the invention of marriage which are, my God, my husband's back.

So they had to hide It happened that they had in their room where they were all sitting There was a big bed And it had three drawers under the bed So each one of the hunchbacks Went in one drawer And they were pushed under the bed

And so they were hidden The husband came in Looked around Found her alone Didn't linger And he decided that everything's fine He's going to go to the pub So he left to go to the pub

She went back to the room Started pulling drawers out She pulls the first drawer out expecting to find a hunchback there, she finds a dead hunchback there. She pulls the second drawer out, the second one's dead too. She pulls the third drawer out, the third one's dead as well. What are we going to do with three dead hunchbacks in the house? This took a turn, didn't it?

So she ran to the street and waved to the first passerby. She said, look, good man, I need your help. Come here. I'm going to give you money if you do something for me. Don't ask me any details. Please, it's 30 pieces of gold. want them or not. 30. I'll go to hell for 30. So she brings him in and she gives him a sack and she tells him I want you to take this hunchback, put him in the sack, go up the bridge and

throw him in the river. So he puts the hunchback in the sack, throws it over his shoulder, goes up the bridge, throws the man in the river. Easily done. It wasn't even a long distance. He was joyfully walking back to the house expecting to get 30 pieces of gold for his troubles. he comes in and he says, it's done. I'm back to get paid. You're back to get paid. You didn't take him, she says. How did I not take him? I just threw him in the river. No, you didn't. What's that then?

And she points at the second one. I don't know what that is, but I just threw one in the river. No, you didn't because this is here. So evidently, when I wasn't looking, you just put him back and you just want to fleece me of 30 gold pieces. No, throw it away. I'm going to need another sack. I'll give you another sack.

New sack. Second person. Up the shoulder, up the bridge. into the river. The man is starting to questioning what's happening now and he's walking back into the house trying to retrace his steps. I did take him the first time, didn't I? I did carry him up there and threw him in the river

I remember distinctly. I feel I had to do this twice. I'm not very sure what's happening but that's okay. It's 30 gold pieces, I'll do it, it's fine. He goes back, opens the door and tells her, okay, now it's done. Please pay me.

Why are you doing this to me? She tells him. What is this? He's still here. He's not even well. Do you think I'm stupid? The man is starting to lose his temper and also to think that this either is witchcraft

or something else is happening. I don't know how this person keeps coming back. But what can you say? It's not in the river. It's in the house. New sack. That hodgepank in. Over the shoulder, up the bridge.

And before he threw him in the water, he thought, you know what? Maybe he's not dead when I throw him. So maybe he manages to get out and go back into the house. So for good measure, he beats the head on the stones and throws it over. He gives him a beating and throws him over the bridge.

And this time he's certain that the hunchback guy is not going to walk back into the house. He's very certain that this person was very much dead. He's not going to come back this time. I'm going to go to the house and there's not going to be a hunchback there. And it's definitely the last one that I've seen. And on the way to the house, he sees the husband coming back from the pub. You impossible creature! He screams and grabs a club and runs towards the husband and starts beating him into a pulp.

Not even bothering to get a sack, just rugs him over the bridge and throws him in the water. And stay dead this time. Very tired, very bloodied, he goes back into the house, knocks on the door and tells the woman, just tell me there is no more. No, there is no more, she says, give him. gives him the 30 pieces of gold and sends him on his way, and spends the rest of her life a happy widow with a lot of money for all for these events that happened on Christmas Day. Very Christmas. That's a beautiful Christmas story, Leo. I love it. I'm sorry.

This is where Christmas hospitality will get you, dead and under the river. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Well, you know what? It's a happy ending. We love to see an abusive guy lose. in the end, so I'll take that. As deaths in the Middle Ages go, we'll take it. Okay. Cleo, thank you for bringing me a suitably bonkers Christmas story. I want to thank you so much for being here. I want to thank our audience so much for, you know, the Christmas spirit

that they've engendered in taking part in this fine comedic tradition. You're welcome. I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit, and if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to rate. review, follow the podcast and tell your friends about it and maybe tell them this joke. My co-host Matt Lewis will be back on Friday with more medieval goodness and I'll be back next Tuesday. Until next time.