Gone Medieval - Medieval Masters of Invention

Episode Date: April 30, 2022

In today’s Gone Medieval podcast, Matt Lewis joins Dallas Campbell - host of our sister podcast Patented: History of Inventions - to explore the role of medieval monks in inventing. Seeing scientific and philosophical investigation as a way to get closer to God - despite the threat of being labelled a heretic - monks were considered masters of invention. Together, they explain how monks navigated this balance and tell the story of Roger Bacon, a friar credited with designing the magnifying glass and who also predicted cars, powered ships and manned flight.For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

From long-loss Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr. Eleanor Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on history hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Did you know that history hits network of amazing podcasts just keeps growing? One of the newest editions is patented, which explores the history of the inventions of all sorts of incredible things. It's hosted by the brilliant Dallas Campbell and has already looked at the inventions of films, the treadmill, the number zero, space suits and breakfast cereals as well as loads of other things.

I was invited on to talk about medieval invention and we focused on Roger Bacon, a fascinating man at the heart of a scientific revolution in England who predicted some surprising things. This is my chat with Dallas about medieval monks, the masters of invention. When we think about innovation and invention, we tend not to go to the 13th century. We like sort of talking about the Greeks and then we talk about the 17th 17th century, the sort of scientific revolution of Galileo and Copernicus and Kepler and what have you. And then we like talking about the Victorians and the Industrial Revolution. But yet, there's this whole sort of missing bit. What were people doing in the 12-100s and the

13th century? But when people sort of talk about the first scientists, we kind of automatically go to Galileo, but Galileo was quite late. And actually, lots of stuff was going on before that. He was very late coming to it. And I think the fact that we overlooked the Middle Ages plays into this dark ages myth that nothing was happening then, nothing was going on, everyone was a little bit thick and they were only really interested in bashing each other over the head with swords and clubs and all of that kind of thing. Yeah, that's exactly what I think, by the way, and I'm sorry for thinking that. It's fair enough. I'm here to talk you out of it now. Good. Talk me out of it. There is so much going on. And to some extent, it's fueled by the Christian, European West,

coming into contact with the Muslim Middle East as part of the Crusades. And what that does, it's a horrible, brutal period that causes all sorts of problems. But what it also does is expose scholars in the West to Arabic thinking, which is in many ways much further ahead than European thinking. And these ideas begin to clash. So when you say much further ahead, the famous name I always think of Ibn Al-Hitham, who is a Muslim scholar, he's again a bit like sort of Galilei when we talk about the first scientist. He's a name that always cropped up. He was obviously a lot earlier, but was his work in sort of mathematics and optics particularly, was that starting to sort of filter into the European mindset? It was. And we can see, particularly in the 13th century in England,

And Al-Hazan's influence is really at the core of what's going on. It creates problems because there is this idea of the crusading Christian West. You shouldn't have anything to do with these Muslim ideas. They can't be great if they're coming from the enemy. But there are lots and lots of people who are actually able to see way beyond that and just see that these are interesting, fascinating ideas that share a lot of roots with Greek thinking and Greek science in a way that the West probably hasn't kept up with.

So, I mean, you get a guy called Robert Gross Test, who is the Bishop of Lincoln, and he is credited quite often with essentially developing the scientific method in Western Europe. He's said to have introduced the idea of controlled experiments into Western Europe, and so he dies in 1235. And his tomb inscription actually says he was a man of learning and an inspiration to scholars, a wise administrator while a true shepherd of his flock, ever concerned to lead them to Christ in whose service he strove to temper justice with mercy, hating the sin while loving the sinner, not sparing the rod while cherishing the weak. And that's a pretty interesting epitaph.

Well, that's interesting because Gros says before he went to Lincoln, I think he was the dean of Oxford, or the first dean of Oxford, I think. And people like Roger Bacon, who I think we're going to talk about a lot, would have come into contact with Gross Tess, wouldn't he? They would have known each other. So all these ideas, like you say, from Aristotle and Muslim clerics who would have been talking about a different way of thinking. How radical was this thinking? This idea of actually not just believing stuff, but actually testing things out and using one's senses as a way of interpreting the natural world. It was fairly radical. I mean, you're in great danger of questioning God here because you're supposed to just believe that the world is ordered as God designs.

Yeah. So why are you picking apart? his design and kind of investigating what it is that God has done. But I mean, Roger Bacon is just an absolutely fascinating man. He's a legend. It's really weird because in my bacon confusion, which we all have, which we all have, I'm like, which bacon is that, not Francis Bacon? No, no, Roger Bacon. He's credited for coming up with all these ideas of sort of human-powered flight and submarines and gunpowder, and all this kind of stuff that we think much later. He was already postulating and thinking about. But there was this clash, presumably, between the religious

orthodoxy of the time and this new, I suppose, Aristotelian way of thinking, which is to rely on one's senses? Absolutely. Roger Bacon, he's given the kind of epithet Dr. Mirabilis, the marvellous doctor, and that's how he's remembered in history. But then his reputation goes through these changes because he's sometimes seen as a wizard because of his interest in Muslim research and everything else. So he's veering away from what the church necessarily believed he ought to be doing by sort of dabbling with Muslim teaching and Muslim thinking. So you get this juxtaposition of him, really. He's either an absolute genius or he's a bit of a naughty wizard who shouldn't have been doing what he was doing. There seems to be a real mix of that, doesn't know, of sort of religion,

because he was a religious man, presumably, he was a monk. But he was also interested in this scientific method, this new way of thinking. I mean, certainly sort of Aristotle and this new way of thinking about using the senses to understand the world, plus things like magic and alchemy, which was a big thing at the time, I'm assuming. Yeah, absolutely. But they're all seen as very much branches of the same way of behaving. You know, alchemy was science. They didn't know that you couldn't necessarily turn lead into gold.

It was a branch of research that people were incredibly interested in. But Bacon comes into contact with Aristotle and thinking he studies at Oxford. So, as we said, Bishop Gross Test had been at Oxford. We think Bacon arrives there just after Gross Test has left. But nevertheless, there's all of this atmosphere that, Bishop Grotesters created of sort of fairly free thinking, new thinking. And so Bacon is sort of immersed in all of that. And he becomes a master at Oxford actually lecturing in Aristotle. So that's where his interest, I think, begins to spark in this idea of scientific investigation

and using your senses to understand the world. Were people aware of Aristotle beforehand? Was Aristotle being studied beforehand in these new universities? I think he was. The Greek thinkers were kind of the mainstay of scientific thinking. at the time still. So medicine still revolved around that idea of the four humours, which goes back to Greek times, that there were four different fluids in our bodies that controlled all of our moods and illnesses. And medicine was an art of balancing those four humours. So you might have an excess of black bile or not enough phlegm in your system. And you have to balance all of these things out. So they were very well aware of Greek scientific and medical thinking. But I don't know

how much it is that this contact with the Muslim world reignites all of this thinking. Yeah, well, we think, I mean, I'm not an experiment, but it is Al Haitham, isn't it? That's the name I've read a little bit about over the years, who was interested in mathematics and philosophy and astronomy and what have you. But also things like optics, particularly, he sort of postulated that thinking that somehow the way that we see is because our eyes project beams of some kind of energy and that's how we see. And actually he was like, no, no, no, no, no, it's just light coming into your eyes that is how we see. And that seemed to be quite a radical departure in the world of optics. And actually understanding optics and understanding mathematics, was to understand the mind of God, as it were. Absolutely. And Al Heisen is someone who was a big influence on Roger Bacon. We know that he had access to his work and he studied his work on optics and mathematics. I mean, a lot of these people, they're such polymasts. You know, they do philosophy, mathematics, science, astrology, all of the things that are

out there, they want a taste of everything. So there's such massive polymasts that just get involved in absolutely everything. But that obviously, especially in Roger Bacon's case, I think, sets him thinking, I quite often get this idea that people think if a medieval person was to land in 2022, their minds would be absolutely blown away by the world around them. But I kind of feel like at least Roger Bacon wouldn't. He might have stood there and said, how come it took you 700 odd years after my death to get to this point, you know?

And I think if you showed a medieval person a mobile phone, their minds might be blown and they might be thinking, you've got all of this power in your pocket. You must be solving all of the world's problems and eradicating hunger and illness and everything else. And I think what would shock them the most is that we're like, know what we do every day is we guess a five-letter word, and we complain about things on social media?

That's the sum total of what we do with all of this power. I think that would be what blows their mind. Well, our minds haven't changed. If you read about these guys, these are people who are just interested in the world. And the world obviously look very different. And, you know, you talk to scientists and artists and polymath today, and they're the same.

They're just sort of interested in the way that world works. And I'm sure Roger Bacon would have got into great fights and disputes over whatever the argument de jour was back then. But let's see, actually, When we talk about science, well, the word science presumably had no meaning back then, although he did write a book, Sientaer, Experimentalus, which was at work that Roger Bacon did about the scientific method. But there was no such thing as a scientist. You know, if we call Roger Bacon the first scientist, he was also a monk. He was a religious man.

He was an alchemist. He was a magician. He was, as you say, a polymath. It wasn't the scientific method like we understand the scientific method today. That's it. Now, he's a Dominican friar who, very much, as you say, he's trying to understand the world in the face of all of this new thinking, new ideas, new research, new material. He's trying to better understand the world, probably in an effort to better understand God. I mean, that would be his ultimate aim in the 13th century and as a Dominican friar is to get close to God and try to understand God's world. Yeah. I mean, it's sort of interesting that that sort of proto-scientific method was still very much about understanding God, whereas I suppose today in science,

we generally sort of keep God out of things. I think it's fair to say. I think that's fair to say. I'm a religious person, so I would say that God is that 0.0% of everything that you still can't understand. And that's fair enough. But what I meant is, you know, if one was writing a scientific paper, you tend not to do the equation and then sort of cite God and then sort of carry on. Plus a capital G. Yeah, exactly. So Bacon, we've got a little bit of a picture about who this guy was and what his sort of influences were. What kind of fields of interest was he sort of dealing with at the time? What were his areas of interest? I mean, it varies throughout his career. So he ends up. But after being at Oxford, we get an interesting little story actually in 1233 that Roger Bacon.

We think it's him because it's someone called Roger Bacon, but we don't know 100% that it's the same guy, but it's kind of right time. Six degrees of Roger Bacon. And right place, yeah. So it may be another Roger Bacon. But the chronicler Matthew Paris records this incident when Henry III is having some problems because of a guy called Peter DeRosch, who is his bishop of Winchester, who is another fascinating character, a proper warrior bishop.

What's his name, Peter? Peter DeRosch. Peter DeRos, I've never come across Peter DeRosch. He's an interesting character, so he's around at the time of Magna Carta and all of that kind of thing, and he gets a reputation as a proper warrior bishop. He's happy to go on the battlefield. His name DeRosch is linked to rocks. So they call him Peter DeRos, who is as hard as rocks, because he's happy to go and fight on the battlefield.

See, this is the Dark Age as hitting people over the head with clubs coming back. Absolutely. He is hard as rocks and bishop as well. So he'll tell you on Sunday to be nice to everybody. And on Monday morning, he's banging heads together. But Matthew Parish, he says a certain monk who was present at the court, Roger Bacon by name, so we think it's him, a man of mirthful speech said with pleasant yet pointed wit, My Lord King, what is that which is most hurtful and fearful to those that sail across the sea?

Those know it, the king replied, who have much experience of the waters. My lord, said the clerk, I will tell you, stones and rocks, meaning thereby Peter DeRosch. So he's standing in front of the king, and we think he's possibly around 20 at this time. if it's our Roger. He's standing in front of the king, sort of saying the thing that's interfering with your plane sailing as king is this bishop who you like.

So he's criticising a bishop, criticizing the king. He's obviously quite clear about his opinions and happy to express those even in front of the king. Yeah, he would have been good on Twitter. If Twitter had been around then, I can imagine him having a divisive yet,

a healthy Twitter following. I think he may be a 13th century James Blunt on Twitter. James Blunt is very quick with the comebacks and the put downs. and is fantastic at that kind of thing. It's interesting actually that he said that he was only 20. I mean, what sort of age would Bacon have, when he first went to Oxford, what kind of age would he have been?

This would probably have been around about that time. So he would have been in his early 20s, we think. By 1237, I mean, we don't know Roger Bacon's date of birth exactly. We think it's somewhere between 1213 and 1215, so we're always guessing about his age a little bit. And he's born in Somerset, so I like to imagine him having a really broad West Country accent as well. He definitely had that. I can testify to that. Definitely. Would it like to a bit of cider.

Yeah, I think so. We know by 1237 that he ends up in Paris. So he's teaching at the University of Paris, which is one of the really big main centres of thinking and teaching in Europe at this point. He lectures on Latin grammar, aristotlean logic, arithmetic, geometry, maths, astronomy, music, all of these aspects of learning. And we know there that he comes into contact with a man called Robert, at Kilwardby, who is a future Archbishop of Canterbury, there at the same time as

Albertus Magnus, who is a German monk, who is a scientist and a philosopher as well. He's there at the same time as Peter of Spain, who is the future Pope John the 21st. And he also comes into contact with a man called Gieda Fulke, who is the Bishop of Narbonne at the time and a papal legate, so working for the Pope. But then decades later, Gida Fulke becomes Pope Clement the 4, and that gives Roger this real in with the papacy. So his work has been almost self-funded. He's from a fairly wealthy background. We know his family had suffered during the Barron's Wars in England and not being able to get much money. So all of a sudden, when his friend becomes Pope in the 1260s, he's given all of this

permission to undertake all of the study and work that he wants to do. And he starts producing lots and lots of books full of his ideas. It's funny, though, here we have this great polymath, symbolic of a new way of thinking about the world, a kind of proto-scientific method, using your senses to make sense of the natural world. Why is it that we haven't heard of him? Why is it that, you know, here we are hundreds of years before people like Galileo, who we credit the same kind of thing, the same kind of thinking? Why is it sort of bacon and this whole period slightly, well, I'm talking, certainly in terms of the history of science anyway, into a bit of obscurity? I think, you know, over on the gone medieval podcast, we're trying to prove that everything is medieval. And I think

people forget that sometimes. And as we said before, it plays into this myth of the dark ages that people weren't doing very much thinking or anything like that. So we look at Galileo, but actually you go through some of Roger Bacon's work. He's credited with inventing the magnifying glass. Yeah, exactly. When we think about lenses, we automatically think about Galileo. I mean, did Bacon actually kind of make lenses and actually fashioned things? Or was it all just hypothetical? We know he sent an optical lens, which we assume was a magnifying glass, to Pope Clement IV, along with his books as kind of, I suppose, an aid to understand the things that he's talking about in the book. I mean, it's hard with things like this because there's lots of talk in the ancient world of people

using gems and things like that to magnify things and increase the size of things. But Roger Bacon is the first man who describes a convex lens and its powers and how it works as a magnifying glass. So he's the first person to set this down in writing and hence gets credited with the invention, even though it may have been something that was around for a while. That's really interesting. And also things like gunpowder as well. Now, clearly he didn't invent gunpowder. We have to go to perhaps China for the invention of gunpowder. But I think Bacon was the first person to actually kind of write it down. Yeah, he's credited as being the first person, at least in Europe, who wrote down a recipe for gunpowder. So understanding how to make

this explosive material. So he didn't invent gunpowder, but he's credited with recording the recipe of how to make it. Yeah. And I kind of think if you're going to take credit for something, whoever writes it down first probably wins. It's part of the story of inventions, isn't it? Exactly. Who gets there first? Who gets the publicity first? Well, that's exactly.

So much of it is down to publicity. It's all very well having an idea or coming up with something. But actually, that's not what it's about. It's about how do you market yourself? How do you sell yourself? I've got a note to hear about some of other Bacon's ideas. And again, you know, we have to be carefully. He's not the inventor of gunpowder.

So we talked about magnifying glass. And he writes, first, by the figurations of art, there be made instruments of navigation without men to row them as great ships to brook the sea only with one man to steer them and they shall sail far more swiftly than if they were full of men also chariots that shall move with unspeakable force without any living creature to stir them likewise an instrument may be made to fly within if one sits in the midst of the instruments and do not turn an engine by which the wings being artificially composed may beat the air after the manner of a flying bird.

So there you go. Maybe can we say that Roger Bacon invented the airplane? Probably not. Maybe not. I mean, he's talking about flapping wings rather than anything powered. But he's talking about something that must be very close to a steamship.

He's talking about powered vessels on the sea that don't need men to row them, don't need wind in the sails, and kind of just need one man to steer them. That's pretty much powered sailing at sea under steam or something like that. And then he talks about horseless chariots. We joke about medieval people

would be blown away if they saw a car. Well, clearly not, because Roger Bacon is talking about it there nearly 800 years ago and saying, you know, one day they'll create a chariot that doesn't need a horse to pull it. When he's talking about that, you get a sense as a historian that he was genuinely thinking these things might happen or they could be possible, or was this very much a kind of science fiction? Because of course, you know, in ancient Greek times, people were writing about space voyages and travel, but very much in a sort of fictional sense in a sort of proto-science fiction way. It's quite a hard thing to work out, isn't it? You think of H. G. Wells and some of his science fiction that it comes true. So is he prescient or is he just guessing at stuff that could

happen? You know, Roger Bacon is quite interested in forces that he sees at work in the universe and he talks a lot about energy and forces. So I guess if he allows his mind to wonder further on that, he's going to be thinking, well, you know, we move about under the power of a horse at the moment. We ride a horse or we get pulled by a horse. But what if there was a force that meant we didn't need a horse to do that? He probably didn't know what that force would be. I'm not saying he was talking about internal combustion engines or anything that specific. But he's clearly having these ideas that in the future, we will find better ways to do things, faster ways to do things.

We'll be able to imitate the power of a horse. We'll be able to imitate the power of a fish. We'll be able to imitate the power of a bird. So he wouldn't have found the world that he would land in in 2022. All that mystifying, I don't think, because it's all the things he's talking about. In April 1982, armed forces from the United Kingdom and are. Argentina went to war over the Falkland Islands. This month, 40 years later, we are dedicating a special series of episodes

to finding out what this conflict was all about and what it was like to fight on either side. The sea harriers were flying over and they attacked us. They trusted us and we felt we had let them known. I really don't know whom I would be now if I had not gone through that experience when I was 19 years old. You can't take a submarine prisoner, you know, you have to find it, you have to destroy it. And if it goes wrong, it goes catastrophically wrong. To follow along, tune in every Friday to the Warfare podcast from History Hit. Absolutely.

There was a Lucien of Samasata, ancient Greek writer. He wrote something called True History, which was this great Gulliver's Travels type of odyssey about this great spouts of water that would carry you up to the moon, and you could live with the Selenites on the moon. And this was first century AD, people were having these sorts of ideas. And I just wondered people, in the 13th century. People like Roger Baker, when they were imagining these types of things as well, what their grasp on the reality of nature was in terms of things like electromagnetism, in terms of things like optics, which of course we kind of attribute to people like Galileo

at Newton a little bit later on in terms of actually getting to grips with things like gravity. What would Bacon's scientific understanding would have been, do you think? I think it would have all been wrapped up in God still in the 13th century. That's the channel through which you understand the world and you understand everything. So if there are forces at work in the world, whether they're gravity or whatever they are, they're created and powered by God. So you can try to understand these things, but ultimately you're still talking about religion. And that's where Bacon slips up a little bit because lots of the church think he's getting a little bit heretical. He's dealing with lots of Muslim thinking here.

It almost becomes the idea of challenging the way that the world exists and runs. We don't want to investigate too far because then we're questioning. in God and God's plan. Like I wonder if he had dropped an apple, what would he have thought? What would have gone through his mind? You know, Newton drops an apple. They must have known. I'm sure people have been dropping stuff on their toes for millennia before this point.

It's just at what point do you start to rationalise that and create an explanation for it? And that has to begin with someone questioning why it happens. So if Roger Bacon is the man who's thinking, well, why don't we have horseless chariots? Why don't we have ships that sail without men to row them? And why don't we have a flying machine that imitates a bird's ability to saw through the skies? Somebody has to think that before people go away and develop that and start to invent it. Now, you think about Tivinci's notebooks full of drawings of helicopters and all of that sort of thing. He wasn't the first person to be thinking that.

And probably Bacon wasn't the first person to be thinking it necessarily. But he's writing it down everywhere and he's sending all of this to the Pope saying, what if we did these things? What if this could happen one day? And I think if no one in all of history had ever thought about the horseless chariot, no one would have invented it. So he didn't have the technology and the wherewithal to create this horseless chariot, but somebody has to have that idea for centuries later someone to be able to create the means of inventing it. Yeah, no, I love trying to trace things back and try and find the origins of the stream. I mean, things like flight, for example, is fascinating. Things like space flight is fascinating. You know,

we tend to think of rockets being a 20th century thing. Of course they are, but in the 1600s, Bishop Francis Godwin imagined this journey to the moon powered by geese. He imagined these geese that would migrate from the earth to the moon. He thought, well, hang on, if we attach bits of string to them, we could attach a chair, and then off we go. And he wrote these amazing stories, and we see these ideas throughout history, and no one kind of gets there first. And things like flight, we always assumed the Wright brothers were first to invent human flight, but of course they weren't. I mean, people were experimenting with gliders long before the Wright brothers were. It's just like you said earlier, they were the sort of clever ones.

They managed to kind of market themselves really well. And because they were bicycle builders, they could apply their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing and their work they'd done with other people working on gliders and it became the first people to sort of control flight. And that's why they get the credit. But it wasn't like they had the first idea. Yeah. They just had the good PR department.

And I mean, you know, were they a million miles away from what Bacon is describing there? He's talking about sitting in the midst of a machine where you turn an engine to cause wings to flap. Well, isn't that a lot like the kind of early? It's exactly. like that. And in fact, actually, the Wright brothers, you know, their 1903, the Wright Flyer, the famous one, actually that's not the important machine. The important machine was the machine they built the year before, the prototype, which was the 1902 glider. And if you look at pictures, and it's exactly as Bacon describes a single person in the middle of this machine with wings that flap. Well, they don't

flap, but they warp. They have wing warping, which is what gives the aircraft their control. So, yes, Wright brothers, not first in flight, first in controlled flight, maybe. Yeah. But that's where you think Bacon might have been looking at it and thinking, how did it take you so long? No, I was talking about this stuff 650 years ago. Well, there is a big gap, actually, between the 13th century and then, of course, the scientific revolution in the 1600s as well. I'm like, come on. What did go on between that time, actually?

I mean, how influential was someone like Bacon a century or so after his death? Like, for example, would Galileo, would Newton have known about Bacon? Would they have consulted his writing, his works? Or was he largely forgotten? I don't know that they did. you feel like they must have. I mean, he creates this incredible body of work. So his big famous work is his opus magus, which he writes in 1267, and it's broken down

into seven sections. I mean, the first section is called the general causes of human ignorance. I mean, if you're going to start a book, why not start off telling everyone they're idiots? This sounds like a kind of proto-twitter argument. You're an idiot. And here's why. Absolutely. He comes up with four, so he's got four general causes of human ignorance.

But then he goes on to talk about philosophy and theology, how they can work together. So again, he's interested in how science interacts with religion, the usefulness of grammar. I mean, I think it's fairly useful unless you're on Twitter. And then he talks about the usefulness of mathematics in physics. So he's talking about applying all of these new ideas to different sciences. So he's interested in physics as a discipline. He has one section called the Science of Perspective. So this is a lot around his work on optics and lenses and understanding how we see.

the world. There's one on experimental knowledge and one on the philosophy of morality. So, I mean, there's a fairly wide gambit of stuff there that he's covering from science to theology to morality. And I think that just reflects his view of the world that everything, it's all wrapped up together, really. These aren't separate disciplines. They're all parts of the same thing. Yes, you're right. We've sort of separated them out now. The other thing that when you read about Bacon, the other famous thing, is he kind of invented Google, but in bronze form. He wrote about this idea of this bronze head that would predict the future. You could kind of ask it questions.

A bit like Zoltan and big, that kind of thing, which I think you see throughout history, you see examples of bronze heads that can speak the future. But this is, I suppose, again, this magic coming in. Yeah, they're sort of semi-legendary things because they get wrapped up in this idea of him being a wizard. There's stories that one of the popes around the same time had one of these mechanical heads that you could ask it any question

and it would answer it for you. And it's mechanical bronze head that sort of appears in a big plume of smoke and looks very dramatic and everything else. And there is some suggestion that Roger Bacon had one of these as well, but we don't know whether this is stories getting mixed up in an effort to make Bacon look bad because these things are also quite often associated with talking to demons. So they were demons that were inside it, so you're asking the demons questions, which is not a great thing to be messing around with if you're a 13th century monk.

But he's accused of having this, as you say, an early example of Google is bronze head that you could ask it any question, it will tell you the answer. But it's probably a demon that's telling you the answer. It's probably bollocks as well It's not like he actually make one This is just sort of been written about It has, it springs up later As part of this idea that he was perhaps a naughty wizard

Like I say But there are stories of a contemporary Pope owning something similar though Obviously, maybe it's a bit of a Wizard of Oz thing Maybe it was a party trick You create this thing and somebody's underneath it shouting upwards Well, yeah, well you do

You see this in the history of robotics You see this idea of mechanical people, Ottomons, in Roman times and Greek times that's sort of been written about and mechanical ducks and all sorts of things. So as an idea, as a concept, these ideas seem to have been around for a while. I wonder how in the sort of religious orthodoxy of the time, how dangerous was someone like Bacon in terms of things like alchemy and magic and talking to the devil and bronze heads that could predict the future?

Was this kind of stuff frowned upon? It was, and Bacon undergoes a period. So before his friend becomes Pope Clement IV, Bacon is placed under, along with lots of other similar thinkers who are doing scientific work and research, they're actually banned from doing any of that work and from publishing any of it. And it's effectively classed as heretical and you really, really shouldn't be doing it. And Pope Clement IV, when he writes to Roger Bacon, he sort of says, you know, what, I can't get you out of this ban, but here's a bucket load of money to go and do it in secret and send me the books and, you know, don't tell anybody.

So the Pope is sort of sponsoring Roger Bacon to do all of this work on the down low, even though he's technically banned by the church from doing it. So I think there's a real disparity of opinion around it. So some people think it's great and we should embrace this stuff and we should learn as much as we possibly can. And then you've got this other branch of the church that's thinking, oh, this sounds really, really dodgy. This is heresy. We're messing with demons. Part of the Bible says, don't question the Lord thy God. Well, what is science if it's not questioning God and the world around you?

Would he have been so well known in the sort of general populace, Bacon? I'm just sort of trying to get a sense of his fame or his infamy amongst sort of everyday folk and here in Britain or in Paris, perhaps, where he was. Did people know who he was? Was he famous? In his own circles, he definitely would have been. So he's mixing with some of the other most influential thinkers of the time. I mean, how much impact he ever had on an everyday peasant's life in 13th century,

England is doubtful. But there's a suspicion there that Henry III was aware of who he was, if he's talking to the king. He's moving in circles with future popes, future Archbishop of Canterbury's, thinkers from Germany, who are influential as well in Albertus Magnus. So he would have been incredibly well known. And lecturing at Paris, incredibly prestigious at the time, this is the university in Europe. This is where all of the best thinkers gather and do their work. So to have been a lecturer at Paris marks him out as someone who is incredibly significant and important.

So I think in his own intellectual circles, he would probably have been a lot of. incredibly well known. And maybe some of the reasons he gets a bad name later is professional jealousy, I don't know. Yeah, maybe. But also that name, Dr. Mirablus, which means Dr. Wonder. So he obviously had that reputation of someone who was, if not an inventor, someone with a great imagination who could paint pictures of a natural world which people hadn't perhaps thought of before. Yeah. And I think it's that extension of those thoughts, isn't it? So you can have these thoughts about the world. But it's where does that wondering, meandering thoughts, take you? Well, it takes Roger Bacon to cars and planes. And also at the heart of science,

at the heart of invention, at the heart of technology, comes that creative urge, that sense of wonder, I suppose. You think of people like, you know, am I allowed to mention Elon Musk? I don't see why not? But you don't know what I mean? These sort of technologists of the day, perhaps Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or something, there is that almost like childlike sense of curiosity. It's like, I want to make the human species and multi-planetary species, whatever it is, those sorts of big ideas. Yeah, we think of science and the scientific revolutions and things like that as being about maths and physics and all of that kind of thing. But to be an inventor, you have

to have this huge creative streak to create something that nobody has ever thought of. You're not working on someone else's work. You're not developing on other people's ideas. You're kind of plucking this idea out of nowhere to say, what if there was one of these? And that requires a degree of creativity that I don't think is often accounted for in science and inventive. Yeah, it does. And it requires a bit of bravery as well. At some point, I can't remember who said, you know, for every invention, a difficult decision had to be made. But, you know, yeah, you do have to be sort of a little bit bullsy, I think, to be an event, and to be a scientist. You have to have that childlike sense of wonder. And it seems like he has it in abundance.

I suppose we like to ask questions, who was the first scientist? And of course, there wasn't a first scientist. But we like to throw names around. So where do you think he ranks in the kind of pantheon of early people who were playing with what we now call the scientific method, this idea of experimentation and using one's senses. I think he is very important. So, as I said, Robert Gross-Testest, that Bishop of Lincoln is kind of accredited with introducing scientific method into Western Europe. But Roger Bacon is really expanding on his work, so he's following in his footsteps and

developing all of this stuff. And he writes so many books, and he sets all of this stuff out. And so he's remembered as inventing so many things like gunpowder and magnifying glasses, simply because he's the man who's writing all of this stuff down. And that has to be an important way of then spreading all of that knowledge around the rest of Europe so that people can keep building on it and keep expanding it all. So I think he probably was an incredibly important person, whether he actually invented anything is difficult to get at. That's OK. He was a great cross-pollinator as well.

He brought these two worlds together, the ancient Greek world of Aristotelian logic and thought, but also the Islamic world, who are also doing amazing things, particularly with mathematics and geometry and astronomy. Yeah, so I think he brings those two worlds together, but what he then does in writing it all of down is propagates it around the world and makes it available for other people to use. So he's kind of a conduit, I guess, for all of this learning. He's an interested man who is fascinated by the world around him, who draws in all of this knowledge, but then he doesn't just sit on it and use it for his own benefit. He then disseminates that as far as he possibly can. That's a good place to end. There we go. Roger Bacon. We like Roger Bacon. If you hadn't heard of Roger Bacon, go and do some Roger Bacon research, if you're listening. into this because he is fascinating. Hey, Matt, thank you very much for coming on and talking about Roger Bacon and others. Where's your podcast on? Because as you say, you are enlightening us about the Dark Ages. Where do we call this period of history? You can call it what you like. I think the Dark Ages is a bit of a misnomer. It is a massive misnomer. Yeah. So the medieval period is good. So I co-host the God Medieval podcast with Dr. Kat Jarman, who is a Viking bio-archologist, which is just the most amazing job title I've ever heard in my life. So,

Cat knows all about the Viking era and the early medieval period. I sort of get the Norman conquest onwards and we're desperately trying to explore all these really fascinating and exciting stories of the medieval period. It's such an amazing period. And it's one of those periods. I am so guilty of in my school brain remembering bits of it from school and then sort of forgetting about it afterwards. But this particular episode, finding out a little bit about Roger Bacon, particularly, has been really enlightening. I'm like, oh my God, who knew? Why are we not talking about Roger Bacon more? As opposed to Kevin Bacon or Francis Bacon or. Richard Bacon or all the other bacon. It's far too much bacon. I definitely want a bacon sandwich.

A lot of bacon. Yeah, we're going to have a bacon time. Matt, thank you very much. It's been lovely. Thanks for having me, Dallas. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode of Gone Medieval. Don't forget to also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to Gone Medieval, but also to patented. And take a look at history hits whole ecosystem of podcasts to find fuel for all your historical passions. I mean, including Betwixt the Sheets Now with Kate List. for literal indulgence of passion. Subscribe to them all, but keep a special place in your heart, on your phone and in your ears, for Gone Medieval.

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