Gone Medieval - Medieval Romance

Episode Date: February 12, 2022

Valentine's Day has become a significant cultural, religious, and commercial celebration of romance and love across the world. With the oldest surviving Valentine's letter confessing undying love being over 500 years old, we take a look at some extraordinary Valentine stories. In this special episode of Gone Medieval, Matt and Cat join forces! From Viking age romance, revenge, arson, and even bribery. Matt and Cat compete for the best medieval Valentine's saga. Do you have any Medieval love stories you would like to share with us? Don’t forget to leave us a rating and review while you're here!For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Monday 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 the 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 very special episode of Gone Medieval, where our two previously orbiting spheres of gone medieval collide. This is our Doctor Who crossover episode because the fantastic Dr. Kat Jarman is here with me on Saturday.

Thank you very much for joining us today, Kat. Fantastic to be able to do this together. I think it was really needed for this particular one today, wasn't it? Yeah, battle of some stories of the medieval period. So I guess we can bill this as partly a public service broadcast. If you're listening on Saturday the 12th of February 2022, or even on Sunday the 13th, it's Valentine's Day tomorrow. You're warned.

Even if you're listening early enough on Monday, it might help not to forget. In case you didn't know, the very first ever recorded Valentine's Day letter that survives was written in England in 1477. It's preserved amongst the pasten letters, which is a treasure trove of, of documents retained by the Pashton family in Norfolk in the 15th century. In February 1477, Marjorie Brews wrote to John Paston excitedly about the marriage that they were planning to each other and called John my right well-beloved Valentine. Marjorie's mother wrote to John a few days before the 14th to invite him to come and stay

stay for the weekend to discuss the wedding with Marjorie's father. And she asked him if he'd like to arrive on the Thursday because up on the Friday is St. Valentine's Day. Marjorie then wrote to John to explain that her mother had been working on her father to try and get her dowry increased, signing that letter at Topcroft with a full heavy heart. And soon after that, Marjorie wrote again to her right, worshipful and well-beloved Valentine, to explain that her father couldn't be induced to improve the deal, but that she hoped John would marry her anyway. So the romance is kind of sucked out of this first Valentine's Day letter by the hard-nosed business aspect of it. But it got us thinking, do we know of any really good medieval romantic stories that we could share with you for Valentine's Day? And we've picked a couple each that Kat and I are going to go through and see which one of them you think is perhaps the most romantic, which one of these strikes you as worthy of medieval Valentine Day Hall of Fame.

We'd love to hear what you think. So Kat's going to take us through one of her stories first. Yeah, so I was thinking about this. And the listeners to this podcast will be quite aware that I am obviously a big fan of the Viking Age. I wanted to try to find something relating to the Viking part of the medieval period. But we don't actually have that many very good sources, direct sources. And also I thought, do we really need a sort of very cheesy, sweet, romantic Valentine's story or other ways that we can sort of find some of those love expressed?

And so the story that really stuck with me is relating to one of my favorite people, who is a queen, Olga, of Kiev. She's known as Helga in the sagas. And she was the wife of Eigor or Ego or Kiev. So this is the ruse we're talking about here, and we are in the 10th century. Now, we don't know that much about Ego or Eigor's marriage as such until the husband dies. And that, I think, is when we really see. her sort of expression of love for her husband. Because what happened is that Igo is slain in 9-4-5

when he goes to try and sort of reassert his control and power over another neighbouring Slavic tribe just outside Kiev. And so he is killed in really quite a horrible way, which we talk of things are pretty horrific. And she becomes the queen, her sons, Svato Slav is too young to rule, so she's in charge. But this then is when her sort of revenge over the Drevillians really shows, I think, her love for her husband. So this is all quite

graphically detailed if you read the Russian Primary Chronicle, for example. Obviously, we don't quite know how much of this is real, how much is fictional, but essentially has a sort of threefold approach to her revenge, because the Dreblins then try and actually ask her to marry, or the Prince, Prince Marl, one of the Drevlins, asked her to marry him, but she doesn't want this. So she wants to avenge her husband and absolutely not marry one of them. So she actually agrees to the marriage, even though she doesn't really want it. And a delegation arrives in Kiev by boat of these men, these aristocrats and the Dreblians. And she throws them all into a deep pit and buries them all alive. But the message doesn't quite get back. So these are all killed off, essentially. And she sends

a message asking for all the aristocrats to come to see her before their wedding. And she invites them when they come along to go into the bathhouse, to wash, locks them in and sets fire to them all. And then finally, she goes to the capital city and essentially just slaughters everyone. And then takes this this sort of continuing revenge over the population. She asks for tributes, or they say, can we give you tribute so that you'll spare the rest of us? And she gets sparrows. She asks each household for three sparrows, but she takes her men tie sulphur to the sparrows feet. And in the evening, they're released fly home, settling the nests in their houses, and they will catch fire, and that's the end of it. And at that point, she's quite happy because now she has managed to avenge her husband,

and yeah, she can basically continue. And I mean, okay, maybe that's not the most romantic story to most people, but I think to go to those lengths for your husband's honour, surely that is a sort of truly Viking age story of love. What could be more Viking then, a true? trail of blood in the name of love. Exactly. It's what you would expect, isn't it, really? I like the story of the sparrows as well. Sulfur on their feet, sending them home to roost is an ingenious way to burn down a village or a town.

Isn't it? They all thought they got up really lightly because they only had to give up three sparrows, which he would sparrows. So, yeah, ingenious. Fantastic. Well, my first offering is actually not all that dissimilar to Olga of Kiev. So this is Jean de Clisson, who is also known as the lioness of Brééééééé. Brittany, which is a fantastic name to have. And I think this is something like the female version of Braveheart the film, not Braveheart the real story. Unpopular opinion here. I absolutely love Braveheart the film. So Jean is born Jean de Belleville in about 1,300. She's the daughter of Morris de Belleville

and her father dies when she's four. She's born into a fairly well-off minor noble family. And eventually her brother actually dies so she inherits all of the family lands as well. But in 1312, so when she's around about 12 years old, she's married for the first time to a 19-year-old man called Geoffrey de Chateaubriand, the 8th, who was a Breton nobleman, and this begins her real connection with Brittany. So they have a son, Jeffrey the 11th, and a daughter, Louise, and then Jeffrey dies in 1326. Two years after this, Jean is married again to Guy de Pontiev, who's a son of the Duke of Brittany. But some of the wider members of the Ducal family seem to resent Jean's arrival. I guess they consider her too low-born for a son of the Duke of Brittany. So they complain and actually manage to get this marriage investigated and annulled by Pope John the 22nd. And then a couple of years after that in 1330, Jean is married for the third time to Olivier the 4th de Clisson, who is another Breton nobleman, whose seat is at the castle of Clisson. So with the dower lands that Jean held from her first marriage and those that Olivier owned,

they become quite considerable landholders around the Breton border. The couple then have five children, but they then get embroiled in the Breton War of Succession between the Blois and Montfort factions. Jean and Olivier initially back the French choice of the Blois candidate, but other members of Olivier's family back the English Monfort choice. So the Breton War of Succession kind of becomes this proxy conflict in the Hundred Years' War between England and France. And in 1342, the English capture...

the city of Van, and Olivier was one of the military commanders there, and he's taken prisoner. He's very quickly released, though, in a prisoner exchange for Ralph de Stafford, the Earl of Stafford. But the low ransom that accompanies this deal caused Charles of Blois, who was the French candidate for the Duke of Brittany, to accuse Olivier of being a traitor who had handed Van over to the English and become their man while he'd been imprisoned by them. So the year after this, 1343, we have the Treaty of Malstois, which was agreed between England and France. And as part of the celebrations of this treaty in France, Olivier was invited to take part in a tournament with some other Breton and Norman Lords.

But then when he arrives in Paris, he's arrested and swiftly tried in secret by a group of his peers. So Jean apparently does all that she can to try and get him released. She claims that he'd arrived under a safe conduct only to be arrested. she reportedly also tries to bribe one of the officials in Paris to let Olivier escape, but nothing works. And on the 2nd of August 1343, Olivier is executed for what is described in the sources as several treasons and other crimes perpetrated by him against the king and the crown of France and for alliances that he made with the King of England.

He's not even simply executed, so he's beheaded, but then the records state that from there his corpse was drawn to the gibbet of Paris and there hanged on the higher. level and his head was sent to Nantes in Brittany to be put on a lance over the Sov-2 gate as a warning to others. So the evidence against Olivier was never made public and the posthumous mutilation of his body really shocked the rest of the French nobility at the time. Three weeks later on the 26th of August, Jean was charged with Lesse Majesty, which is assuming royal authority for trying to bribe those royal guards. She was protected by Olivier's eldest son from his first marriage and she managed to evade the authorities at this point. So she goes back to Brittany,

collects her two sons with Olivier, who were called Olivier and Guillaume, and she takes them to Nant to have a look at their father's head up on a pike. And at that point, she swears vengeance on King Philip the 6th of France and Charles of Blois, who was their candidate for Duke of Brittany, and she blames them for the cowardly murder of her husband. So she sells whatever she can to raise a load of money from the family lands. And she recruits an army of about 400 men who reportedly begin by attacking a castle at Tofu and then at Chateau Thibault. And the English King Edward III really sees an opportunity here to cause trouble for the French. So he begins to back Jean.

And with English backing and some other brest on support, she manages to secure a fleet of three ships. And she has all three of these ships painted entirely black and all of their sails died red. And she calls the flagship that Jean sails on, My Revenge. So she's now sailing around in a black ship with a. red sails called My Revenge. For the next couple of decades, she operates as a pirate in the English Channel. She sometimes attacks Norman towns on the coast. During the English Cressy campaign, she supplied the English army from her ships. But eventually the French fleet managed to engage with Jean's three ships, and the My Revenge was sunk. Jean and her two sons, Olivier and Guillaume,

were left adrift for five days, during which apparently Guillaume died of exposure. But despite the loss of the My Revenge, Jean continues her piracy for another 13 years after this. She generally harasses only French merchant shipping in the channel. And her process was to board these vessels, steal all that they carried, slaughtered the entire crew but for one man who was set ashore with a message to take to the French king that Jean de Clisson was still after him. During the 1350s, Jean married for a fourth time to an Englishman named Walter Bentley, who was Edward III's lieutenant in Brittany.

When Edward changes tactics then, he begins to back Charles, the Duke of Brittany, and he orders Bentley to hand John's castles over. Walter actually refuses, goes back to England to plead his case, is imprisoned for a while, but is ultimately successful. And by this point, then,

the black death is beginning to grip Europe and war is no longer really a priority. So the couple eventually settled down at Hembont on the coast of Brittany, where Walter eventually dies in December 13, 1559, and Jean follows him a couple of weeks later. So for 20 years, Jean had terrorised French shipping in the channel, supported the English effort against France in the Hundred Years' war. She'd raided the coast, being named in the truce of Calais in 1347 as an English ally, and pursued this ruthless policy of killing all but one of the crew so that they could

deliver a message back to the King of France. And all of that was in an effort to exact revenge for what she considered the unlawful and unfair and cowardly murder of her husband. So this is full-on female pirate terrorising the English Channel all in the name of love in her red-sailed black ship named My Revenge. I mean, it's maybe not the most romantic story in the world, but it's pretty cool, I think. I think so I completely agree. And I think those two, they are quite simply right. I think you could be cynical and say, is that really about love?

Or have they got different motives? It's about politics and conquest. But really, I mean, it's that love that triggers it, doesn't it? It's the relationship and the husband and that, you know, that sparks that whole sequence of events. Yeah, you could talk about the cynicism, but would they ever have done those things if they hadn't been faced with that terrible crime that they felt the need to revenge? You know, if Olga's husband hadn't been murdered and if Jean's husband hadn't been executed while he thought he was under a safe conduct, would they ever have turned to those measures? Probably not. So precisely. Or, you know, and also if they didn't love them, if they were in fact quite happy to get rid of an annoying and tiring husband, they probably wouldn't have gone on all of that.

You know, Olga might have been happy to marry the other prince. So I think it does demonstrate something about love. So yeah, I think both of these stories are brilliant examples. Qualify as Brutal Romantics. Exactly. As you listen to this, me and team history hit are on our way down to the Weddell Sea. joining the expedition mounted by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust to the place where we believe the endurance lies on the seafloor. If we find it, it'll be the greatest underwater discovery since the Titanic. So get ready. Dan Snow's History Hit podcast is the exclusive place to follow in real time

the search for the lost endurance shipwreck in Antarctica, with regular episodes and updates dropping in the feed throughout the month. So what's your second story for us, Kat? Okay, so now I wanted to go in a slightly different direction. And I did raid through the Icelandic sagas for this one, because they are brilliant. But they do have quite a lot of quite traditional love stories. It's a lot about marriage and it's about who's going to marry who. And some of them are quite complex people sort of coming and going.

But I thought, well, now in the 21st century, you know, how can we find something that is a bit relevant and interesting to us? maybe something we weren't quite expecting from the 13th century. And the saga, the Azanic sagas, also, some of them are really quite interesting and quite juicy. You get a lot of detail about some of these relationships. Some of them are full of euphemisms and others are quite direct and explicit. So I wanted to find one that was more about some slightly more casual relationships. That's very similar sort of things that didn't necessarily end in lifelong marriage and happiness,

but actually which I think are romantic in a way. So I settled on one of them, which is the saga of somebody called Bosi or Bosa, depending how you pronounce it. And it is a really incredible story. It falls into that really quite explicit category, I would say. So I'm not going to give all that full details, but people can definitely check that one out. And it's a really interesting saga. So it talks about two best friends, basically. So the primary hero of the saga is actually somebody called Herod, who is the, son of the king of Sweden. And he's one of the characters, but Bosi really is the main one that we follow. And that's Herod's best friend. He's the youngest son of a former Viking and his mother was

a shield maiden. So he's got a good starting point as a sort of warrior. And Bosi's actually a little bit rough, but the two of them are really good friends and they end up going on lots of Viking raids together. Now eventually, I'm as a whole big sort of preamble to all of this, which I'm not going to go into the detail of, but suppose it gets into trouble. And to the extent that Herod's father, the king, actually threatens to execute them both, and he ends up sending them into exile. And he will kill them unless they complete this very dangerous quest to sort of prove that actually they're good to people. And what they have to do is they have to go back and bring back a vulture's egg inscribed with golden letters. So this is the sort of whole premise of the saga and they go and

meet sorts of people and have lots of adventures. But within this, we hear a lot about Boise especially and the things that he does. And he makes quite a few friends along the way. And he also meets quite a lot of women. And he may come across at first sort of reading of this as a bit of a sort of cat just going out there and having all these flings and affairs. But actually they're really quite nice. So we've got three examples of this happening. And in order to sort of help find this vulturn and the egg. And in one case, the first case, they go to stay with a farmer who has a very beautiful daughter and both in the daughter flirt and at night he sneaks into her bed and they have this amazing conversation which is very direct about his warrior and what his warrior needs. It doesn't take much imagination

to understand what they're talking about, but they have a really nice time and they talk about it and eventually she also gives them the information that they need to find the vulture. And what I like about this is it is just a very short-term relationship, but they were both really, really happy. So she comes out of it very pleased, and so does he. And she ends up basically saving that part of the mission to find the vulture's egg. And then, of course, it doesn't end there. The two men have to go then and rescue a princess, who's in need, of course,

because that's the sort of thing that happened. Bessi goes off again to Permian in Russia, finds another farmer's daughter. I don't know why he's always ending up with these farmer's daughters. Same sort of story. And again, she gives him all the information. There's a lot of graphic detail. There's quite a lot of fun details about their relationship. But again, she's very happy.

He's very happy. He doesn't just leave her upset and taking advantage of her, but she again gives him the information that he needs. There's a lot of humor in these stories as well. And at the end of it, he gives them nice gifts. There's no judgment here. But we have just someone who can go out, meet women, have a really nice time, treat them,

actually quite well by the sound of it. They seem pretty satisfied, which in the Viking age we know was a very important thing. You could divorce your husband if he couldn't satisfy you. That was quite common. So this is a really nice example. In the end, of course, it ends well. There's marriage and everything as well. But I think I like the idea of this, that you have these relationships as well that are actually quite happy ones in the 13th century. Sounds very much like something that could happen in 2022, but we're set in the Viking Age. So that's going to be my slightly alternative a bit of romance from the Viking Age. I think love helps them on their quest, isn't it, in various forms? Absolutely, yeah, to sort of be, you know, maybe short-term love, but maybe that's nice

too. It doesn't have to be marriage and having to avenge your husband in the next 20 years, but it can just be nice. The different kinds of love. So my second story, is it might be well known to some people, but lots of people don't seem to have heard this story. So it's about a couple called Abelard and Eloise. And this is, it's really Romeo and Juliet stuff, probably to the power of 10. This is full-on tragic lovers,

with the added bonus that history hit subscribers can listen to the full audio book of the letters of Abelard and Eloise. So the story centres around a series of letters that details the couple's relationship. Peter Abelard is born somewhere around 10, 17,000, 10, 80 in Palais in Brittany, so we're still in Brittany, to a fairly well-to-do family. He's the oldest son, so expected to inherit.

His father takes great care to give Peter and his brothers a really good education. Peter shows really great aptitude and they're all full of hope for him, but then he gets so interested in all of his books that he decides to quit all his claims to the families, businesses and lands and devote himself to the study of philosophy and divinity. He goes to Paris where he studies under a famous philosopher called William De Champo. But William soon grows jealous because Abelard kind of goes full Darth Vader and becomes much more like the master than the student and is beginning to question everything that William's teaching him. And Abelard becomes increasingly disliked by lots of people around the university and others who do like him encourage him to go and set up his own school, which he does in Melin and then moves to Corbe. There he falls ill because he's working so hard.

and studying so hard, goes back to Brittany for a couple of years and then comes back to Paris again. Some of the academics are continuing to conspire against Abelard and he goes back to Melon again. Not long after this, he opens another school on Mount St Genevieve, which is right near Paris. And this is, we think, around about 1110, so he's about 30 years old. Eventually there's loads more running feuds, but Abelard devotes himself to studying scripture and he delivers all these lectures all over the place on a wide range of topics that go down an absolute storm. As his success grows and becomes more steady, so less people are kind of openly hating him, he begins to turn his thoughts to love. So say he's around about 30 years old.

He's credited with being good looking. He writes lots of romantic poetry and songs, which he sings with a perfect singing voice. So you can start to see why lots of other people in Paris hated him. He's one of those guys who seems to be incredibly good looking and good at everything. So the question was, could he find a woman who he could fall in love with? He says, you know, I don't really want just any woman. I don't want flings kind of thing. I want to find someone who I can talk to and fall in love with. And it turns out that one of the canons at the Church of Notre Dame named Dr. Falbear

has a niece who catches Abelard's eye and also his heart. Her name is Eloise, Eloise Darjean Twil, and she is born, we think, around about 1,100. So there's potentially scandal here. There's a 20-year age gap going on already. The dates of their relationship aren't entirely certain, but there's lots of suggestion that Eloise is probably around 18 or 19 when they actually meet. Abelard apparently fell for Eloise immediately, and the more they talked, the further he falls. Abelard discovered that Full Bear was looking for a tutor for Eloise. And he also then makes out that he, Abelard, is looking for lodging, so somewhere to stay. So Fullbear then comes up with this great idea that Abelard could move in with them,

and instead of paying rent, he could tutor Eloise. And I think I can imagine Abelard turning around and going, oh, well, that's a great idea. How wonderful that you thought of that. So Abelard then gets to spend lots and lots of time with Eloise, learning what she's interested in, and he falls further in love with her, and she begins to fall in love with him too. Fullbear has this country house out at Corbe, where Abelard and Eloise frequently go so that they can,

and do it air quotes, concentrate better on their lessons. For about six months, they enjoy this kind of secret relationship. Abelard writes in one of his letters that at this point he felt like a man who'd been starved almost to death all of his life, but it suddenly brought a great feast. But hey, it wouldn't be a compelling story if that was the happily ever after bit, would it? So rumours begin to crop up all over town that Abelard and Eloise are more than just tutor and pupil.

Full bear, the uncle seems to start off blindly telling every. that this is ridiculous. Abelard is just the tutor. Nothing is going on. And surely he'd know about it if something like this was happening under his roof, wouldn't he? Well, eventually Full Bear finds out the truth and he kicks Abelard out of the house, ordering the couple to stay away from each other, because obviously that always works. It always goes well, doesn't it? Abelard manages to bribe Eloise's singing teacher to take letters to her by which they arrange to meet. Abelard climbs over the garden wall in the middle of the night and the couple managed to get together in the garden. But Eloise has a surprise for him at this point because she's now pregnant.

So if Full Bear had any lingering doubts about what had been going on, they're about to be put to rest. They agree at this point that Eloise should go and stay with Abelard's sister in Brittany until the baby's born. And Abelard then trying to do the decent thing, I guess, says that he'll marry Eloise before the baby's born. And to his shock, she refuses. She lists all of these reasons why she would prefer to remain his mistress and his lover rather than a kind of housewife who he might end up taking for granted. Abelard resolves then to tell Full Bear what's going on in the hopes of preventing him from being too upset,

which seems unlikely, surely. But by the time he gets there, Full Bear has already heard the story that Eloise is pregnant and has run away, and he's obviously not very happy. So Abelard then falls back on pleading that love had driven him. mad and caused him to do all of these things, so it wasn't really his fault. Full Bear still isn't happy, and after a blazing row, they eventually agree that Abelard should marry Eloise after the baby's born so that they can draw a kind of veil of respectability over the whole business. And obviously both these men, while they're discussing all of this,

aren't asking Eloise what she thinks while she's away in Brittany. So Abelard goes to Brittany to see Heloise, tells her that her uncle's furious, but that he's managed to calm him down. and she promptly tells Abelard that she couldn't care less if her uncle's annoyed. She still doesn't want to marry Abelard. She maintains that marriage would be what she calls the tomb of their love. So eventually, Abelard does manage to convince Eloise to go through with a wedding to try and settle things down. After she's given birth to a son, they go back to Paris, they get married in a secret ceremony with only Full Bear and a couple of their best friends present.

But again, word soon gets out that there's all this scandal. they've had a baby and they've got married. And there's lots of suspicion that Full Bear is spreading the story because he's still annoyed about everything that's gone on. Eloise then apparently starts lots and lots of rumours that our uncle's a liar. And Full Bear really loses his call. So the account at this point says that he proceeded to use her barbarously. So there's a suggestion of some physical violence being involved here.

And Abelar decides that he can't sit by and watch all of this happen. So the couple decided that the baby should go and stay with Abelard's sister. back in Brittany, and Eloise should become a nun, though she wouldn't take the veil so that she'd be able to leave the nunnery again after things had calmed down. Abelard then continues to visit Eloise at the nunnery at Argentin-Tweil, and the other nuns seem perfectly happy to let them sort of carry on as a married couple. So Fulbear finds out about this now, and if he flip before, then this is when he really, really loses it completely. He hires some assassins and bribes one of Abelard's servants to let the assassins into Abelard's room.

at night, but they're not there to kill Abelard. Instead, Fulbert has instructed them to cut off Abelard's manhood and leave him alive. So then the assassins and the servant flee, but eventually they're caught by the authorities. They have their eyes put out, and for good measure they have their manhoods cut off to in retribution for the crime that they've committed. So after this, Abelard retires to a monastery. He says himself that he took the habit more out of shame than devotion so he's so upset at being no longer a full man, if you like, no longer able to be a proper husband to Eloise that he takes vows and retires into a monastery. Eloise ends up moving to an abbey called the Paraclette, which Abelard had actually started,

where she becomes the first prioress, and he goes to St Gildas in Brittany, where he becomes the abbot. And the two didn't see each other again for years and years and years, a couple of decades maybe. And that's not the end of the story. And the reason that we know about this is because while they were both busy, Abelard goes back to his studies. And again, he's being harassed by people who disagree with him. Eloise is making a success of her Abbey.

But Abelard eventually writes a letter to a friend who's going through a load of difficult stuff at the moment. And Abelard decides it would help if he explains all of this that happened to him, the trauma of his relationship with Eloise to try and make his friend feel better. somehow this letter ends up in front of Eloise, who recognises the handwriting and opens it. And this begins in exchange of another six letters in which she expresses her enduring love for Abalad, and he tells her that she ought to forget him and focus on her work. And you kind of get the strong sense that he's still really, like, deeply embarrassed about what happened to him.

And although he still loves Eloise too, he won't drag her from the position at the Abbey just to be with him. He talks about taking care of their immortal souls now rather than their bodies anymore. And eventually Abelard dies in about 1142, probably in his early 60s. He's buried at San Marcel, but his bones are pretty soon dug up and smuggled to the paraclete, where Eloise has them entombed within the abbey there. And she lives for another 20 or so years. She dies in 1164, at which point she has her body laid to rest beside his. and although there's some claims that they're still buried at the paraclete,

other people suggest that their bones were actually moved to a tomb that's marked with their name at the Pell Lechais Cemetery in eastern Paris. So whichever is true, I guess we can hope that they're still together after having been forced apart for so long in life. So I don't know whether that one qualifies us a little bit more romantic. It's got plenty of medieval brutality in there for us, but maybe a little bit more of a romantic story than my other one. You know what? I think you pretty much convinced me. I do like that one. I love the fact that they are having their bones buried together at the end. I think that's a definite real long-term commitment, isn't it?

So much as I sort of started out thinking my Olga of Kiev or Bosse's happy-go-lucky version of love, I have to say, I did like that story an awful lot and maybe a little bit more of a traditional Valentine's love story, I suppose. Yeah, and we're just lucky to have all of these letters. I mean, we're never quite sure how Abelard's letter ends up in front of Elouise. And she says in her letter, you know, if I hadn't recognised the handwriting instantly, I'd never have paid any attention or I certainly wouldn't have opened somebody else's mail, but having not heard anything of Abelard for so long, she couldn't resist it. And then you get this wonderful exchange of they very clearly still love each other very much. Abelard hasn't managed to get over what was done to him.

and Eloise is trying to convince him. Yeah, but it doesn't matter that much to her, really, does it? Clearly. So she must love him for something else. Yeah, and I think she repeatedly says, you know, I don't, that's not the part of you I loved. Without putting it probably in quite those terms, you know, you're no less of a man to me. You're still Abelar.

And I still love you. And he's very much saying, you know, well, we've both taken these holy vows now. And you get the sense that he's saying we can't be together in this life now, but there's always the next one. You know, we're both good at what we do. now we'll both end up in heaven and maybe we'll meet there one day. And yeah, he dies and she has his remains taken to where she is and she lives and works around his tomb for the next 20 years and then is laid to rest next to him. So yeah. I don't think Bosi would have gotten that sort

of loyalty from any of his lovers, would he really quite? Probably not. But he probably had more fun than Abelard and Eloise. I think he did enjoy himself quite a lot. And so did the women. So it's Yeah, good story for them too. I think it's probably the one out of four that we might class as a happy story because the other three probably aren't. Exactly. There's good outcomes all along, I think, in that story. Definitely.

So I guess we'd be interested to hear from you guys, which one of those you think is the best story, the most romantic or the most interesting or just the most brutal or the one that would make the best film? I don't know. Yeah. Oh, gosh, good films there. That's a good idea.

There's some fantastic stories. Yeah, there's something that we've missed that we should know about Do you let us know on social media. Yeah, do you have a great fantastic medieval love story that we've completely overlooked here? Please tell us all about it. So thank you so much for joining us for this special Valentine's episode of Gone Medieval.

It's been brilliant to do this with Kat. We're so often doing this completely apart. It's wonderful to share an episode on such a fantastic topic. Absolutely. Great to join forces and get the whole of the medieval period with some slightly different perspectives. Absolutely. Fantastic.

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