Gone Medieval - Medieval Treasures at the National Archives

Episode Date: October 23, 2021

The National Archives can be seen as any medieval historian's candy store. It's filled with an amazing variety of materials, from the Magna Carta to mummified rats. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt is joined by Principal Records Specialist at The National Archives (TNA), Dr. Euan Roger. Euan takes us through the fascinating ancient documents, materials, and upcoming endeavours that the TNA has to offer, even including a riddle. Can you help us make sense of this early Tudor puzzle? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. The National Archives is any medieval historian's treasure trove. Ancient documents, some of them central to the greatest stories in history, fill boxes, aisles and whole rooms. My guest today is you and Roger, the principal medieval records specialist at the National Archives and a man whose job title might as well to me be child in a sweet shop. Thank you very much for joining us,

Hugh in. Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here. Brilliant. So just as our opener, what is the National Archives? How did it come to be this big depository of important documents? Yeah, so the National Archives, or TNA for short, used to be known as the Public Record Office or PRO, and we're the official archive and publisher for UK Central Government and for England and Wales. And we hold records sent to us from UK central government and the central law courts for permanent preservation. So our collections contain over a thousand years of iconic national documents from Doomsday to Downing Street tweets. And the public record office was founded in 1838 to safely keep the public records after centuries of rather suspect record keeping across different archives associated with each part of government

and the law courts. So originally, at the time of the Norman kings, the monarch would have conducted the practical business of state through an itinerant court, so following the king around the country in the course of his travels. And the business of the courts produced written records which formed part of the king's treasure. And so they were kept, basically, whichever royal palace the king was staying in, that's where the records would be kept. But as government becomes more complex in the 13th century, the departments of state, such as the royal chancery, so the writing office, they stopped travelling around with the king and start to settle down in permanent places. And consequently, the different departments of government

all came to have their own treasuries or record repositories, including at the Tower of London, the chapter house at Westminster Abbey, and the Rolls Chapel on Chancery Lane, where the PRO would later be housed. But from the earliest days onwards, the practices of those in charge of storing and accessing records in the pre-modern period could sometimes be a little bit questionable. And one of my favourite stories about how they're keeping these records is that the records of the court of common pleas. So that's one of the main central law courts which sits in Westminster Hall. They stored their records in the medieval period in a chamber called hell underneath the hall. So the room's official title was the common pleas treasury, but they called it hell.

And it was staffed by the clerk of hell, which is quite frankly one of the best job titles I think I've ever heard. And there's a lovely reference in one of the records about this. So they actually try and stop people going into hell saying none other shall have their recourse into hell. at their pleasure. And by the reign of Ebert IV, they have a second chamber, which is named heaven or paradise in the same vicinity. And later on, we also find purgatory among the offices around Westminster. And these names come to represent yards, rooms, and even taverns on the Westminster estate. But by Henry VIII's reign, and this is something that, again, happens in the 19th century, it turns out that several of these records become damaged. So in Henry the 8th rain,

it was by the moisture of the floor of the said house and the rotting of the chest standing in the floor of earth in the same and they were greatly broken by both rats and mice and some be rotten and some destroyed. And so they try and make repairs at this time. But it was a similar concern which would lead to the foundation of the PRO in the 19th century, the problem of rats. So after a series of inquiries by committees within the House of Lords

into the storage of historical documents in the 18th century, At the start of the 19th century, a man named Henry Cole begins working with the records of government. And he's shocked by the poor condition they're being kept in. And so he helps to create what becomes known as the Public Record Office. And as part of his evidence for how poorly these records are being stored, he presents to Parliament a mummified rat. And we effectively call that Henry Cole's rat today. And he'd found this rat of a stomach full of chewed documents,

which helped secure the passing of the Public Records Act in 1890. 38. And what's fascinating is in doing this, the rat actually ends up becoming part of the PRO and now TNA's collections. So the rat has its own document reference, which is E163-24-13-9, and you can sometimes see it on display today. And you can also buy a slightly cuter, fluffy version in our shop. So our early record collections have this very long and complicated history. And in terms of the type of records we hold, they're very much focused on administrative and legal records, that side of medieval life. So what's reflected on the government side of things rather than personal collections, which might be held in, for example,

local archives. So, for example, the records of a royal grant in medieval times, but made using a royal charter, for example, we will hold the process of the issue of that charter, so all the administrative warrants that kind of come into being while that's being granted and the official crown copy of the grant enrolled in the chancery rolls. But the physical charter that was given out to the grantee won't be in our collections. So that would be held at a kind of local or private collection. In a modern example, we would have Department of Education correspondence about the policy and inspection of schools,

but we wouldn't have internal records to the schools themselves. So pupil lists. they'd be at the local level. Where we do have some private deposits of individuals, they tend to be very high-profile people, so the papers of Lord Kitchener, for example, or collections such as Acelian Stoner letters from the 15th century, may also have come into central records by another means,

often linked with the seizure of individual papers or estates when someone was charged with treason, or through, for example, a legal case. So what this means in practice is that all of our collections include, the kind of big hitters such as Doomsday Book and copies of Magna Carta, for example, the vast bulk of our pre-modern collections are the millions of administrative and legal records produced by central administrations through their everyday activities. And these can sometimes be

a bit intimidating to try and search through initially, but they can shed light on a huge number of subjects. And basically, it's a case of looking for where the state and an individual institution or group intersect. So it's a great place to be. So it's a great place to be a huge number of subjects. to work and to research for that very reason, because there are so many different rabbit holes you can go down and new discoveries to be made. It's incredible to think there's everything from Magna Carta to a mummified rack with a belly full of chewed-up records. It's an incredible range of materials to have in there. So how does the TNA work? Can anybody go? Could I go down to the TNA and look at some of these records? Yeah, so our collections are open to absolutely anyone

to access at our site in Q in West London or through our online resources, and that's whether you're an Oxford professor or simply an interested amateur. So all you need to do to get a readers ticket is bring along a couple of forms of ID, and then you can use our research library, access online resources on our computers, visit our exhibition space and cafe without any ID requirements at all for those. And you can also ask our specialist staff for advice about doing your research. So we want to welcome as many people from different backgrounds as possible. Sounds like an incredible day, week, month out, somewhere to get lost. I know one of the projects that I've been keeping a particular eye on

that you and the T&A have been working on, and not in a weird stalkery way, but because it's something I'm interested in, is the re-adeption of Henry the 6th. So this is his brief return to the throne in late 1470 until early 1471, kind of called the re-adeption as an invented word for what do you call a king who's been booted off the throne and then comes back for a while. But it was a famously poorly documented period due to lots of the materials being destroyed when the Yorkists come back to the throne. So was it a challenge to work in that apparent vacuum of material?

Or was there more that survived than you'd expected? Or was it a case of looking in slightly different places? Yeah, the readeption is a period that has absolutely fascinated me for several years now. Because for me, it's such an important period in the Wars of the Roses and Edward the Force reign in particular. but it's often overlooked in part of the histories of this period because of both the shortness of Henry's return to the throne, which as you say is called the re-adeption, and it's actually called that in documents from the time,

even if perhaps Henry is not quite with it, he's suffering mental illness at this point. So it's kind of a puppet king at this point. But because of the shortness of his return to the throne, and as you say, because some of the most crucial records being destroyed in the aftermath of the re-adeption, it's often overlooked. And I think this is particularly evident

when you look at, say, biographies of both Henry the 6th and Edward VIII, where for Henry is often treated as an epilogue to his life and reign, given that he was basically king as a figurehead, while Edward's biographers have naturally tended to focus on his movements when he's in exile, rather than events in England. So it's a really complex period, but as I say, I think it's a real turning point in which Edward the 4 secures his legacy, removes almost all of his chief rivals, and it leads to relative peace in England for the next decade until Edward's death. But it could easily have gone the other way. So I think it is really important to study this very short period in detail, despite the

difficulties and challenges associated with this. And I think it's as fundamental as we know Parliament sat during that period, but we don't have any records of what might have been discussed or decided there. Yeah, exactly. So the one main document, which might have shed light on the events, the account of the Parliament, which took place over the winter of 1470 to 71. The Parliament role does appear to have been compiled, but then likely destroyed in the following years. And so we know very few items of parliamentary business for certain. So we know kind of what institutions and individuals would likely have been doing. They'd have been trying to secure confirmation of their various grants and privileges under the returning administration.

But we could only get hints of these interactions in what survives. And particularly as it was the 550th anniversary of this key date in 2020, we decided to try and take a really deep dive into what does survive to see if we could find new angles for what's happened. So one approach we took was to try and link the records held in TNA's collections with records held elsewhere, so the local end of that interaction between state and individual. So this was something I was able to do previously, which kind of led to my interest in the re-adeption, by looking at the clerk of the Parliaments, a man called Baldwin Hyde. Now, Hyde was also a canon of St George's College at Windsor Castle during his time working at the readaption Parliament. And for the period 1468 to 79,

the college has an amazing surviving attendance register in which Hyde's movements during the parliament were recorded. So in this register, it records official attendance in Chapel each day, but it also records where official absence was being granted by the college and one of the community was essentially being paid as being present, but he's not there, he's away somewhere else on official business. So I guess it's a medieval form of kind of official working from home. And in Hyde's case, he was actually working as the clerk of the parliaments. So from linking these two sources and types of documents,

we can actually identify the likely start and end dates for each parliamentary session. and we know that hides there throughout, even if we can't tell exactly the type of records that he's compiling in his records. Now, we were hoping to do more of this, but unfortunately, COVID meant we weren't able to get into these local archives to try and match them up to what's held at TNA. So we're hoping there'll be lots more opportunities for new angles yet to come.

But I think it does show the benefits of comparing different archival sources to try and tell a fuller story. Yeah, it's a good example, I think, of lateral coming at it from a sideways view and we don't have those documents, but can we piece together some of the key figures involved? And can we try and recreate as much as possible from almost nothing? Yeah, exactly. And the other thing we tried to do was we tried to think about where, but more importantly, when different documents might have been produced or recorded or come into the Crown's collections. So one of the most useful types of documents, which give a flavour of medieval life just

generally at this time, are legal records, because as disputes arise and are settled in court, they often pick up lots of the flavour of what's going on around different times, if you get insults being recorded, for example, or additional material that's not really legally relevant, but is being used to support a case. And what we found with the readeption is because England's so unsettled at this point, one of the things we realise is you actually have to look several years later to try and find these disputes being recorded, because people don't want to rock the boat in periods of political uncertainty. So we do find you have to look several years later to try and find cases to do with the readaption. And likewise, we find later government officials looking

back on the events of the reedemption and sometimes preserving material from earlier periods, which might otherwise have been lost. So we found, for example, among the records of an exchequer official in Henry the seventh reign, we found a copy of the manifesto put forward against Edward the 4th by his brother George Duke of Clarence and his former ally, the Earl of Warwick, in 1469. So this is part of the events building up to what would become the re-adeption. But we find these almost a couple of decades later being reflected on, looked back on, studied when Henry himself is facing a bit of unrest in the country. So again, it's trying to think, where will things be?

and how long do these disputes take to come out into the open? The other thing we're able to dig into is we kind of think of this period as being quite sparse in terms of records. But what we also found is there's a lot of background administrative work going on throughout the reademption with things like warrants producing these grants. These are documents that often go understudied in comparison to the more popular series which have been published, calendared, made available

in various publications. But the way we were thinking about this was no matter the political intrigue, people still need to be paid for things. The Crown still needs to pay for food and drink and wealthy goods and jewels and clothing. So all of this still needs to go on. And that material does survive.

So it can be in places a bit dry, a bit tricky to try and work out exactly what's going on. But the administration of both of the... Exchequer and the Chancery does keep ticking over and we can start to track day by day how the administration of Royal Favor proceeds in these difficult times. And what we found, I'd say, is that once you look beyond the initial view of this vacuum of records and start to dig a bit deeper, there is more that meets the eye sometimes. And these records can be quite intimidating to look at at first as they're sorted in several different ways. Sometimes they're sorted by the

official they're being sent to, sometimes alphabetically. most commonly by date alone, so they can be very difficult to get your head around how these documents are structured and how they all fit together. But by piecing together these little hints and linking between different series, different collections, you can start to build up a more nuanced picture. Sounds like trying to do a big 10,000 piece jigsaw that's all one colour and desperately trying to make sense of it all. Exactly. And sometimes these records, these kind of warrants that are producing grants and gifts to people. Sometimes they do just copy what you get in the patent rolls.

So the patent rolls are the kind of final product where the letter is being sent out to someone to grant them a position, a title, amount of money. But sometimes you do get more information hidden away in this administrative mass. And one of my favourite examples of this comes from a little bit later in June 1497. So as part of my research into a charitable foundation at Windsor Castle, who are called the Poor Knights of Windsor, and they're now known as the military knights. So this is a group who are meant to provide a living and accommodation for men who have been injured or retired, who had served in the King's Wars and become impoverished as a result.

So it's a kind of early form of Chelsea Pensioner. And I was examining the appointments and grants of these men in the 1480s and 90s. So for the earlier periods, you often get loads of details about their war service. These are veterans who have served in various places in France. But for the later period, you don't get as much detail in these grants, mainly because the 100 years war is over by the stage, and so knights aren't getting ransomed by the French all the time. But one appointment I came across was a man called John Lyle, and the enrolled grant gives basically no information. So it says grant to John Lyle of the place of one of the Knights of Prayers

or Arms with the College of Windsor on the next vacancy. Not a huge amount of information there, nothing really to dig into this man's career. But if you look at the one, which provided this grant, you get more information because the warrant is actually a petition to the Crown requesting this grant. And Lyle himself asked to be granted this position, and in his warrant, which isn't in the grant at all, he states that he was servant to Giles Lord Dornby. And on the basis of this, Giles had requested he be rewarded. If we look at the date of the grant, however, and we see the date of the grant is the 20th of June 1497, and the grant was acceptable. by Henry the 7th, we find a clue about the real reason for his reward, because three days earlier,

the Cornish Rebellion of 1497 had reached Blackheath just outside London, and the rebels in that rebellion were defeated in the Battle of Blackheath by Royal Forces. And one of the men at the very heart of this battle was Giles Lord D' Albany, who finds himself surrounded and wounded in the fighting. And so it seems entirely likely that Lala's getting this reward, probably for his service during the battle, whether he saves Dauberley's life or at least serves him loyal in the fighting. All that information is lost from the final grant. So it's an example of where these grants, the patent rolls, have been published and they're widely available and historians around the world use them regularly.

But without digging into this puzzle as material behind the final product, you'd never really see that full picture. And it is tricky to try and piece this all together. but I think it's worth it a lot of the time to find out more. It sounds like what we think of as being these wealth minds of information actually only tell us a fraction of the story and there's so much there to be bolted onto and built around that bare minimum that tells a much more colourful story about an individual or an event.

Yeah, definitely. And I should say as well, that not all of our records are even accessible in this way at the moment because we have a salt line where we keep lots of records that haven't been sorted. And because of various reasons, including damp and mould on some of these documents, they may never be accessible. But there are millions and millions of records that have never really been looked at. So I think sometimes we think medieval history, what more is there to know?

But there's this vast ocean of documentation still to be properly looked into. I feel like I need to get in there and get into one of those boxes. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast not just the Tudors, we talk about everything from sex to spying, wardrobes to witch trials. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Subscribe from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. So are there any interesting or exciting projects going on at the moment that you could tell us a little bit about? So, yeah, one of the most exciting things is that some of the warrants are starting to be calendared and made more available. So particularly for those interested

in the Wars of the Roses, the Excheca warrants for the Yorkers kings are currently being worked on calendared with the aim to make them more available. So the Rich of the Third Society have funded this for the Ricardium warrants, which will make available a huge amount of fascinating material in the near future, I believe, about Richard of the Third's reign, with payments for all sorts of things from royal gifts at Christmas to the purchase of clothes and jewels. And that's very much a Ricardian society project, but it's going to be amazing when it comes out to properly look through and find out more about Richard's reign. But at TNA, we've also been working with some volunteers and placement students to try and make a start at least on the huge

number of warrants for Edward the Force Rain, although this will probably take a lot longer before it's finished because there's just lots and lots of them. So that's definitely one to watch out for in the future. And I am hoping we can at some point do something similar, with more of the Chancery-style warrants. But for the moment, I've been busy trying to explain some of the oddities I've been finding in these collections, including that of John Lyle. But there's also some weirder things that we've been looking into recently.

So we found in some of these warrants, they randomly start writing part of the documents in mirror writing. So in the kind of style of writing that Leonardo da Vinci is quite famous for doing, you're literally writing so that if you hold a mirror to the document, you can read the document in the mirror. So it's written backwards. And we have no idea while they started writing like this for a short period in the 15th century. And a specialist, record specialist, when you find something weird like this,

you often end up going down these kind of research rabbit holes to try and explain these oddities. So in this case, I think it's to do with how these warrants are being sealed. And it opens up more and more questions, which ultimately add to our knowledge about these documents and how they are created. So, Chancey Warrants one for the future, hopefully. At the moment, it's a bit complicated. but we're trying new ways. It's a fascinating, odd detail that for some reason, at some point, they started using mirror writing for presumably a fairly brief period

with no kind of explanation of why they were doing it really. Yeah, I think it's an attempt to essentially make the contents of a document or the kind of summary contents of a document more accessible and readable when a document's been sealed. So you don't seal all these documents and then forget who each one's meant to be sent to. So once you send them off to the Chancellor, you can still tell who they relate to. But I think it's ultimately unsuccessful because it doesn't last very long. So I think it's a kind of a failed attempt at reform potentially.

Yeah, an experimental reform that didn't quite work out. Yeah, exactly. We've also been thinking a lot about how we can explore our pre-modern collections in new ways. And so a lot of the history of the medieval period has been the traditional constitutional, political history. But we're trying to work out where there are new areas to explore new themes to look at. So I've recently been working quite a lot on pre-modern state responses to pandemics and disease, including the earliest known quarantine and social distancing measures in England. So these were put in place at Windsor Castle in 1517 because Henry VIII was terrified that people

with the plague were getting into his castle. And it was instructed that alongside quarantine measures, those suspect of infection had to use a four-foot-long white stick to mark signs of infection while leaving quarantine to collect provisions. And as you can probably imagine, it was obviously fascinating to see how closely some of the measures taken over the last year to years compared with those in the 16th century. So this is something I'm thinking about more and more in terms of the aftermath of the recent pandemic and trying to expand this research a bit more to think about regulation of medical malpractice and medical regulation more broadly in the years leading up to the foundation of the

Royal College Physicians. So it's a kind of reflecting on recent research in line with kind of modern thoughts and experiences. So it's echoes of history and I'm just thinking of a few moments where I would have quite liked a two metre social distancing stick. Seems like a tool that could have come in handy several times over the last couple of years. Yeah, definitely. Do you have any kind of favourite documents? Are they big ones or are the unusual little gems that you come across? Do you find yourself turning the page and finding something unexpectedly amazing? Yeah, so I'm a little bit obsessed with pre-modern marginalia. So the doodles that you find and the kind of lyrics and riddles, which provide really human side to the individuals who compiled these records hundreds of years ago.

And a lot of these tend to appear in our legal records the most, probably the result of kind of long days copying out parchment sheet after parchment sheet, a very repetitive legal text. But they're such an insight into real life and real people in the past. And we've got loads of examples of these from children's exercise books through to records of the highest royal courts, people doodling and instilling the documents with their own personality. So I've got a couple of doodles to show you, and also a riddle. And with the riddle, I cannot for the life of me work out the answer to it. So if any of your listeners can work out what the answer to this riddle is, please let me know. So this is a Tudor riddle which is recorded in the records of the Excheca.

And it reads like this, because you will know the certainty of us whose children these be, to these children, we be mothers, and to our husbands, they be brothers. Uncles to each other, these children be low, and our sons be fathers to our husbands. Take here, here is no outrage. for all this is in true marriage. And I've got no idea. It's one of those kind of puzzles that you still get today

where you're trying to work out my cousins, father, son's sister. I've gone through this time and time again and I have absolutely no idea what it's meant here, but it's a fascinating kind of insight into the types of riddles

that are around in early Tudor England. I'm going to have a good think about that and maybe if anybody who's listening has any thoughts, you can track you and down on Twitter and tell him what you think that means. Yeah, definitely. And I've got some amazing kind of marginal doodles here. So this one that I'm looking at now is from, I think, a 13th century legal record. And what is going on is a whole tableau of images at the top of the document. So we've got a lion and the lion is being poked by a man and the man is poking the lion's rear. Now, we don't know the lion is often a symbol of royal authority. So we don't know whether this is the clerk himself kind of, putting one over the king for having been out on this trip for so long.

We don't know. We've got some lovely images of a horse, and horses do feature quite prominently in some of our records. But most entertainingly, in the top right-hand corner, we have a small man sat on the toilet. And there's a bit of Latin text above his drawing, which says, Blessed of those who go down and hear the word of the Lord.

Now, what this actually probably represents is the word decendo, for going down, here is being used as a bit of a pun to represent the descending of the bowels of this man while he sat on the toilet in quiet contemplation. So it's a very interesting doodle. I suspect that whoever drew it probably wasn't particularly popular with his superiors if they saw this, but we have no idea whether they ever saw this or not. They must have been pretty sure they were going to get away with anything that was cheeky or naughty or, as you say, aimed at the king, maybe even directly. They must have felt like they were anonymous enough

that no one would ever find out. Well, the one I'll show you in just a second is very much not anonymous. They must have been working on the basis that no one was ever actually going to check these records. Although we know on occasion that lawyers and clerks would check them, but they're clearly hoping they could get away with it. So this second image I've got for you

is again from that similar period from the 13th century. In this one, the clerk has drawn his favourite horse. and it's a very large horse and kind of full flight in the image. But what I love about this one is that the clerk has written the horse's name next to the doodle. So the horse's name is given as Rusty.

It's written in Anglo-Norman, but it's the Anglo-Norman for the kind of rusty-coloured word. So I just love the fact that this Clark was maybe riding around on this horse and he's just taking a bit of time to sketch him into the bottom of his record. And it's a fascinating drawing this one. Yeah, maybe Rusty had been a particularly good boy

that day and the clerk felt the need to immortalise him. Exactly. We have some more images from the 15th century as well. So this isn't just the kind of 13th century thing. And there's one clerk that absolutely fascinates me. So this is from 1471, this record. And so just after the events of the readaption, what we have is a clerk called Forster, drawing himself on several occasions throughout one of the records of the court of common pleas. So one of these main central legal records. And in these records, they would write their names at the bottom to authorise each bit of parchment and Forster turns the F of his surname into elaborate doodles. So on one occasion, he turns himself into a centaur and as a centaur who has to stab himself to give that crossbar of the F. But in this image here,

we've got what appears to be Forster's night out in London. Because we have, Forster, who's bleeding quite profusely from his forehead, seemingly accosting a young woman whose breasts are out. And in her hand, she's got a glove and she's got some sort of either a purse or something that she's whacked him around the head with. And we see her featuring in other images from this same role carrying a barrel of beer. So we think she's probably a barmaid. And this image has nothing to do with the records and the cases around it. So we think it's just Forster potentially kind of narrating his night out in a visual form. There is some interesting iconography.

So there's a stalk with a snake in its mouth, which may indicate perhaps that she's a prostitute. But we don't really know. We've just got this image of Forster profusely bleeding. So I think he definitely got what he deserved in this occasion. Yeah. Lad's Night Out in London went a bit wrong, as it has been doing for 600 years since.

Exactly. And Forster does this, I think about six or seven or eight times within this role. But what is absolutely fascinating to me, me is I think he gets told off for it because he carries on as a clerk in the next legal term, but he reverts back to a very small signature of his name. There is no elaboration whatsoever. It is just forced to are written very neatly, very professionally at the bottom of his entries. So I think someone does see this and gives him a bit of a telling off. Gets a slap twist. Yes, exactly. And I'll just show you one more image, or talk about one more

which is my absolute favourite. I don't think I can ever top this as a doodle as finding another dougal better than this. So this is from the 13th century. And again, it's from the records of the court of King's Bench. It's a role of essentially excuses from people not coming to court. And at the bottom of one of the entries, we have the text, my lords is like this, followed by a very, very, possibly the smallest he could draw set of genitals. And then the line below, it reads, but Gerrard's is like this. Q, a very large deal of genitals. So this is literally Gerard, who we think must be the clerk,

having a go about his master, the person he's writing for, and claiming that Gerard is substantially better endowed than his master. So it's a sign, I think, that things don't really change across hundreds of years. People are still kind of sketching these things on their records, although perhaps not on the records of the central law courts these days. Yeah, maybe not, but I was going to say it's amazing how the kind of people were insulting, the bosses, and the ways in which we're insulting people haven't changed in seven, eight hundred years? Yeah, exactly. And there's another one from around a similar time where one of the clerks has written his name to authorise the parchment sheet.

And then someone else has come along afterwards and added the words old shrew above this guy's name. So yeah, it's clearly kind of this subterfuge, this, yeah, having a good. go at the Masters in the court. Sticking it to the man. Yeah, exactly. I should say, we've actually just released a set of playing cards based on some of our nice marginalia examples and some seals, although sadly I wasn't allowed to include the naughty ones. But you can buy these in TNA's shop, in Q and online as well.

Oh, fantastic. I'd say for listeners as well, if Ewing can send me some of these images, we'll try and pop these up on social media when the episode comes out so you can have a look at what Ewan's talking about. If you want to have a look, particularly at the Gerard one, maybe you don't, but we'll try and get some of those images up on social media so that everyone can look at what it is that Ewan is talking about there. And so do you have any advice for anyone who might want to go to the National Archive

to research something? So maybe people don't know where to start. Is there a good way to make the most of the trip? Do you have any tips on how people should interact with the National Archives? Yeah, definitely. The main one I would say is do as much research as you can before you come. So work out what it is you want to look out. Think about where the type of records you might want might exist.

Is something being paid for by government? If so, you want to look at Exchequer. It's something being written by government. You might want to look at Chancery. So think about that. And the best way of doing that is we've produced a whole series of research guides which draw on decades of research and specialist knowledge at the National Archives and indeed based on material we had at the Public Record Office,

previously. So this information is all freely available on our website and it gives you both a breakdown of where you can find things, but also then when you do find them, how are these things structured? How are you going to find things within a particular series? Because this will change depending on what you're looking at. So by having a read through those research guides in detail, then you're starting with a head start. And do as well use the research expertise that we have at the archives. So we have like a live chat service. We have an email inquiry service. If you're not sure about something and the research guide doesn't really explain it properly, or you're not understanding what it means, just get in touch. Like we are here

to help you do your research, to help you do the best research you can possibly do. So particularly if you're coming to queue from a long way away, just prep in advance, talk to us, read our materials and just make sure you can then spend the best amount of time that you can. You can, you can, you can in the archives. I can feel myself in danger of getting banned from the live chat for being on there too much and asking too many stupid questions. And just to end on, you gave me a little teaser before we started recording that you might be able to give us a little bit of an exclusive. Yeah, so I'm really excited about this. I can't say too much in terms of content, as we've not quite finished the final prep for this yet. But at the moment, we're currently developing a major exhibition at TNA on the history of

high treason from the 1352 Treason Act through to the modern day. And it's hopefully going to be an amazing exhibition which will tell some of the biggest stories in the nation's history. From the Wars of the Roses to the Second World War, from Richard the Second to Charles I. From Eleanor Cobham, the Royal Witch to Anne Boleyn. And as well, we're going to try and tell some of the lesser known stories of those branded as traitors. So at its most basic, treason was a violation by a subject of their allegiance to the sovereign or the state. And so in some way, the story of treason is also a story of power and the relationship between the state and its subjects from the medieval period right through to the modern day. And it's been absolutely fascinating

to research this, as we've been exploring across different specialist teams at TNA, the ways in which different generations would interpret, tweak and alter the definitions of treason in line with the concerns of their age. Adding new legislation where required, but what fascinates me the most is that the core of that 1352 treason act remains in force relatively unchanged today. So it's a story of how we've come from the 14th century to the country, the state that we are today, but how at the core of this legislation is we still have those same acts in force. So it's a history of an act, a piece of legislation, but I think it tells a much bigger story and we're all very, very excited for it. So do keep an eye out for this exhibition

at the end of next year at TNA and come to queue, if you can, to come and see some of these iconic documents together on display for the first time. Sounds like it could be an incredible opportunity to, as you say, chart the development of treason, how much of it has stayed the same and how much of it has changed

as the kingdom changed into a state and the nation and the world around us changed. Has treason really changed at its core? Or, as you say, is it still very much the same as it's always been with things around the fringes being updated and altered a little bit. So that sounds like a fascinating one to definitely keep an eye out for. Thank you very much for you.

And that's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's been great. It's been wonderful to have a peek behind the scenes at the National Archives. So don't forget to join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another fantastic brand new episode. Don't forget to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've got.

medieval. I would like to give a quick mention to an episode of the ancients, also from history hit, in the lost tomb of Alexander the Great, Tristan is joined by Dr Chris Norton to talk about just where Alexander's resting place might be. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hit.