Gone Medieval - Real Medieval Women with Philippa Gregory

Episode Date: March 12, 2024

When we think about women in the Middle Ages, we know about Eleanor of Aquitaine or Hildegard of Bingen, but we are a lot less likely to think about the alewives plying their trade in cities, or the noble ladies quietly running their estates, or even the nuns falling in love with each other and praising God. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Jannega is joined by the best-selling novelist and historian Philippa Gregory, whose new book, Normal Women: 900 Years of Making History, sets the record straight.This episode with edited by Ella Blaxill and produced by Rob Weinberg.**WARNING: This episode contains some explicit sexual discussion**Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code MEDIEVAL - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. When the average person thinks about the medieval period, the first thing that springs to mind isn't necessarily the women who inhabited it. I can largely forgive that tendency, because the people who wrote the medieval works that survived to us were often men, as women were very rarely taught to read, let alone write. So we know the names of great women, like Eleanor of Aquitaine or Hildegard of Bingon, but we are a lot less likely to think about the ale wives

plying their trade in cities, or the noble ladies quietly running their estates, or even the nuns falling in love with each other and praising God inside nunneries. I'm Eleanor Yonaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I am delighted to be talking about one of my favorite subjects, medieval women,

and I'm even more excited to be joined by best-selling historical novelist and historian, Philippa Gregory, whose new book, Normal Women, 900 Years of Making History, does just that. Philippa, first of all, thank you so very much for agreeing to come on the podcast. It's a real pleasure. Thank you for inviting me. I am absolutely delighted to have you here because you, like me, share a desire to talk about, well, normal women, as you've done so expertly throughout your book.

Just the title of the book is so bold and I was so excited when it came out because I love talking about normal women in the first place. that's most of everybody. And I think that regular people are who makes history, right? Absolutely. And I think the way to understand the history of England, it cannot be solely by reading the books that are offered us as the history of England, that they are almost all drawn from chronicles exclusively written by men, many of them in monastic life. So not only did they not know women very well, they were sworn not to know women very well. So you've got a very, very limited source material and that source material gets developed as we all know by subsequent

chroniclers and commentators all the commentators most of the commentators up until the 17th century are male and then all of that gets really developed in the sort of heyday of medieval studies which is the Victorian male historians women aren't allowed to attend universities yet and all of the books and all of the publishers and all of the editors and all of the historians are men so you've get an absolutely biased national story, which then gets offered to us as the source of any histories that we might write. And all I wanted to do was to really restore the gaze of women to this picture, the understanding of women to this picture, and the actual women doing the historical events to be restored to their history. So this is something that's come up in my work

before, because one of my favorite English queens is Anne of Bohemia. It's like, do a lot of work on her father, Charles the 4th, and I really like the Luxembourg's. And if you read Victorian things about Anna of Bohemia, they are not only just dismissive, but they insult her where they'll say things like she was very silly. She had a stupid sigil. She's to blame for bringing in the hen in the two crowned hat. All of her femininity are these things that Victorian historians very specifically don't like, and that's what they write about her. You know, nothing about. about her incredible power as a queen or what queens do behind the scenes

to do things like get London back on good footing with the king? She's a really interesting person, but that's not what anybody wants to talk about. Absolutely, I agree. And I think the idea also that the Victorian historians have a concept of female nature,

what is natural, normal and right for women, and then they impose that retrospectively back onto medieval women and therefore make these quite extraordinary judgments about whether a woman is a good queen or not a good queen. And they twist themselves up into such difficulties because some of the judgments are very moralistic, particularly judgments about people's sexuality. And the Victorian view of what is appropriate sexuality really only applies to the Victorian age. You cannot apply it retrospectively.

Certainly from what we know of medieval women's sexuality, it was quite unlike what the Victorians would think was all right, and indeed quite unlike what we would think was all right. So I'm always conscious when I'm doing this sort of revisionist history that I too am a creature of my time, and I too have to really watch for my own beloved darlings when I'm writing. It's a struggle that I'm not sure that I will ever be able to overcome certainly. I suppose that that's a good thing because it would mean that history was done if we could ever, you know, get a perfect piece. You simply can't overcome it, but what interests me so much is that people can be perfectly

clear-sighted about someone from another period being completely determined by the culture they're raised in and then not see it for themselves, which, of course, everything I write, especially when I'm writing fiction, when I'm writing in first person, when I'm writing as a medieval woman, it starts from an anachronism. You cannot convincingly inhabit another person anyway. you certainly can't convincing inhabit someone who's your 20 times grandparent convincingly. Well, what you can do, and that's the joy of historical fiction, is you can have a good go at it. And I think it's really reasonable to start every novel with the premise that this is fiction. But really, you need to start every history with the premise that there is a degree of fictional reconstruction going on here as well, which historians tend to deny.

You've absolutely got us there. I mean, one of the things that your book does incredibly well is that just as you were saying with the way that our ideas about women in the medieval period are really covered by Victorian historians who write about this, you're also really great at pointing out the fact that the history of women isn't just a perfect arc of things being bad in the past and a perfect run through the future where women get better rights and they are seen perfectly as equals. And you really are able to elucidate about the muddiness that there is for women, especially, I think, in the medieval period. Yes, and I think one of the really interesting things about doing such a long history. So everybody these days does either a long period of a very limited subject, I always remember with great affection, the book called History of Cod. and it was literally cod fishery and cod preservation and cod eating. And I remember going like, have we now got to such tiny histories that we're taking one thing, in this case a fish, and writing its history?

But we're not doing the history of women. In all fairness, it was an extremely interesting book. But there's this sort of fashion of taking a limited topic and a long run of time or a long run of time on a very limited topic like, say, an art form or something. But what I wanted to do was a long run of time on a big topic, so women over a long period of time. And what that yields to you is the awareness of how the very view of history itself has itself a history. So the idea that things will get better and that things are getting better and that it is the nature of things to get better comes in in the Enlightenment. And you really see it arrive.

And on the one hand, you go like, well, this is surely nice to. finally get to a point where people think things are improving and they're not just stuck in the mud of the medieval world and everything being always the same forever, God being constant, the church being constant, everything's always the same. Everybody dies about the same sort of age. This lasting nature of what we call the medieval period, which is itself a myth. But broadly speaking, there is a sort of a stolidity about it, I would argue. You might think differently. I'm kind of waiting for you to jump in and say, not at all. Anyway, you then get to the 18th century, late 17th century, and there's this sense that everything is changing, but everybody is getting more polite, everybody's getting more cultured, everybody's getting better educated. We're finding out stuff about science, which gives us facts that we can rely on, which is in turn going to give us medicine, which is effective, and everything will get better. And of course, it doesn't apply to women. So they immediately go, like, Well, why aren't women getting better? Why are women still so talkative and ignorant and vulgar?

And, you know, why they carry on having babies in this, you know, rather disgusting way? Why is their fertility so unreliable? When we know that everything gets better all the time, why are women so cyclical, both in their long life cycle but also in their monthly cycles? What is it that means that women are not becoming enlightened? And then, of course, you have historians now who say that women didn't have a renaissance, either, that some of these big historical changes barely impinge upon the lives of normal women. I agree with you because I suppose one of the things about the medieval period, and of course there are huge differences, as you point out in your book, you know, for example, in terms of

what the pre-Norman world is like as opposed to the post-Norman world, there are big changes in government or, you know, indeed for women the rights that they have. But we can sort of talk fairly confidently about the medieval period because as you say, there are big things that exist in it, like the structure of the church as kind of an overarching thing. Kingdoms and there rises and falls and sure that could be varying dynasties within a particular kingdom, but there are things we expect to see. This holds true into even the early modern period, and sometimes it can be really difficult to say where we are, because as you say, the medieval period is made up. And so how do you know that you've come too far. And I always say, well, okay, if they're Protestants, then you've come too far,

because the church no longer exists as the overarching structure. So we'll call that not medieval, but that doesn't mean that everyone's changed their minds. But I just think that- If that's your cut-off point, and it's fascinating that that is your cut-up point, you know, how do you cope with Mary Judah? It's so difficult. Well, this is the trouble is I love the 16th century, so I'm often kind of trying to say, no. That's the same, and I can have it, you know, but I just think that these things are really porous. I don't think Mary Tudor would have woken up and told you, oh, well, I'm a modern woman. I'm not like those people before. Exactly. And if you look at her personal life, well, both her political life and her

personal life, her political life is very much like that of a medieval woman leader, sort of in constant stress and tension with the men around her who think they know naturally more than she does and better than her. And her personal life, like her fertility, that's a very medieval story of a real ignorance around what's happening. She doesn't feel modern to me at all, but I'm fascinated that you see the dominance of the Protestant Church as being a sign of moving out of the, it's certainly not high medieval anymore. I agree with you absolutely, it's not that. But isn't it funny how we start inventing terms to kind of cover our embarrassment? So we have high medieval and then we have late medieval and then it's kind of hardly medieval at all.

And I'm a late medievalist. Yes. Now, I'm often late as well. But also, I think one of the things that was so revealing to me about when I was writing normal women was if I decided, and I decided very early on, that I wasn't going to divide the book into sections which represented eras of kingship because I wanted to get away both from the importance of the royals and certainly away. from it being a male history.

I rarely use this word, but between friends I will. If I wanted to get away from patriarchy, then I'm not going to have each chapter for my book headed up by the name of the king. It would be absolutely counter to what I'm trying to do. So I then had this really interesting exercise where I went like, are there eras of women's history in which you can see a coherent thing start and complete its cycle?

And could I make that a section? and sometimes I'm pushing it a bit, to be honest with you, but I still think it's more interesting than just doing it on whether a king's alive or dead. So I start with Doomsday, which I think is a massive impact upon the women of England. And I take that up to the Great Pestilance, which has a massive impact on the women of England and changes their lives collectively. Then I do the Peasants Revolt, which is a women's revolt in my telling of it. And then I try and go through the...

periods looking at the big signposts of women's history and not the big signposts of men's history. So this is a thing that I absolutely loved about normal women is the amount of granular detail you actually get in about women here because sometimes that's all we get for medieval women. It will be a kind of name here and there. And as you mentioned, a lot of my favorite women that you find in the medieval period are involved, for example, with the peasants revolt. But the way that we learn about women oftentimes is when they get in trouble. So they'll show up on tax rolls, when they inherit property, or when we understand that they need to give their lord whatever it is that they owe. And then they also

show up when they've done something wrong. And we hear from all these incredible women who are very willing to put their bodies on the line and commit really, really brave acts against what they see as injustice. And also, we've come across them in the morality courts. And I think that's another very interesting thing, where you get a real insight into the community's reaction to women. So every now and then, I mean, you get a lot of reports of community action against scolding wives. You can see that there comes a point where it's the law that you have a cucking stool in every parish.

And you go like, that's literally legalised punishment of women who are not conforming to the society's requirement of quiet and obedient. And we know that women are going on to the cooking stool, which later becomes a ducking stool, for offences like, quotes, scolding. So that means basically backchat. And that means having an opinion and stating it to your husband, possibly in someone else's hearing. And you go like, this is now a crime. You know, we have lots of reports of that, but every now and then, we get the most wonderful report of, say,

a group of women inspecting a man for potency as matrons of the parish. They have a status in that. They are responsible for sexual issues. And their reports are vicious. They are gratuitously unpleasant about the man's lack of ability. I just think every now and then,

through the years, these voices just ring out. And they say, I can't remember what his name is. I think it's William. I think he's in York. And they say his member is worse than useless. What could be worse than useless? And what a thing to say publicly. I mean publicly about a man for the rest of his life, everywhere he goes, everyone's going to know that his member is worse than useless. It's very vivid. It's very critical. It's very cheeky. And I love that. You know, every now and then, very rare, but every now and then, you hear, about our husband beating his wife and the neighbours go around and beat him up or do a protest or do a charity or do a sort of community protest outside his house.

It doesn't happen very often. It's much more disciplining women. But every now and then you go like, there's a group of women who said enough enough. It tells us a lot about the fact that there are indeed limits. And of course, it's society which limits women in a number of ways. but there are also still ways to push back that are seen as acceptable. And I suppose even if they aren't seen as acceptable, what do you really do if every single woman in the village has decided to do this? There isn't a whole lot that can be done.

So it's almost like a union of women to say, okay, well, that's the end of that. So for example, during enclosure where we see the process by which common land is taken away from ordinary people, it's often women that are the ones who are doing direct action, I suppose, against these containments. Is that correct? Oh, absolutely. And I don't know of a single food riot, stopping grain going out of the country, stopping grain being forestalled by the market, or stopping prices becoming too high. I don't know of a single food riot like that that isn't led by women and mostly staffed by women. You find men definitely get involved, but women are really using the advantage that they have by the misogynistic and sexist law,

which gives them no rights, says women have no position in law, they can't go to court and swear under their own name, their own word is not valid, they belong to their husbands in legal sense. Whereupon, of course, you know, women, therefore it's much less of a risk for them to go out and riot or to go out and stop a cart full of grain or to rob a ship full of, of grain because if the magistrate turns up at all, he has no police force. He can't arrest 50 women. What he's going to do is call their husbands into him later and say, don't let that happen again. You are responsible for that woman. And of course, the husbands say, as husbands have since time immemorial, I do think that might be an unchanging fact of history. I can't tell her

what to do. She damn well does what she likes. And the only time that this starts to break down is when there are so many riots and there are so many challenges to male authority by women that they start prosecuting women directly. That's when you get the names of the rioters and that's when you get really clear written accounts about what's happening in the riots, but it's also because these reports are being sent to the court or to the staff chamber in some cases and the women are being prosecuted directly as responsible for themselves. It's only when women's action becomes so troubling to the elite that women start to become directly prosecuted.

To circle back a little bit to touching on Protestantism and how maybe that's a way of cutting off the medieval period, one of the things I really loved about normal women was you're continuous circling back to how women are perceived within religious circumstances.

And you do a great job of tracking this. I was struck in particular by your discussion of women during the black deaths, where there's this sort of acknowledgement that women can maybe be people who can intercede with God. You note that during the Black Death, when there's such a great mortality that you can't always get a priest in when someone's dying, they decide, well, regular lay people can hear confession of people who are dying. And now, granted, they would rather that you have a man do that. But if you cannot get a man to do it, then suddenly, it turns out women can.

in a pinch, hear your last confession in the same way that men can. And that's really striking in a world where, of course, there are holy women and nuns are certainly a holy bunch of individuals, but they're in no way seen as on par with their male counterparts. And you pick this up all throughout the book. I suppose that's almost a thing that I somewhat find difference about Protestantism. Of course, not that Protestant said, oh, yes, like, absolutely, let's have women be clergy members in the 17th century or something like that. But there is a lot of it. But there is a little bit more, I suppose, of a willingness to admit that souls have a direct relationship with God that isn't mediated by a priest. It's complex, isn't it? Because as you say, in the plague

years, I think it's the bishop of Batham Wells that says, if you can't get a priest and you're dying, a man can hear your confession. And he doesn't say, give you extreme action. But I think the understanding is, is that he can forgive you your sins, i.e. he can speak as a priest with the authority that God speaks to him. So it's as an intermediary for God, so it's huge. And then he says, if you can't get a man, worst case scenario, a woman can do it. And that is massive because not even the holiest abbess, not even Hildegard of Bingham, none of our top religious women have the authority to speak for God and forgive sins as if they were the priest interceding with God for a person. So it's a huge breakthrough, which I have not read about very much anywhere,

because I don't think in the world that we're in today, which is so much more of a secular world, that we understand how powerful it was for a medieval person to be able to say, I am God's representative here on of, and what I tell you is what God. is saying. And to give that authority to a woman, revolutionary. When you come forwards to Protestantism, you do have a lot of women preachers and women visionaries. Of course, you have women martyrs as well, and saints, but with the Protestant church, you don't have a structure to beatify them. So they're not recognized as saints in the Protestant church. But what, especially in some of the more off-to-the-side sects and some of the visionary sects. You do clearly have women who are claiming to speak in tongues or speaking for God

or intercede directly with God. You do have people who are manifesting quite strange physical phenomena, which is supposedly the Holy Spirit moving through them or God moving through them. But the Church of England itself never recruits these people as priests, never lets women preach in church officially. and William Tyndale's translation of the Bible, which goes on to form the big King James version of the Bible, which everybody loves so very, very much, introduces this phrase, a weaker vessel, which is an invention entirely of his own into Peter's letters. And at this point, women are defined as more feeble than a man. So literally in the English translation of the Bible, which of course is translated by Protestants,

So in this founding text of Protestantism, literally the Bible itself, you've got this definition of women as less spiritually strong or able than men. And that, I think, misogynistic view of women just runs through Protestantism right the way up to the 20th century where you have the first application of women to be priests rejected by the church in a huge document which goes through all of the reasons why women. women can't be priests. And it's really late. It's like 1920. And even at 1960, they're still saying women don't want to be priests. They're not likely to want to do it. How would they ever manage if they were to be pregnant or how could they manage with young families? And then the absolute clincher, which is what would happen in a household if a man was a vicar and his wife was to be a vicar to who would cope? You know, God, you know, maybe vickers would have to do their own washing up, even if they were a man. Part of it is quite comical, but the effect of it is to keep women from any

sort of recognition that their spiritual life might be as good as a man's spiritual life, that they might be able to speak to God, even after they get to the point where you can speak in the Houses of Parliament, you can speak to the King, but you can't speak to God until really, really late directly, 1992. It's extraordinarily late. It's so interesting when you have to have these things that are within our living memory where there are still these huge junctions. And I find that really valuable to talk about as well because there is something that we always have to push back against historians where people really desire to be much smarter and more equitable and more just than people in the past and put our own morality onto them and say, oh, well, look,

we're so much better because actually we treat women better. And it's like, all right, well, from 1990, that's when we decided that women were spiritually equal. So, you know, maybe we shouldn't be patting ourselves on the back so much for that. No, absolutely. I also work in film and television with adaptations of my novels. And you have to grab onto the costume and props people and say, prior to the import of sugar into England, not everybody has terrible teeth. It is not a distinguishing characteristic of a peasant. They have fabulous teeth because they don't have any sugar. So the idea that everything is getting better, which is, of course, an enlightenment most, really bigs up the present. So we go like, we are so

liberated, we are so informed. And it's so interesting, I think, particularly in a long history, to look at periods far earlier than us, 500 years ago, well, women's rights were better protected than women's rights are today. One of my favorite things about normal women is your continued discussion of, as you put it, I think quite rightly, women who love women. And I thought this was so well done within a medieval standpoint. There's no such thing as being gay for medieval people. They don't have a concept of being a homosexual because sexuality, that's something that you do. It isn't something that you are.

So if you were to have sex with another person of your same sex, then you're a sodomite. But you could also be a sodomite if you do the wrong sorts of sexual acts with your husband when you're a married woman. But certainly we see sometimes sexual relationships between women. You know, we certainly see, for example, sex toys that would get used between women or we definitely see women who write erotic letters to each other. But we also see these really romantic and loving relationships between women that are not sexual in nature or that I would not classify as sexual. You've already mentioned Hildegard of Bingham. She seems to be very much in love with some of her fellow nuns. but I very much doubt she was having sex with them.

But I think that these relationships are really romantic and worth celebrating and bringing out into the limelight, even though they don't adhere with what modern people really expect from women. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. One of the difficulties of talking about sexuality and history is, again, we don't realize that our view of what sex is is so determined by a historical period. So the invention of sex as an act in which a man penetrates a woman,

it literally happens in the 18th century. You can see it happening. Thomas Lerker has written so interestingly about the fact that up until then, all sorts of practices, all sorts of courtship rituals, all sorts of intimacies of touch and kissing and holding and sleeping in the same bed and sleeping together and sort of sleepouts on collective sex. I don't mean orgies.

I mean couples all in a barn, pairing up, coupling up, like maybe you did at teenage parties. I'm pleased to say, I did. All of that was regarded as a sort of courtship. There wasn't really a sense that this is sex and that isn't. There was very obviously a very clear understanding that when you were pregnant, you had taken a step which would have enormous consequences, but nobody got terribly interested in the act of penetration as being the defining act of sex. So that means that if you're in bed with someone of the same sex and physically intimate with them in all sorts of ways, nobody had you

on a sort of a scale. You know, when I was very much younger a long, long time ago, people would talk about first base and second base as if it was a sort of mountain to climb and the top was penetration. But that's a profoundly modern view. I think it may even be an American phrase, but it's a profoundly modern view. Whereas in the medieval world, there's much more sense of playful intimacy, loving intimacy, regular intimacy obliged by the law. So if you get married, you owe a marital debt. You have to have intimacy with your partner, whether you're a man or a woman. And that goes with the whole idea of women as physical beings who enjoy different forms of sexuality, who are proud of their sexuality. The lovely poem, Chaucer's poem, where one of the

female characters says that if she doesn't have enough sex with her husband, then she will walk out and find another lover and she will be as fresh as a rose. There's no sense of her being rubby or soiled or in any way unattractive as a what we would now say, thirsty woman, just okay, it's fine, it's natural and normal and nice. And that sort of freedom about what sexual practice was, that freedom of language around sexual practice, all of that goes away in round about the 18th century when you start defining ladies as chaste and then in the 19th century ladies as frigid and then in the 19th century, ladies as frigid and sexual desire mostly rooted in men. And that really, to me, it all goes to hell

round about them. That comes a time when what sexual pleasure is, what the sexual act is, is much more defined by men and much more defined in their terms. And women almost disappear from sex altogether. They're just left as sort of opportunities, not as actors. You're bang on there. And it's something that I go on about all the time, this idea that we have decided that we know what the ultimate idea of sex is and that, of course, it's scientific and it's procreative. And because men are scientific, then they're the ones who own it all. To medieval people who thought nothing of the kind, you know, for them, women are the sexual ones. And men are very holy, indeed. And they're being tempted away by the terrible women all the time. It's a fascinating thing that you realize that to the medieval world.

Women are the sexual aggressors. They're the predators. They're the ones who are really, really keen on sex. And it's men who have to constantly fend them off. And that's not just the chroniclers. It's not just the men. It's that in marriage, sex is for procreation. It's not for pleasure. And that the challenge for medieval men is how to procreate and stay faithful to your wife and pay the marital debt without getting involved in an offence against God. Whereas I think when from all that we can see and we can't see that much, tend to have a much more pragmatic view of it. All of the matrons inspecting men don't seem to be very anxious about sexual pleasure. The midwives assisting women to give birth are encouraged and advised to bring her to orgasm by masturbating her. That's just how you do good midwifery. There's no question that that's in any way inappropriate or undesirable. It's also considered in general a basic medical maneuver that medical practitioners should do it with women even when they're not pregnant just to make sure their wounds don't collapse, quote unquote, which of course isn't real, but it's still something that we see come up time and again in medical manuals for women throughout the medieval period.

And it's interesting because, again, us looking back, we would say, oh, and then that's very sexual. But if they don't relate to it like that, then we can't say that it is. If they're telling you that this is a curative process, we have to take their word for it, I'm afraid. Absolutely. And I think it fuses the modern brain of it to think of orgasm as not being a sexual act. I remember reading an very, very old cosmopolitan magazine where the writer said was advising women how to achieve orgasm. It's Cosmopolitan magazine. What else would it be doing? And it said, think of it like a sneeze. You go like, oh, well, yeah. So not sexual, but certainly a sort of ejaculation, as it were. Well, I guess we have to bring this to a close,

but one of the things that I wanted to bring up right here at the end is you hit on this thing in your conclusion, which I really found useful. Or you talk about, and I'm going to quote you, the compulsive habit of men throughout history to define the nature of women. And this completely imaginary label has served as the starting point for the laws about women,

ways to control women, provide for women, define appropriate work for women, sex standards for permitted treatment of women and even to define those who may call themselves women. This was wonderful because I simply like to see people yell about the same things that I do. A lot of the time when we look at the medieval period, as you well know,

because we're looking at things that men are writing all of the time, even if we want to talk about women, we're doing it through the lens of what men think is notable or how men think about women. And we sort of have to take that and screen, quint to see women in the background. And luckily, that gets easier in the modern period, but this is still something that we're really battling every time we pick up a history book, I think. Somebody said the reason that we don't have lots of accounts of women, lords of the manor,

although we know that once a man was given his enormous country estate, he almost always had to go off and do military service, or he had to go to court to stay in with the king, or he had to go to London to pursue his non-country business aspects. So the lands were almost always run by women. So the stewards of the land, the people who are actually working the land, the people who are the entrepreneurs bringing in businesses, the judges sitting in their own courts, these are all women. And the reason that nobody remarks upon it is because it's just how it always is.

So why would you bother to say? You might say, his lordship's gone to London, because that's him going somewhere and you observe that he's gone there. But you wouldn't say, so therefore for the next year, his wife's going to run everything because obviously she isn't. There's nobody else to run it. So you get, in a sense, the obvious things, the really day-to-day, the normal things, like the normal women, are the things that are never reported. That makes in trouble being a historian so much harder.

You only get the exceptional recorded, and that's what you see in the reports, and what you have to do, what I've been doing all the way through this book is going like, yes, but while that was going on, what were the women doing? What can the women have been doing in these circumstances? It's like you don't hear about women going on crusade, but you do hear the Pope saying women and children

cannot go on crusade anymore because there's too many of them and it's too difficult to manage and we don't want women on crusade anymore. And then a hundred years later or so, a Pope says, yeah, okay, they can go, they're going anyway. They can have permission to go. And you go like, so in that 100 years, there was a massive number of women going on crusades, but very, very few names.

I suppose these are the things that we just have to accept when we do history, is that there are always going to be these filters that we have to work around. But there is such richness in there. And I suppose this must be one of the really wonderful things about writing historical fiction, right? You can just take what that Pope said and then do what it is you want with it, whereas I'm trapped, you know. doing regular history and saying, and this is indicative of this, but I can't really say much more. Yes. I mean, I think the big difference that I find between writing history and historical fiction is that you show your workings when you're writing history. So I may deduce that someone is somewhere from the historical record because they turn up in, say, Wales and then I next see them in London.

So I assume that they've made the journey and I can speculate about how they've made the journey. If I was writing a history, I would say, I know they're in Wales, then they're in London. They probably went this way by road, or they may have gone this way, by river, or they might have gone this way by sea. When I'm writing historical fiction, I just decide which is the most likely, and I say they did that because it's an invented character. It's an invented book. I am the author, and I say it's fiction, so my conscience is completely clear on it. If it's incredibly controversial, I might do an author's note at the end and say, this is incredibly controversial, but I took this decision for these reasons. But when I'm writing history, I've either

got a record of how they went and I report on that, or I've either got a record of how everybody else goes, and I have to report on that and say everybody else goes this way, they may have done that way. But what I have to do is to be really transparent about where the material comes from and the conclusions that I've drawn from it, which makes it a more meticulous work for sure, but also such a joy. I mean, you're not a historian unless you love a bit of nitpicking. I think all of us really, really enjoy that. And particularly in something like this about looking at the history of women, because it's been so neglected, I feel a greater obligation to be as accurate as I possibly can be, because for all I know, another 900 years will go by

before somebody has a bash at this. It's important. It's really important. And it's important, especially when you get into, as you were saying, the idea that when people look at the history of women, they make conclusions about the nature of women. We sort of owe it to ourselves to make us full an account of what women can do as possible. Because from that comes the claim to diversity and richness and opportunity which we deserve. Philip, thank you so much. As you say, I really think that normal women goes a long way to getting this complexity out into the public consciousness. And thank you so much

today for coming to chat about it. Thank you. I've really enjoyed the conversation. It's always a pleasure to talk to you. And today was a very good one. Thank you. Thanks so much, as always, for listening. And thank you to Philippa once again for joining me. This has been Gone Medieval from History Hit. And if you liked what you've heard, don't forget to rate, review, follow the podcast and tell your friends about it. If you fancy suggesting an episode, drop us an email at Gone Medieval at HistoryHit.com. Otherwise, my co-host, Matt Lewis, will be back with more Gone Medieval on Friday,

and I'll see you again next Tuesday. Until next time.