Gone Medieval - St. George & Springtime Saints

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

Dr. Eleanor Janega welcomes back Amy Jeffs, author of Saints: A New Legendary of Heroes, Humans, and Magic, to revel in the fascinating stories of spring saints, including England's patron saint St. George. Along the way they encounter that famous tale with the dragon, speaking corpses beneath St. Paul's Cathedral and Brendan the Voyager's epic adventures. They uncover the deep connections these legends have with medieval Christian thought and the creation of national and local mythologies.More:Edward the Confessor and the New Year Saintshttps://open.spotify.com/episode/7i4V3LuC73ZezCgtBAlGQ4Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Additional voice Sophie Gee. It was edited by Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on 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. Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanorianica and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were. And how we got here.

If I took a day off for every Saints day in the calendar, I'd probably never go to work at all. That's because hardly a day goes by when a marvelous saintly character isn't being commemorated or celebrated somewhere in the world. In January of this year, Amy Jeffs, the author of Saints, a new legendary, of heroes, humans, and magic, joined us on Gone Medieval to tell us about St. Edward the Confessor and a few other saints we associate with the first three months of the year. It was such a blast that we've invited Amy back for each quarter of this year to talk us through some of the spectacular and sometimes supernatural, stories of the saints who have made their marks on the coming season. And since it's the month of April and spring is very much in the air,

where better to start than with England's very own patron saint, St. George. I also want to ask her about the early London Bishop Saints, Urquenwald and Meletus, whose legends contribute to the mythology of London, and the Sinbad of Northwestern Europe, Brendan the Voyager, and his encounter with the skull of a giant. But first, let's remind ourselves of that famous story involving a knight called George and a rather unpleasant dragon, or at least one version of it. The people of the ancient city of Salini lived in constant fear. Every night, a terrifying dragon would wrap itself around the city's walls and choke them

with its toxic beams. The screams of the dying echoed through the streets. The king was desperate. The only solution to bring an end to the dragon's nocturnal attacks on his people was to feed it. The citizens were ordered to offer up livestock to the beast, and for a while it worked. The dragon's attack ceased and the people breathed a sigh of relief. But as their herds dwindled, Hanuk set in once more. Grimly, the king and council were forced to make a horrifying decision.

They would sacrifice a child each day, chosen by lottery. But in a cruel twist of fate, the time came when it was the turn of the king's daughter, the princess, Boone, to be offered up. The king begged and fleeted that the angry mob would not relent. For a week he resisted, and each night the dragon, growing impatient, wrapped itself around the city, grieving death upon the people. Riots erupted in the streets. Finally, with a heavy heart, the king relented. He led Una to the city gates, and as the gates slammed shut behind her, she faced the vast lake where the dragon lived.

She slowly approached the wall. water's edge, her heart pounding. She saw the blood-stained stake where previous victims have been tethered. Tears streamed down her face as she realized her fate. Suddenly the water churned and the creature rushed toward her. A monstrous rectilian head broke the surface of the lake, its jet black eyes fixed upon her. But then a thunderish sound split the air, hoofbeats. A horse and rider appeared, launching over Una's head. The mysterious knight's lance struck true, piercing the dragon's neck just as it lunged for the princess. The beast thrashed and roared in agony, its massive body crashing onto the shore.

The knight commanded Una to bind the dragon with her belt, and with trembling hands she obeyed, tightening the leather around its throat. Now, the knight declared, lead it to the city. And so, Princess Una. Once destined to be a sacrifice, led the conquered dragon through the gates of Salini. People lined the streets in awe, watching the girl and the knight who had bought an end to their ordeal. The knight then presented, Neubel, with a choice. He would kill the dragon if the people consented to become Christians and be baptized. 15,000 men, including the king, converted to Christianity.

George, for that was the knight's name, beheaded the dragon with his sword, and the body was hauled out of the city on four ox carts. A church was built to the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. George on the site where the beast had been killed. The spring flowed from its altar with water that cured all disease. What a hero, St. George was?

Or was he? Did he really kill that dragon and convert all those? people to Christianity. Well, Amy, welcome back to Gone Medieval. Thank you for having me back. It's great. I am so excited today because we are going to talk about one of my favorite saints, but I think it's everyone's favorite saint, really. Because I think one of the really big, heavy hitters that comes up in spring is, of course, St. George, right? And he's like, everybody loves him, right? Like, he's the patron saint of several many countries. Everyone likes to talk about him. I love to talk about him myself and point out pictures of him whenever I'm in

an art museum and this sort of a thing. But, you know, as many countries as love him, there are also as many versions of the story of St. George and the dragon, right? But they all seem to really hinge on this motif of dragon sling, which we see biblically all the time in my favorite book of the Bible, the book of Revelation, right? You know, you have St. Michael, more of our particularly slaying dragons. So is this the kind of origin of St. George grappling with a guy, or am I drawing too long a bow on this one? No, I think that's a fair shot.

The story in the book of Revelations of St. Michael battling Lucifer is like the climax of the Christian drama. And something I love about saints' legends is that they are kind of this never-ending battle against the devil, which, well, in human terms, is never ending. But with the last judgment and the apocalypse, it'll finally culminate in this kind of ultimate symbol of Lucifer, the dragon, battling the Archangel Michael. But, you know, in the meantime, every saint is going to come up against a manifestation of that being. And so, but that being will always pop up again. It's like the ultimate kind of James Bond villain sort of thing. You can always write the

sequel until Judgment Day and then you'll see the final battle. So I think, you know, one of the big sort of impulses of saints' legends is to demonstrate the kind of how saints are engaged in this great cosmological battle between heaven and hell and to present the devil in some form or other and any frequently. So you get these kind of manifestations of chaos, leviathons, sometimes swarms of monstrous creatures and sometimes in the case of St. George and saints like St. Margaret, an actual dragon kind of.

And I don't, it's interesting because sometimes I've had, like, some people have asked, you know, in these kinds of podcast scenarios, you know, do people think dragons were real? And it's like, well, creation could be whatever this kind of supernatural needed it to be to play out its cosmic drama.

And so this is a kind of quasi-natural creature, this dragon with its noxious breath. We don't really get the dragon in the earliest legends of St. George. In the earliest ones, and I think it's that fifth century is the earliest, and it's called the Vienna Palimpses now. It's a story of this military hero who won't submit to persecution. Well, he won't submit to his persecutors and relinquish Christianity. and so he undergoes many, many different forms of torture and they're really elaborate, like having his boots filled with nails, having nails hammered into his skull,

and he's boiled in lead, all kinds of things. And he dies three times. And then the Archangel Michael brings him back, which maybe is part of that link with the dragon. Maybe there's something like some synapse connections were triggered a bit later with like, oh, Michael, oh, dragons. But then he is finally killed in a way that many early Christian martyrs are finally. cool where somebody just chops their head off. They're like, all right, this is it.

That's one of the big connections, you know, other than the dragon between St. Margaret and St. George is they both, you know, at some point in time, there's a dragon and then everyone goes, saw it. I'm tired of this. It just chops their heads off, right? And it's one of these things that I have to warn people about when I'm trying to show them medieval art, right? You know, the short-hand is I'm saying, if it's a woman and it's popping out of a dragon, you've got St. Margaret. If you see angel wings and a spear and we're fighting the dragon, that's St. Michael. And if it's a knight on a horse, that's St. George. So the dragon itself isn't really much of a code.

You have to have the dragon plus, right? My daughter's three, and she has to go to a lot of churches for obvious reasons. And now my thing, I mean, it will work probably for, like, I don't know, a year, two years, tops. But when we go in, I'll be like, find a dragon. and she just goes off on like a dragon hunting quest because there's bound to be one, right? Like you said, in every church there's somewhere there's going to be a dragon.

A pew end or a stained glass window. Anyway, the dragon, as far as I understand it, we find the dragon first in Jacobus de Varagene's golden legend in the 13th century. And that is that kind of killer hook, you know, amazing George and the dragon. One of the things I think so interesting when you think about St. Margaret with that like weird pseudo birth where she pops out the belly of the dragon

and the dragon's this like I guess there it's a kind of diabolical mother that she has to escape from. I mean gosh, I was very intrigued by these like later medieval paintings of George defeating the dragon where the dragon is lying on its back and has this kind of, you know how chickens have like a sort of a hole that does everything that cut the eggs come out? It's called a vent. And the dragon will also have this kind of like almost chicken-like vent. And, you know, scholars have observed this and this kind of, you know, if you want to be Freudian about it, like George with his lance, coming in and the dragon with its gaping sort of vent vulva thing is really intriguing. And so, you know, I think there's something about the evil feminine with Margaret's dragon and with George's dragon. and different gendered ways of overcoming it,

like being born from it or kind of skewering it with your phallic symbol. I don't know. Well, I mean, it's over and over. We tend to see this, you know, the feminine being associated with the diabolical. It goes back to Eve, doesn't it? Serpents, et cetera, you know.

So the big sexy thing, though, is the dragon, right? You know, I would be lying if I said that the reason why I like St. George isn't because of the dragon. You know, I'm not particularly interested in the pseudo-military history behind it. But there is one of those, right? We do have a kind of potted history

about the more ordinary St. George, isn't it? Yes. So he's kind of an ideal Milos Christi, soldier of Christ, and many medieval kingdoms take advantage of that stories, or Christian kingdoms. So they use St. George as a symbol of holy war and being a kind of soldier of Christ. And so the banner of St. George develops this kind of red cross. I think actually, I might be wrong,

but I think that we see this first as a kind of resurrection banner in resurrection imagery of Christ. He's often standing. Maybe I'm getting my timeline slightly mixed up. But you see, and he's definitely by the 14th century, you get Christ standing with a banner with the red cross on a white ground. And maybe George kind of being depicted under that flag, there's something going on there about.

He's a soldier of Christ. So anyway, he definitely has these strong military connotations. He's being used to bolster the rhetoric behind the wars happening in Europe or in Christendom, let's say. And so this is the same in England. And it occurs in relation to the Crusades, but specifically in England, you see it. I sort of home in on manuscripts quite a lot. And there's one in the Bodleyan Library. Christchurch

manuscript I want to say 92 your memory is good you say that but I might have got it wrong it's either it's 60 or 92

but it's all digitised the reason I'm saying the shelf mark is in case listeners just want to Google it while we're talking but if I have got it wrong then Google

Walter Mile meet treaties and it's a amazing gilded highly decorated manuscript made for Edward III when he was a teenager like in his mid-teens

and probably commissioned by his mother to commemorate or kind of as a present for when he becomes a knight. And she's also like plossing and scheming because within a year, so she commissions it, I think, in 1326. Within a year she's deposed his dad and he's sort of somehow very conveniently died. Look, you know what? Now it's illegal for women to have hobbies, I see. Fine, fine. So anyway, in the middle of this manuscript, there is an image of St. George giving the arms of England to Edward III, the young Edward III. From this kind of these military connotations around St. George, you're now getting kind of, I support godly kings or kings that are sanctioned by God.

I'm a kind of mediator. And so I think that, you know, within, so Edward III, then he, you know, within a few years, he's exiled his mother, killed her lover. and taken the throne wholesale. And then he is the one who dedicates, who builds and dedicates the chapel of St. George at Windsor, founds the Order of the Garter, all of that stuff. But he really sort of grabs hold of this kind of idea of St. George as a king supporter, not just a war supporter.

And I think that's instrumental in sort of shifting the emphasis away from Edmund the Martyr and Edward the Confessor as the kind of royal English. saints, the king supporters, as was, although they still appear in things like the Wilton Diphtick in the late 14th century. Yeah, so I mean, I guess that there is this kind of more, I don't know, pedestrian version of St. George, you know, like, oh, here's a good soldier, he was a Christian, surprise, the Romans tortured him. You know, it's the standard kind of

early Christian martyr story that we hear. And then it gets dressed up and suddenly, you know, here he is with this dragon. And, you know, I've bothered you all. already about all the art because I'd love it. And I think it's fantastic. But do we have any accounts where this is actually written about as well, whether or not there's anything about the actual slaying of the dragon? The slaying of the dragon is in Jacobus de Varagenei. And so that's the story of a Libyan king of a city called Scylene. The city is being terrorized by a dragon. And it's not fire breathing, but it has noxious breath. And it wraps itself around the city walls and breathed by night and the people who live near the edge of the city all are asphyxiated.

And the city obviously is structured so that the king lives in the middle, so he's okay. He then comes up with this plan where they're going to appease the dragon with sheep and livestock. The dragon lives in a lake near the city, so every day they send out offerings. But eventually they run out of meat to give the dragon. And so they come up with this new plan, which is that they're going to cast lots, but they threw some square things or did something and basically homed in on. a family would have to give up a child to the dragon. They were chosen at random by means of this game.

And it's, you know, in my sort of imagining of the story in my book, I sort of write it as fiction. I'm imagining it from the perspective of the king's daughter, Una. And she's sort of like, oh, these families, they're so nobly giving up their child for the good of the city. And it's really, and she's sort of viewing it from a distance. But then one day the die is cast. And she is chosen.

And the king has totally forgotten. that he himself has a child. She might well be nearly of marriageable age, but she still has to go through and the people of Ciline won't let him duck out of his duties just because he's king. And so he's forced to march his daughter through the streets and send her out through the city gates and she has to go stand at the side of the lake. And now she's eating a very horrible piece of humble pie because she's realising she's just got the same obligations as everybody else. And then the dragon comes leaping out of the water and at that very moment St. George comes charging, he's just passing, he's just wandering past his horse, sees what's going on, sees this damsel in distress and the dragon

leaping out of the water and he charges forward and skewers his lance down into the, sort of, into the dragon's throat. And then the dragon sort of collapses on the shore and he says to the girl, take off your belt, put it round the dragon's neck, so the girl, Una, the Princess, and lead the dragon into the city. So then they processed into the city with her holding the dragon on a lead. And she's this kind of symbol of innocence. And the dragon's a symbol of, I guess they're these forms of womanhood that we were talking about, the kind of pure woman, this little princess creature. And then the dragon is malevolent sort of. And yeah, and then they go into the city and then the story gets slightly less dramatic from a secular perspective because then everyone's baptized because they see what

George has achieved and he then sort of initiates this big mass baptism. So that's what's Jacobus de Varagenae, and he wrote a big collection of Saints' Lives called The Golden Legend. It was from the 13th century, and it was written ubiquitous and medieval Christendom. And it is the kind of model for loads of adaptations into verse or into different vernacular languages. For readings, were performed on Saints' Feast Days, for mystery plays and dramas. The iconographies that we see in stained glass or in paintings and wall paintings and panel paintings, they're often, straight out of the golden Jacobus de Brasini's golden legend.

Yeah, and even after the Reformation in England, you're getting George and the Dragon sort of great pageant wagons being built. It's really interesting, isn't it? Because there are so many pairs that come out of this legend. So you have kind of the divine feminine in the innocent princess and the malevolent feminine in the dragon. You have the Christian good of George, who here is kind of a stand-in for, I don't know, Michael or Christ or whoever is going to

fight a very bad dragon at some point in time. But you also have this pair of the ultimate ways to be a very nice royal, right? Like whether it's being a good knight like St. George, who can be a model for Edward III, or being a very good princess, you know, who has to do the same things as everyone else that she rules and this kind of reminder there. So there are all of these little tweaks that exist in that story that I think are so interesting because you get lots of ways of how to be ideal out of it, I suppose. Yeah, and that kind of what chivalry was, that idea of doing your duty and being faithful to your duty and faithful to your king, which George is doing the king being God. Yeah, but then, you know, you got the big baptism scene at the end, you know.

Less sexy for us in a secular country now, you know, right? But we definitely get that. But okay, so we see George get trotted out. He is a great model for kings and knights generally. But we see him then brought out in this very specific context of the Crusades at some point, right? Yeah, I mean, this is, I think, as I understand it, really where the cult of George in the English imagination, if we're going to home in on. that in relation to Edward III later and St. George's status as patronessate of England. I think that's where that starts being entrenched. And so there he is a symbol of holy war.

I don't think it's so much specific to a single kingdom, but to Christianity and Christendom in general. So no wonder people start wanting to sort of claim him or kings start wanting to claim him for their own specific kingdoms after that point. Yeah, which is quite funny because it's a great question. How do you get St. George as the patron saint of England when, you know, he's hanging out in Africa, likely from around, you know, what is now Turkey? And then English people are like, oh, yeah, I'm having that. And it's like, well, you know, he's got other associations. It's not just about where you're from, right?

Yeah, I mean, it's a think it's a really interesting thing about the history of Christianity is that it has this in its kind of rhetoric, this emphasis on going beyond. individual political entities, individual kingdoms. And that this is, you know, some of the tension that we see with conflicts like the one between Thomas Beckett and Henry II. Henry the second is not that happy with the church and his high-powered ecclesiastics, having authority beyond his own authority, being able to go to Rome. And, you know, this, I think, culminates in England with Henry the 8th and the Reformation, that disquiet.

And so maybe there is a slight impulse on the past of medieval kings, not just of England, but of many different countries that claim St. George as their patron saint, to slightly climb on top of St. George as a symbol of Christendom, but be like putting Christendom beneath the state power as well a bit. So saying if St. George is an emblem of Christendom as a military power, then if he's also. got our kingdom specifically in his high up on his list of things he intercedes for at the divine throne, then we're as important as Christendom. I think there's something between the kind of the tension between state power versus church power that was, we find causing upheaval throughout the Middle Ages. Well, I guess, you know, he's an avatar in very many ways of the importance of military action and violent power, which the church is expressly. not allowed to wield, right? So in a way, it's saying, oh, yes, and we're very necessary as well.

You know, you can be holy and killing things. Please, let's not go too far, right? So you can understand why kings want to uphold this, because, you know, part of their kingliness, part of their reason for existing is the fact that they are in theory able to do these violent things in the name of God, right? So what you want is a guy who's done that, right? Yes. And I think one of the things that's so intriguing about George is his, sorry, we're on, I don't need to use his title, apparently, we're on first name terms, me and George. Yeah, obviously. About Saint George is his longevity after the Reformation. Well, this is something I find interesting. He's got so entwined with ideas of politics and military power that when it would be completely unthinkable to be

making an image of another saint for a procession or a celebration is seen as somehow allowed. You know, George is like a different, he becomes a different category of saint by the very late Middle Ages and into the early modern period. He's a political symbol almost more than he is an ecclesiastical one. Well, there you go. So if you can still have him in the Reformation, right? Like you have to absolutely get rid of Thomas Beckett if you're Henry the 8th.

But George, you can stick around, right? Yeah, as 8th is responsible for the major refurbishments of St. George's Chapel in Windsor, you know, this titular chapel of the Order of the Garter and George is the patron saint of the Order of the Garter. So you can see Henry 8th thinking, yeah, so I'm on side with this idea of this order of knights, these are my kind of knights to the round table, and having this military saint as it's kind of poster saint, we're going to really like cover St. George's chapel in the Badgers or the Tudor dynasty and just kind of own that, be unapologetic about it, even though it doesn't quite sit with the rest of the arguments, I suppose.

I suppose when you have a saint that popular, everyone is just kind of excited who's still around, right? The good stories are good stories. I think that that's one of those. But look, I'm going to drag us away from St. George, which is a very difficult thing to do. I wanted to talk to you, though, about some lesser known saints. We've got these two early London Bishop Saints who are Erkenwald and Melitus. Yeah. And I love Erkenwald and Melisys because I'm a London girl, right? And they are really big in creating this mythology of London in general.

And they're both Spring Saints, you know, so on the 24th of April, we get Melitis. And on the 30th of April, we get Erkenwald. What is it that is, you know, I've got this obvious London affection for them, but what about them grabbed your attention? Yeah, so I want to pick up just on that idea of the mythology of London, because I think that was something like with George, it's the mythology of England. You can't, maybe when it came to the Reformation and his sort of curious longevity, it's that Henry the 8th couldn't throw away St. George without throwing away some of the mythology of kingship and the mythology of England with it. And so if he wanted to keep that, what mythologies like that do is create a sense of unity and kind of pride that's rooted in. in a good story. And so, you know, this was also the case, I think, with Melitus and Erkenwald. And I just, I really think it would be exciting if we all knew more about them. So if they were on the London map.

So their shrines were up by the high altar in Old St. Paul's before the Reformation. There were these side by side, like go to, you know, they would have been very, very beautiful, gilded. They were gilded, great big wooden casket things with jewels and probably. hung with votive offerings in the middle ages, people would have gone to them to say thank you for miracles if they had invoked them at a time in time of need. So they would have been a real, almost like a Christmas tree type eye-catching thing right next to the high altar in old St. Paul's. And Meletus was the first ever bishop of London. So just to recap, I'm sure many listeners for

this is an old hat, but in, you know, 597, Augustine is sent by Gregory the Great to to convert the Anglo-Saxons. He lands in Fanet, and he meets Ethelbert of Kent. And Ethelbert of Kent's wife is already Christian, because she's from Gaul. He converts to Christianity. A church is founded in Kent, in Canterbury. We get this, the remains, St. Augustine becomes the first of Archbishop of Canterbury. And he starts founding bishoprics elsewhere in England where they can get a foothold.

So there's some familial links to London, which means they can get a foothold in there. So one of the guys that he sends to London is Melitus, sets him up as the first bishop of London. There is already, they build a church which becomes St. Paul's, which they dedicate to St. Paul. And I'm trying to think of the best ways to help. Because my way in to the story of Melitus was actually via Edward the confessor. Ah. There is a fantastic, basically, there's a story of, I'm going to do it really quickly and say to listeners, if you want the whole story, go back to the previous episode, which was about Edward

the Confessor. The potted version of the story is that Meletus wanted to build a new church upstream from St. Paul's. And it was on what was then an island. So where Westminster is now, the Thames at that point had many sort of rivulets and little islands. Now those have all been banked off and it's just a single river. So we had this island called Thorny or Thorn Island. He was building a church on there, Meletus was, around 601, I think, 605, that kind of time. And he's on his way to dedicated to St. Peter. But while he's riding there, he doesn't realize, but it's sort of dawn or so. St. Peter has appeared to a fisherman on the Thames.

The fisherman has taken St. Peter in his boat across to the island. St. Peter is miraculously dedicated, consecrated the church to himself. And he's left lots of evidence. Like, he's flung so much holy water around that the walls are just drawn. wrenched. He's left a message in a Greek alphabet on the floor outside the church, and he's had the fishermen catch a really big salmon from the Thames. And he says this, the fisherman, go to Meletus, give him this salmon, tell him, but by this and by other signs that I have left, he will know that I've already dedicated the church. And so that's the kind of one of the big legends around Meletus

by the 13th century that he received this salmon and went and saw the signs and therefore kind of set up this church, founded this church, that will become Westminster Abbey and the necropolis of the Plantagenets. So by the time his shrine is visible, I think the record of his shrine and Erkimole's shrines from the mid-13th century, which is kind of peak Plantagenet time. So they're becoming important to the whole concept of English kingship. So in the first place, he's got this great connection to Westminster Abbey, which you can't get more kingly than that. But he also has some cool connections with Canterbury as well, right? Yes.

And I should also say St. Paul. So he is as the first bishop of London, the one who also found St. Paul. So he is like the founder of St. Paul's and St. Peter's, even though St. Peter put him at the post with actually consecrating it. And then the early miracles of Meletus, which are recorded by Bede, are I think quite a bit more boring. He gets expelled from London because the king that had been there when he was the first bishop died. and the new one that comes in is not very pro-Christian and so he has to sort of run off back to Canterbury and he remains there into old age

and I think at some point he redirects the wind so that a fire doesn't spread. Ooh. Really cool and shouldn't be underestimated. I prefer the salmon story. One of the things we really need to remember is that these are men from North Africa and from Italy You know, that are transforming Eastern England at this time.

I mean, absolutely. And, you know, we might laugh. It's quite funny to be given a salmon and be like, look, everybody, it's a miracle, right? Because it's like, yeah, it's a miracle every time I go down the fishmongers or what have you. But, you know, this is symbolic, right? Like, there's a purpose behind handing salmon off, especially if you're St. Peter, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's the classic St. Peter miracle of throw your nets over the side of the boat, see what you find.

Except, of course, St. Peter was the one throwing the nets originally. There is in the 13th century version of this legend, which is kind of when it first, is that true? And it first appears in the vernacular, I'll say. It says, and as a result, the monks at Westminster Abbey have been given a tithe of salmon by the fishermen of the Thames every year. And one year they forgot their tithe, and it was worse for them. But the amazing thing is, and I don't know if it's an unbroken tradition, so maybe somebody who works in Westminster Abbey can, you know, fill us in on this. But at the moment, on the 29th of June, which is the Feast of St. Peter,

the Deenum chapter of Westminster Abbey meet with the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, who bring a salmon with them and are given some French bread and wine, and they sit down and eat it together in commemoration of the miracle. I love that. Oh, that's so brilliant. Yeah. Anyone at Westminster who wants to invite me, please contact the show. That would be great. Yeah. Absolutely. If the salmon is from the Thames, that would be a miracle.

I mean, yeah, anymore, right? It's interesting, right? Because we have these kind of connections here. We have these men, as you say, Italian men, North African men, who are here in England and are like, right, that's it. We've got to remake this country. And we're going to redo what the religion is. And is there any kind of, I don't know, bound upness between these sites and the non-Christian people who lived here at the time? Yes, Melitus receives, there are letters that survive from Gregory the Great to Meletus, giving him instructions on how to convert the Anglo-Saxons. I say Anglo-Saxons knowing this is a, but just I'm hoping this will, it's a contentious term, but I'm hoping that it means most people understand. who we're referring to the early English

pre-norms the Germanic tribes so he wrote to Gregory the Great the Pope wrote a letter to Meletus saying when you are converting these non-Christian peoples

do not destroy their temples just empty them out put in altars and dedicate them to the Christian saints and don't stop them from killing animals, which is what they do when they're making their pagan sacrifices, quote unquote, like kind of change it around so that on the feast days of the dedicatory saints,

they have a special dinner of that animal with an animal killed at the center of it. So, you know, an obvious example of that is like the goose on the feast of St. Martin. I don't, I can't say for sure that that was something that was appropriated from a pre-Christian tradition, but there is that many different saintly feast days centre on the killing of a specific kind of meat animal and feasting on it together. So yeah, St Martin's Day is always goose. And so this was a letter that Menetus received. And so it follows actually on quite nicely to the Urquenwood legend, which is probably why you asked me that clever question. It's all falling into place.

London, when Meletus arrived there would have been a mixture of, Roman, Romano-British, Celtic places of worship. There would have been some abandoned churches from when London had been a Romano-British settlement. These would have been probably overtaken by Germanic places of worship and temples. And so then he's now creating a new sort of Christian landscape, reappropriating Christian buildings or taking over non-Christian ones. And so when it comes to the story of St. Erkenwald,

according to Bede, Urquemarle becomes Bishop of London in 675. But then, you know, Beads' stories of Arkhamwolds are fairly sort of, let's say, prosaic or kind of believable, I suppose. But the one I want to focus on is actually, it's a 14th century poem, which, as far as I know, has basically, you know, foundations in fact. It's got its own reasons for telling the story it tells. But it does play with this idea of a landscape in which there are layers of belief. There's a kind of stratigraphy, archaeologically speaking, of different, religious beliefs. So it begins, it tells us this story of how Urquenwald had wanted St. Paul's to be enlarged and to destroy some of the structures of the pagan, it says temple, and to dig down

and deepen the foundations and things. So he's overseeing this project. He goes off into East Anglia for some reason, and while he's away, or into Essex it is, the workers, their shovels hit something under the ground and they clear the earth away and they'd reveal, an enormous white marble sarcophagus, all covered in amazing designs and gold letters and things. But the inscriptions on the sarcophagus are illegible to them, are illegible to all the learned people they bring in to try and decipher them. Word gets to Urquemwald, he rushes back.

Before Erkenwald arrives, they push the lid of the sarcophagus off and reveal that there is, so even though this is deep underground and deep under buildings much older than St. Paul's, there is the body of a man in the sarcophagus and it's completely incorrupt. So it hasn't rotted away at all. And his skin has got like a lovely blush and he's wearing a very elaborate costume. He's got crown and he's got like I think an ermine collar and a gold belt and a scepter. And he says this beautiful kingly corpse.

He's not moving. He's not talking but he's lying there completely incorrupt. And so Urquenwald is brought back to see the corpse. And before he does that, because he's just so good at resisting temptation, he says a really big mass in St. Paul's with all the nobility. Then he goes to see the sarcophagus. And he says, he sort of thinks a land. He says, so this is all from a 40th century poem called St. Erkenwald.

And he says, you know, who are you? And the corpse kind of emits this like ghostly grown. I mean, I think there's something about 14th century. macab coming out here is really beautiful. They've got a way of handling it.

It's like, I think it's the same kind of mindset that creates those transy tomes with the corpse on the bottom and the be dressed person on top, effigy on top.

And it says, you know, long, long ago when King Bellinus was on the throne. So I personally get really excited here because my first book, Storyland, was all about the legendary

kings and queens of Britain and the line of Brutus of Troy. So Bellinus is what peers and Geoffrey of Monest history of the Kings of Britain. He is an ancient sort of, I think he's around at the same time as done these Old Testament kings or prophets like Ezekiel or something. Anyway, he's super way back, Old Testament time. King Bellinus, King of Britain. He's famous, or in Jeffrey of Monmouth, emphasizes that he makes really good laws. He's a really good king. And he is responsible for the building of what we now think of as the Roman roads. And he is just and noble.

And so this body, this corpse, says, I was a judge. in London, or in the new Troy, as he calls it. London is supposed to have only been called London after a legendary king called Ludd. And before that, it was the new Troy because Brutus of Troy founded it and was kind of transplanting. Anyway, big, long other story. And so he says, you know, when I was a judge in the new Troy and I made good laws. And when I died, the people of London honoured me by giving me a crown to represent

justice. And he goes through his whole costume about how the sceptre and the belt are all gifts from the the people of the city to recognise the role he played in keeping justice in the realm. And he says, but then because this was before Christ, I was sent to hell with all the other good people and the bad people. We all just went to hell. And I suffered in torment until Christ was born and the harrowing of hell, which is the moment after Christ's crucifixion, where he was said to have gone down into hell and set free all of the souls who had been trapped there even though they had lived good lives.

But the poor old judge, he, for some reason, didn't manage to get on the bandwagon or whatever you'd call it, to get out of hell at this point. And so he got left behind. And he says to Urquandwald, he's kind of standing over the open sarcophagus, you know, I've been suffering here in hell ever since, even though I was good and even though all my friends are now feasting at the great table in heaven. And Urquenwald finds this deeply moving. And he says, look, I'm going to baptize you. Just give me one sec to go and get some holy water. And he says, I'm going to baptize you. I need to go get some holy water.

But I will do so in the name of the father, the son and the holy spirit. And when he says those holy words, the tear falls from his cheek and lands on the corpse. And the corpse says, oh, it was enough. The water from your truly eye. And at that moment, he realizes he's, he's, he realizes he's walking towards the heavenly feast and this skin begins to sort of crumble on his face and his skeleton turns to dust and everything vanishes from the sarcophagus before all these, the masses of people have come to watch Urquenwald, kind of conversing with the corpse. And he is reunited with all of his

friends in heaven. This is the big Erkenwald miracle according to this 14th century poem. Well, okay, look, I'm going to immediately make this about 14th century heretics because that's what I do. You know, but it's very interesting to me as a 14th century heretic fan because at the same time here in England, we have the rise of Lollertory, right? Like, especially over in Oxford, obviously. And one of their big things is they are not necessarily sure that you need to be baptized in order to be saved. I mean, like, let's see, I'm being kind, right? You know, they've got all sorts of ideas.

Consumstantiation, not transubstantiation. The fact that baptism isn't necessary. You know, they're kind of down on the sacraments, I would say, more generally. And then you have a poem like this and it's like, hey, remember everybody? Not only are the sacraments important, but you are a part of this beautiful history of saints. Yeah. So I was supervised by a man called Paul Binsky, Cambridge University, and he would talk about, so I'm not historian, and he would talk about these kind of like ecclesiastical public type sculpture on the outside of churches as something that he would talk about it in terms of Aristotelian rhetoric. That was his kind of his focus. He still does, in fact. If you ever see him, you're almost certainly going to have a conversation with him about this. And he would, the phrase he would use is the sort of creating confident, sent to believe, like with beauty.

And that when you hear a story, like, I mean, this is now me interpreting that idea, that when you've got a story like that one of Urquenwald, with the kind of mystery of the white marble tomb and the gold lettering, and just the kind of thing about buried treasure and bodies underground that we all still think is really cool and interesting. And then the kind of nobility of it and the great, and the emphasis on justice. and truth and and it's all of these really beautiful images

and beautiful concepts. I think you just want to be on, you want to be with that story and that world, don't you? And so like you said, it's sort of, you're part of this great history,

this great mythology, and the sacraments are integral to it. And, you know, maybe we don't think now that sacraments are all that big and sexy. But I think we can all agree, we like the talking to a corpse vibe. You know,

that's something that modern people, people like. But in terms of the Spring Saints, we have another let's chat to a dead body guy. And he goes one better. So, you know, we got Brendan the Voyager, another one of my favorites. His feast is the 16th of May. And my guy manages to have a chat with a giant skull. So can you tell us a little bit about that? I personally just think Brendan's legends are just the best. Oh, they're so good. The best body of stories are so cool. So there's a scholar called Glyn Burgess,

who recently put together a big loaded translations of Brendan Legends and adaptations of Brendan Legends from across the Middle Ages. You can get them all in one big book and just read the variations. And Burgess describes Brendan. This is just so lovely as the kind of Sinbad of Northwestern Europe. I love that. And so he's this kind of adventurer figure. I think when in the early legend of him,

there's a 9th century Irish Latin text, it's very much, his motivations are very clear. He's going to go and look for an earthly paradise and he sets off from the west coast of Ireland in a hide-covered boat with a group of brethren, and off they go. But as the Middle Ages wear on and as there are more and more translations,

especially into the later Middle Ages, the motivations kind of change and think it's a 15th century Dutch version where it's not that he's going off to look for an earthly paradise it's that he has a book in the monastery of the wonders of the world and he's reading it and he thinks, well, this is all a load of bull and throws it on the fire. And at that moment, an angel appears and is like,

you have just destroyed the only record of all the wonders of the world. And you must go off now and find them all again, which is just a brilliant, brilliant opening to a story. However he sort of is prompted to go, the main sort of meat of each Brendan story is that he is travelling the ocean, the great ocean, to look for wonders. Or he's encountering wonders. And there's this earthly paradise thing as well that sort of comes along at the end. And we've got here to kind of forget about the idea of the Atlantic with America on the other side and notions of the Pacific. We've got to take on this kind of medieval Christian worldview where you've got Jerusalem at the center of the map. You've got east at the top of the map.

So directly above Jerusalem. And at the top, at the very, very outer edge of the map, you've got Eden. And then to the east you've got India and it goes into Asia. At the bottom of the map, you've got Africa to the south. And to the – if you're looking directly at the left-hand side, of the map, you've got the west. And Britain, this little silly little thing in the western edge of the map on the ends of the world, an island just beyond. And looping around all of that is the great ocean. And it is not that this is a flat earth conception of the world. It's still an

orb, but that the landmass is surrounded by sea. So that's what Brendan is voyaging around. And the earthly paradise that he was believed to have discovered was considered to be a real place. And if you were going to try and transpose this onto a modern map of the world, you'd say there were something like the Canary Islands off the coast of Africa was Brendan's Island. As a tiny digression, the earliest ever globe that was made, I believe it was in the 15th century or the late 14th century, early 15th century, was made in Germany and has Brendan's Islands on it, Brendan's Isles, the earthly paradise that he's supposed to have found.

But the thing I find quite funny is that it was called the Aird Aptfel globe. Now, my grandmother's Austrian and we speak that, Austrian dialect of German, and Airdapful is potato. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, and I think it's also southern Germany. That's the, you know, and it's the same as Pond de Terre in French for potato. But obviously, the potato hadn't come to Europe by this point. So they had no idea.

They were giving this amazing new invention, this globe, a really funny name. Call it a potato. I love that. So anyway, he doesn't meet a giant skull in the 9th century version of his... Boo! Every year, for seven years, he visits the same set of islands. And some of them, they have things. like one of them has a monastery on it where a flaming arrow comes in through the window every

morning and lights all the candles in the church and zooms out again. Or there's an island which has just got an enormous sheep or another which has got vines where each grape is so big that it can feed a single monk for three days. But then there's like there's an island that seems to be a volcanoes and there are kind of demons coming in and out of these flaming rock holes. And one of them. I think one of the brethren at this point jumps out the boat and can't stop himself from swimming towards the demons and then they grab him and drag him into the volcano. Be where your sins will find you out. And so it's an amazing, the 9th century one is a really wonderful story. And I think there are translations readily available online. It's the 15th century Dutch one where just as he's

leaving to go off on his great voyage, he notices a strange boulder on the beach and goes over and there is an enormous skull. And like Urquenwals, he kind of thinks that, he's like, who are you and where did you come from? And the giant's skull replies and says, oh, I was a great giant. And I used to stand in the sea. Oh, yeah.

It's also on the subject of sacrament stuff, Brendan wants to know where the giant's soul is now. Actually, isn't so much about sacraments, but about the human, like the limits of what is human and what the human soul is, I think. So, you know, he says the giant, and where is your soul now? So the giant then replies, I was a great giant, and I used to stand in the sea, and I used to plunder ships.

And when they went by, I would seize them, and I would take what I wanted of spices and treasure. And many innocent souls were drowned because of my deeds. And then one day, and so, you know, I was so big that no tide could overcome me. But then one day there was a great storm, and I was overwhelmed, and I was swept under the water and he says and then my blood vessels burst and he dies and and he finds himself damned for his sins and Brendan's very moved and says to the giant if I were to bring you back if I were to speak to God and he would and intercede on your behalf and he would to raise you from the dead and if we were to baptize you would you live a good life with the chance of being able to be saved and the giant says

even if I had 2,000 years and you gave me the whole world and it was made of solid gold and I could do what I wanted with it, I would say no, because I would sin again and I would die again and I'd be damned again. And don't you think I'd be damned worse for being damned a second time? And so Brennan is sort of like, well, I wash my hands of you and goes off on his journey. And this story just, I just think of this like incorrigible bad boy giant, like pirate giant. That's really interesting because it kind of brings up this idea of, you know, is there a kind of nature? Are some people simply born bad? Is there something about the non-human races, which, you know, kind of exist in the medieval imagination? That means that they uniquely cannot be saved. Or is it just him as a giant? You know, he's just the bad giant, right? Yeah. But I like it, though, because, you know, with this and certainly, you know, the demons that are leaping out of volcanoes and having to drag people back on, it's got all of these echoes to classical literature, right? You know, that's very much like the sirens that we see during the Odyssey, right? So it's a very fun way of getting these stories into a very good and very Christian way of thinking about the world, isn't it? it is and I always just love the insights you get into I think the 9th century voyage of Brendan I mean one of the classic Brendan motifs is the whale with an island on its back

where the brethren naively build a fire think oh yeah it's dry land and they go over there build a fire and Brendan stays very proudly on the boat who's like no no I wouldn't do that if I were you and then the next thing I know the whales started to dive and they all have to scrabble for the boat and this was that is from the physiologous second century Greek, sort of an encyclopedia of animal law, this idea of the kind of, I think it's

called Aspidocalone, sort of a monstrous turtle whale thing with an island on its back that gets subsumed by later Christianity as a symbol of the devil, and it'll pose as a safe haven and then drag your soul to the abyss. But yeah, I think you also get these insights into the writers. And when I was taught by Professor Rosalind Love when I was an undergraduate. and she had a particular affection for the author of the voyage of St. Brendan. And one of the things she homed in on was how hungry he seems to have been. Oh. Because his descriptions of food are so kind of full of yearning.

And there's one moment where the brothers go into a monastery on one of the islands they've landed on, where they dine on roots of remarkable sweetness. Oh. This author is their kind of dreaming of part. Parsnips writing about St. Brendan. And I guess it reads a little bit like a plant-based diet blog. It's lovely. Ever since I am, she highlighted that bit of the text.

Whenever I have eaten a really good parsnip, I've been like, yeah, man, if you've been fasting for like bread and water for weeks or months, and then you ate a parsnip, you're, oh, completely. Or a carrot. You know, Swedes, man. They're like incredible. So, you know. Now I want a parsnip.

Okay. I guess that you've already touched on this, but we have these St. Brendan's stories in all kinds of languages. You know, you've mentioned the Dutch version, but we get him come up in Occitan, in like Anglo-Norman, in Catalan. I mean, is it this adventurous nature that leads to such a far-reaching appeal, do you think? Or is it, you know, the authors have an opportunity to author here and they can just make up any story they want? There is something about, you know, one of the stories of Brendan, it could well be, it might be the Anglo-Norman one actually, I'm trying to remember, but he's out on the ocean, Brendan and his brethren, and they meet what is called in the text, a dwarf sitting on a leaf with a little, I think he's got a little ink pot and a stylus, and he's dipping the stylus in the sea and dripping the water into the pot and then pouring it out again. And Brendan says, what are you doing? And the dwarf says, I'm measuring the sea.

And he says, you know you're never going to be able to achieve that. And the dwarf says, well, you know that me trying to measure the sea is about as likely to work as your attempt to see all the wonders in the world. Ah, I love that. And it's probably taken or at least inspired by Augustine of Hippo's City of God, where he has a conversation with a boy. on a beach about like the boys trying trying to fill up a hole in the sand with water and the water keeps draining away and Augustine says you know that's never going to work and the boy's like well you're just trying to understand God's never going to work say mm-hmm get him yeah which is like good on you little kid for talking back to Augustine of hippo I think there's a way of like

repackaging philosophies from the church fathers in a incredibly appealing and imaginative way and because there's no limit with the potential of God's wonders in these stories, it just sort of gives you the invitation to be as imaginative as you want to be. I love the bit where in one of the translations where Brendan's just, they're sailing by night, but the seabed is lit up because it's solid gold. Ah, I love that. Oh, but I guess that this is the appeal for us, right, about these saint's stories is we do get to see, you know, obviously it's a window into what is considered holy, but it's also this incredible look into the medieval imagination as well. And I mean, I could keep you here all day, Amy.

This has been absolutely amazing. And I can't wait to drag you back at the beginning of July when we're going to get to do the summer saints. But in the meantime, thank you so much for having come back. Oh, it was a joy. Thank you for having me. Thanks to Amy Jeff's and to you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to a war. award-winning original TV documentaries, including my recent series Meet the Normans, and add-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com forward slash subscription.

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