Gone Medieval - The Greatest Medieval Divorce Scandal

Episode Date: June 9, 2023

In 855, the Carolingian king Lothar II was married to the aristocratic Teutberga for political reasons. But there was a third person in the relationship — Waldrada of Lotharingia. Their affair led to a prolonged and messy battle by Lothar II to secure a divorce from Teutberga, which involved Charles the Bald, Louis the German and two Popes. On this edition of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis talks to Dr. Chris Halsted to find out more about Waldrada’s incredible story and the greatest medieval divorce scandal.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians including Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Matt Lewis, Tristan Hughes and more. Get 50% off your first 3 months with code MEDIEVAL. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up here > You can take part in our listener survey here. If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter 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. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. Waldrada, it might not be a name you've heard before, but she has an incredible story. In early medieval Europe, she was, well, actually, no, I'm not going to tell you, I can do better than that. Chris Halstead is going to tell Waldra's tale instead. Chris is a Kluge fellow at the Library of Congress who specialises in the political history of early medieval Europe, as well as matters around magic and gender. Welcome to God Medieval, Chris.

Hey, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here. It's great to have you on, and I'm really, really excited to learn more about Waldradas. It sounds like a fascinating story. So just to set the picture here, what period are we talking about and whereabouts in the world are we for Waldrada? So we're talking about the middle of the 9th century in Carolingian-Lothorindia. So Carolingian Empire, this massive empire that rises covering France, Germany, Italy, etc. And the middle of the 9th century is basically the height of Carolingian power. Waldrada actually occupies this really interesting place where she's at the moment where Carolingian power kind of peaks and begins to turn downwards. So she's going to bridge the time of Carolingian flourishing into the beginning of Carolingian decline, the decline of

the dynasty. And the kingdom that she's in is basically the modern day Netherlands, Belgium and bits of France and Germany. It doesn't correspond to a modern-day country for reasons involving Waldrada, so that's a fun fact. Oh, interesting. It's the meat in the sandwich between what's now France and Germany. Yes, essentially. And how much do we know about Waldrada's origins and her early life? We unfortunately know very little. As we will get into later when we talk about the reason we know about her at all, the case, some claims that are made later on in that case, make it clear that she's a free woman, so she's not enslaved. That's an important detail for the political social claims being made for her life. And she's probably from

an elite background. She's not, we think, part of the hyper-hyper-elite, the imperial controlling class, but she is elite in some ways. Interesting. It's so frustrating when these people, we want to know so much more about who they were and where they come from, but they just sort of spring into the record at some point for some reason. And then it's clambering around trying to recreate some kind of background for them, isn't it? Yeah, we really know very little about her actual life. We don't know the name of her parents. We don't know the name of what family she's from. We know practically nothing. Everything we have about her is connected to this fascinating case that we're about to talk about. So medieval women, particularly in this period, are notoriously hard to

see. Why do we know about Waldrada at all? So we know about Waldraada because she has the great misfortune, I think, of being at the center of the greatest divorce scandal of the ninth century, and really possibly the greatest divorce scandal of the entire early Middle Ages, though I'm sure people who study other centuries might disagree with me on that. She's at the center of the divorce, or the attempted divorce, of King Lothar II of Lothorindia and his wife, Thoit Berger. Wow, so she's the third part of a love triangle. Or maybe there's not love, I don't know.

The other thing is that from all the sources, it seems like she already had a relationship with Lothar before he marries Stoiberga. So is she the third part of the love triangle or is she the first part of it? It's all a bit of a mess. Yeah. So what do we know about her relationship with Lothar? You suggested perhaps that she was there before Lothar was married. How much do we know about their relationship before Lothar's marriage? So far as we can tell, they started a relationship before Lothar was married.

Lothar gets married at the age of 18, very young, to this elite woman named Dotyberga, and it basically happens at the same time as he becomes king. He becomes king of Lothorindia and Mara's Dotyberga as part of kind of the same political moment. Before that, the sources tell us when he's still living in his father's house, essentially, he has a relationship with Waldrada. And the chances are, if we look at the birth dates, he seems to have already had at least one child with her before his marriage, to Thoitberga. So it's quite an established relationship before he is married, even though he is quite young. And so is that marriage to Thoitberger most likely a political one? Otherwise, why would he not

marry Waldra, if they're already having a relationship? It's absolutely a political one. There's two real reasons that he marries Thauteberga and not Waldrada, to my mind. The first is an immediate political reason, and that is that Thoctberga is the sister of a very powerful magnate named Huckbert. Huckbert is one of the... these medieval power players. He is a landed member of the elite who controls all these estates, very rich, very wealthy. In particular, and this gets us into the fraught territory of Carolingian inheritances and kingship in the 9th century, Huckbert controls a lot of the mountain passes between the kingdom of Lothar and the kingdom of his younger brother, Charles of Provence.

So if Lothar wanted to, as the Carolingians frequently did, go invade his little brother, or if Charles wanted to march up and invade Lothar's kingdom, he'd have to go through Huckbert's territory. So Huckbert is a hugely influential man to have on Lothar's side for his burgeoning kingship. And this is actually slightly later when Lothar tries to divorce Thoed Berger, he will actually make the claim that he was forced to marry Thoctberga by Huckbert. He will say, if I hadn't married Thortbergh, Huckbert wouldn't have allowed me to become king. I don't really buy that particular line. I think that this is still the part of the Carolingian century when you couldn't really mess with an established succession plan that effectively. I do think that Huckbert was the kind of person who might have caused Lothar a lot of problems if he hadn't gotten him on his side in this way. Then there's the second reason that he married Thoiburg and not Waldrada.

out, it's kind of reading between the lines. Well, while Drada was a member of the elite, it doesn't seem like she was a member of this hyper-elite, this world-class empire-ruling elite. And I think that both Lothar's advisors, probably his father, who died in 855 and when he became king, and probably even Lothar himself, when he was early on in his kingship, might have seen it as more prudent to marry someone from this imperial elite than to marry somebody who, was essentially his like boyhood girlfriend. As she falls into that really unfortunate position of being a great mistress but not marriage material for him. I think that's what a lot of people at the time would have seen it as.

As we'll talk about, he comes to disagree, but it doesn't go well for anyone really involved. So Lothar gets married. Do we know what happens to his and Waldraja's relationship at that point? Do we know if they continue their relationship or do they break it off for a while? We think, and again, this is one of these problems where, what do the sources say, what can we infer, it doesn't really seem as if there's any pause in their relationship. They'll end up having four children in total, and it seems like they continue to have children throughout this time, which implies a certain amount of relationship. The other thing is that it was considered essentially acceptable for Carolingian Kings to have mistresses. This was not a scandalous or unknown kind of thing. Everyone knew that the political side of marriage was political.

And essentially, there was a longstanding practice of Carolingian Kings having women that they would have relationships with on the side of their marriages. So I don't think there would have really been any reason to break it off when Lothar becomes married. Although I will say he certainly does not seem to try very hard to make the marriage with. the Thaigberg a work. He doesn't really put much effort into that one, as far as we can tell. Yeah, which might be nice if it's because he's madly in love with Waldrader, but who knows? Again, it's unclear. This could be a medieval love story, or it could be something entirely different. It's hard to tell. Before we get onto the meat of why we know about Waldrada, what do we know about her position as a king's mistress then? In terms of legalities, politics,

I guess her children are illegitimate, but does she have any kind of political power as the king's mistress? This is a really interesting question, and it's really interesting because both the religious and legal rules for this kind of position are evolving really in concert with this controversy. You know, your bishops and your religious thinkers are hashing out these problems looking at this case specifically. So they're trying to figure out how all these rules work. And the case that Lothar's faction, and this all becomes very much, political, so it does break into factions at a certain point. The case that Lothar's faction makes for why he should be able to marry Waldrada will actually shift in the eight 60s to the point

where they will argue that he had actually already married her before he had married Thortberg. And I think this is probably completely false, right? This is an argument that they only make after five years of attempted divorce, so there's no reason to think this is real. But they'll in the eight 60s start to argue, well, he was actually really already married to her. So that's why he should be able to marry Waldrada. And that element of the controversy really focuses around this word concubinus, concubine. It's a English cognate. Concubinage was a kind of loosely defined position in the Carolingian context. It's not an official legal or religious position. You're not allowed to have religiously or legally extramarital relations. It's just not allowed. People did it

Anyway, so it was a socially recognized term for this kind of relationship. And often there were steep social divides between powerful elite men and the women who were their quote unquote concubines. So part of what happens in the eight 60s is that there's this long argument about how Waldrada is actually Lothar's wife because they don't want her to be a concubine. To have it be said that she was a concubine, quote unquote, is to admit that there's this social gap, social divide between them. They want to cover that up in order to make it more palatable for him to marry her. It's quite a complex position.

I think that in terms of her political power, the political power she has comes from her proximity to Lothar himself. The obvious affection that Lothar has for her, the fact that she ends up burying his children, that is the source of her political power. It's a very personal power, and it's not based on any kind of real official position. But we're still in a world which is kind of molding the rules around marriage and what constitutes a marriage and all of that kind of thing. And I guess the case that we're about to talk about helps to define all of that a little bit. Yeah, it's very nascent. The Carolingian era is when a lot of these rules get set down,

and they're all figuring out what they even think about it, which is why it's quite a fascinating moment, really. So I guess we're getting the impression that Lothar and Thaubberga's marriage isn't going great. So why do we know about Woldrida then? What happens to bring her to the four in the picture? The real explosion point here is the year 857. So Lothar becomes king in 855. He marries Thoetberger.

So far as we can tell, he continues to maintain a relationship with Waldrada over this entire period. And then in 857, once he's a little more estate, he's a little more estate. established on the throne. I think he might feel at that point like he can maybe dispense with Huckbert, this brother of Thaigberga, who is the reason that he really married her. In 857, he starts to try to divorce Thoet Berger. This was not the only Carolingian divorce scandal, but it was certainly the most sensational and all-encompassing. First of all, it'll take 12 years for the entire course of this thing to play out, which is just a stunning amount of time to try to figure out one's marital problems. What's also very sensational and amazing is the litany of

accusations that Lothar brings against Thaubberga. And by Lothar, we should say that Lothar and Lothar's advisors and Lothar's, the people whispered in Lothar's ear, right? None of these people can be conceived of as pure individuals in this context, right? There's all kinds of thinkers and opinions that all sorts of people in the background are having that we just don't have access to. Lothar accuses Thutberga of prior to her marriage to him, to Lothar, of having had an incestuous relationship with her brother, Huckbert, in which they coupled, quote, as men do with men, and having aborted the resulting issue of that relationship. Your heads are probably spinning a little out there in podcast world. It's a lot. It's a massive slate of accusations that are

meant not only to secure his separation from Thuatberga, but also to frankly destroy the reputation of Huckabert and Huckbert's greater family. It's a very serious series of accusations to levy in the 850s. Yeah, I mean, I'm always keen to say that everything in the world is medieval. And for anyone who's thinking Henry VIII's marital scandals were a big deal, I mean, this seems at least on a par with that. Yeah, well, the thing with this particular marital. scandal is that because of the nexus of all the different things that are happening in the 850s, it drags in everything. So we're in the middle of discussing what marriage even means and how we define marriage and can someone remarry after they divorce. That's an open question at this point.

It's a closed question, but with some asterisks, I guess I would say. So all of that comes in and you suddenly have bishops from all around the Carolingian Empire and the Pope himself getting involved in this. We're also in the middle of the Carolingianianian. empire falling apart and everyone kind of scrambling for the bits that are going to claim and are going to become part of their kingdom. So Lothar is flanked on both sides by his very powerful uncles who are the kings of West and East Francia, aka the future France and the future Germany. And those guys certainly are invested in whether or not he has legitimate heirs, right? We're also at a moment when the Pope is making a claim to be the center of Christendom, to be the Pope.

And so the papal power is being worked out with regard to secular power, with regard to the Carolingian Empire, in the context of this marriage controversy. So there's all of these things going on that make this just a flashpoint in a lot of ways. Sex. It might surprise you to know that, oh, I've been around for a while now. In fact, we are all the living, walking, breathing, talking proof that sex has been around for a long time. And over on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast with me, Kate Lister, I will be rooting around for the kinkiest, quirkiest stories in the history of sex, scandal and society. Or in other words, the best bits. Well, at least I think so. From bras to BDSM, from African warrior queens to witches,

join me as I bed hopped throughout time and civilizations to get under the cover with the most of the most. fascinating things that we've been doing, not to mention the downright weird. For example, did you know that men in ancient Greece was so turned on by a naked statue of Aphrodite that it had to be protected by guards? We have accounts of men trying to have sex with the statue. It caused a sensation. And that university professors once moonlighted as grave robbers? We were executing less and less people, so there was a real shortage.

If you want to hear about all of this and more, then join me. betwixt the sheets today, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Brought to you by History Hit. There are numerous claims and charges of magic and witchcraft and things like that involved in the trial. What should we make of those kinds of things? Were people genuinely concerned about witchcraft at this time, or is this politically motivated, or is it both? The Witchcraft claims are really interesting. After Lothar makes this series of accusations against Thaute Berger, which are quite fascinating in themselves, Thorntberg's camp comes back and accuses Waldrada of essentially being a witch. They argue that she has bewitched and insorseled King Lothar.

And I think this accusation follows from actually a quite reasonable observation, which is that Lothar seems so attached to Waldrada that he is willing to act against both his personal and political interests. And so the conclusion is, well, she must have bewitched him, right? The question of how seriously to take these kinds of accusations is always really interesting. And this is something that I actually get into with my students quite a lot when we talk about religion and politics, that sort of thing. As moderns, when we look back on these kinds of events, there's this tendency to retreat to a sort of political cynicism, to think that, oh, well,

there's an obvious political reason for these accusations against Waldrada, so therefore they must not have really believed them. They must have only been saying them for their own political reasons. And I think that kind of misses the point. I think the way to look at it is magic and the supernatural in general is part of the lens that early medieval people, ninth century people, were bringing to the world. So if you believe in the ninth century that the court of the king is almost this sacred space that is supposed to both mirror the stability of the greater kingdom and mirror the stability of the kingdom of heaven. It's like a layer cake, right? The kingdom of heaven is on top. The court kind of mediates and then there's the kingdom on the bottom. And all of those things are supposed

to be working together in harmony, right? So if all of a sudden there's disruption in one of those planes, all of a sudden there's this kind of massive problem and it is being instigated to your perception by a perceived outsider like Waldrada. You might think, well, that's got to be at the instigation of the devil, right? That has to be maleficia is the term, wicked magic. There's every possibility that while it was a politically motivated charge, it was also how they were understanding the politics of the moment. The most thorough commentator on this whole controversy, a guy named Hinkmar of Rems,

who publishes basically this treatise answering questions on all aspects of marriage law and divorce and magic and biology. He's the one who says, just so you know, you can't get pregnant from coupling, quote, as men do with men. So that accusation has to go out the window. Anyway, Hinkmar devotes several chapters to questions of love magic, of seduction magic, essentially, and he cites the Bible, he cites Isidore of Seville, he cites Bede, and he ends up arguing quite forcefully that, yeah, of course magic exists. Of course this is possible. So I really think that for the people involved, this was a real possibility that they were thinking about. Yeah, I think it's easy for us to be quite cynical, isn't it?

And think they were creating a concern about magic to fit their political ends. But there's no reason it couldn't be both that they could have genuinely feared it. And it also happened to suit their politics. And that's why they're bringing it up. What do reactions of contemporaries, and I guess later writers to the whole scandal around Waldra? Tell us about their attitudes to women, particularly those who clearly have power and influence where people don't necessarily think they should. This is a really interesting question, and this is actually why I got into looking at Waldrada in the first place.

This is a huge part of my research. And it's also something that a lot of other people have been working on for decades. So there's a large corpus of scholarship to draw on here. I think the way to think about it is that early medieval women could have political power. There are plenty of examples of very powerful early medieval women. But that occurred within very prescribed roles. If you could play the role of the wife of the king or the queen, depending on how that nomenclature works, if you could play the role of the mother of the king, right? If you could perform that, use power in that sense, you could be quite powerful.

You could essentially be an empress in all but name. The problem comes when somebody is perceived as overstepping those bounds. So either somebody, a woman, is perceived as becoming more powerful or influential than she otherwise should be, or she's perceived as exercising that power in a way that is not quite appropriate. So mistress of the king becoming this incredibly influential figure, that's a no-go for the early medieval mind in a lot of ways. And this is a repeated trend across the Carolingian era. The Empress Judith, the Empress of Louis the Pius in the 830s, has a very similar accusation levied against her that she is sleeping with one of the high-powered magnates at court, and also she's a witch, which is why Louis hasn't done anything about it because she's insorcelled him. See, very similar. And that actually turns into a civil war across all of the Frankish Empire, and the ensuing crisis will actually end with Louis the Pius, has to abdicate the throne for a couple of.

couple months. He comes back, but there's this massive crisis that comes from this perceived overstepping of the bounds of power by this woman. And it'll repeat for other figures throughout the 9th and the 10th century as well. So it's something that happens again and again. There's a tendency to think people in this period couldn't understand or tolerate female power. But I think it's more like female power was an Olympic swimming pool with very clearly defined lanes. And as long as you swam in your lane, everybody's happy. What they don't want is someone dive bombing in at the deep end and zigzagging across the lanes. And they don't understand that.

It doesn't make sense. And they can't comprehend that. So as long as you stay in your lane, you're fine. There is ways to wield female power. It's when you try and get out of your lane that the problems arise. Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you look at somebody like in the 10th century, the Empress Adelaide, the second empress of Otto the Great,

Adelaide will maintain a position of incredible power and influence. over the course of Otto's life and the course of his son's life and the course of his grandson's life until she finally dies. And she is basically never besmirched in the histories. Nothing bad has ever said about Empress Adelaide. She is very influential. As long as you do it in the ways that are perceived to be correct, you can have very powerful women.

And then you have the opposite, the Byzantine Empress Irene, in the 8th century, who ends up blinding and accidentally killing her own son to keep her hold on power. probably not the most prudent thing to do politically. But she's excoriated and maligned in the histories, right? Because she's this archetype of the power-hungry woman. The line between those two things is probably a lot more down to the interpretation of individual authors than we'd like to think, right? The line between an Irene and an Adelaide is probably thinner than we might otherwise expect.

And so to take us back to Lothar and Woldrida, does Lothar get his divorce and do he and Woldrida have a happy ending? So they don't have a happy ending. He does temporarily get a divorce in 862, at which point he marries Waldrada, introduces her to the court as his queen, and everyone's very happy. It's a Disney ending. But then the political tides reverse once again.

The Pope, who gets involved, essentially orders Lothar to take Thaigberga back. By this point, even Thocterga doesn't want anything to do with him, so there's actually this realigning of the alliances involved. And Thoet Berga and Lothar together go to the Pope and say, no, please, we would really like a divorce. But Pope Nicholas refuses to budge on that one. There will be several more years of this.

At one point, Waldra gets excommunicated because the Pope summons her to basically explain herself to him. And Waldrada says, no, I won't do that. And so she gets excommunicated. Finally, in the year, 869, Lothar will try to make the trip down to Rome to explain himself. The popes have switched out. There's a new kind of softer pope who, is on the papal seat, Lothar wants to go explain himself so that he can get Woldrada's excommunication

lifted and he can live happily ever after, and on the way he becomes ill and dies in Italy. So there is not really a resolution. Lothar dies with all of these questions still up in the air. And what that means is, first of all, it means that Wolderata still has no official position. She ends up, we think, retiring to a monastery. It also means that all of his children are still technically illegitimate. So, Lothar's kingdom, Lothyrinia, it's literally referred to as the kingdom of Lothar in the text, that's where the name comes from, Lothorindia is gobbled up by the kings of West and East Francia. And that is why there is not a massive state called Lothorindia in the middle of the European map, because Lothar spent all of his political capital, really, trying to make

this marriage work, and in so doing, doomed his kingdom. And it, doesn't exist. It's doomed to oblivion. And I guess he didn't manage to get his children made legitimate either. If he has several children with Waldruder, presumably he would have quite like one of them to succeed him on the throne. But if there's all this ambiguity and uncertainty when he dies, presumably that's not an option. Yeah. So the thing about the Carolingians is, to my knowledge, there's not really a mechanism of legitimization the way there is in the later middle ages. The way that you legitimize a child is by marrying the child's mother, right? That's how you make that child legitimate. There are cases of illegitimate children succeeding in the Carolingian context.

Arnulf of Corinthia and then his son Sventibald are both illegitimate. The way those guys succeed is either through kind of force of arms, they'll make some allies and they'll take it by force, or by their father essentially just saying, disguise my heir and you can't do anything about it. So it's not declaring them legitimate. Everyone still recognizes that they're illegitimate, but we're still at a point in the Middle Ages where there's enough power in the throne and there's little enough established rules that somebody can just kind of point and go, yeah, that guy's succeeding me and everyone's, I guess that guy's succeeding you. But because Lothar dies in the middle of this crisis, he doesn't have the time to do that.

I think if he'd lived longer, he probably would have tried to set Hugh, his son, up as his successor. He doesn't. Hugh will try over the course of the next 10 or 15 years to become king, it will not go well, and he will end up being blinded and packed off to a monastery to remove him from political consideration. It seems to be a lot of blinding that goes on at this time. Yeah, there's a number of them, yeah. It's a Byzantine practice that the Carolingians import. In the Byzantine context, there's a lot of blinding of political rivals.

You can slit the nostrils to remove someone from succession. The thought is that if you are in any way physically marred, you cannot be the emperor. So there's nostrils slitting as well, which is, I think, a little kinder than blinding. but still not something to aim for. So just to end on, I guess, and I don't know whether this is a question or a statement, but this seems like another one of those fascinating survivals from a political point of view. It's great to have all this stuff to talk about. But frustratingly lacking in any personality from Waldraud.

We don't see her or hear her voice or really know anything about what motivated her, how much of this was she driving or how much of it was she being dragged along by. It must be frustrating not to be able to actually see Waldrager in any of this. It's massively frustrating. And it really is one of those things where we think that we know so much about her because she's the center of this controversy. But every source we have has a political agenda. Every source we have is making an argument in one direction or another. And none of them preserve her voice, right?

We don't have a source that says, and then Waldra got up and said, wow, I'm really in love with Lothar. And I'd really like to be married to him. We don't have that. So she, her personality and the reality of her relationship, to Lothar really falls to the wayside in view of this massive political, religious, social controversy that gets stirred up. So there are a thousand ways to interpret Wadrata, right? I think it would have been quite reasonable for her to look at the situation and say, why, yes, I'd really like to be queen. Like, I think I should be queen. Like, that would actually be a reasonable goal for her. Or she could

have not wanted it at all and really just wanted a relationship with Lothar. Or who knows if she was even into the relationship with Lothar she was. Maybe she was kind of like, eh, we don't really care about this Lothar guy, but he's king, so I kind of have to do what he says, and Lothar was the one who was driving it. We have no idea whatsoever. It's actually incredibly frustrating.

Yeah, I can see it's frustrating. It tells us a lot, but it also leaves so many questions unanswered that we just can't get to. But nevertheless, at least we know about Woldrada and we know something about her story. And this fascinating insight into the early medieval period when all of these rules

are still kind of being worked out and that Waldraada sort of wittingly or unwittingly contributes to this creation or formation of the idea of what marriage actually is and what it means. I wonder what she'd make of us still talking about her 1,200 years later. It really is a little crazy. It's an episode where within the same kind of 10 or 20 year period, definitions of marriage that will be used for the rest of the Middle Ages, the power of the Pope, and what France and Germany are going to look like are all kind of worked out together and all center in this same bizarrely personal case. It really is fascinating, and I do wonder what she would think of us still talking about

her. I wonder what any of the Carolingians would think. They'd probably be confused about smartphones. Yeah. Although I've had this argument before that if people always think if you bought a medieval person to the modern world, they'd be amazed by things like smartphones. But then I also think they would say, so you've got this thing in your pocket that you can hold in your hand that has all of the power in the world and all of the knowledge in the world it can work as fast as your brain and it can reach the other side of the world instantly. What do you do with it? Oh, we guess five-letter words every day for Wordle.

We look at memes on Facebook. Yeah, we laugh at cats. I think that would be what would shock them, that we don't use the knowledge and the power that we have for better things these days. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Chris, to talk about Ward. It's been fascinating to find out more about her and all of these things that played out around her, even if we can't quite see her.

It's been brilliant to talk about her. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I've had a really good time and I hope I have interested some of the audience in reading more about this fascinating case. There are brand new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more on the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcast from and to tell your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you get a moment, please drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find their way to us. If you're enjoying this and looking for a bit more medieval goodness in your life,

you can subscribe to our Medieval Monday's newsletter by following the links in the show notes below. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone medieval with history hits.