Gone Medieval - The Hospitallers: Warrior Monks

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Matt Lewis explores the evolution of the Knights Hospitaller, from charitable brotherhood to a formidable fighting force at the heart of the Crusades. How did they reconcile their piety with the brutality of medieval warfare? How did their growing military and financial power reshape the fragile politics of the Holy Land? And how did they endure as one of the most resilient institutions in medieval Europe?Matt is joined by Dr. Rory McClellan to delve into the origins, purpose, daily life, and lasting legacy of this remarkable order.MOREThe Knights TemplarListen on AppleListen on SpotifyCrusader CriminalsListen on AppleListen on SpotifyGone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Max Carrie. The producers are Joseph Knight and 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. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. The military orders of the medieval period have always demanded attention. Half night, half monk. The members walked a fine line between acts of kindness in God's name and brutal slaying of their enemies. It was a circle the medieval mind became. quite adept at squaring. One of those orders survives in several guises to this day. The Knights Hospitaller predates the First Crusade, though the shifting politics of the Holy Land redefined the order.

So who were they? What were they established for? And how did they end up impacting European politics? Rory McClellan, author of the new book Warrior Monks, is joining us to fill us in. A very warm welcome to gone medieval, Rory. Thanks for having me. It's good to have you here.

Interesting topic, because we've talked about crusades. We've talked about military orders before, but this is a military order that we haven't really got to grips with. So I think it would be really nice to get under the hood and find out what's going on with the Knights Hospitler. I guess to start us off with, when and where does the hospital of St John come into being? So they're actually a little bit before the Templars start up, even though they don't actually become a military order until after the Templars. So around 1070, Jerusalem, even before First Crusade, it's still this very, very important pilgrimage site.

And so there is a constant stream of people coming from Europe to go on pilgrimage there. And a group of merchants from Amalfi in southern Italy, they have visited the city around 1070, and they decide to set up a hospital to look after other pilgrims coming from the west. and this is what becomes for the eventual hospitalers. And in this case, medieval hospital doesn't necessarily mean you go there because you're sick and they'll treat you. It could also be more like sort of a hostel where you stay whilst you're travelling. And it's more of that sort of case that it sort of starts off as.

And then by the time it comes to the First Crusade, you've got armies coming in from the West, they sort of rampage down the coast, they eventually set up these crusader states, they conquer Jerusalem, but then they have a problem in that most of them go home. And so you now have these new states there that have invaded or attacked pretty much everyone in the region, or at least threatened them, and they're now very short of manpower, and they're surrounded. So you then start to have groups like the initial knights that formed the Templars in around 1120, deciding to set up these military orders, this sort of new concept of a permanent body of troops

that would combine the military life of a knight with the sort of monastic life, the discipline of a monk. So they're going to be a standing sort of military there. They're not just going to pop over for their crusade, fights and battles, see all the holy sites go home. and the Templars do this first and then, well, over the following 15 years, the hospital has sort of morph into doing the same. And we start finding them taking on military roles or having military titles, appearing in armies, and being given castles to manage. And so, you know, if you're given charge of a castle, you need to be able to defend it.

You are given proper military responsibilities. But a bit unlike for Templars is that because they've, got that hospital origin, they always have this dual role. They are always trying to provide some forms of charity and medical care. They end up having this very elaborate hospital in Jerusalem, where they even have things like a dedicated ward for maternity and so for giving birth, a labour ward, and for caring for newborns. And there's even records that they were offering diets specific to the people that were visiting. So if you weren't able to have wine, for example, because you're Muslim,

then they would give you sugared water and things like that. So really quite advanced and able to have up to 1,000 patients. And this remains a big part of their order throughout their history in their documents. It's only very late on late medieval period, but they start to sometimes refer to themselves as knights of, you know, St John or Knights of Roads or wherever. They, officially, they are still very much the hospital of St John Jerusalem. And that's what really sets them apart from the Templars. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting origin,

because we tend to think of all of these military orders being born out of some form of religious war, but the hospital predates the First Crusade and the idea of Holy War. and it seems like they're sort of slow, they follow the Templar model, but after a while they're not jumping two feet into the idea of becoming a military order. I guess you can picture them trying to work out how being a military order fits

with the founding principles of providing care and support. I guess you can marry those two when you're in a dangerous place, but it seems like they're quite slow to do that, which I think sets them apart from a lot to the other military orders that we often think about as being founded for a military

purpose but having a religious element. It's sort of the other way around. Yeah, there are a few other orders that start off as hospitals and then militarise, but they generally come after the hospitalists. Like the hospital has already shown that that's possible. So like the order of St Lazarus or the order of St. Thomas Vaca seem to have started as hospitaler orders in the same way that they run hospitals, they care for people. And then because of military need, they then take on this military role. The same for the Teutonic Knights, because that's originally a little hospital for German pilgrims in Aker. And so they really sort of show that there is this idea that you can do hospitaller but military rather than just having to do your knights, like with the Templars,

where the military side comes first. Yeah. Do we see then the First Crusade? I mean, the First Crusade comes along, what quarter of a century after they've been founded in sort of 1096, and tears the Holy Land apart for several years after that. Do we see that having a significant impact on the hospitalers at the time? Obviously, later they will change into a military order. But does the change in the politics of the Holy Land affect them at all? I think it certainly speeds up their development because, you know, they've been around since about 1070.

It's not until 1113 that the Pope actually recognises them as a distinct order. until that point they're sort of subordinate to this abbey next door to them that's the abbey of St Mary of the Latins and Latins in this case meaning what we'd sort of now call Catholics but it's a bit anachronistic, I call them Latin Christians. And yeah, it's not until after the First Crusade, after this area is now under Christian control, but they then start to get donations out in the West because presumably some of these people, they've been on Crusade, they may have actually stayed at the hospital, they may have been treated by them or helped by them. And so they start giving them donations in the West.

And the Pope then actually recognises them as this order, which then makes it a bit easier for them to manage these possessions. Because that's the other quite weird thing about most of the military orders is that if you think of, say, Benedictine monks or Augustinians, they're not actually a single organisation. So you might have two Benedictine abbeys in the same county, but they are independent of each other most of the time, unless one of them founded the other. With the hospitlers, with the Templars, it's different. The guy who's at the head of the Temple of Order, or the head of the hospitlers, he controls, you know, through a big network of subordinates, all of their territory, all of their lands or their possessions.

So it's much more centralized, and it's even been considered sort of the first proper centralized religious order before the Cistercians, before the Friars and so on. And that, I think, only really happens because you end up having the First Crusade sort of cementing Christian control there, because otherwise it would just be this little hospice in a far-off city, which there'd be people traveling there, but it wouldn't be the same level prominence. Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. How significant is it for the orders development that it begins to arrive in

Western European countries? What are they doing there when they're coming to places like France and England? It's the core part of what really leads to their massive sort of development. And it's probably actually something because it's always difficult to work out the exact numbers, but it does seem looking at the records that, you know, there might actually a bit more hospitalers eventually, once you get to sort of the late 1200s and its 1300s, more hospitalers back in Europe than sort of on the front line, as it were. So obviously they're running these castles in the east. They've got the hospital. And this is expensive. It's very expensive

to race these troops and to man the castles. They have some lands in the east as well. They're doing some farming there, some trading. But it's much easier if you got it in the West, where it's not on a crusade front line. There's still conflicts, but it's generally going to be a bit more safer, but it's secure. And also people go on crusade, they then come home and they go, well, I quite like those guys. I'd like to give them something to sort of help out their job. I don't own land all the way over in Jerusalem, but I do own it here in Essex. And so they will give lands to them. And it's not that unusual. You can also find other non-military orders, normal sort of monastic orders, that are given lands in, say, England,

but the main monastery is actually over in Italy or in France. So it's that same sort of thing. And what they do is they use these lands to then raise money. And so most of the time, if you used to live near them, you probably wouldn't really see much difference between them and any other sort of monk, because they're not going to be riding around in full armour and sort of full battle dress. They're there basically to recruit people. to farm and to be landlords. And we know that they take part in the wool trade, which is a really big economic driver in medieval England.

Up in Scotland, they have saltworks. They also own lots of tenements that they rent out. So it's really important for them as a sort of financial resource. And then each of the estates they have in the West are called preceptories. This would normally be a manor house, some farmlands attached, maybe a church, and then it will own a whole bunch of other lands in the area. And each preceptory is supposed to send a third of its income out to the east. And we know that they then gather this up each year and they send it out

and it normally goes via France and then through Venice and then out to the east. And sometimes a slightly different route to fair at war with France. But it's a really key part to how they actually get all the money and also the men that they need out to the east to do the orders work. Yeah. And do they become kind of significant landowners in England? If you look at a map of all the protectories across England, it's pretty much every county, apart from, I think, Cumbria and some of the areas just bordering it in very northwest, that don't have a preceptory. But there are still a lot of the orders lands throughout there. And they are very widespread because not only do they have their own lands later on when the Templars gotten rid of. They inherit much. most of the Templar's lands as well.

So they end up with this massive network of prophecies across the country. Just the hospitlers in England and Wales, because they're also in Scotland and in Ireland, just the hospitlers there are richer than Westminster Abbey and Glastonbury Abbey, which are two richest abbeys in the country, just because they have so much land. And it does then mean that they become quite important, because, you know, you can't can't really turn up in a country and buy up a whole chunk of it without also then becoming quite an important political figure as well. Yeah, I was going to ask how far they stray into politics at this point because I think

they get involved in the Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland. Do we see them kind of taking a political role? I guess as you say, if they're significant landowners, it's almost hard for them not to, but do they have any trouble reconciling that with their military aims in the East? Or can they see the political connections as a way to enhance their presence in the Holy Land? I think sometimes it definitely works to enhance it because it's increasing the status and the prominence of the order by having these connections with a lot of the Anglo-Norman and Canberon and Norman lords that go off and invade Ireland, those same lords then give them a lot of land in Ireland that they didn't have before. So now they have more income coming in. It's not too

unusual if you think of them as churchmen because most of the medieval administration is churchmen. The chancellor is normally a bishop or an archbishop. It is quite usual for people to get involved. Even when you look at it and go, well, you're not actually supposed to be leading armies, but in Ireland, for example, it's normally the Archbishop of Dublin that is chancellor. And he often actually has to lead armies, even though he is a churchman. So in that respect, it's not quite so unusual. But it does have a bit more of a difficulty because yes, I suppose the archbishop,

he's ultimately answering to the Pope, an abbot might end up having to answer to sort of a provincial head. The hospitalists have quite this authoritative figure on the other side of Mediterranean who might not really like that they are ending up getting involved in fighting with other Christians and so on,

but can't really do that much against it because they are holding land from the king. If the king then says to you, well, you're a landholder, I want to go to war with France. Can you raise some troops for me? There's not really much they can do to sort of resist that, particularly because the king can then say, well, if you don't do this, I will just stop you sending money to the east.

And because, you know, you might be sending it abroad to my enemies. I don't really like that. And the other tool of issue that gets in the way is that most of the brethren, who are in England are English. And so you think, well, how much do they see themselves as being hospitalers first or being English subjects first? Is their loyalty to the king or to the order? And sometimes you can see that there are priors, so the men who are heads of the order

in England, Wales and Scotland is this prior of England. And sometimes you can look at it and go, oh, yes, no, he's clearly, he's putting the order first, he's repeatedly going out to the east when he's asked to be said. spending monies for them and everything. He's actually avoiding getting involved too much in politics if he can. And then there are other ones where you go, oh, he never goes out to the whole land. He just stays here. He clearly doesn't actually prioritize that as much. And it does end up bringing them into quite a few problems. Initially, in the 11 and 1,200s, they seem to be a bit reluctant to actually get on the battlefield against Christians. They do a bit of fighting in Ireland.

and a few of them do in Scotland in the late 1200s. But it's only really later on that they more fully sort of go, oh yes, no, okay, I will actually join the army, the king's raising and I will go out. Yeah, and I guess for the hospital itself in Jerusalem, there's an extent to which the ends justify the means they need the money to protect the Holy Land. I suppose there's some degree to which they might feel

they can turn a bit of a blind eye to how it arrives there as long as it does keep arriving. I think so. There's certainly also, do they even know about it in time to do anything? Because the news would take so long to travel that distance that, oh, for the prior of Ireland, he was off on a campaign fighting the Irish three months ago. Oh, it's over now. And by the time that we tell him not to have done it. So yes, I think there's definitely that sort of, well, we can't actually do much to stop it, but also, this is, firstly, probably their duty as an English subject. And if we tell them to say no, what will the king do? And the king might get in our way. And that really wouldn't be very good. So it is quite a balancing act that they have to do to not push too far.

And certainly when it gets later on into the 13, 1400s, and then in 1500s, it's made very clear that you can push the English kings too far. They will just seize all your lands if you don't. play with them. I guess we might be quite familiar. We've talked about the Templars before on gone medieval and we've talked about how they become a big financial institution. They're lending money to kings and all of that kind of thing. Are the hospitalers doing anything similar? You mentioned they're getting involved in the wall trade, which is obviously a core part of the English economy. Are they providing those kinds of services that get them really into the

fabric of England? Yes. So it's like for Templars, they develop this system of, you can deposit money at one end with a hospitaler house, and then you can withdraw it at the other end. Because this is what they're already having to do anyway. They're having to send money all the way from Scotland all the way out to Jerusalem to fund their troops there. They are developing systems to manage that. So why not open it up to other people?

It's helping pilgrims as they go to the east. They can get some money from it, or at least good connections with the king and so on. And so this ends up leading from being actually quite good at finances. And that therefore means that the kings can look at it and go, well, you're quite good at numbers. Why don't you come and work for me? And that's how they really start to get into government in a big way. It starts a little bit in the mid-1100s when Henry II and Beckett are having a falling out.

Sometimes the diplomats that are going between them are hospitalised. and Templars. But then when it gets into 1200s, you start finding both orders doing things like auditing royal accounts or helping collect taxes or they're entrusted as a sort of safe deposit place for royal jewels and funds. And this becomes a really big thing. When you get two very weird sort of quite opposite sort of hospitilers in the 1270s who both become treasurer, one in England and one in Ireland. So the first one is Joseph de Chauncey, and he is the treasurer of the whole hospitaler order.

And he's done this for over 20 years. And Edward I has come out to the Holy Land on Crusade. He's still only the Lord Edward. He's not just yet king. He's still got a year to go. And he goes around and he raids a couple of places. he builds a new tower, gives a bit of money, and then he goes home. But with him comes Joseph De Chauncey, who's this English veteran hospitaler,

and if he's been in charge of the finances of this entire pan-European organisation, he's probably for 20 years. He's probably quite good at numbers. And Edward has recruited him. He now makes him royal treasurer of England. And so De Chauncey gets involved in raising taxes, he ends up paying off some of the king's debts, and he seems to become this really quite valued servant of the king. And he seems to have this sort of friendship between him.

They send gifts to each other. But De Chauncey eventually asks whether he can go back to Holland and he can still help out there, support the order there. And when he does, he actually sends letters back to Edward. And he reports back to him and says, there's been this big battle involving some of the Mongols and Christian forces fighting against some of the Muslims and this is everything that happened. And the Holy Land's in a very bad state. But if you were to turn up, I'm sure you'd be able to conquer it all in one go. And you you only need a thousand troops or so and it would be fine. And Edward does write back to him and says,

thanks for all the gifts that you sent me, including the hoods for the Falcons, but please don't send any more because I'm far too busy to actually go walking anymore and asks, can you come back? Because actually I really need you here and you're really useful. And this would be really helpful. But sadly for Edward, the Chauncey,

He had probably died of ill health by this point. He's probably in at least his 70s, maybe even into his 80s. But he seems to have been such a valued servant that Edward lets him go out to the east, doesn't let any of the others go out. He's really quite restrictive afterwards and is quite cagey about letting other hospital priors go out, presumably because he's worried they might not come back and they can be quite useful to him. He has quite an odd sort of counterpart, Joseph de Chauncey, in another hospitaler who's active at the same time, who's Stephen of Fulburn, who's probably from Cambridgeshire.

Unlike De Chaucer, he's not actually a knight. So the majority of the leadership in the hospitalers are knights. But there's two other divisions in the order. There's the sergeants who are a mixture of some military sort of officials and some more administrative officials who generally just are from a more humble background and then there's the chaplains so the order's priests and stephen of fullborn was one of these chaplains and he was a massive crook he ends up going off to ireland on task for henry the third's queen eleanor of provence and then he ends up sort of having the rest of his career there. So Edward I makes him a royal tax collector, and then this vacancy comes up for the bishopric of Waterford. And Edward puts him up for that. And he's the only

English hospitler to actually make it to being a bishop. It happened for hospitalers elsewhere, but not really in England or in Ireland. And so he becomes a bishop. And so he becomes a bishop. And And very soon after, the king decides, oh, and you can also be treasurer of Ireland. And this seems to be a sort of an idea of I'm going to get someone from outside the colony to clean the place up and fix all the finances. The English colony in Ireland is riddled with corruption. It's far away enough from the centre that you have all of these powerful figures there who don't have very much oversight.

and they often get into quite brutal feuds with each other, all these English and Anglo-Irish lords. And so the Royal Administration thinks, well, if we send over some guy from the outside, who's also, he's a hospitler, so he's a monk, he's celibate, it's not like he's got loads of illegitimate children, but he's going to give all these nice jobs to. So we'll send him over, and hopefully he can clear it up

and actually make the colony make some money, because through most of its existence in medieval period, it's actually just a drain on the royal finances. And he does quite well. He sets up new mints and he actually manages to make the colony start to turn enough of a profit that it can help support Edwards' wars in Wales. And the King's so impressive that in 1281 he gives Fulborn the temporary job of Justicia, which is the chief government. of the colony. And so he is basically there to represent the king. He is in charge of administering justice. He's also in charge of defending the colony. So he's now in charge of justice, defense, and finances. So he's got almost the entirety of the government. It's just the chancellorship, where they actually produce all of the documentation, all the writs, all the orders, all the letters,

all the letters that actually keep government going day to day. That's the only bit that's outside of his control for now. And like I said, even though he's a chaplain, doesn't get in the way of him doing some fighting. He joins a couple campaigns against the Irish. He recruits soldiers from Wales to help out. And he ends up having, going a little bit beyond what he should be doing in terms of his sort of authority is just this year. Because in the 1270s and 1280s, the English colonies had a lot of problems with the Irish in Leinster. The two McMurrah brothers there, so Mertak, the king of Leinster and his brother Art, have been repeatedly raiding the colony and they've been getting other Gallic Irish kingdoms to support them. And by at least 177, the war was over, but

They're still seen as a threat. They are put under the king's peace so that they can negotiate. And they're supposed to come over to England in 1281. And they're given a royal safe conduct, should all be fine. And instead, Fulburn just decides, well, actually, I'm just going to put a bounty on their heads. he hires a hitman to just murder the pair, even though this is supposed to be incredibly illegal. They're in the King's Peace.

They've got a royal safe conduct. They're not outlaws or anything like that. And he just hires a minor knight to murder the two men, whilst they are in the port waiting to get a ship to go to England and go negotiate with the king. And the hitman then brings the two heads to the bishop. and he generously agrees to split the reward with him. And he then holds this retrospective inquiry

but proves that the McMurreras had always been criminals and so their deaths were entirely legal and it was all okay. And he puts a big fine on any of their supporters. And so even though he's broken the king's safe conduct, on the king's behalf he's broken the king's word, Edward seems quite happy because he then goes, oh, okay, you know, that temporary job is justici. Let's make it permanent.

And admittedly, the colony doesn't have any trouble with Leinster for about 15 years after this. So he's got almost complete control of the colonial government. He's actually gotten away with murder. He becomes a bit more blatant. He ends up appointing his brother as deputy treasurer. The chancellor dies in 1283. and so he just makes his nephew chancellor. And so he's now got control of the whole of government.

And he brings in his other nephews into governments and other roles as well. He lets everything just fall into sort of disrepair. The chancery, he starts just employing one guy there who apparently is so incompetent that most of the writs that he writes aren't legally valid. So government just stops working. And everyone starts getting quite angry with him, within the colony, lots of the Anglo-Irish lords end up fleeing into the countryside so that he can't force them to authenticate false records,

and they refuse to bribe him and so on. So eventually enough of this reaches Edward, and they start an inquiry into these accusations of corruption. And Fulborn still doesn't give up. He threatens the witnesses. He tries to get in the way of the investigation. He runs off to Wales, takes most of the treasury with him. When he does eventually come back, the auditors find that he's still withholding lots of money from royal accounts.

He's skimming off the top of customs duties. If there's any fines given to people he likes, he pardons them. He's taken control of all the wine trade, and then he seizes all the importsmen, sells it off at an inflated price. and he apparently appoints some poor hospitler underling as his new deputy treasurer to replace his brother. And this hospitler knows very little Latin, is very incompetent, and Fulbourne doesn't even pay him properly. He sees most of his wages for himself and he gives a little bit to his underling. And he's accused of installing a secret trap door over the treasury between his office and the treasury so he can get in steal things and no one will know that he's been in there.

And he's also accused about this murder of the two McMurrow brothers. But the bigger issue seems to be less that he's murdered two guys who were supposed to be under safe conduct and more that he kept the money for himself. It sounds like he was doing quite well to a point in that he was being dodgy, but he was being the right kind of dodgy from Edward's point of view, but then he's just gone and pushed it a bit too far? Well, he actually still comes out of it pretty well. So he is removed as treasurer. He's given a big fine, £13,000, really massive, but the king eventually pardons him of 9,000 of that. So he only has to pay $4,000. And he still stays on as just this year. And then a year later,

another vacancy in the church comes up, and Edward says, oh, you can be the Archbishop of 2am. So he actually gets a promotion after all of this. Falling upwards, the classic falling upwards. And when he dies, you can just see, because there's this inventory of all his goods, you can see how ridiculously wealthy he became after this. You know, 14 years at the top of the Colony's government, he has a Episcopal palace to him. It's full of gold and silver.

He has 11 pairs of silk shoes. He has 10 towels. And his kitchen's full of all. all of these exotic imported things like albans and dates. And he has 14 horses, two of which are called Rusty. He manages to do quite well. And it's the sort of, they really exemplify the two types of hospitlers that you get out in the West, that you get people like Chauconcy, where they go out, they serve their king loyally,

they become quite important, but they still remember the order and they still keep going back and serving in the east. And then you have people like Fulburn that go, oh, I'm really far away from my boss out here. They're all way over in the Mediterranean. And I've got all these lands and all this income coming in. I'm just going to make the most of it. Yeah, yeah, super dodgy. And that move into the role of treasurer is quite a significant one for the hospitalist, isn't it?

It begins kind of a long connection of them to the very top of government in England. Yes, because if you think about sort of the main royal positions, then obviously, you know, if you've got the Chancellor and then you have some of the household officials, but Treasurer is still very high up there and you're in charge of the money. So it really ties them in. And then when you get to Edward I, having more of these conflicts of wars around Britain, he's going into Wales, going into Scotland. you then start to have the hospitalers taking on more direct military roles. So we don't have anything showing that they definitely took part in the initial invasions in Wales, but they do help put down a Welsh rebellion in 1294. And then when Edward goes into Scotland in 1296, one of the Welsh hospitlers goes with him. and then when we have the Battle of Falkirk in 1298, both the English Hospitlers and the Templars are on the battlefield on the English side.

Because this becomes quite a big problem firm, because the hospitalers lands across Britain, they are all answering to a headquarters in England. Most of the hospitals in Britain are English. When it comes to a conflict between England and Scotland, or between England and Wales, they generally side with the English. So their headquarters up in Scotland, Torficken Preceptory, it's a bit west of Edinburgh.

William Wallace ends up sacking it because the hospitalers have so clearly sided with the English, even though this is a religious order, these people are supposed to be here to fund the crusades. They're supposed to be above this. They have submitted to Edward. They're backing him. And so Wallace actually occupies Torfican and holds his only parliament there. And then the battle for Kirk shortly comes after Wallace is defeated, but the hospitaller

preceptor of Torfican dies in the battle. And then they have to reoccupy their old home afterwards now that the Scots have been defeated. And this then carries on when you get 100 years war. most of it, they managed to avoid actually going out and fighting in France. I think because there is, firstly, the English make this repeated case that they have overlordship over Wales and over Scotland. And the Scots, as a political force, their position isn't that strong enough to convince much of the rest of Europe that that's wrong.

whilst France is much more secure, it's much more powerful state and there's so much of the order's membership are French and the order's leadership is usually French. It's a bit more difficult for the English hospitalers to actually go out and fight on the battlefield there. So it only happens a few times. A bit too much of a conflict of interest for the order. Yeah.

Whereas you can get away with Ireland and Scotland and Wales, you can't get away with it in France. Yeah. And also generally, they're sending their responses, their money they send out to the east, goes through France most of the time. And so what we have at the start of a hundred years' war,

prior Philip Detem, who's come prior of England, been there for about five years by the start of war. And he's immediately sort of under suspicion. The king really doesn't like that he's sending this money abroad, particularly because medieval money is only really worth as much as the actual precious metal that is in the coins. And so if you are exporting

coins out of the realm, you're taking silver out of the realm, that's really potentially quite bad for the economy. And that's really quite concerning for the kings, because that coin probably isn't going to come back. And so once you get to a hundred years, well, they repeatedly start cutting off the supply of money going from England out to, by this point, roads, where after the fore, the whole land in 1291, hospitalers have taken over roads and made that their sort of their own independent island state. And so prior Phillips Tem isn't allowed to send money out anymore. He's instead made an admiral. And he's given charge of looking after Southampton,

because that's already been raided by the French. He has to raise troops to defend it. and he has to manage a lot of the defence of the South Coast and then also occasionally raise troops and raise money. But when we're talking about raising troops, these aren't generally hospitlers themselves. There might be a few of them there, or their leaders might be hospitlers. But we're talking about, you know, raising sometimes hundreds of men at a time.

There probably were only about 115 hospitlers, 120 hospitlers in England most of the time. And so it's more they're raising them from the lands for hospitals. These are sort of hospital attendants that they're raising rather than actual members of the order who would generally only be leading these forces if they were on the battlefield. Just to take a slight step backwards, between kind of all of the stuff that happened with Edward I and the 100 years war, there is a crisis for the Templar. So, you know, military order in Europe in 1312 will fall.

They'll be suppressed and they will be portrayed as heretics and all of that kind of thing. Are the hospitals in any danger at this point? Are they, you know, could they have fallen into the same category and been sort of rounded up with the Templars and done away with? Or do they escape any suspicion? I think there's definitely a risk if they hadn't started to reinvent themselves and if they hadn't taken roads. So 1291, a kick to Alvahoui land, the Templars hospitalers, Teutonic Knights, they all retreat to Cyprus. And at this point, they then sort of, well, we actually lost the mainland, what do we do? And the Teutonic Knights, they're not doing too badly because they've been fighting in the Baltic, in Prussia, in sort of what, and in what's sort of now.

northern Poland and Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. So they can say we're still on the front line. We're fighting against pagans, admittedly, not against Muslims, but we're still doing stuff, still active. And the hospitlers and the Templars is a bit more difficult for them. And the Templars briefly take an island off the coast of Syria, but it's less than a square mile in size and it doesn't have its own water supply. They hold it for two years and they get staffed out. So that didn't really work. And because people in the West have seen the massive estates of these orders, and they know that there's all this money going out to the east, you do start to get a lot more criticism of, well, but look, they own half the county. They

have so much land. All this money's going there. We donate to them. Why did they lose? They can't have lost because, you know, they weren't supplied enough or something. It must be because they were, they weren't good enough. They didn't fight hard enough. And I guess also, if they've lost, why would you carry on giving them money? You know, why are they still sending that money out there when it's lost and they're not doing that work anymore? Yeah. So they start getting blamed for it as well.

This all builds up. And though they do, they keep on proposing new crusades and say, well, we could, this is our plan. We could go and do this. there isn't really much of a movement to it to actually doing anything. It's just a couple of coastal raids. It doesn't really work. In 306, the hospitalists decide, well, actually, what we're going to do is we're going to take over roads. It's owned by the Greeks, who are Orthodox Christians, but it's fine.

They don't follow the Pope. They're schismatics, so we can still go and do it. And they do actually manage to win the Pope's support for this. They even get him to declare a crusade in 1308 to take Rhodes. And so they start doing this in 1306. 1307, the Templars are arrested in France, and then this follows throughout Europe. And this really spurs on the hospitlers,

because it makes it clear that if you don't actually have your own independent base, Teutonic order have their one up in Prussia, the Templars didn't have one. They have outposts in all of these other kingdoms, controlled by other people. And so they need their own base, that's on the front line to show that, firstly, they are still doing things, they are still fighting crusade, but also that it's a safe haven from kings like Philip Vorth of France,

who's just arrested the Templars so he can seize their lands and money. And the Teutonic order clearly realized this as well, because in 1309, until then, their headquarters had been in Venice. And that year, they go, no, no, we're going to move it up to Prussia, far away from anyone that can get us. I think if the hospitalers hadn't established roads, they might have ended up being suppressed like the Templars, but if you've already done that once, I don't know if people would necessarily believe it a second time.

And a lot of people didn't actually fully believe it because when they are suppressed, the Pope does say that he doesn't actually find them officially guilty of heresy. He just says that the order has been so damaged by all the accusations and by the trials that its reputation is not salvageable and so they have to be suppressed. At the very least, the hospitalers probably would have had what the same has happened to the Order of St Lazarus, that they would have slowly demilitarized, and then they would have been sort of broken up by country. And, you know, one king and one country would have seized the lands, maybe made like his own national. sort of an English order of hospitlers, and then they might have just ended up as like an honorific that you could give out to minor members in the royal family, like they do with the

Spanish military orders. They would have just sort of faded away and been secularized. But having this place on the front line really saves them and lets them go, no, we are still fighting. We're still doing this. We're still fulfilling our original purpose. And also, they still have the hospitler side of it. They're still running hospitals, arms houses and so on. They're still giving out charity, which was never as bigger thing for the Templars. So they could survive a bit more easily, I think. Yeah, I guess it makes them more difficult to target when they are still doing something that you can identify as good and valuable work that is outside of being a military order.

And ultimately, by avoiding being suppressed in the same way, they actually benefit, don't they? because they acquire, as you mentioned before, they acquire an awful lot of the Templars lands. Yes, so it's a bit of a poison chalice when the order is suppressed by the Pope 1312. He says, and the hospitlers are going to inherit the lands. And of course, French kings are very angry about this because that was not what he was hoping for.

And the hospitalers are probably quite pleased because this is basically the biggest transfer of land in medieval Europe, because we're talking about lands in Spain, Portugal, in Germany, France, in Britain and Ireland, Italy, so much territory is about to be transferred. This is the biggest until you get, you know, all of the suppressions of religious houses during Reformation. But it also means that they've basically put them in the largest sort of legal battle possible because the Templars have been arrested, depending on the country,

for four or five years. So the local kings have been managing the lands. which means that they've sent their guys over there to take over the preceptories, continue farming the place and everything. And in the meantime, they've been collecting all the income. And they don't really want to lose that. And then you also, in some places you've had like the descendants of the original founders going, actually, we'd quite like that land back, please. My granddad should not have given it away.

So they basically spend the next several decades having to fight all of these legal battles, try and persuade the king to actually do what the Pope has said. And of course, the king's given a whole bunch of the lands to his favourites. So at this time it's Edward II, the new temple in London. So where the temple churches. That's been given over to Hugh Dispenser. And so they really are struggling because these are people that the king's very fond of. And why would he want to piss them off by just giving it to the hospitlers?

And there's also the whole side of, now kings aren't really that keen on people like popes and other outside authorities telling them what to do in their own kingdom if they can avoid it. And they have to get through all of these legal battles. Some of the Templar lands they never get and they just remain outside and they're given to new religious houses or they're just hung on to by these different nobles. But most of them they do acquire, like the new temple, they do eventually. get that, certainly helped by the fact that, you know, the dispensers have quite a fool

from grace and everything with Edward Second. It is a very difficult time for them that is also very costly because they're having to pay all these lawyers. They're also basically having to bribe a lot of people. And they're having to give up some lands in return for getting others. And it then leaves them very short of money for the next several decades. And on top of that, they've just had this big campaign to conquer roads. So they're quite vulnerable. this point, financially, they're very overstretched. And it's not really the best time for the order. By the time we get towards the end of the 14th century two, the peasants revolt in 1881, one of the major political casualties of that is Robert Hales, who is the treasurer

and who is also the prior of the order of the Knights of the Hospital in England at that point. Have we reached a point here where the hospitalers are so establishment that they're sort of, you can't separate them from the government, that they are tied to the successes and failures of, you know, Richard the 2nd's government. It's almost like Robert Hales has come to represent the failures of government by that point. Well, with Hales, I think if he'd been in another position,

he might have been okay. The problem is that, of course, peasants are all lots of causes behind it, but one of them is the poll tax. Robert Hales is treasurer, so he's in charge of collecting the poll. poll tax. So, you know, if he'd been off being an ambassador somewhere, or if he had just stayed being admiral, like he'd been in the 1370s, he might have been okay, but he's very unlucky to basically been holding the parcel when it explodes. So the poll tax is really unpopular, even though

there have been previous ones, but this one, it's not graded by income. Everyone's paying the same rate, no matter how rich you are. And the poll tax collectors really antagonise people and are quite aggressive in their collection. And the previous treasurer in February 1381, he's either fired or maybe he's quite wisely resigns because he can see what's coming. And Hales is then appointed. He is a veteran hospitler. He's had important roles out in the east. He's been an ambassador, but also an Admiral back in England. And there's no evidence, though, of him having any sort of financial or administrative experience specifically.

It's more military. So it might just be that no one else wanted the job. But he ends up becoming treasurer. And he also has an enemy in London. So you end up having the outbreaks of rioting in May and early June 1381. and you have bands from Essex and Kent marching on London. And they particularly target religious houses. Because another thing they're quite angry about is serfdom

and this institution that you owe certain amounts of time working on your lord's land and so on and all the rents and Jews you owe to them. And so they target religious houses and burn their archives to destroy records of the service that they owe to their landlords. And the hospitlers are very heavily targeted for this. a lot of our lands in Cambridgeshire get burned in Essex as well. And there's one Londoner called Thomas Farringdon, who's particularly angry at the hospitalism and at Hales specifically.

He claims that Hales had seized some of his houses and had denied him his rightful inheritance. And Farringdon's from quite an well-established London family of goldsmiths. The family has included a Lord Mayor of London and an MP. So he's probably from a higher sort of social background. from this sort of country night that's not really from that high up in society because most of the hospitalers

are from like the lower nightly class and Farringdon gathers a mob, burns for hospital as lands in Essex. He gets into London, he burns the new temple, which had just passed to the hospitalers and he makes sure to target a lot of their

records there. He goes and marches on Clark &well. Now the new temple, he burns us Voi Palace, then Clark and Well Priory. This is all in one day for him. And they loot and kill the hospitalers men there and some Flemish immigrants who would hid out in the church. And then afterwards that night, he sits with his comrades and he writes down a hit list of all the royal officials that he wants to target. He then goes and burns the hospitler manor the following day at Highbury and then marches to Myelend where all the rebels are gathering. And on the way, he

meets Richard B. Second, who has ridden out of the tower to try and negotiate with rebels, and he grabs the king's bridle of his horse and insists that he have justice done and that on the prior and that otherwise he will do justice himself on this false trait at the prior. And Richard apparently says that, you know, I will sort it, but Farringdon clearly doesn't believe him because he lets the king ride on and then he goes, oh, king's out of the tower, rest of the government's hiding in the tower, let's all go to the tower with my mob. And the Tower of London does have this big reputation as a scary fortress and a castle.

It's not actually a very good prison and is not actually very good at keeping people out as well as keeping people in. So they turn up and they just persuade the garrison to Lerver-Drawbridge and the mob is let into the castle. They break into the white tower where Prior Hales is hiding, along with Archbishop Sudbury, who's the Chancellor, so you know, Chancellor and Treasurer, two of the most important figures in government. The Queen Mother's there as well. They're in St John's Chapel in the Tower. And clearly Sudbury and Hales know that the end is coming because they've been praying, given confession, they're saying the listening, they know this is not going to end well for them.

and they're both dragged out of the tower, along with a couple of other unfortunates, and they are led out to Tower Hill, a log is put down, and several strokes of the axe are needed to behead Sudbury and Hales. And the heads of them and two others are put on spikes on the gate of London Bridge, so what you traditionally do with the heads of traitors. and Farringdon then marches back into the city and the authorities soon end up capturing him trying to knock down someone's house, probably another person who was on his hit list. And the revolt is eventually put down by Richard.

He persuades them to disperse and just goes back on his promise and then ends up setting in all of these inquiries and trials of leading figures in the revolt. and Farringdon is imprisoned and there is a real sort of condemnation by the government of what's been done to the hospitalers. A lot of the early pardons say we can excuse what you did,

you're pardoned as long as you weren't a ringleader and you weren't involved in the murder of Sudbury or Hales or burning the hospitlars headquarters at Clark & Mell Priory or burning the Svoy Palace and a few other incidents. So it's listed there as these are the explicit things that we can't actually ignore.

And somehow, Farringdon survives. He stays in prison for about two years and then he is given a royal pardon. They do not execute him for this. And it's really, really odd. It might be that his claims against Hales were genuine or it might be that the government are a bit worried about, well, if we execute the guy who executed Hales and everyone hated Hales, might reignite things, so we might not want to risk that. But even the hospitalers don't seem to complain, because you would have thought that the hospital of leadership, or maybe his brethren in

England, would say, you know, this guy murdered one of us. He needs to be executed in return. But there's no demand for an investigation. The closest that happens is that hospitalers are quite concerned about all of the chalises and so on, all of the important items that are used for administering the sacrament, they were stolen from the church in Clark and Well Priory. So they make sure to get those back and they make sure to note down that when it was given back and to record it in their records. But there's nothing about hails. So it might be that he wasn't very popular. It may also be that the leadership sort of took the view of, well, you know, this was in your capacity he is a servant and the subject of the king, and you played with fire and you got burnt,

it's not really our fault. And he clearly wasn't very liked, at least, by his employees. Because among the people who end up attacking the hospital and manners at Highbury and Clarkenwell, are three of Hales' own servants, including his groom. So presumably someone he's got a fairly close sort of relationship with. And his groom and one of the other servants then actually joined the mob. that drag hails out of the tower, and they're present at his execution. So he's clearly not very well liked.

Yeah, because it speaks as well to that kind of blurring of the line between being a religious figure and being a political figure, and this is maybe a sense of where that goes a little bit too far into the realm of politics, and the religious order are willing to kind of cut him loose because his downfall is more related to politics than it is to religion and he sort of blurred that line a bit too far and got caught up. Yeah, which then happens even more when it gets awards of roses. And when you get to sort of the second war of sort of 1469 through to, to what, 1771, when Edward VIII gets deposed, Henry V, 6th gets put back on the throne by the Earl of Warwick. In that new government, the readaption government of Henry 6th, the hospital of

prior John Langstrother is appointed treasurer. He is an ally of Warwick. He helped support Warwick's initial attempt to sort of launch a coup against Edward and exert control over him in the 1460s. Langstrother has a good reason to have a grudge against Edward IV, because when his predecessor has Pryor died. Edward VIII, he's married for Elizabeth Woodville, he's got this very big family of in-laws that he wants to give nice jobs to, and so he tries to make one of his brothers-in-law Hospital of Pryor, and the hospitalers are not having that, but it does take, I think, about a year until Edward finally accepts Langstrother as Pryor, as he's the one who's actually been elected by the hospitalers rather than this outsider who has nothing to do with them.

So he's got a bit of a grudge against him, so he joins with Warwick's rebellion. And he ends up becoming treasurer, so he's right there at the centre of government. He's one of the few lords that when Henry V. 6th has been released from the tower from his imprisonment there, Langstrother joins Warwick and George Duke of Clarence to actually go and formally receive the restored king. So he's really right there at the centre. He is then sent abroad to go and bring back the queen of Henry the 6th and his son, Edward of Westminster, Stever, Lancaster and Prince of Wales. And he's supposed to escort them back into England. Unfortunately for him, he gets delayed by bad weather.

Edward VIII does not. He is turned back up in England with his own army, is marching through the country. and by the time that Langstrother lands in the West country with the Queen and with the Lancasterian Prince Wales, the Earl of Warwick is dead, he's been killed by Edward IV, George Duke of Florence has switched sides back to supporting Edward and every six has been captured again. It's all falling apart. And so you've got Paul Langstrother is there.

He's realised he's really chosen the wrong side in this. and he is in joint command of the centre of the Lancasterian army when Edward VIII brings them to battle at the Battle of Chukesbury and he's got joint command with the young Edward of Westminster, the Prince Wales. Considering we know Langstrother has had quite a good career of military service out in the east, it's probably more that Langstrother is actually in charge and is sort of, you know, making very firm advice to the prince about what to do. But clearly it isn't actually enough. The Lancasterians are defeated. Langstrother flees into Chukesbury Abbey and he would have

actually been killed then and there by his very angry Edward IV and his men who stormed into the abbey to find all of the escapees. But there is a priest who comes out and is still holding the sacrament from performing mass and basically shames them into not spilling. blood in the abbey. And so instead they all get dragged out and a scaffold is set up in the centre of Chukesbury and they're executed there. And again, there's no response from the order. There's no condemnation. This does very much seem to them going, well, you played at high politics and you lost. That's your own fault and we're not going to get involved in this. It seems like in a lot of these repeated cases, there's very little effort by the hospital

to stand aside from politics. They're very willing to pick aside and kind of throw their lot in with one side in any given conflict. People will know I'm slightly obsessed with Richard the 3rd and the princes in the tower. And two of the kind of priors of the Knights Hospital will get involved in the two pretenders

who oppose Henry the 7th later on, supporting them against Henry the 7th. So again, they're throwing their lot in with rebellion. They're not making an effort to say, you know, we're a serious religious order, we're above politics, they are saying, bang, we're on that side. Yeah, they get really tied into it.

And it doesn't help that the order does start to secularise a bit in the late medieval periods. It's not fully, it's not as much as has been said in the past. They do still have that quite strong religious aspect. And at least officially, they're not supposed to have kids or anything like that. There are a few of them start to. But they do start to secularise a little bit. things like initially when they start appearing in Parliament in 1300s, they sit with the clergy.

But then once you get into later on, into 1400s, 1500s, they actually start sitting with the barons and they're treated as one of the more senior barons. And you get more instances where the local nightly family has put their son, one of their sons, into the hospitlers, and he'll then rent out all of the orders land in the county to them as a cut rate and things like that. We find more evidence of them going hawking and hunting and so on. And they start to take on, they become more of the knight side of things than the monk side. And that really plays in at sort of the higher level of politics. And yes, they both get involved with both Lambert Simmel and Perkin Warbeck.

and one of them even ends up entertaining an idea of assassinating Henry V. 7th as well. So they're really getting involved in these things that you look at and go, you're not actually supposed to be here to do this stuff. Yeah. And I guess once we get beyond the medieval period then, it feels like that secularisation might have been something that could have protected them at something like the dissolution of the monasteries because they're not overt, not a very religious order anymore,

if that's not a weird way of phrasing it. How long do the hospitalers end up staying in England? So they are suppressed by Henry V8 in 1540, which is actually quite late, because of course the dissolution really starts in 1536, and so they survive multiple rounds of suppressions. He lets them last really quite a long time, because Henry has this very ambivalent relationship with the hospitalers.

On the one hand, he really likes them because it's all, oh, they're a fighting crusade and their chivalrous knights, and they had this amazingly valiant but failed defensive roads in 1522, and I heard all the stories about it, and it was so amazing. I thought, oh, I'm going to give them some cannon to help them retake the island and so on. And he's even been declared the official protector of the order. in 15-11 as a sort of way to keep him on side. So he really likes that side of them, but also they ultimately answer to the Pope. And so he's now got this bunch of people in his

kingdom who ultimately support the Pope, and he really doesn't like that. And he's denounced the Pope, and he's tried to cut ties with them. And yet these guys are still taking money out of his kingdom, money that could be quite useful here, taking useful military commanders, particularly by this point, the hospitalers are very known for their skill at naval combat. These guys could be very useful admirals to him, and they're going off from their fighting on Malta, where they've now moved to after losing roads. And so he's not that happy about this, but he gives them quite a lot of leeway for quite a while. He actually lets them continue to go around selling indulgences as long as they don't emphasize the authority of the Pope or anything like that.

for a few years after they're not supposed to sell indulgences anymore and it's supposed to have been banned. And he does eventually come to a settlement with them in 1537, well into the dissolution, saying that, yeah, no, you can still answer to Grandmaster. I get veto over who your new prior is going to be. I get some of the first income. Every time a preceptor dies, I get the first year of the new preceptor's income and so on. But you can still go out there. It's okay. you can still send money out to Malta. It only really sort of falls apart when you have a very xenophobic and rather unstable hospitaler, English hospitaler on Malta called Clement West, who is just basically

writing poison pen letters back to both to Henry VIII and to Thomas Cromwell saying, yeah, they don't believe in your supremacy over the church. I think it's all rubbish. They think that something bad is going to. happen to you because God has turned against you. And then a couple of hospitalers also get involved in the pilgrimage of grace or are accused of being involved. And so at that point, it just becomes, well, Henry seems to think, I can't trust these guys. They're skirting quite close to the line by still having such close ties to the Pope. And so he then suppresses them. He ends up

seizing all their lands. He gives out very big pensions to the surviving hospitlers. He gives £1,000 pounds a year to the last prior of England, but the prior dies of grief the day of the Order's suppression. So that doesn't actually come to anything. And then several of them end up staying on in the country. They become royal admirals and commanders or ambassadors. So they still end up sort of remaining there and there continues being this suggestion that pops up every now and then among the Tudor kings and then under the Stuarts that are, maybe we should bring the hospitalers back, but it never comes to anything. And they just sort of fade away.

They survive up in Scotland until 1564. But then after that, that's basically the end of any sort of real hospital or activity in Britain. It sounds a bit like they blew an opportunity under Henry the 7th by not quite playing the game as they might have done. And in terms of the broader order, what happens to the night's hospitaler, you know, does the order come to an end eventually? they've lost roads, moved to Malta, what happens to them then? They have a bit of a revival, at least in their reputation, in 1565. Because when they initially get to Malta, they don't really like it. They think it's just a temporary stopping place.

There's no trees there. There's not much of a water supply there. It's not very developed at the time. And they're not that happy about it. They then get besieged by the Ottoman Turks in 1565. Turks have already kicked off. off roads. They think now this is a final chance to really get rid of this quite small but quite irritating thorn in their side that they've had for a couple of centuries by this

point. And it's a massive Ottoman army and it's something like 7,000 or so defenders, only a few of whom are hospitlers, lots of them are locals, mercenaries and so on. And over the course of months of siege, they managed to defeat the Ottomans and drive them off. And it becomes this massive success across Europe, even in England, you have church bells rung to celebrate the defeat of the Ottomans. And so this really revives their reputation and they have this sort of chivalric image about them. And so for the following couple of centuries, they remain on water. They become this sort of outpost against the Barbary Corsairs. They have multiple naval campaigns fighting against Muslim piracy there, whilst also doing a whole lot of their own piracy at the

same time. And they stay there until 1798, where they, by that point, have a real problem, has been the revolution in France. Most of the order's leadership are still French. Lots of the order are French. Napoleon has turned up on their doorstep, and the French knights are very torn, and they can't quite bring themselves to actually fight most of them against Napoleon. and so they surrender and he seizes the island and the order goes on a bit of a wonder around Europe. But it is still there today. There's still the Catholic successor order, the sovereign and military order of Malta is still around. It has one room in a fort on Malta and one plaza and a couple of buildings in Rome.

And it still claims sort of sovereign status. can issue passports, it has its own stamps, that sort of thing, and observer status at UN. And there are a couple of other Protestant successor orders. If you add them and the sovereign order together, they still do so much charity work, but they are second only to the Red Cross and Oxfam. So they basically returned to their original hospitular non-military role. They still call themselves knights, but they are doing what their sort of institutional ancestors, their predecessors did at that little hospital in Jerusalem in the 1070s. That's fascinating and kind of comes full circle from the beginning of the story to the end. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Rory, and talking us through the story of the Knights Hospital.

It's been great to meet some of the key members of the Order and hear about their stories too. Thank you very, very much for sharing all of that with us. Thank you. Rory's book Warrior Monks is out now if you'd like to delve deeper into the story of the hospitalers. You can find episodes about the Templars in our back catalogue and there's a fantastic episode with Steve Tibble about Crusader criminals in there too. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday so please come back to join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on

Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of HistoryHits podcasts and free. Head to HistoryHit.com forward slash subscribe right now. Anyway, I better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hit.