Gone Medieval - Why The Middle Ages Matter with Ian Mortimer

Episode Date: November 20, 2021

The Medieval periods' impact on the world and how we see it today is often overlooked. From culture, society, and technology, the horizons of England are ever-changing, but how did the medieval period contribute to these advancements? In this episode, Matt is joined by one of the most prolific voices in Medieval history, Ian Mortimer. From the element of speed, war, and even self-reflection. Ian takes us through the extraordinary shift of horizons. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. Ian Mortimer is one of medieval history's favourite voices from biographies of Edward III, Henry VIII, and accounts of Henry V's Aze Angkor to his wonderful A Time Traveller's Guide series. Ian writes with insight and clarity that never disappoints. He's also ventured recently into the realms of historical fiction with the outcasts of time, which you can catch up with. Ian joins us today to talk about his most recent project, though, which he's entitled Medieval Horizons, and it considers the medieval shifts in culture and society that have long been overlooked. Thank you very

much for joining us, Ian. Thank you very much, Matt. So if we dive in, first of all, can you tell us what you mean by medieval horizons and why you're using this as a way to approach history and discuss the past? Yeah, good question. The whole idea really comes from realizing the extent to which people do not understand the changes of the Middle Ages. It became apparent to me when I was writing a book called Centuries of Change, which asked the question which centuries saw the most change of the last 10. And in writing that book, I realized that people just assume nothing really happened over the course of the Middle Ages. And in researching other big sort of landmark books that dealt with historical change,

I realise that this actually applies to historians too. For example, Yovilna Harari and His Sapiens has a beginning to his chapter 19 where he says that if somebody was a peasant, if fallen asleep in the year 1,000 and had woken up when Columbus was set sail, he'd noticed a little bit of change, but not much, but if he'd fallen asleep for another 500 years,

he wouldn't know where it was coming or going. But I just looked at this. I thought, you don't realize how much profound change there was over the first 500 years of the last millennium. And the more I started picking up on this with other writers, general historians seem to underplay this too. They are convinced that technology is the benchmark of change. And as a writer for the public, I appreciate why people work with the tools they have at their disposal.

They heal to the public to make use of what they already know. But in so doing, they're just confirming this idea that nothing much happened in the Middle Ages. It was all faith and bloodshed and famine and nothing really happens until. the Renaissance comes along to save us, and then the scientific revolution provided us with the modern world. And so the more I thought about this, the more it seemed to be that technology is the wrong benchmark to use when you're looking at the Middle Ages. So what would be the right benchmark to use? And in asking that question, I thought, well, we'd sailed round the world by 1521. In the year 1000, we hadn't got a clue how big the world was, relatively.

few people had any idea that it was a sphere. We still believe that there were no skierpods around the world, people sheltering under a giant foot and cannibals eight foot high who could chase you after you and crocodiles wept after they dragged you into the Nile. There was just such ignorance turning to a massive expansion of our horizons. And as soon as I figured on that word, horizons, it became apparent because we go from hardly traveling ourselves to traveling quite long distances on a regular basis. People started exploring the world and circumnavigated the world. And in terms of our built horizon, houses, well, went from single-story buildings everywhere to five-six-story buildings in London. Cities expanded massively. Over and over again,

every way you can define a horizon, it changed beyond recognition over the course of the five, six hundred years before Shakespeare's time. And as soon as I thought, how do I connect this with Shakespeare, then that was the green light, because everything we have in common with Shakespeare, every time we think he speaks for us, we acknowledge that technology doesn't really matter in that essential relationship. What we have in common with Shakespeare is a product of the Middle Ages, and nothing really since has managed to go beyond that and say that technology matters more. And so I simply had to write medieval horizons. I'm hooked already. I think, guess we've been guilty, and probably I'm as guilty as anybody, of thinking that progress,

if you measure it in terms of technology, you get this kind of probably a little hiccup at the end of the Middle Ages with the Renaissance, which is really more to do with art than technology, but then this explosion around the Industrial Revolution, and we're living in another explosion at the moment of the internet age and things like that. And so you sort of write everything else off, but as you say, I mean, just the built environment, you think the Norman invasion and how much that changed the landscape of England, you know, on our doorstep, bringing the castle, that would have been absolutely mind-boggling to people living in England when those things started springing up across the countryside? Cassals, I mean, the biggest churches

that anybody could possibly imagine in this country. I mean, Mark Morris has made a very good point about how virtually all the churches from Saxon, England, all the major ones, got knocked down and replaced with Norman ones. We can't judge the scale of Anglo-Saxon monastic and cathedral architecture because it was all destroyed. The Normans came along and something bigger and better. Whichever way you look, there is this sort of extraordinary shifting of horizons. Now, sometimes, I mean, you mentioned the Industrial Revolution there. My last time traveller's guide did deal with what's it like in the early 19th century.

There's no time in the Middle Ages when you had life expectancy as low as it was in the Industrial Revolution. In the 1830s, the reports to the government on the state of the large towns gave statistics. for life expectancy in the unsewered streets of the industrial towns, and sometimes it was less than 14. Now, there's no time in the Middle Ages anywhere where it's as low as that. You do find working-class areas, life expectancies, which have been calculated about 18, but most of the time it's in the 20s or 30s,

pretty much where it was until Elizabeth's reign. So our ideas of progress are really distorted by our idea that it relates to technology, because you can have the technology come along and people's living standards become more and more miserable, and they're driven into standards of living that no medieval person could have accepted. So, yes, we need to get away from this idea that progress affects everything.

I mean, there are instances of progress, and I would say that one of the great contributions of the Middle Ages is frequently overlooked, and it's how we overcame famine. By the end of the 16th century, we had pretty much got to grips with the fact that the weather is fickle and that people sometimes starve to death. But the last time large numbers of people starved to death in England was in the 1590s.

Very brief bit in the mid-1620s when the North experienced famine. But other than that in England, it was a conquest really by medieval people. We've got to remember at the start of the 11th century, famine killed large numbers of people roughly one year in every three. In the 12th century, it's roughly one year in every five.

So the idea that we actually managed to feed ourselves, you know, of all the great achievements of the Middle Ages, that's got to be right up there. I suppose we think we've done well eradicating some diseases and things like that, but we've not done anything as big as eradicating famine. You know, we still live with some poverty today. But in the grand scale of human progress, dealing with famine is a big thing that we've obviously overlooked so.

Yeah. And it's in that sense, I think progress is a good way of thinking because there is this constant striving to improve things to overcome the natural and adversity. So I think progress does have its uses, but when we start to apply it across the whole of society, we lose sight of so many things and we allow our assumptions to get in the way of our appreciation of what really happened, what mattered to them and why things changed. And what we need to do is broaden our horizons. Absolutely, yeah, well fair.

And one of the areas that you talk about a little bit is the horizon of war. So how do you think that that develops over the medieval period? as a medieval horizon and what impact does it have on people's lives? I mean, there's a whole chapter on the horizon of war. I've got to go slip back a little bit and talk about how the concept of the horizon changing isn't just a geographical concept. It's how the horizon of knowledge around the world, the horizon of trade, embrace the whole world,

the horizon of memory. Because remember in the early 11th century, very little was written down. Most works of a historical nature were written down. for a particular purpose, such as a hagiography, a saint's life was written really to instruct people on morality and how they should behave if they were saintly. And of course, all that changes that you've got probably less than a million words per year being written in England in the early 11th century. There's more than 10 billion words being written per year and printed per year by the 1590s, which is really I'm taking as the end of the Middle Ages for cultural

purposes. So you've got this huge change in the horizon of memory and legal response. And with that particular horizon, obviously, how much you can expect people to obey the law changes. And as we all know, that it's hugely down to the change of the 12th and 13th century and the great king lawmakers. Henry II, Edward I was the first, perhaps most of all. Now, in terms of war, when you read chronicle accounts of what war was actually like in the 11th century, it's pretty much an everyday experience for people. I mean, if we think in terms of England, South Coast, when the depredations of the Vikings' height in around the year 1000,

yeah, I live on Dartmoor, but this area was under threat too. You know, the King Stainton down the road was smashed to pieces and burnt. Right across the country, there was a sense of being threatened all the time. People didn't, on the whole, live on the coasts because it was just too dangerous. Vikings might turn, or any other sort of pirate might turn up at any time and get away before you had a chance to summon the militia. So war was pretty much an aspect of everyday life. And you can't really see that really changes through the 11th century

because obviously our most famous battle took place in 11th century, but also the way that the Normans responded to threats to their authority, the way that the feudal system encouraged violent repression of any uprising or questioning of their authority. So we move over the course of the Middle Ages from a world in which, violence is every day an endemic, to one in which it is governed by rules, governed by chivalric restrictions, governed by what you can't recall international law, because there's no such thing yet as international law, but law interpreted in an international context. Sort of an international

convention on the way you should behave during war. Absolutely. I mean, in the 14th century, got him the third sending over to the Pope, lots of people to protest that he has a right to go to war, to prosecute his or further his interest in the throne of France. And when you have Henry V. Who agitates for, I mean, Henry VIII is determined in 1415 to go to war no matter what. All his negotiations are an attempt to make him seem justifiable oppressor in the eyes of the rest of Christianity and Christendom. So you've got all these restrictions and rules. And that's not just why you go to war, but down at grassroots level, remember Henry VIII and his war, the actual action court campaign,

somebody's caught stealing something from church and is immediately hanged. Prostitutes aren't allowed to hang out with the English army. You know, they've got this whole restriction, the rules of war. The chivalric rules that say you don't kill a high status captive, you ransom them and so on and so on. By the early 16th century, you've got Erasmus and Thomas More writing. And they really represent the two extremes of then approaches to war. Erasmus very famously says, you know, I think the book is called Erasmus Against War. He says that war is basically abhorrent, only prosecuted by fools, and should be avoided at all costs.

No matter what the reason for going to war, bad peace is always better than any war. Thomas More takes the more subtle, perhaps, and more nuanced and probably more modern view, that war is sometimes a necessity. And you should do all you possibly can to avoid it. but when you have no other option, there are occasions when regrettantly you must go to war. Now those two opposites, war is always bad and sometimes war is a necessary evil, are a spectrum that probably everybody sits on today.

And there's no place that 11th century view that war is justified, we enjoy it as members of the fighting class, that we just, you know, come on dear, our peasants to do whatever we want. Yeah, that the 11th century war, war endemic every day, that has given way to a position on that spectrum of necessity somewhere. And that's a pretty profound change because we haven't really gone back from the degree to which

war is a necessary evil. We've never gone back as far as I know to justify war simply because we enjoy it and we like exploiting other people and killing and raping and everything else that goes along with war. And do you think that horizon in particular is one you would characterize as a slow development? Are there big leaps forward that we see in this? Or is there something that's slowly evolving over those four, five, six centuries and we begin to refine our attitude to these things and develop our approaches? Or is it driven by an event, you know, the Battle of Hastings, for example, some cataclysm that forces change? Or is it simply a case of every time we go to war, we find a little way to it, I want to say improve it, but that's not really the right way

to think about war, is it, but to change the way that we govern it and the way that we approach it, is it a really kind of gradual, glacial almost approach, or are there big changes? I mean, it's a really good question, because yes, there are big changes. And the obvious one is the introduction of gunpowder and projectile warfare in the years around 1400 especially. So that is a big change. But I'm with you. I think it's actually a slow development all the way through, through legal means,

through the growth of awareness of a moral value to life, imparted largely by the Catholic Church, I have to say. So although you've got, of course, a reliance on the justification of legal system, so although you've got moments like Henry IV on his campaigns to put down rebels in the early 15th century, taking cannon with him and basically marching up to a rebel castle, which previously would have required a siege of several months and possibly other rebels to ally their forces,

And Henry basically just taking two or three shots to smash down the walls with a heavy cannon, which he incidentally designed himself. It's one of the little known things about Harry the 4th. So at Borkworth Castle, I think it took seven shots to bring the castle to submission. And that's a major castle. And at Berwick, I think there was one massive blow which took down an entire tower. So that really changes the nature of war. And there's a seminal moment, I think, for an English aristocrat,

when the moment that really sticks in my mind is, is it Sir John Cornwall? I can't remember the knight's name. Sir John Cornwall, with his 18-year-old, much-loved son, was standing on a battlefield, or it might be battlements. I can't remember in 1420, and a cannonball took his son's heads clean off. And he vowed never to fight again at that moment.

And there is this sense, at the same time that Lollody is making people reflect on their position on earth and that recurrence of the plague is making people think, are we that sinful, this is God's punishment on us? That coinciding with the idea that the highest status man, the man bred for war, can go out on the battlefield and have his head blown clean off. It's all proving too much for the idea that war is a noble pursuit, and people are then looking at war in a different light.

So, yeah, you're right. I think it's a slow development, but there are those moments where you say that really changed something. And I think that moment is probably one in which you realize that this warfare is no longer man against man. It's no longer who is the best trained knight who is put in the hours to prepare for this. That cannonball can take literally anybody's head off

and there is no training that can save you from that. And that is a fundamental shift in the way that you have to think about your presence on the battlefield. And well, you think about government because up till that point, kings led from the front. kings were on the battlefield. And after the introduction of guns, kings are frequently being taken away from the battlefield because they're politically so vulnerable.

You know, if that cannibal takes a king's head off, then, you know, your entire government, your stability of your country, everything's up question. So it's not surprising that, you know, after the death of Richard III at Bosworth, you don't have many kings on the battlefield. I mean, there's a king of France, captured the Battle of Pavia, and there's a king of Portugal killed in the late 1500s. Al-Qasaila-Khabilia, there are very few kings who are risking their lives after the domination of handguns becomes apparent in the early 16th century. And what used to be kind of the rule and the

given about leading from the front becomes very much the exception because it's just too dangerous. Yeah, and you're not going to have the belief that, you know, whoever wins the battle is favoured by God, you can't risk your king being out there and getting his head blown off and then say that God's on our side, because God's frankly not. on your side if your king's head gets blown off. Yeah. And do you think there's an element as well of an attitude change in that a king leads from the front because he should be the greatest warrior that your nation has on the battlefield. But as soon as you remove that element of battle being about the skill of an individual against another individual, it loses that value. So the king's

presence isn't necessarily as important as it used to be. And it's also politically far more dangerous than it used to be. So it just can't take place anymore. Warfare has changed so much that it's not what it used to be. Absolutely. I think all that applies. And I would add that, of course, the king, who we're not going to look at these people as being weak in the 16th century, this is an age of absolutism.

He's got somebody to blame if the general's out there. You know, it's not a case of God didn't favour us. That's really fading from the whole idea of war. And it's much more a case of, well, we lost the battle, not because God didn't favour us, but because we had bad generalship. So execute the general, and then we'll move on. So it plays into a political narrative at the top end,

too. But in this way, you know, the whole nature of war changes. So this sense of the horizon of warfare really changing from everybody's point of view was such a major shift in the Middle Ages that it had to have a chapter of its own. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the history hit warfare podcast, from the polionic battles and Cold War confrontations to the Normandy landings and 9-11. We reveal new perspectives on how war has shaped and changed our modern world. I'm your host, James Rogers, and each week, twice a week, I team up with fellow historians, military veterans, journalists and experts from around the world

to bring you inspiring leaders. If the crossroads had fallen, then what Napoleon would have achieved is he would have severed the communications between the Allied force and the Prussian force, and there wouldn't have been a Waterloo. It would have been as simple as that. Revolutionary technologies. At the time the weapons were tested, there was this perception of great risk and great fear during the arms race that meant that these countries disregarded these communities,

health and well-being to pursue nuclear weapons instead. And war-defining strategies. It's as though the world is incapable of finding a moderate light presence. It always wants to either swamp the place in trillion-dollar wars or it wants to have nothing at all to do with it. And in relation to a country like Afghanistan, both approaches are catastrophic. Join us on the history hit warfare podcast, where we're on the front line of military history. One of the other horizons that you focus on is the idea of speed. So can you tell us a little bit about why you think that particular aspect of medieval life was important and how it changed?

Absolutely. I love this subject because I think I'm right in saying, no one's actually realised how much speed increased in the Middle Ages before. I mean, there are some scholars who've looked at the postal system in the 16th century who have, But on the whole, most people think, well, technology didn't change, therefore speeds didn't change. And I think every book that I've, well, probably every book, let's play safe, probably every book that I've looked at that deals with medieval speed of information, speed of travel, refers to two benchmarks. One is Genghis Khan's postal system in the 13th century for basically covering the entire Mongol Empire, which claimed through a relay system of riders riding 24 hours a day to, be able to, in the words Marker Polo this is, to be able to cover in excess of 200 miles per day. And the other benchmark people refer to is the Roman postal system, which is a very different thing

in which one rider would use a succession of horses. Now in Western Europe, we carried on with the Roman system, or we resurrected the Roman system as a post, and never really adopted Mugenghis Khan like one. Now the Robo one was meant to be able to do in the region of 160 to 180 miles per day, Some people have claimed more, but there is good evidence that they could transfer news through a single rider over long distances at 160 miles per day. And there is good evidence that the Mongol system actually did what Marco Polo claimed. Now, Marco Polo normally exaggerates everything, but put in the books, the reasoning and the evidence how we should take Marco Polo in this sense, that is worth. Now, in the 11th, 12th centuries, we could not do anything like those speeds. When you look at kings under duress who have got the wealth and urgency to have information transferred,

if they get close to 100 miles per day, they're doing well. And I couldn't find any instances in the 12th century where people were getting anything like that fast. The fastest I found was the information about Thomas Beckett, both the knights going to kill him and the news being brought to Henry afterwards that he was dead. I couldn't find anything really faster than that. And that's probably a maximum about 80 miles per day. Granted, it was right at the end of December, beginning of January, so not the best time of year for travel.

But then, if you think about Edward I, news of Edward I, the first death being brought to his son, Edward II, in London, in early July 1307, well, the information travelled at roughly 80 miles per day then, which is pretty good going. Edward III could send messengers to the Pope who had travelled at more than 100 miles per day. We know from their own records.

When Elizabeth I died, news of her death was taken to Scotland at 160 miles per day. We'd got up to those Roman speeds for, you know, we'd basically doubled our speed of urgent information. But that wasn't the end of it. We actually had methods of going faster. There is a remarkable account, which was a journey that took place in early January 1602 by Richard Boyle, who was father of famous scientist Robert Boyle, bringing news from Cork in Ireland to the government in London of the defence, the attack on Cork. Now we can date these accurately

because we know when the attack on Cork took place and we know that he left at 2 o'clock in the morning with a written account of the battle and 48 hours later, no, it's actually less than that, it's 42 hours later, he was having dinner in the Strand with the Secretary of State

and saw the Queen the next morning. We can date all these things because we also have news incorporating the news from Cork in a letter written on the 5th from Westminster. That's at 270 miles per day. I mean, this is incredible speeds for some, when we haven't actually changes in technology. So speeds are getting faster.

And you realise that in the 16th century, people are able to commandeer the postal system for their own purposes. They can ride with the post. They can send messages with the Royal Post. And so we go from a society which really can't transmit fast information in the 11th century

and private individuals certainly couldn't at any speed, they'd have to take it themselves, to one in which you can, as a normal person, travel at 10 miles per hour by riding with the post, if you've got some money, or you can send letters with the post, which may be travelling up to 140, 150 miles per day. So there's a complete change.

The real impact of that, you might say, what difference that make? If it's only going to take you three days to get news to Scotland and back, you can defend your borders, You can govern your borders far more efficiently than you can if it's going to take two weeks to get that information there and back. I mean, the real example I think matters so much more is in France.

We've got huge, you know, 17 days to get a message to the south of France before the rebuilding the roads in the 18th century. Now, if you have that, you've got so much better control of your land. That also applies here. So when Edward VIII sets up a postal system to and from Scotland for the defence of the northern border, he's got a much better handle on what's really going on, and he can govern more directly.

He doesn't need to delegate to other people. He can keep control. And all our spies that we have around Europe in the 16th century, well, we wouldn't have them if it took three weeks to get a message back from Germany. When it's three days, then you can really start talking in terms of you can respond to the intelligence. So it's a huge change. And what that feel? Do you think that would feel like it was speeding the world up to people?

because it means you can react to things so much more quickly that if you attack somewhere, you're going to have much less time before there's a response. And so it begins to contract all of those events into a much smaller period of time, which must have made it feel like the world was speeding up. So an attack on the Scottish border, for example, that might have taken a couple of weeks to organise a reaction to and then get up there and fight it and news to get back and everything else. That could be done inside a week kind of thing. it must have made the world feel like it's barreling along at an inordinate pace to people who are used to that slower way of dealing with things. And central control of those regions is so much more direct, more immediate, more powerful.

You remember in, was it, 1504, Henry V. 10th bans private armies. No more is there to be any livery. He can actually maintain that because he got such control of the country. His systems of communicating up and down the country is so rapid that if somebody were to raise a private army, he would know about it so quickly, he'd be able to move against it. Now, you can't say that's going to be true. Go back to the 13th century.

It would take such a long time for that information to be gathered and then a response to be formulated. The whole sense of speeding up is triggered by this sense, so you've got the information, you need to react immediately. And so I think all the way across government, that would have been the sense, or whether they've actually felt it, it was a reality. People felt it at grassroots level when wheels came along,

in the 16th century. I mean, John Taylor, the water poet, is frequently talking about the world running away on wheels. And that was definitely a sense in Elizabeth's reign, that everything has just got so, so fast and so crowded and traffic jams in London all the time. So there is a sense of grassroots level as well that everything's speeding up. So it's speeding up, but the government is also reaching further and faster and deeper into everybody's lives. So there's a big impact from that point of view as well. Yeah, your lord of the manor who basically once opens a law under himself and had the right to execute whoever was found guilty or felony on his manner, well, that's no longer the case. You know, you are subject to royal justices. You have to take the bloke off to the shrievel or county court or whatever, to await the justices in there to come around from the government. There is that much more intervention in people's lives from central government. Many of the concerns that you see in the 20th and even today, 20th century in today, are there in the late Middle Ages. these concerns about to what extent do you allow government to impact on your freedoms,

your privileges and your way of life when you live a long way from the government. That's all there. And I also think it must chime today when you're talking about traffic jams in London and the pace of life, you know, feeling like the world is running away with you. That's the sort of thing people complain about today. You know, do we get our work-life balance right ever? And the world is moving so fast that we can barely keep up with news from one day to the next. And it sounds like they were having that kind of crisis five, six hundred years ago.

Absolutely. There's a lovely line. I can't remember I've read it, but it's always stuck in my mind. It's written about, I think about 1550 by an Italian scholar who said so many books are being printed these days, I haven't got time to read all the titles, let alone all the books. And from our point of view, the whole idea that you should read all the books that are produced is just ridiculous. So you couldn't possibly do it. But how do you keep on top of knowledge when you can't actually keep in top all the titles? The sense of the world running away with you is definitely something you start to see in the late Middle Ages. Yeah, which is fascinating because I think we probably feel like that's a new phenomenon for us in the electronic age. But actually people have been grappling with this for centuries before we were around. One of the things that we've spoken on the podcast before to another guest was about medieval authors and scribes and their kind of lack of desire to claim their works personally. They weren't necessarily bothered if they were attributed to them. And I think this seems to have changed by the end of the medieval period. So do you think that that reflects a wider change in the view of self in the medieval period?

Is that a horizon that changes over those hundreds of years? The chapter on the sense of self in the book is one that developed from a wonderful invitation I was given from an academic at Southampton University, a psychology specialist in the self, to give a keynote address at the International Syposium on the study of the self. And he put it to me that all the things I'd written about the development of the mirror and the changes of the self that followed on from that introduction of a mirror image need to be explored further and should be seen in a wider context for its cultural impact. And I totally agree with them.

So I wrote a speech that was given then and I rewrote it for this book as a study of how the self changed in the Middle Ages. And it changed remarkably. And I would agree it does have this impact that where at the start of the Middle Ages, if you're a writer, you probably see yourself as being an instrument reflecting God's will and God's work in the world. by definition you have to have had some sort of religious upbringing or clerical background to be a writer or the vast majority did and therefore you see yourself not as an individual so much writing or a creator but an instrument of God's will and I would say that probably applies to artists illuminators right across the board of creativity but the mirror is one in a line of whole succession

developments that accentuate the sense of self and if we just pause on that particular point. I mean, the mirror, as we know it, is really invented in the last year as the 13th century in Italy. It becomes a metaphor very quickly across Europe. I mean, people had some polished pieces of silver before that, but you need a lot of money to have a polished piece of silver, so most people hadn't got wherewithal to see themselves in a mirror, and you don't get the same impact from a polished piece of bronze or a muddy puddle. So by the end of the 14th century, when a lot of people had come to terms with the idea of metal-backed, glass mirror, they're able to see themselves and focus on their face. If I ask anybody in the

street today to draw a picture of themselves, they'll draw their face. That's what they see when they look in a mirror. But if you haven't got a mirror, if you've never seen yourself, what do you draw? Maybe it's your coat of arms. Maybe it's an anvil if you're a blacksmith. Maybe it's your pub sign. If you're a landlord of some description, a tavern. Although another subject to have pub signs at an early date. But the sense of self, but the sense of self, it was a lot of the sense of self is just so much more diverse and diffuse and it probably relates to what you actually do which is a restrictive thing if you are a carpenter that's because god created you to be a carpenter that's your identity that is yourself if yourself is your face you could be anything a carpenter

explorer a baker you name it you have so much more versatility you think of yourself as an individual to a far greater extent rather than simply an instrument of god's will so the mirror changes people's attitudes towards themselves. And you see this really take off in the Renaissance because not only are the great experiments with the perspective using mirrors, but you also have the first genuine self-portraits in the 1440s. You have mirror writing. Leonardo writes everything with mirror writing, so you need a mirror to be able to read his writing because he basically looks at the mirror as being the symbol of the Renaissance, his new learning, to reflect on yourself, to see yourself. And this actually changes people.

philosophy as well, a religious outlook. And the artists, of course, present mankind, Donatello's David, for example, as a subject for study in his own right or in mankind's own right. It's no longer necessary to study mankind simply as an object of God's creation. Now you can look at man for his own sake because of the changes brought in by the mirror. And I think this hugely impacts, the degree to which individuals take responsibility for the works they create. And playing into this, I guess, a little bit, literacy is another one of the horizons that you consider, and we're all aware, I guess, of the explosion in literacy with the printing press towards the end of the medieval period. But do you think this had been going on longer than

we might allow for? Again, has this been a slower building process rather than just an explosive event at the end of the 15th century? Very much so. I mean, if you think about the legal implications of having a written record. They change everything, really. I mean, imagine you're going to travel off around the world today and select where you might go to. You might, you know, think twice about going to a country where there is no law and order. They probably would put you off more than anything else. Now, that introduction of law and order is therefore a basic safeguard, which we very easily take for granted. Because there were laws before literacy, there were attempts to keep order, but they were far less effective.

And if you had been the victim, if you were the victim of an injustice, it's very difficult to get recompense, to get some legal redress. When people start writing things down, then you can hold them to account. And in the 13th century, you see this very clearly,

as increasingly bishops registers and monastic records, cartularies, hold written statements of what they own, what rights they have, and increasingly minorial records, are developed in the second half of the 13th century so that lords can hold the king to account so that, well, not so much hold the king to account,

but they can hold their tenants to account and they know what they actually owe their tenants, their tenants owe them. And this works up to the top end of society with the king and the hundred rolls, for example, where he knows what's been granted out from the royal domain and how it's held by his vassals. So literacy has incremental effects on society.

First of all, at this period, the 13th century, through its effect on the law. Then, in terms of business in the 14th century, long-term banking would be impossible if you didn't have a means of actually keeping written records of who owed what. And in the 15th century, literacy obviously has its greater implications

through mass production of the Bible after the Gutenberg Bible. The translation of the Bible, of course, into the vernacular, especially in Germany, where it's very quickly translated into German, the slower here. And then in the 16th century, of course, once we do have our printed Bible

in the vernacular, all of society changes. I mean, with huge repercussions for women, for example, who are able to teach themselves to read when they have a Bible in their own language but previously weren't taught Latin so could really never learn to read in any great numbers.

Once they can read and write, then women can write books and address other women directly. Well, it's really impossible beforehand. So you have huge changes as a result of literacy. This tide of literacy that goes out or so encompasses more and more people changes society.

profoundly. And if you look at the parts of the Europe where, for example, slavery and restrictions on individual liberty remained longest, Eastern Europe, I'm thinking most of all, these are countries which didn't get the Bible and vernacular until very late and had very high levels of illiteracy until very late in 18th, 19th centuries. So the spread of literacy has been a tremendous force throughout society and it is right up there as one of the most important horizons of the lot. And I guess setting literacy aside then, as I'm listening to a lot of what we're talking about, my overriding question, as I say, setting literacy aside, we tend to think of progress as always being good and always being desirable and always making the world better when we look at it in terms of technology and things like that. If we view it as horizons, are some of these developments not so good? I'm thinking what we're talking about with war, you know, it changes so that it becomes a much more careful, governed, process, but then gunpowder changes it into this much more random, explosive, destructive affair, albeit that people, as you mentioned, like Erasmus and Thomas Moore, are

refining their views to put the desirability of war on a completely different footing. In terms of law and order and the speed of government and things like that, I'm thinking it removes the onus that was always on the community to govern itself and be responsible for itself. All of that is kind of lifted and taken away to a central government, which makes it more universal, I guess. The law is easier to apply in the same way across the whole country, but is also something a bit more distant from your everyday life and you feel perhaps less responsible as an individual for enforcing that. So are all of these changes, do you think, good or are some of them bad? Well, good and bad is a personal distinction. I mean,

I always think that we should restrict, we should hesitate to look at progress as always being a good thing, because in terms of military activity, I don't think that the First World War, for example, was a marked improvement on the wars of the 17th century. We killed each other in far greater numbers in just as brutal ways. And when you have technologies such as gas attacks, I can't really see that this is an improvement of any sort. I think that wars of the 20th century are terrifying. And I would go so far as to say worse than previous wars. The idea of total war is a modern phenomenon, let's face it, you couldn't really have total war in a society where the king had to be everywhere leading the army. So many areas do have this moral ambiguity if you step away from the

idea of progress or progress has good. One of the most obvious for me is in writing about equality, which is a very tricky thing to write about. But nevertheless, I felt was a responsibility because the horizon of equality does change so much over the course of the Middle Ages. The most obvious example, perhaps, is slavery where 20% of the country, in this part of the world, Southwest, was a slave in the 11th century. And most of the remaining population, especially in Devon, where I am now, were villains. They weren't allowed to leave the manor where they were wrought up and raised. So there was virtually no liberty. You couldn't choose to marry who you wanted in a lot of cases.

By the 16th century, of course, all that has changed. There's no more slavery in this country. The villainage had shrunk to being less than 1% of the population. people couldn't restrict each other from marrying whom they wanted. So in that sense there's far more liberty, but did it allow greater equality? Well, there you've got to look at a different thing going on, because the more you increase equality of opportunity in the Middle Ages, the more people take advantage of those opportunities

to better themselves at other people's expense. So you have far greater inequality by the end of the Middle Ages because people had bettered themselves at other people's expense. So if you are trying to work out in a society from the 11th century, is it equal or not? Well, pretty much everybody's in the same hole, so it's pretty equal. It's not a very nice hole to be in. It's pretty miserable to be a peasant or a villain or a slave in the 11th century, but there were many fewer gradations of wealth and status,

and that is far more a feature of later centuries. It's a matter of perspective where you think it's such a graded society as an improvement or not. There are many people who think of that as progress. There are many people who think that the greater inequality is loathsome and to be avoided at all costs. And you can see it accentuating. It's almost as if the Middle Ages didn't really stop until the Industrial Revolution, because you can see those trends carrying on right into the early 19th century, where you have such incredible inequalities of wealth.

It really is quite unbelievable that it wasn't a revolution in this country. So a lot of the progress is just a matter of perspective. There are lots of areas where studying the past through its shifting, horizon is revealing of how everything is comparative and relative. And you might come off best of that greater sense of liberation and liberty in the late Middle Ages. You might be lucky enough to get education and become a lawyer and become somebody who is a king's justice and can earn 10,000 pounds a year, which is more than an earl. On the other hand, you might be exploited and never actually you're able to get away from being a tenant farmer

and eventually through the process of enclosure, find yourself without any land at all, and being forced to become a labourer right at the bottom of society with really not enough an income to feed your family. So everything is a matter of perspective. It would be, I think, quite misleading to say it's all good or all bad in any of these respects. That's also fascinating.

I think this is a completely new way of looking at the development of mankind throughout the Middle Ages to reach the point that we've arrived at now. Do you know when we can expect to see this book? Because I'm already thinking, when can I get my hands on it? I normally write books when they're under contract from my publishers. And they say, oh, yes, we like this idea. And will you go ahead and here's the deadline. And this is when we'll publish it and blah, blah, blah, blah.

And the book I was meant to be writing, which you probably know, as a biography of Richard Duke of York, became impossible because COVID came along and shut all the archives. And the one thing I'm not going to do is start writing about a character before I've seen all the archival material I need to to know where he was and what his relationships were and etc. So it became impossible to write that book. So I sat down last year and thought, what would I do instead? And I came up with two ideas,

one of which is halfway through, which is a history of England from a single point of view. So how did the history of England, how did it appear to the people living in my house in Devon over the last 1,200, 1,300 years? because our history of England is really just a whole hot-potch, a patchwork quilt of stories. When you look at it from a single perspective, it's a very different thing. And the other thing I wanted to do was this medieval horizons book,

which developed and changed and became more a sense about how we need to do something very similar to that single point view of the history of the country, is to be aware of our perspective. And it is all about really perspective, though I don't actually tell anybody that directly until the end of the book. I run quite a lot and I was running with somebody and they just said in the course of this run, you know, the school children I teach know more about the world than the greatest scientists in the 17th century. And I thought, God, in that one sentence you've encapsulated why people do not understand the middle ages at all because you really think that their knowledge, because you don't know about it or you don't rate it, is less good. They knew just as much. Come on. I mean, so many great scientists were able to do things that,

today's schoolchildren couldn't possibly dream of doing. But even at grassroots level, they knew about the seasons, they knew about all the animals and all the flora and fauna of the environment. They knew things like how to ride a horse, which relatively few people know these days by comparison. Everybody did then. So much knowledge that we just don't take for granted. And in terms of scientific understanding,

a lot of their understanding was suitable for their lives. It was necessary for their lives. The fact that we don't rate it doesn't mean it's not good knowledge. Just as somebody from the year 2,500 might look back on us and say, good, they would knew nothing. They're in the 21st century. They're just ignorant. So it's a matter of perspective. And once you realize that so much of our understanding of the past is simply a matter of perspective

and getting that perspective right, then you start to be able to see the world in a different way. And of course, there are many ways, many directions from which you may look at the proverbial mountain. And it doesn't always look the same, even though it's the same mountain. but being aware of that very fact there are different views on the past does allow us some better understanding sometimes of what went on. So this book is in the pipeline,

doesn't have a release date yet? Oh, you want an answer? It's with my publishers. Well, no, not if there isn't an answer. There isn't an answer, actually, because although it's finished, and it is with the publishers, and it's being discussed,

I don't actually know what they're going to say. They don't want to do it, in which case, somebody will. Well, based on this conversation, I'll vouch for it. I want to read it. Oh, well, thank you very much. very kind of you. I mean, I'm really enthusiastic about it, and somebody will publish it at some point or rather, but when and how, because it's quite a small book. I normally write big books, and this is quite a small one, so I think it's taken by the surprise of it. But we shall see, in an ideal world, it will be agreed by the end of this year and probably appear in about 16 months time, I guess. So early 2023, perhaps. Fingers crossed for that.

I hope that's provided everyone with plenty of food for thought about the ways that we view the past and how it touches the present and as Ian were saying then the perspective from which we look at it and how that affects our opinion of it. While I've got you, I'd like to recommend an episode of Not Just the Tudors, also from History Hit. Lady Jane Grey has a fascinating but tragic story and in the episode named after her, Susanna is joined by the wonderful Nicola Talis to tell us all about her life. You can join Dr Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another brand new episode. Don't forget to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.