You're Dead to Me - Medieval Animals

Episode Date: September 10, 2022

Greg Jenner is joined by Dr Tim Wingard and Kiri Pritchard-McLean to look at what we know about animals in medieval Europe. From hunting and farming to companionship and entertainment, animals have long been a part of our culture but how did the beliefs and treatment of animals by our medieval ancestors inform our societal values today? And just how do you lick a bear into shape?!You’re Dead To Me is a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. Research by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Written by Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Assistant Producer: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow Project Management: Isla Matthews Audio Producer: Max Bower

This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. All day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. I was the chief nerd on the BBC comedy show Horrible Histories. And today we are saddling our horses and gathering our hounds to chase down what we know about animals in medieval Europe. And joining me on this historical hunt are two very special guests.

In History Corner, they're a lecturer in late medieval history at the University of York. My old stomping ground, hooray! They are an expert on animality and sexuality in late medieval culture. They also teach medieval religion, culture, sexuality and politics. A proper expert is Dr Tim Wingard. Welcome, Tim. Hi, Greg. It's lovely to be here. Delighted to have you here. And in Comedy Corner, she's an award-winning comedian, writer, podcast and broadcaster. You might have heard her co-host the All Killer No Filler podcast or the Now Show or the News Quiz or Radio 4 Extra's News Jack. Or you've seen her on the

telly on Have I Got News For You, or Would I Lie To You in one of her trademark sequined outfits. They are absolutely fabulous. It's the positively sparkling Kiri Pritchard-McLean. Welcome, Kiri. Oh my gosh. Do you know what? You know already, Greg, that I'm obsessed with this podcast. I have frequently sort of stared into the middle distance and imagined what amazing intro would Greg give me and imagine if I said now and that was awful no it was amazing it was everything I dreamed of. So how are you with history did you like it at school are you comfortable in this area or are you daunted today? History was very genuinely my favourite subject at school it was um in my school

it was very annoying because you had to pick between drama and history and i went for drama in the end because i knew i was going to definitely go in that direction and i'm really sad because i i just loved it i couldn't get enough and actually lots of my show this year that i'm doing is is about is about welsh history in particular and So yeah, I just, I'm fascinated. And I know you're an animal lover and I know that, I think you grew up on a farm in Anglesey. I believe you live with rescue chickens now. I do.

Yeah, so. Rumours spread, I see. Rumour has spread. Yes, I'm very animal orientated. Grew up on a farm, live on a farm now. I'm a vegan which of course my welsh farming family is absolutely thrilled with and my mum was a riding instructor my father was a um a welfare officer for a charity for donkeys so yeah there's always

been animals in our lives, what do you know? Right, well let's do the first segment of the podcast. This is called the So What Do You Know? This is where I have a go at guessing what you, our lovely listener, might know about today's subject. But maybe it's sort of jousting horseback, maybe it's a knight's tale, Heath Ledger romping up and down on his horse, or maybe it's gawd by boar, the best kind of death in Game of Thrones, King Robert Baratheon of course. Maybe you're thinking of the rats that caused the Black Death. Or maybe you're imagining lavish banquets with roast pigs served with apples in their mouths. And of course, pies with four and twenty blackbirds in them, which, you know, you don't really get that at Waitrose, do you? So there's lots of stuff happening in the nursery rhymes and in our

fantastical understanding of the medieval world. Indeed, of course, mythical animals, griffins, unicorns, dragons. But what else is there to know about the animals in the European Middle Ages? And most important of all, is a beaver really a fish? Well, let's find out, shall we? Right. First, a quick content warning for listeners. There will be discussions of the horrible things that medieval people did to animals, and we will not dwell on those in a funny way, but they will be part of the show. So just a warning there. I mean, Tim, when we define the Middle Ages on this show, we get very kind of wobbly and loose and sort of go, oh, it's about a thousand years, roughly. What we're looking at today is European Christendom or Latin Christianity. And I guess in that time, Christianity had a big impact on how people thought about animals. Is that fair?

Yeah, yeah, definitely. So in Latin Christian beliefs about animals, and really it's worth saying that in the Middle Ages, Greek Orthodox Christianity shared many of the same views. This was really a time when Christian believed that God had given them control over animals. So in the biblical book of Genesis, God granted Adam, and therefore all of humanity, dominion over the natural world. And this is a belief that was often depicted in manuscript illustrations of Adam naming the animals. And when you say Adam naming the animals, he's not sort of going, I shall call you Barry, I shall call you Alexander, you're naming the species. Is that right? Yeah, yeah, no, it's these wonderful illustrations of all the animals gathered around him like it's a kind of sermon and he's just going around pointing each one and

saying well cat seems the right one for you i guess lovely so we'll start with the obvious question for you then kiri what do you think people would be eating back in medieval Europe when it comes to animals? Interesting well it would have been the normal stuff right so like sheep, pigs, cows but they're quite labour intensive as well so I wonder if there's easier things so like trapping rabbits and things like that would have been done because that's they're just pests. You're pretty much on the mark there Kiri. So some wild animals were hunted and eaten including deer, boar, hares, rabbits and fish. Of course animals had long been domesticated since kind of prehistoric times so there was a wide range of different livestock available to be raised for slaughter especially pigs which had no use as working animals. So in the early Middle Ages, up until around the 11th

century, herds of pigs roamed free in forests, tended to by a swine herd. But by the late medieval period, pigsty farming had become much more common. Pigs really were very cheap to raise because they tended to eat anything and gain loads of weight really fast so they were kind of an ideal food source. By contrast cows, oxen and horses were mostly used as work animals only to be eaten when they actually got too old to you know function properly. Actually this last bit was quite rare with horses because the church forbade the eating of horse meat. Why? That's so interesting is that i mean if they knew about the lasagnas about 10 years ago coming from like quite a horsey family we was had horses around and donkeys and things and i i didn't ever understand the disconnect between why people wouldn't eat horses not that i would

eat my own but i didn't ever understand that mental disconnect so you do think it's a hangover from that time of the church saying you can't eat them? Horse meat is considered impure according to the dietary laws established in the book of Leviticus. So obviously this is kosher dietary laws that Jews today still follow. So while medieval Christians didn't really adopt most of the religious dietary customs from Judaism, this particular one about horse meat did seem to stick around. So in the 8th century, Pope Gregory III wrote a letter to Boniface, who's the Archbishop of Mainz, and this guy's leading efforts to convert pagan peoples in what's modern day Germany. So Gregory asked Boniface to crack down on the local custom of eating horse meat, calling it a filthy

and abominable custom. The issue here really was that the consumption of the horse meat, calling it a filthy and abominable custom. The issue here really was that the consumption of the horse meat was really closely associated with paganism. So for Gregory and for a lot of his contemporaries, the opposition was primarily about enforcing that distinction between, you know, a pagan and a good Christian. Oh, that's so interesting. I bet chickens were like, I wish we thought of that. We'd be left alone if we'd have knocked around with the pagans a bit more. And I guess we should talk about dairy products too. Milk, cheeses, I suppose eggs sometimes get included in dairy in supermarket aisles, which is very confusing because it's not dairy. But like these sort of secondary byproducts, those are also part of the food system from animals, aren't they, Tim? Medieval people did eat a fair amount of dairy.

So goats were kept in small numbers for milk and meat. But the most common sources of things like milk, cream and cheese would have been sheep rather than cows. Most households did keep chickens and peasants did actually often pay their rent with eggs rather than sort of physical money. Wow Kiri have you ever paid the rent with your rescue chicken eggs? Well do you know what that actually rings very true so we've got four rescue chickens and they're really happy really healthy but the problem is is when they're laying an egg a day I I'm on tour, you come back and there's a plethora of eggs. So anyone who visits my house for any purpose, if you're there from the, you know, the Office of National Statistics, if you're the postman, if you're a Jehovah's Witness, you're getting

like a dozen eggs just to get them out of my life, just so I can get rid of them. We should also, I think, talk about class, because there's a big class distinction between the rich and the poor, isn't there, Tim? Definitely. So throughout the Middle Ages, you see an increase in setting aside of land for arable farming. This means more crop cultivation and less space for animals, which means that really the poor were eating a lot less meat. So the aristocracy continued to enjoy beef, mutton, fowl and rabbit and therefore meat eating very much became a sign of wealth however there were also religious restrictions on when you could and couldn't eat meat so you're not really supposed to have meat on holy days including

basically every friday so this led to a certain amount of creativity from people looking for loopholes for that rule yeah every northerner i know because they're usually from a catholic background they always have chippy tea on a friday and that's why isn't it because it's fish you can have fish love it but um how do you think they reclassified the definition of fish in the middle ages to get around the slightly annoying no meat problem what did they say it was a plant or something not far off they said that fish would also include beavers ducks and geese so because they're in rivers they're sort of just about they're kind of wet it'll do

so it's beaver tails as well also quite sorry rabbits are definitely not a fish hang on that's that's that yeah that's definitely cheating but there's also this sort of fear of you are what you eat isn't there tim some theologians urge people not to eat hares or hyenas i don't really know how many people in england are going to be eating hyenas in 1250 but they they were on the list of you know things not to go for okay since both animals were supposed to be really sexually promiscuous oh and then people thought that the urge to sort of be lustful and have rampant sex might spread to the people eating them crikey you are what you eat Kiri which means you get horny if you eat a horny animal apparently that's amazing so because i know of like oysters

are meant to be an aphrodisiac but who knew hyena was on the list as well okay so we've heard about animals as food but their bodies of course had other uses too paper for example was not used in medieval europe so people would be writing instead on parchment and vellum vellum was the fancier of the two. Vellum was made of calfskin. It was much more luxurious. But Tim, what other animal byproducts can we include besides food, besides vellum and parchment? So the huge one would be wool. There was kind of a very big industry in farming sheep for their wool in very, very huge numbers. So records show that in 11th century Norfolk, there were about 92,000 sheep being farmed. And by the 15th century in Spain, there were 2.5

million sheep, which were driven across the country in sort of huge wandering flocks. Wow. Wool was a really, really incredibly valuable resource. And English wool in particular was really high quality and kind of internationally renowned so sheep were generally brought into the house at night to keep them safe or put into thatched cheap houses and guarded by dogs so they're quite a valuable commodity. Kiri have you ever kept a sheep in the house have you ever sort of welcomed in a flock of sheep? Yes yes well genuinely yes so I grew up on a sheep and cattle farm. And when you have a sheep that either has too many lambs or passed away, you'll get these pet lambs that you need to sometimes trick another sheep into raising or they're bottle fed. And often the problem is keeping them warm because they've got no one to snuggle up to. snuggle up to so many a time i would come home we had an agar in the kitchen and if you know anything about an agar there's a plate warmer in the bottom right hand corner and i would come home

from school and that door would be open and on a tea towel would be a little sheep would be sat in the plate warming bit of the agar to keep warm so quite often yes there was sheep in the house so you'd have a sheep in your oven but you it wasn't sunday dinner it was just toasted warm mint sauce yeah just yeah yeah um okay so we've also got leather as well haven't we leather working and then that brings us on to fashion clothing yeah and it was it was a hugely political issue there were these things called sumptuary laws, which specified which social classes could wear different kinds of fur. So for the more luxurious end of the market, you might have skins from rabbits, foxes, squirrels, ermine, stoats and martens. But for the kind of poorer end of the social spectrum, if you were the daughter or a wife of a craftsman or a yeoman,

If you were the daughter or a wife of a craftsman or a yeoman, you'd only be allowed to wear the furs of lambs, rabbits, or as a devoted cat parent myself, I'm sorry to say cats were also quite popular. So cat fur would be low class. I guess if you're wearing like lion fur, that's probably high class. Big cat fur. Leopard print in the 13th century is probably very classy. Let's talk about how animals were used for their labour. And of course, I don't mean horses doing accountancy. I'm talking here about draft animals, pulling, lifting, carrying, dragging.

So strong draft animals, usually oxen, mules and horses, they were used for pulling and ploughing in the fields. So horses, which were much faster animals, came to replace oxen as the dominant draft option, in particular as well because you could also ride them in a convenient mode of transport. So oxen would be yoked at the age of about four and then worked for an average of four years before being slaughtered for their meat and their hide to be turned into leather. For ploughing, you'd need a team of about six to eight oxen or sometimes a mixed team of oxen and horses. Books on animal husbandry recommended that animals not be

overworked and that they be properly cared for in order to make them useful. So you have kind of very early ideas around animal rights and animal care. Cattle were kept in enclosed fields or cow sheds most of the time. so for smallholders this might be a room attached to the family home or sometimes maybe even just in the communal space within the house and talking of cows we actually have evidence for medieval cowboys in spain cattle ranching developed from around the 11th century where cows much like sheep would be driven really long distances by cowboys and then slaughtered for their meats and hides medieval cowboys kiri well i love that it's like a movie we haven't seen yeah the welsh side of my family are welsh farmers and then

they're from the the county of cardiganshire which is where the cardiganshire corgi comes from a dog i own and they are cattle driving dogs so they're long and low to the ground so a cow can kick but it goes straight over their head and my father tells a story but a little disclaimer my father is a a chronic liar that he remembers as a kid because they could get the best prices in london so they would drive the cattle down to london and then the when they sold them the farmers would get on the train and go back and then a couple of days later the corgis would just turn up because they've got themselves home that's what a welsh cowboy looks like it's one who gets on a train and leaves his dog there i'd watch that film too to be honest i'd watch both versions i'd watch the sort of gritty

antonio banderas one and i'd watch your dad on a train. That'd be great. Okay, so I'm afraid we're approaching this slightly sadder stuff. We're moving into the kind of animal entertainments, inverted commas, where obviously cruelty was part of that. Yeah, sadly, this is the slightly more grim end of things. So with hunting, for a lot of the poorer sections of society, you have hunting as subsistence, so just hunting for food. But for the wealthier classes, so the gentry, the nobility, it's really one of the major pastimes during the Middle Ages, particularly hunting with dogs. You have two main methods for doing this. So in the first you have dogs which are used to catch the scent of prey and then together with mounted hunters drive the prey animal towards archers who then kill it. There's another kind of hunt as well involving a dog leading a lone hunter to an animal at which point that hunter notifies the rest of the hunting

party and then many dogs were released to chase down the prey while their handlers followed, culminating in a kind of very gory final kill. There's a little bit of natural justice in there sometimes though. Sometimes the cornered animal would fight back and end up actually killing some of their hunters. So the classic scene from Game of Thrones of Robert Baratheon being gored by a boar, that's something that actually did happen. So after the animal was killed, dogs would then be rewarded with meat from the carcass. So hunting dogs were usually only fed on bread when they were in kennels, and they only got the meat after a successful hunt as a kind of reward.

Generally, it was deer or boar being hunted for fun in most of Europe. Wolves were also targeted, but more because they were threats to livestock rather than because they were sort of fun game to hunt. The other sort of famous hunting aristocratic pursuit would be hawking, which is not where you go after famous physicists, but where you go after animals using a hawk. That takes a lot of training, doesn't it, Tim? but where you go after animals using a hawk. That takes a lot of training, doesn't it, Tim? Yeah, so the training a hawk is really, really horrible. Hawks would usually be netted in the wild. So they'd be tamed by having their eyelids stitched shut temporarily. Once the bird was accustomed to humans and was dependent on them for their food, so basically broken through captivity. Their sight would then be restored, you know, the eyelid would be unstitched, and then they could continue to be trained. So hawks often worked in pairs to bring down larger birds, things like partridges, ducks, geese, crane and herons, and then a dog on the ground would then finish the job off.

Hunters were encouraged to reward their hawks by feeding them the heart of the birds they brought down. Where hunting with dogs tended to be a much more exclusively masculine pastime, hawking was actually one kind of big pastime where really men and women could mix. And so it was sometimes seen as potentially a little bit subversive a little bit of a kind of flirty thing to do it's sort of a dating scene yeah oh my gosh i remember that next time i'm single but um i've been i've been on the apps when i'm single what i need to be doing is offering a partridge's heart to a hawk in front of an eligible bachelor. That's how I'll get him.

That feels like a lyric from something, from a Kate Bush song or something, doesn't it? I offered him a partridge's heart. We're now again steaming into the sad animal cruelty section because we've got bullfighting was obviously a big deal in Spain and Portugal in the Middle Ages. Knights on horseback fighting bulls. Sounds terrifying, but obviously pretty cruel. There would be animal versus animal, so cockfighting, bear baiting. You know, there's bear baiting in the Bayeux Tapestry,

which we talked about in a previous episode of this series. There were also more exotic animal pairings. You know, there's bull versus lion. There was rhino versus elephant. But occasionally animals got their own back. There's a story from the 11th century Saint Popo. His life, when it was written down the incident describes a male actor a performing bear and some honey being smeared on

some genitals and apparently poppo had to intervene to prevent the worst happening there because i guess if you put honey on genitals and then release a live bear well kiri you love horror movies but i don't think we've ever seen that in a horror movie have we no but i've now upgraded what i want to offer a partner instead of some partridge heart it's gonna be on the genitals isn't it really catch their eye god that is terrifying what all of these sound like sort of aborted ideas for channel five series run for a bit on netflix it's absolutely terrifying yeah i mean there is a winnie the pooh horror movie coming out it's called winnie the pooh blood and honey because apparently winnie the pooh's gone out of copyright so immediately someone was like let's make a

terrifying horror movie so maybe we'll see honey smear jennifer being ripped off by winnie the pooh who knows but let's let's move on from that. This story is also horrible too, although there's a certain creativity involved. In medieval France, there was a man called the Abbot of Ben, who was a churchman, who worked for the King of France, Louis XI. And Louis was a big fan of music. And Louis said to him, make me an animal-themed musical instrument. This is cruel, but imaginatively cruel. So the Abbot of Bain allegedly constructed a pig piano where he arranged a variety of pigs of different sizes and ages to represent the higher and lower keys on a piano. And then he put spikes underneath them.

And then when you push the keys on the keyboard, the spike poked each pig and you got a different pitch squeal from each pig, which means you could play a tune. Oh my God. I mean, it's horrifying. But also, who listens to a bit of music and go, well, I'd love to hear that screamed by pigs?

It's never going to improve the music, is it? No. Okay, let's move on to the most famous medieval animal entertainment, jousting, and we all know what this is. Tim, this is two dudes on horses riding each other while the crowd are singing We Will Rock You, and Heath Led this is, Tim. This is two dudes on horses riding each other while the crowd have sing, you know, they're singing We Will Rock You and Heath Ledger is looking excellent. That's authentic medieval history, right? Oh, God, I love A Knight's Tale so much. It was the last time I taught a seminar on chivalry. None of my students have heard of it. Oh, no.

It was a horrible moment of realising that I'm getting old and out of date. Anyway, so there were two kinds of medieval tournaments. So one kind of tournament involved teams of mounted knights effectively imitating a battle. So no one was supposed to die, but both men and their horses would very frequently be injured or even killed. So this is called a melee tournament. But the other kind called jousts, between two knights where they go charging towards each other, these developed out of the melee tournament and became much more popular from between the 13th to the 15th centuries. So the horses used in these jousts were very broad chested and bred for endurance. But actually, recent archaeological research shows that medieval war horses were much more smaller than we might expect.

So they're about the size of a modern day pony. Yeah, medieval horses were quite dinky, Kiri. I mean, that stacks up to me because as soon as you said broad chested and endurance, I was like, OK, well, it'll be like a cob-type breed that has that sort of strength. And if you think of all the archaic British breeds like Suffolk Punches and, you know, well, Shetlands, Dartmoor, you know, all the native horse breeds in the UK, they don't have a great height to them. And people were tiny as well, weren't they? People were smaller. So you just don't want horses are hard enough to deal with anyway because they are

weapons grade stupid so i think the smaller something is the easier it is to negotiate with that stacks up to me you know there's a huge variety but horses are super expensive to maintain weren't they tim they're really they're prestigious animals you've got to feed them you've got to clean them you've got to stable them water them yeah they're really sort of the the ferrari of the middle ages whereas you know if you're just a poor farmer then you want something a bit more low maintenance a bit more sort of fuel efficient in the medieval sense of the word needs Needs a bit less grass. Okay, we've talked about, I guess, working animals. Let's talk about pets, because in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Miller's Tale, there's a reference to a cat flap. So this is a 14th century poem, and there's a cat flap mentioned, and you kind of go, oh, fun, cat flaps are old.

But are cats beloved in medieval culture? There's a bit of an ambiguity. So on the one hand, they're often identified as symbols of heresy or later witchcraft. So there's this idea that people use cats in all kinds of weird, dodgy rituals and kind of evil satanic practices. Yes, there's osculum infame the kissing of the cat's bum hole uh but uh yes let's not dwell on that but people definitely also saw them as as quite useful so good for kind of controlling vermin controlling pests and we do have this very very sweet poem written by this the sort of early medieval irish monk where he writes just a very sweet little song dedicated to his pet cat. Okay, but let's talk then dogs. I think dogs are more, more beloved.

Yeah, dogs are really, really highly kind of respected and loved. They're sort of really held up as symbols of fidelity and loyalty. Medieval people had a lot of emotional closeness with their dogs. So a lot of dogs would have been working animals, so hunting dogs, guard dogs, rat catchers. But we do know that people, especially women, also kept lap dogs. And unlike working dogs, they obviously have no purpose apart from companionship. Even nuns seem to have kept dogs so again in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales this character the prioress feeds her little pet dogs fine meat and white bread and mourns them when they die. Yeah one of my favourite sort of animal related medieval books is called The Master of Game and it's a textbook on hunting written by Edward Duke of York in the early 1400s, Kerry. And in it, he gives a long, long list of

names you can give your dog. And some of my favourite names are Smilefest, Clench, Holdfast, Nosewise and Nameless. So I wanted to ask you, how do you name a dog what's your technique well my dog i've got a little cardigan chicorghi and i was gonna call him kutch which is uh welsh for like a cuddle and um and then yeah it's a cute name isn't it and then one day when he was a puppy he broke into the room that had the dog food in it a whole bag of dog food came into the living room and vomited it all up over the carpet and i thought i you're no longer a coach now you don't deserve an adorable name because you're disgusting so my dog's name is key which is spelt ci and it means dog in welsh so that's what I'm talking about but also I lived in Manchester when I had him so I'd call him in the park and they obviously

people in England don't know what key means so they all heard Keith so when I was in the park they'd be like here comes Keith it's Keith the Corgi and so he has a different name in England he's called Keith and then in Wales he's called Keith and I suppose in terms of pets but obviously there are menagerie pets Tim if you're a king or a queen and you've got proper clout and a big bank balance you can get yourself any kind of pet so what kind of beasties are they keeping in their menageries they They had all kinds of weird things in there. So these often came as gifts from foreign rulers. So in the 9th century, we have the Frankish Emperor Charlemagne

is gifted an elephant named Abul Abbas by the Caliph of Baghdad. Charlemagne also kept bears, camels, lions, monkeys and rare birds. From the 12th century onwards, foreign wars, including the Crusades, as well as diplomatic missions, meant that more exotic animals were being imported into Europe. So the English monarchs had a menagerie which from 1235 was housed in the Tower of London. This included a white bear that fished in the River Thames, an elephant, lions, leopards and possibly lynxes, camels and porcupines. The French kings also had a sort of private menagerie and Charles V even added ponds for his aquatic animals including a porpoise and I've no idea how you're going to get that kind of across the land in

France to your pond but he managed it. Yeah how do you how do you transport a porpoise? So you know pets could go on the on the road with you which is kind of cute. We know the famous Thomas Beckett the archbishop who got murdered by the king and his knights he carried with him pet monkeys. We know the Pope Urban V had a collection of travelling rabbits. But we know also that pets could sometimes be a bit of a no-no in the nunneries. They were deemed to be, I don't know, a nuisance? What was the problem with pets in nunneries, Tim? So they're kind of really seen as luxuries that if you're living a good spiritual life, you shouldn't be having.

So in fact, you actually have archbishops regularly having to issue bans to nuns from keeping dogs. In the 13th century, you actually have William of Wycombe telling the nuns of Romsey Abbey in England that keeping pets imperiled their immortal souls. Kiri, maybe your soul is being imperiled by your chickens. Have you considered this risk? Not another thing to worry about. Another thing to add to my list of anxieties. Also, imagine how many women were living in a nunnery. There's got to be loads of them.

Just imagine them all having a dog. It would stink. It would be horrible. Sounds like an absolute nightmare. Right. Interesting stuff, actually, because on the subject of souls, get ready for a gear shift, Kiri, because we are turning now to theology, everyone's favourite thing. Because Tim, medieval theologians, they like to argue that unlike humans, animals did not have souls. And this was quite a big conversation, wasn't it?

Definitely. The early church fathers argued that there was a really significant difference between humans and animals, because humans, after all, were created in God's image. So animals are hairier, humans can laugh. Animal sperm is unaffected by the movement of heavenly bodies, whereas human sperm is. Sorry, what? Yeah, it's totally wild there's this whole world of medieval thinking about how like the planets and the stars can exist a kind of gravitational influence on sperm and make it all sorts of weird things it's kind of used as the basis to explain like why some people are ginger why some people are short or tall. It's very, very wild.

Okay, moving on. What other differences are there between humans and animals? Theologians believe that animals basically didn't have a soul, so they wouldn't be resurrected at the end of time when humans are all resurrected and then judged. Neither could an animal go to heaven, or for that matter, hell. Linked to this is the other crucial idea that animals are more violent than humans and governed by their own instinctive desires and appetites, and that they're irrational. Humans, on the other hand, have intellect, they have free will, and they have reason. And this is particularly apparent in discussions around sexuality. So the very, very prominent philosopher Thomas Aquinas said that in sexual intercourse, man becomes like a brute animal. And likewise, Augustine argues that in animals, lust is natural since they lacked

reason, but it's unnatural in humans. He therefore called men's erections bestial movements such a good name for a gay bar such a good name if you've got a hard-on no it's a bestial movement sorry it's not my fault nothing is that a bestial movement are you just pleased to see me yeah exactly yeah all right let's get back to the bigger more important question of the differences between humans and animals i think we do then get into a really fascinating thing this is something i find particularly fascinating is the idea of animal trials and i do not mean testing makeup on bunny rabbits i mean putting animals on trial. Because this happened, right?

In 1386, a pig was found guilty of killing a child. He was dressed in men's clothes and executed in a public square. So, Tim, if animals are not humans, how can they be put on trial in human courts and treated like humans? What's the logic? So it's a real enigmatic phenomenon. Some animals were tried in church courts and others in sort of secular criminal courts. So the church court tended to try wild animals, things like locusts, mice, flies, who had damaged or or caused problems for a whole community and so maybe some of the logic there was that since these were wild animals they possibly came under god's

jurisdiction and so it resulted in these animals getting excommunicated from the church that explains why there's no locusts at my local harvest festival with that idea of putting a pig on trial i can almost see the logic of that if it's if it's you know killed a kid but to put it in men's clothes to hang it that feels like that's a that's a bet that's got out of hand juries were convened judges were appointed but also defense lawyers were put in place my favorite one is uh in france in 1522 it's a place called autant rats were destroying the local crops they were causing a famine it was a huge issue but their lawyer bartolome de chassene he managed to get them off he got the he managed to defend them on a technicality do you want to

guess what his legal tactic was, Kiri? Was it claiming that it couldn't be the rats because they were too busy training four teenage mutant hero turtles at the time, so they had an alibi? Love that 90s reference. Excellent, excellent stuff. No, he argued that the rats would not be able

to come to the courtroom safely. It was unfair and unethical for the rats to be made to go to the courtroom safely. It was unfair and unethical for the rats to be made to go to the courtroom in case cats intercepted them and ate them. And so, yeah, the trial collapsed and Chastanet became a very famous lawyer in France because of this. But what else do we need to know, Tim, about animal trials in the medieval period? So they represent a point of disagreement between elite intellectual culture and more kind of popular culture. So on the one hand, you have people like the secular French judge Philippe de Beaumanoir, who said that animals have no knowledge of good or evil, so they can't act maliciously and therefore they can't do crimes.

And the whole basis of animal trials is, you know, just a complete myth. But on the other hand, what some modern historians have suggested is that animal trials indicate a more popular belief that animals do have a certain degree of sort of sentience or rationality and that they can participate in the moral universe that humans can okay so i suppose the other things we need to talk about tim are knowledge of the animal kingdom so we've talked about adam naming the species of animals we've talked about obviously people interacting with animals in terms of work in terms of food you know they're eating beaver tails on a friday so they can get away with stuff but also who are the kind of david attenboroughs of the medieval world who are the kind of David Attenboroughs of the medieval world? Who are the kind of knowledgeable zoological experts saying, this is a bear, this is a dog, this is

what they do? Medieval Europeans tended to look towards ancient Greek and Roman authors as being the real sources of authority on the natural world. People like Pliny the Elder, who writes his natural history that's quite influential. But really, the big name for medieval people is the Greek philosopher Aristotle. He writes this kind of this collection of treatises on animals, which were lost to Western Europe for many centuries. But in the East East they'd been preserved by the Greeks, by the sort of Byzantine Empire, and then later by the Arabs who came in and translated the Greek originals of Aristotle into Arabic. And then in the 13th century these were taken by Europeans and translated into Latin. So this corpus of works by Aristotle was then taken up in the 13th century by the Dominican friar

Albert the Great, who wrote this amazing treatise, De Animalibus, or in English, On Animals. This work is really extraordinary and very, very unusual for the period in how far Albert really tried to fact-check the information he got from Aristotle. For example, he verified the size of whales by seeing how many cartloads of meat a dead whale accounted for when chopped up. And apparently the largest whale that he knew of was around 300 cartloads worth of meat. And he also actually did some dissection. So he dissected moles to verify Aristotle's claims claims that moles had no eyes just black liquid under the skin where an eye should be and he found this out to be not true so while albert's very very widely read he is quite unusual in how far he actually does try to do that kind of more

almost modern experimental science yeah it's almost empirical i love the fact that he because we often say how big is a bus as big as a whale We use sort of whales as a metric of like how big a thing is. But he's like, well, how big is a whale? 300 cartloads of meat. And then you can do how big is a bus. So he's called Albertus Magnus or Albert the Great. But there's some really, really funny, dodgy history facts going around in medieval Europe about different types of animals, Kiri.

Have you ever heard the phrase to lick something into shape? Yes, I have, yeah. It comes from medieval animals. Do you want to guess which animal? Well, I've always assumed that it's cats because when they lick their fur, it sort of stands up. I feel like I'm about to be horrified. No, it came from the medieval notion that a mother bear,

when she had a baby, the baby would just be a lump of flesh that had to be licked into the shape of a bear and so that was to lick it into shape was literally that's what a mother bear did she had a little flesh a little flesh baby and then she went and then it became a bear so um yeah your hands are over your face that's good sorry i probably shouldn't have done the licking i'm sorry to listeners for the uh but there's some other stuff too and we're gonna get on to now some of our favorite things here these are called bestiaries these are animal encyclopedias describing various features characteristics of animals but also with fun pictures so um tim do

you want to tell us about the most famous bestiaries and then we'll show kiri some fun pictures oh my gosh they are literally my favorite they're very much almost like a game of telephone so the first bestiary texts which were originally called the physiologus they were written in greek and then they get translated and they travel across europe and they get gradually rewritten and rewritten. And loads of the animals that are described in these books are things that no person in Western Europe would have ever seen. So, you know, you have this account of an elephant and no one who has been copying out these manuscripts or reading them has any idea what they're supposed to be. And they're also very, very, as you'll see, beautifully illustrated,

very, very high quality. They're honestly just absolute gems. So let's have a look at some, shall we? Let's show you the first image. Max, our producer is going to pop up the PowerPoint and the first image, I want you to guess what it is, Kiri. What animal do you think this is? Well, that looks, oh, it's got a cloven hoof. It looks like a horse to me it's got a long tail four legs and sort of a horse's shaped neck a very sad face yeah i'd say it was a horse what do you notice about the colors oh yeah so it's got a blue neck a red face and then from the shoulder back over to the bum is red as well yeah belly and sort of patterns on it as well yeah oh the belly looks green i think yeah yeah sort of a greeny color so you think this is a horse

brown leg i mean it certainly looks like a horse listen yeah it's got it's got if i was blurring my eyes i'd be like oh that's a horse and someone's got a bit creative with it with the crayons yeah this is a this is a medieval chameleon so it's what okay right so it's the the colors around the picture match that of the what i now know obviously to be a chameleon okay so it's picking out the color so someone had just heard of a chameleon and drew it and assumed that it was well a horse because there's a tree next to it and it's about the same size as that rather than a lizard that's incredible yeah so they've clearly gone it's an animal that changes color to match its surroundings i'll just draw a horse it's probably a horse there's always a horse so that's a chameleon let's have the next image please max what's this little blighter kiri

so it's got a again quite human face with a big sort of rictus grin and then it's got it's sort of lizard like um with four legs and almost looks like a winged lizard and then a spiky tail that appears to be going through someone's hand is it oh is it a is it a ray is it oh no it's on land isn't it it does look a bit like a ray yeah but it's got legs it's got four legs lizard yeah i'm afraid uh it's not that no i'm afraid it's a scorpion fair play fair play this is so good this is like the artistic equivalent of drink driving. This is absolutely wild. Yeah, this is very, this is like sort of Vic Reeve singing club tunes on Shooting Stars in the 90s.

This is like, guess the song. Yeah. So medieval art is beautiful and lurid and exciting, but it's often completely unrelated to what the animal actually looks like. That's fun, isn't it? And now let's read you a couple of descriptions from the bestiaries and see if you can guess what they are from the description. So no images here, Kiri, but just this description. So this animal conceives at the mouth and gives birth through its ear, though some say the other way around.

What animal do you think that is? Conceives at the mouth and gives birth through its ear. Oh, would that be an elephant? Because it's got a long trunk and a big ear. Lovely guess. It's the weasel. Of course it's the weasel. So they think, they thought that weasels were unclean and conniving animals. Hence they conceive through oral sex and they give birth through the ear canal. So that makes sense, right? And then I think, I think we've got one more image we can show you this animal can change their sex they live near tombs they eat the dead bodies that they find there we can see an image of it i think and uh we have mentioned this one before actually kiri

what's this animal okay so it lives near tombs and eats dead bodies it looks like a rabbit is it a hare hyena it's adorable isn't it it's really cute you want to pet it but yes it's a terrifying hyena so um they hadn't quite nailed down the images but they are very very fun and a couple of more fun spurious animal facts for you uh beavers apparently were thought to castrate themselves by biting off their own testicles and flinging the testicles at anyone hunting them because they knew that's what the hunter wanted.

Lions apparently were born dead and remained dead for three days until their father would breathe life into them, just as God brought Christ back to life on the third day. So look out for that the next time you're at London Zoo.

And best of all, hares were apparently, I can't believe I'm going to say this on the radio but hairs were apparently really into anal sex and as such they grew a new anus every year and you could thereby age a hair by the number of anuses it had like tree rings oh there's so many people that i could uh i could mention now that I'm not going to. So, listener, if you want to go to bestiary.ca, knock yourself out, have fun. There's absolutely hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of these amazingly bizarre images on there. But Tim, can we talk also a little bit about mythical monsters?

Because I mentioned right at the top of the show, dragons, griffins, those sorts of imaginative creatures. Those also get folded in with the real animal kingdom, don't they? Definitely. And I think it's important to acknowledge that for medieval people, you know, these animals, they very much believed that they were real. And if you travelled out to the sort of generally places in Asia or Africa where they were said to live, you could actually go and find one. So they do have this word monster, which comes from the Latin term monstrum, meaning to show. And this word was originally used to describe monstrous births, so hybrids between different creatures and different species. And when these were born, these were seen to be particularly significant or portentous of

great events to come. So these include things like griffins, which have the body of a lion and the wings of an eagle, the lucrota, which has the haunches of a stag, the breast and shins of a lion and the head of a horse, and the perandrus, which has the head of a stag but a coat like a bear. But of course, today the most famous medieval fantasy creatures would be the dragons and unicorns, again both of which are considered by medieval people to be very real animals. So dragons frequently appeared in saints' lives and other literary works as representations of the devil or of kind of great evil. Unicorns, on the other hand, are very much good and representations of Christ. So they could only be tamed by virginal maidens into whose laps they would sleep in. And you have all these wonderful

stories about hunters trying to set a trap for a unicorn on a hunt by basically getting in a nice, to set a trap for a unicorn on a hunt by basically getting in a nice you know virginal damsel to just come and sit in a forest for a bit and you know summon over the unicorns and then they hunt them Kiri what would be your fantasy chimera hybrid animal if you could if you could invent any animal by squishing together two or three animals what are you making um I mean if I was still eating meat it would just be like a walking three bird roast, I think. That's what it would be. To duck in with legs. I also, as a Welsh person, deeply offended that the dragon is associated with hell and with evil. But maybe that makes sense.

The fact that our religious history is largely is sort of Druidry. So I guess it sort of pertains to all that as well. And obviously we had the Mabinogion with all the stories about the dragons in there. So, but yes, just another thing to add to the chip on the shoulder of the Welsh people. Well, staying with nationalism, I very quickly have to, this is my tedious point I always make whenever England are playing in the football, but three lions on a shirt is wrong. They are actually leopards, and they are born of lions mating with pards. Pards were mythical beasts. So yeah, the shirt is wrong. The song is wrong. But very quickly,

Tim, can we finish up also with something that's really, really sort of intriguing? I know this is sort of big in crusader literature, but the idea of half animal, half human hybrids. Again, a big deal in like modern fantasy storytelling. But we get this through the works of Pliny the Elder in ancient Rome. But the idea of half human half animal double beasts which is sort of fascinating because it's that sort of soul question again isn't it with this a lot of it comes down to really kind of western europeans being curious but at the same time not really knowing a lot about the world outside of europe So they tended to populate it with all these kind of weird monstrous races that are often kind of half human half

something else. So these included races like the Blemmye who had no heads or necks and whose faces were basically like right on their chests. So you have the skyopods, who are basically just one enormous leg and foot with a sort of human torso on top of it. My personal favourite is you have the kynencephali, which are basically humans with the heads of dogs. So sometimes they're depicted as very kind of beastly, monstrous cannibals, but sometimes they can also be very sort of positive things. So Saint Christopher is, you know, according to some legends, supposed to have been born with the head of a dog, and in some narratives I think loses that head and becomes fully human when he converts, and I think in some other legends just keeps the head forever,

even when he's Christian. But again, these are very much, you know, believed by many people to be real. So there is this absolutely wonderful exchange of letters between another one of the popes and another one of the bishops. And this bishop is like Boniface up in kind of Northern Europe trying to convert pagans. And he's heard reports that they're a kind of Kephali, you know, a little bit further away from where he is. And so he's writing back home to ask, you know, am I allowed to convert these people? Can they still be Christians if they have dog heads?

And, you know, the response is, yeah, no, go for it. They, you know, as long as they, as long as they will accept Christ as their Lord and Saviour, they can become Christians. Great. Good to know. Well, I mean, it is extraordinary. As long as they're not gay, that's the only thing. Oh, Kiri.

The Nuance Window! It is time now for the nuance window. This is where Kiri and I sit by the fireside on our wolf fur rug, feeding fine meats to our small lap dogs, while Tim talks for two uninterrupted minutes about something we need to know. So my stopwatch is ready. You have two minutes, Dr. Tim. Take it away.

So this kind of links back to what we were talking about earlier, about the differences between rational humans and irrational animals in medieval thought, but I want to dig into that a bit more to think about how medieval societies used those ideas in order to discriminate against marginalised sexualities. So building on Aristotle's zoological theories, medieval thought develops the concept of the natural sexual appetite, so that's the desire for men and women to have sex with each other. This is understood as something innate in all living beings, it doesn't operate on the level of conscious thought, but it's a more instinctive impulse. Medieval thought contrasts this natural desire with unnatural acts, also known as the sin of sodomy. This is a very fuzzy

category, in theory it can mean any kind of sexual act that can't result in pregnancy. But over the course of the later Middle Ages, it becomes increasingly associated specifically with sex between two men, and less commonly two women, what today we would call gay sex. So most medieval philosophers claimed that sodomy was unnatural because it went against one's natural appetites. So instead, you're allowing yourself to be tempted by the vice of sodomy. This is something that only humans can do, because to be tempted, we need to have free will and rationality. But it's also unnatural because it doesn't appear in nature, so to speak. The same thinkers asserted that no animal ever performed

gay sex because their instinctive drives could not push them towards this. And all these ideas about nature and sexuality and about the differences between humans and animals, these were used to support efforts to criminalise gay sex in medieval European societies. So lawyers and theologians drew heavily on Aristotelian notions of natural desire in their condemnations of sodomy. Though a lot of what we've been talking about today has been, you know, quite funny or weird, at the same time it did have some very serious consequences in terms of how medieval societies used knowledge about animals and the natural world to control and oppress people. Wow, thank you so much. And two minutes on the dot. Very, very impressive. Kiri, what do you

think to that? It's so interesting, isn't it, that stuff that can seem sort of innocuous and seems sort of frivolous as well is nearly always used as a way of weaponizing marginalized people that this this it just seems that every sort of fascinating facet of history has this other side to it and it's obviously incredibly incredibly grim that these sort of like moral standards are being set and also because that's something i learned about recently about how they sort of hid the history of of like same-sex couple um animals because then you would have to acknowledge that it is perfectly natural and the fact that the seeds are being sown this far back as well well it's obviously really really sad and explains why it's taken so much undoing,

not that it's even fixed in many places. But yeah, thank you so much for sharing that, Tim. So what do you know now? It is time now for our quiz to see how much Kiri has remembered. We've talked about so much stuff, some very weird stuff, some funny stuff, some pretty cruel stuff. So we've got 10 questions for you, Kiri. Are you feeling confident? No, I'm feeling really terrible. I'm so scared. These are all things we've talked about today. So here we go. Question one. Which powerful

working animal did the medieval church ban from being eaten? Because of the pagans. Horse. It was horse. Question two. Which animals were most commonly kept for their milk? Sheep. It was sheep. Question three. Which aquatic animals did hungry monks reclassify as fish so they could eat them on fast days? Beavers and ducks as well. Yeah, and geese, absolutely. Question four. What was vellum, the best quality writing material, made from? Calf skin.

It was, you're doing very well. Question five. Throughout the Middle Ages, animals were put on trial for killing humans or destroying crops. Why did some philosophers object to this? Oh, because they didn't think they had a soul. Yes, they didn't think they could be rational enough to make a decision to do a sin. Question six. How were hunting dogs and hawks rewarded when they helped bring down an animal?

They would get the meat and the hawks would get the heart of the bird. Yes, they would. Question seven. Which animal was believed to be impregnated through the mouth and give birth through its ears? Weasel or stoat. It's one of the long ones. I can't remember which one. It was a weasel.

Well done. Question eight, which religious group were told off by various bishops for keeping pets, especially lap dogs? Nuns. It was nuns. Question nine, what animal kept in the Royal Tower of London Zoo in the 13th century would sometimes be seen fishing in the Thames? A white bear.

It was, and this for a perfect score, we've done amazingly so far, described two of the mythical races of monstrous creatures found in influential works like Pliny's Natural History. I can't remember this one. That's okay, you had the Cynocephalae, the humans with dog heads, the Blemmyes, their heads are in their faces or in their chests, rather. Oh, yeah. And there's the Monty Python one, which is like a foot and a leg and then just a head on top. So I can remember what they look like, but I can't remember what they're called.

I will give you half a mark then. OK, in that case, I'm giving you nine and a half out of ten. A very strong score. Well done, Kiri. Very, very impressive. You absolutely aced it until that final question. Then suddenly the heat got to you, I think. Well, we've had a lovely, fun time. We've learned an awful lot. Thank you so much to Kiri. Thank you so much to Dr. Tim. Listener, if after today's episode,

you're desperate for more medieval cultural history, why not go over and listen to our medieval Christmas episode? It's very jolly. Or check out our episode on the bio tapestry to find out more about William the Conqueror's horse with its very large penis. But you'll find all of those and more on BBC Sounds. And remember, if you enjoyed the podcast,

please leave a review, share the show with friends. Make sure to subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. But all that's left for me to do is say a big thank you to our guests. In History Corner, we had the fantastic Dr Tim Wingard from the University of York. Thank you, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Pleasure. And in Comedy Corner, we had the delightful Kiri Pritchard-McLean. Thank you, Kiri. Oh my gosh, I've had the nicest time. I feel like I've won a competition. Thank you so much for having me. You're very welcome. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we mount our modestly sized horses and charge headlong towards another historical topic. But for now, I'm off to go and see if you really can lick a bear into shape. Bye!

You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. The episode was written by Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emin Nagoose and me, and produced by Emin Nagoose and me. The assistant producer and researcher was Emmy Rose Price-Goodfellow, the project manager was Isla Matthews, and the audio producer was Max Bauer. Do you want to exist in the real world? Audio drama.

It's not just TV drama without the pictures. Look, I'm in trouble. Where are you? Look, this is a real mess. Stop, they're going to come for me. Who? It's more like a novel, but with the added texture and energy of sound. In human eyes, a black vortex at the centre of them,

swallowing everything it sees, pulling me towards the precipice. BBC Radio 4 presents Limelight, the podcast for thrilling original audio drama box sets. Jolene, we need to leave now. audio drama box sets. Jolene, we need to leave now. With incredible news stories told by a stellar cast of actors. I love you too.

Subscribe to Limelight on BBC Sounds. So who shot him? I don't know.