Did Alfred Burn the Cakes? & Other Medieval Myths

Join Matt Lewis and Dr. Eleanor Janega for a rigorous session of medieval myth-busting! Did William Wallace really shoot lightning from his backside? Did Pope Gregory IX cause the Black Death by ordering a cat genocide? And did King Alfred actually burn those cakes? And the biggest question of all; can Matt and Eleanor keep a straight face as they tackle history's most persistent fibs. MORE William Wallace, Scottish Rebel Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/william-wallace-scottish-rebel/id1564113746?i=1000724733569 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1lwsHgq9gA1psiEausz7lu Norwich Castle Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/norwich-castle/id1564113746?i=1000740718029 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0ycWp8r9t5TpMrBJO7wkEJ Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and Dr. Eleanor Janega. The producer is Rob Weinberg, video producer is McKenna Fernandez. Edited by Matthew Wilson. Studio manager is Hanif Hussain, production manager is Beth Donaldson. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Watch Matt and Eleanor's film The Ascent to Power: Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II now on History Hit TV. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost 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 Yarnagger, 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/subscribe.

• 0:40Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to Gone Medieval. Today, we're going medieval myth busting. Some myths of the Middle Ages are universally known, like, did Alfred really burn the cakes? But others are so strange, you want them to be true. For example, did William Wallace fire bolts of lightning from his backside? And perhaps most importantly, does the Pope owe an apology to all cats everywhere? I'm Matt Lewis, and I've invited Dr. Eleanor Yarnagger down from her ivory tower to separate the medieval facts from the medieval fibs. And thanks to all of you who suggested myths that you've always known, but weren't always sure whether they were true or not. We're here to put your minds at rest. Let the myth busting begin.

• 1:38Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, Matt, I want to start us off with a strong one, right? Because this is a classic, actual myth from the medieval period. And this is about your friend and mine, King Alfred the Great. Now, cast your mind back to the Viking invasions, okay? And the myth is that King Alfred the Great is hiding from the Vikings. They're invading the kingdom, it's overrun. And as a part of this, he takes shelter in a poor woman's cottage. And she doesn't know who this guy is. And she's like, yeah, sure, buddy, you can hide out here, Vikings everywhere. But while I am out doing some chores, can you just keep an eye on these cakes that I have by the fire? Okay, so Alfred, yeah, yeah, absolutely. But he's, you know, pondering, pondering on the fate of the kingdom

• 2:22Eleanor Janega?

  and doesn't pay attention to the cakes. The cakes subsequently burn, and the old lady comes back and is like, what is this? And gives him a good hiding, right? So this is one of these like really traditional stories that gets told about Alfred the Great. I think it's actually one of the things you hear most about him, even above and beyond his career. But unfortunately, it just isn't true, right?

• 2:47Matt Lewis?

  No, so it's a myth that appears later. It does appear in medieval sources, but it crops up much, much later. And it kind of tells us around 878, Alfred is having all of these setbacks with the Vikings. He's been pushed back to Athlmy, this island in the midst of his lands, which might be Glastonbury. Who knows? Go and stand on Glastonbury tour and see what you think. And that he is hiding out. And as you say, you know, he's in this woman's cottage. All she asks him to do is keep an eye on the cakes, and he can't do that. So it's a story for the ages, isn't it? Men aren't very good at the one thing that you've given them to do.

• 3:20Eleanor Janega?

  Am I right?

• 3:21Matt Lewis?

  Because he's thinking about 50 other things, obviously. But I think it's one of those things that is meant to present Alfred as this kind of humble, human king who is facing real crises. And it kind of is suggested that he's not betraying these huge crises on his face. This woman doesn't know who he is. He's not going everywhere proclaiming himself to be the mighty Alfred and demanding obeisance from everybody around him. But I think there's also a little bit of a moral lesson in there that you can concentrate on all of these really big, huge issues that are concerning you. And the danger is you let the little things get away from you too. You let the cakes burn because you're doing something

• 4:05Matt Lewis?

  you think is much more important. And there's a lesson in there for kings, I think, in you have to have this macro view, but you also retain the micro view as well. You have to be aware of so many different things that are going on. So I think it's meant to drive home to us that Alfred, you know, allowed himself to get distracted by the huge things when it's the little things that will really help him make a difference.

• 4:24Eleanor Janega?

  And I mean, I think here also there's this idea of, yes, you're thinking about politics, you're thinking about the great needs of the kingdom, but what's going on for the small folk? What is happening for your actual subjects who are faced with these things? And fundamentally, they just want to put the cakes on the table, right? They just want to eat tonight. And so I do think that it presents you with this nice story about what kings ought to be doing, which is, I think, most often the way that we learn, especially about the earlier medieval kings. You know, they're presented as allegories. They're presented as a way of thinking about the concept of kingship more generally, right?

• 5:00Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, and I think they're great ways. Stories like this are great ways of summarizing Alfred, of filling in gaps that we might have in the source material. So we don't know what he's doing while he's in Athlmy. So here's an opportunity to imagine the kind of thing that might have been going on, how he's learning the lessons. And it's almost searching for an explanation for why he comes back from this and is then so devastatingly successful against the Vikings. You know, what has he learned while he's been away? What's his secret? Was he bitten by a spider and he's come back with superpowers? I don't know. No, he just burnt some cakes and learned his lesson.

• 5:32Eleanor Janega?

  Well, listen, is this the first ever example of a celebrity bake-off?

• 5:36Matt Lewis?

  Oh, it could be going horribly wrong.

• 5:38Eleanor Janega?

  Exactly, right? Classic, classic stuff.

• 5:41Matt Lewis?

  Right, I'm going to move us on to the next myth, which is one I think that you'll like. I'm pretty sure you'll enjoy this one. Joan of Arc, often portrayed as this lone visionary girl who miraculously reinvigorates the cause of the French, kings against the English invaders at the beginning of the 15th century, kind of 1429.

• 6:06Matt Lewis?

  And there is this impression that when she's captured, she's sold, she's burned at the stake in Rouen, and that this is all the actions of the Roman Church, that the Roman Church has taken this poor young girl, prosecuted her as some kind of witch, burned her at the stake. So the Catholic Church has killed Joan of Arc.

• 6:27Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, this one drives me up a wall, right? Because what that does is it presents the Catholic Church as a monolith which it simply is not. And fundamentally, this is also a really interesting one because you get it presented more often in Protestant societies, which I find very interesting. Because what it does is it serves as this way of kind of saying that Joan of Arc is like a proto Protestant of some type. And I mean, really, the truth about this is Joan gets captured, right? And she's immediately handed over to Rouen, which is controlled by the English at the time, right? Because it's Normandy, right?

• 7:11Eleanor Janega?

  That's the traditional place that English kings are controlled, right? And more particularly, she is in the hands of a bishop called Pierre Cauchon. And he is the bishop of Beauvais. And technically, technically, right? He's allowed to do this, right? And it's him and also the academics at the University of Paris. Let's keep in mind that universities are staffed entirely by members of the clergy at the time, right? And they are all very specifically on the side of the English cause, right? And that is more particularly because, remember when we did the other week, the Burgundian Armaniac Civil War? They're in with the Burgundians, right? Because the Burgundians have cash, and they're like, whatever it takes, babe.

• 7:55Eleanor Janega?

  Like, they've been promised fabulous riches, right?

• 7:58Matt Lewis?

  Because it's initially the Burgundians that capture Joan and hand her over, hand her over, seller to the English.

• 8:03Eleanor Janega?

  Right, and that can be confusing for us because it's already weird. Because it's like, wait, no, isn't Burgundy part of France? Like, yeah, yes and no. It is now, it wasn't then, right? And what they are doing is very technically above board. They're like, technically, I have the right to try Joan of Arc as a heretic. And they get her on these very specific and persnickety legal things, dressing like a man, saying that her visions are incorrect, and also disobedience, right? Because they're saying, we are, we are representatives of the Church, sort of, yeah. And we're telling you not to do this, and you won't knock it off, right? And she does, at a point in time, say, yes, okay, I am a heretic. And then the visions tell her, no, you should, you should put men's clothing back on.

• 8:48Eleanor Janega?

  And there's this very, very careful legal framework that they put forward. But I, and many other historians would argue, they're doing that because it's dodgy, right? Like, this is very, very dodgy stuff. And if you had other more French sympathetic bishops involved, they would be like, what are you doing? You can't try her as a heretic. The papacy does not know about this, right? So when people say "the Church," they often mean "the Pope." The Pope doesn't know this is happening. They're just like, yeah, maybe, like, let's get rid of this chick.

• 9:19Matt Lewis?

  We've filled in all the right forms.

• 9:21Eleanor Janega?

  Complete, completely. And fundamentally, what happens is, once the Hundred Years' War dies down, the Church is immediately like, absolutely not. This is, whoa, not the case, right? And also, I think the thing of like, oh, making her a saint, that's kind of like overriding it, and they know they've done something bad. She doesn't become a saint for quite some time, right? They say, that was really bad, she's blessed, right? She's blessed, Joan of Arc, fantastic news for her. But her sainthood doesn't come along until the modern era anyway. So this whole idea that this is the Church feeling bad about having done something wrong obscures the truth about the Church more generally, which is that there are individuals who run individual courts. In theory, you can kick up to the Pope,

• 10:06Eleanor Janega?

  but if people want to keep it secret, they can keep it secret. And this idea that the Church is doing this like behind the back of the French, that doesn't really work. It doesn't pan out in this way when there's so much chaos coming, very particularly from the English and Burgundians. And so that's why it's also a very pervasive myth, because the truth is just so complex that it takes several minutes to explain it, right?

• 10:30Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, absolutely. And it does speak to the political influence that is going on because the way that this plays out isn't necessarily the way the Church might have wanted it to play out. It plays out the way the English wanted it to play out. Because one conviction for heresy isn't enough to execute Joan of Arc. And it's pretty clear, they want to execute her and be rid of her. They need a second instance of heresy after her first conviction, which is why her ending up back in men's clothes, potentially under threat of all kinds of horrors and torture.

• 11:02Matt Lewis?

  Is so important. It feels like here, we're seeing the church being driven by the political wants and needs of the English.

• 11:10Eleanor Janega?

  Which happens all the time, which happens all the time, right? And it's one of these things that is a constant thorn for the church. They're always going back and forth, saying, really, our bishops should be free to serve the church more generally, but they're always getting pressure from above and from the local nobles and royalty who they are also members of, right? You do not become the bishop if you are from a poor family. You're from these noble and princely families. So he is getting this pressure from family members. He's getting this pressure from politicians. So it isn't as easy as just saying the church did something ever. That's not how the church works.

• 11:45Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Important.

• 11:47Eleanor Janega?

  Important. Well, from one person who was burnt to a few who may have been threatened with bodily harm, I want to talk. You're gonna like this one. Matt, would you say that Joan of Navarre, Elizabeth Woodville and Jaketa of Luxembourg were witches?

• 12:06Matt Lewis?

  I wonder if they were. I think this is really, they're really interesting cases. So Henry V imprisons his stepmother, Joan of Navarre, on charges that she's a witch. And as a result of this, he's able to confiscate all of her lands and money, which is really significant amounts of lands and money, at a time when he needs lands and money to go to war in France.

• 12:29Eleanor Janega?

  Yep.

• 12:30Matt Lewis?

  Slightly suspicious. And it's interesting that on his deathbed, one of the things that Henry V does is order the release of Joan of Navarre, almost with an apology. I'm sorry, stepmom.

• 12:41Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, my bad.

• 12:42Matt Lewis?

  I didn't really mean it. He knows what he's done here. This is the political weaponization of charges of witchcraft against women, which becomes increasingly prevalent in the 15th century. And particularly as we move through the century, I mean, we get to Eleanor Cobham, you know, in the, the middle of the 15th century, who is married to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, the uncle of Henry VI, youngest brother of Henry V. And she is charged with witchcraft for going and visiting this lady, Kate, called Marjorie Jormaine, who is known as the Witch of I. And she's charged with trying to have the, the date of death of the King Henry VI foretold so that her husband Humphrey will succeed.

• 13:25Matt Lewis?

  Now, she admits to going and trying to get some fertility medicine from Marjorie Jormaine so that she can conceive and have a child, but she said, I absolutely did not do the rest of that. And the government find themselves, actually, they want to charge her with treason for foretelling the, the death of the king. But they, they find out there is no legal mechanism in 15th century England for trying a woman for treason. So if you go back to Magna Carta, it's all about how you try men for treason.

• 13:52Eleanor Janega?

  Right.

• 13:53Matt Lewis?

  By a panel of their peers and all, and it specifically says men. So no one's quite sure what you do about a woman who might have committed treason or you want to charge with treason. And so they turn to witchcraft as the next available best option, really. And so she is pursued on these charges of witchcraft. She's forced to do penance, walking through the streets of London, and she's forced to have her marriage to Humphrey annulled. She spends the rest of her life, about 15 years, as a prisoner of Henry V's, Henry VI's government, sorry. And this is just very, very clearly a trumped up political charge, which is really trying to get at her husband. It's not even about her. She's paying the price for the attack they want to make on Humphrey.

• 14:38Matt Lewis?

  And it's actually at this point that the government then also changes the law to say, we're gonna find a way to try women for treason.

• 14:43Eleanor Janega?

  Surprise.

• 14:44Matt Lewis?

  As well, just in case we ever want to. And they essentially say that they'll be tried by a panel of their peers, male peers, though, not female peers, and that the punishment for a woman who's committing treason is being burnt at the stake, similarly to those of witchcraft or heresy. And then you get on to people like Elizabeth Woodville and Jaketa of Luxembourg. And here we see, you know, the height of the Wars of the Roses, when you've got Edward IV falling out with his cousin, the Earl of Warwick. The Earl of Warwick is again, politically weaponizing these attacks on women as a way to attack Edward IV. It's not good form to go directly for the king. You go for the, the softer targets around him. And the women are now becoming potential political levers against the men.

• 15:28Matt Lewis?

  People have seen it happen to Humphrey with Eleanor. Well, why don't we just do that again? And so Warwick launches all of these attacks on Jaketa and Elizabeth Woodville, saying they used witchcraft to ensnare Edward to trick him into marrying Elizabeth Woodville. And Shakespeare will take this and run with it by the end of the 16th century to say that Richard, Richard III is then claiming that Elizabeth Woodville is casting spells on him that have withered his arm and all of this kind of thing as well. So again, I think what all, what we have to see here is generally political attacks on men through the vehicle of charges of witchcraft against women that are close to them.

• 16:04Eleanor Janega?

  Now, I think that that is really important as well, because it is this new thing that we see cropping up at the end of the medieval period. And obviously, this will continue to snowball. And then by the time you get to the early modern period, we see, you know, you can just throw charges of witchcraft around willy nilly. It's very interesting, because you just don't see this in the earlier medieval period at all. It's just not something that anyone ever does. And you see it almost exclusively, even in the later medieval period, in these highly politicized contexts. Like, the concept of the witch is so new at all. And it's just thrown specifically at these well-connected political women who are being kind of inconvenient.

• 16:45Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, this is something very, very different from the, the much more serious kind of witchcraft trials and the, the witch crazes and things like that that happened in the early modern period, particularly in the 17th century. You think James VI and I genuinely terrified that witches are causing trouble in his kingdom. That really isn't happening here at the end of the medieval period.

• 17:08Eleanor Janega?

  No, absolutely not. And one of the big things that you will notice is these women largely survive. Despite, I mean, it's not a great life. Nobody wants to be imprisoned, but they're not being hung. So that's something.

• 17:20Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 17:21Eleanor Janega?

  Some good news, a little like good news.

• 17:23Matt Lewis?

  Hang on to those small positives. Right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring you in one, one here that I think you will like. There is a persistent myth, and you and I have just made a program about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine.

• 17:35Eleanor Janega?

  Yay.

• 17:37Matt Lewis?

  Great fun to do, and we would love to do more.

• 17:38Eleanor Janega?

  Yes.

• 17:39Matt Lewis?

  One of the most persistent stories that we hear about Eleanor of Aquitaine is that as she's, she's older than Henry, as she's aging, Henry is taking mistresses. True.

• 17:50Eleanor Janega?

  True.

• 17:52Matt Lewis?

  There is a mistress that he gets particularly attached to, Rosamund Clifford, considered to be fair Rosamund, a beautiful young woman. And that Eleanor is so consumed by bitter, bitter rage and jealousy. And Henry is so scared that Eleanor is gonna do something to Rosamund that he builds this, this maze, and he puts Rosamund in a cottage at the center of the maze so that Eleanor can't possibly find her. Only Henry can find his way in on those lonely nights when he wants a bit of company. But Eleanor somehow, because she's an incredibly clever woman, finds her way through this maze, finds Rosamund Clifford, and in most sources, poisons Rosamund and kills her. And probably does a wicked cackling laugh at the end of it.

• 18:34Eleanor Janega?

  I'm sure.

• 18:35Matt Lewis?

  Because she succeeded. Did Eleanor of Aquitaine murder Rosamund Clifford?

• 18:39Eleanor Janega?

  No. No, leave my girl alone, right? This is, this does Eleanor of Aquitaine so dirty on a number of levels. In the first place, you know, when Henry's taken out by Rosamund, Henry and Eleanor are already estranged, right? Eleanor's been back in Poitiers. She's like, yeah, that's great. Cheers, you know, I've had eight million children, roughly. I'm good, you have fun, right? And more importantly, I think, this would not be possible, because when Rosamund Clifford dies, Eleanor is under arrest by Henry II and being kept in Sarum Castle outside Salisbury.

• 19:20Eleanor Janega?

  So the entire story, I mean, like, let aside, you know, the fact that a topiary maze is created and, you know, the, and we all know Rosamund is actually at court. Like, Henry's like, that's my girlfriend, ladies and gentlemen, isn't she hot? Right? And everyone is like, oh, very hot girlfriend, well done, Henry, right? So she's not being kept in any cottage, in any center of any maze. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But then how does Eleanor get out of imprisonment to get through said maze to find Rosamund and kill her, right? Like, what's she gonna do? Say to the guards, oh, hey, guys, I know that I'm under a house arrest, but could you let me out so I can go kill my husband who you work for's girlfriend? That'd be great, right? And then what, she presumably goes back in? And like, the entire thing is a 14th century invention.

• 20:05Eleanor Janega?

  This is when we find that these stories start swirling. And this is a specific time when we're seeing Eleanor talked about more commonly in general. And it's one of numerous allegations that's thrown at Eleanor at this time. So this is also the time when people are alleging that she is having an affair with Saladin on the Second Crusade, which, uh...

• 20:28Eleanor Janega?

  Sure, babe.

• 20:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, definitely. It's not like he's a 10-year-old boy or anything.

• 20:31Eleanor Janega?

  No, no, but you know, like, listen, her beauty is so legendary that even 10-year-olds are drawn to it, right? And, you know, very obviously, modern scholars are like, this is very clearly about the fact that people don't like it when a lady is powerful, right? And we understand that, we see where it comes. But even in the 20th century, this was still being taught in English schools. And I know this because people have come to talk to me about it and said that they were taught this, and I'm like, well, that's a shame that you were taught this thing. But I think it's really an instructive story because its persistence does show us exactly the playbook for how powerful women are treated, right? There's, there's this specific thing where the thing about women is actually the men

• 21:15Eleanor Janega?

  in their life, the thing about women is their sexual lives and their raging jealousy and dislike of other women. And not that this is an incredibly powerful woman who is currently under house arrest because she's managed to negotiate kind of a treaty with her husband after her sons revolted against him, right? Like, this is, she's making power moves, incredible political plays. And we're like, oh, she's jealous, shut up.

• 21:38Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it kind of points us to two, two main things, doesn't it? That almost every voice that we hear from the medieval period is a powerful man or a monk, you know, who have very particular images of women. This is the time at which the church is really solidifying its idea that all women are the daughters of Eve, who are just driven by their unrestrained libidos and are corrupting men left, right and centre. So that everything that goes wrong isn't a man's fault, it's a woman who's driven it to him. And it's exclusively men that are telling you this. And also that as these myths accumulate around a woman like Eleanor, the sheer number of them, the idea that she's having an affair with Saladin, an affair with her uncle, that she might have slept with Henry's dad and all of these kinds of things, all of those

• 22:21Matt Lewis?

  add up to tell us that she is an incredibly significant and powerful woman because people are so relentlessly attacking her.

• 22:29Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, if you are the right kind of medieval queen, no one talks about you, which is, you know, incredibly frustrating for those of us who are interested in medieval queens. But people talk about Eleanor because she's very good at her job. She's great at her job. And others would argue that she's maybe not very good because they shouldn't have to think about her, they shouldn't have to think about an Eleanor, but too bad, actually. Team Eleanor for life, we love her. She would never do that, she's a girl's girl.

• 22:59Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, no criticism here.

• 23:00Eleanor Janega?

  No, absolutely not.

• 23:02Matt Lewis?

  But I think we need to crack on with some more myths. We're maybe going to talk a little bit about Robert the Bruce right after this break.

• 23:19Matt Lewis?

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• 26:32Eleanor Janega?

  All right, Matt, are you ready for Robert the Bruce times?

• 26:35Matt Lewis?

  I'm always ready for Robert the Bruce times.

• 26:36Eleanor Janega?

  This is a good one, though. This is a really fun one. We like an actual, actual myth here. And this myth is the idea that Robert the Bruce, oh, he's down on his luck, he's in hiding, he's defeated. And while he is hiding, he observes a spider in its web and it's trying to kind of spin or climb up its web over and over again, but it keeps falling, right? And eventually, after trying and trying and trying, the spider gets up there, it gets up there, right? And it manages to finish its web and do its thing. And Robert the Bruce is like, hey, I'm like that spider.

• 27:19Eleanor Janega?

  I, I will succeed if I simply keep at it. And so he internalizes this as a lessons in persistence and, you know, eventually he goes on to win Scottish independence. Lovely, lovely little Pat story.

• 27:35Matt Lewis?

  It definitely happened, yes.

• 27:36Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, the end.

• 27:38Matt Lewis?

  No, the idea that Robert isn't busy enough that he can literally just sit there for days and watch a spider try to build a web mystifies me. So we're around kind of 1306 here. Robert the Bruce is definitely facing setbacks. If he's trying to make himself the king of Scotland in the face of the efforts of Edward the First of England, who is still just about around at this point, there is an ongoing war. Edward, Edward is very, very good at war. Robert is facing setbacks. Lots of his relatives have been captured or killed. It looks like he's losing and we get this idea that, again, you know, he goes into hiding. And it's similar to the Alfred story, I think, isn't it?

• 28:21Matt Lewis?

  This one doesn't crop up for, for maybe 500 years later. It seems to be Walter Scott who kind of creates this myth of the idea that, that Robert the Bruce is sitting there watching this spider. And I think similarly to the Alfred one, we need to be thinking about people who are looking for some kind of explanation for what's happened. What's the epiphany that Robert had that turned all of this around? Because things looked so bad for him and then he emerges from this moment to achieve ultimate victory. I mean, partly what happens is Edward the First dies and Edward the Second lives, which

• 28:55Eleanor Janega?

  That's helpful.

• 28:55Matt Lewis?

  It's helpful for Robert's cause. And so I think, again, we're looking at how do you explain all of these things? And there's a really nice moral story to be delivered in the idea that, that patience is a virtue, that if at first you don't succeed, you try and try again. And that we can all, even kings, can learn something from a humble spider who keeps plodding away. Because again, there's the reference to, to the ordinary people who are forced to work and work and toil and toil to get what they want. They're not like the nobles who can most often just buy what they want or grab it and take it. Robert is learning lessons of humility that make him more like a normal, ordinary

• 29:40Matt Lewis?

  person, make him more kind of relatable for everybody. So it's an effort to make these popular kings like Alfred and like Robert the Bruce, one of us, one of the lads.

• 29:50Eleanor Janega?

  And I mean, unfortunately, anytime you've got a story this good, you know, a story that really encapsulates something, it's almost always going to be a literary invention, right? This is come up with by an author who's good at making stories, you know, it's like, oh, I've got a metaphor, we're going to write it down. And that doesn't mean that there isn't something historical to learn from it, because we can understand the way that people wish to present kingship, the way that they wish to historicise things, the way that they want to make people seem more human. But anything that nice and pat just isn't going to turn out sadly.

• 30:27Matt Lewis?

  No. Right, for our next one, we're going to stay in the same kind of period.

• 30:31Eleanor Janega?

  Okay, great.

• 30:31Matt Lewis?

  And I'm going to try my best not to do a Scottish Braveheart accent. William Wallace!

• 30:38Eleanor Janega?

  Get out, no!

• 30:39Matt Lewis?

  He's seven feet tall and shoots fireballs from his eyes, and bolts of lightning from his arse at the English.

• 30:46Eleanor Janega?

  And that did happen, yeah.

• 30:48Matt Lewis?

  Documented at the back.

• 30:48Eleanor Janega?

  That's right, that's right, correct, yeah. So at the end, we can all go home.

• 30:52Matt Lewis?

  So again, these are stories that get told about, you know, the Scottish freedom fighter who is around at a similar time to Robert the Bruce, that he becomes this kind of mythical giant figure. And in the retelling, he's forever taller and forever having these additional superhuman powers in an effort to explain what people perceive to be his success. So is he seven foot tall and can he shoot lightning from his arse?

• 31:16Eleanor Janega?

  Oh sadly, no. Sadly, no. Okay, this is one of these ones where we actually have the literary bead on it as well. So it's about 160 years after William Wallace lived. And it comes to us in an epic poem that is called The Wallace, and it's written by a guy known as Blind Harry. Great name, we love this. And yeah, it's a metaphor, babe. Like, it's about how big and strong he is and how he's got these magical powers. But also, it's very specifically presenting William Wallace, you know, with the lightning bolts from the bum, right? This is humourising it. It's saying, you know, there is something to his crudity, to his like, not noble status, even though he absolutely was a noble, right?

• 32:00Eleanor Janega?

  There's something about the everyman of William Wallace, right? And it, again, humanises him whilst at the same time mythologising him. So he's seven feet tall, he's got these magical powers, but, literally but, that's it, period. So, you know, and this is also kind of linked to the fact that there is a William Wallace sword, and it's at the Wallace monument, and it's huge, it's like five feet tall. And so it's like, oh, only a seven foot tall guy could have swung that around. And I mean, listen, he probably was a big guy. That is a large sword. Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, was that ceremonial? Or was he just really, really good with a long sword? You know, many such cases. So

• 32:42Eleanor Janega?

  yeah, it's a great story, we love it. We definitely want to talk about it, for sure. Lightning from the bum can't go wrong. But yeah, of course it's not, of course it's not.

• 32:51Matt Lewis?

  But it does tell us something about the kind of things that people in the situation of those around William Wallace, who are trying to lead this rebellion against something as powerful in this period as the English crown. They feel like they need a hero. They may not have ever seen William Wallace in person, they may never have encountered him. And that means that all of these stories can grow up around him. And it has the sense of them telling stories around the fire in the evening, and Wallace starts off at six foot, and then he's six foot two, and then he might be six foot four. What if he's six foot six? And he just eventually gets bigger and bigger in the retelling of these stories. Because it's also a way to embolden all of these people who are risking every single

• 33:34Matt Lewis?

  thing that they have, including their lives, to follow this cause. If they believe they're following someone seven foot tall who's able to call down lightning upon his enemies, that gives you a little bit of heart, doesn't it?

• 33:45Eleanor Janega?

  Oh yeah, absolutely. You want to imagine that there are heroes on your side. And there's no real difference between this and, for example, stories about the Trojan War. And, you know, the gods getting involved on the sides of the Greeks or the Trojans, right? It's the same sort of thing, where we're mythologising in order to give a nice pedigree and encourage people, encourage people in the cause, right?

• 34:07Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Eleanor Janega?

  Well, you know, standing on the battlefield, I've got a good one for you. A lot of people asked about this as well. So is it true that knights can't move in armour, right? Because there's this idea of the knight, when you see plate mail, they are just so weighed down by it that they can't run. You know, if you fall off your horse, you're just going to lay there. You have to be lifted by a whole team onto said horse. And I mean, this comes into play a lot of times in movies. You know, it's like, oh, it's funny, they're kind of like falling down. But I think also, there is a big thing here where people get battlefield armour and tournament armour confused. And that's also likely because the armour that

• 34:52Eleanor Janega?

  we are most likely to see is tournament armour now, because you go to the museum and you're going to see like, the best of the best, the fanciest. You know, you're going to see Maximilian's tournament armour, for example, right?

• 35:04Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And I mean, shout out to your favourite film of mine, A Knight's Tale.

• 35:07Eleanor Janega?

  Yes.

• 35:07Matt Lewis?

  Where you see all of these knights desperately struggling to get onto their horses, while Heath Ledger strolls in and hops on the back of his in his new lightweight armour. Perfect.

• 35:14Eleanor Janega?

  I love it.

• 35:15Matt Lewis?

  This is just simply not true. And I think it comes from our imagination, that looking at that much metal feels like it must weigh you down. But the question is, if it did, if it stopped you moving, and I think we probably have to, before I answer it, we have to balance this slightly with, there are stories of people, you know, falling on the field of battle and being trampled into the mud and drowned because they can't get up in their armour. But that's to do with the fact that the mud is sucking them down and pulling them down and filling up their armour. And there are stories of people trying to flee the battle, crossing rivers and things like that and drowning. Because if you fall over in water in some of this stuff and it becomes waterlogged, then you probably are in real trouble. But if you're a medieval knight, what is the benefit to

• 35:56Matt Lewis?

  you of putting so much protection on that weighs so much that you literally can't move? That you just become a stationary turret for everybody to attack? And you're just kind of standing there desperately trying to hit anyone that comes near enough and hope they don't push you over, because then you're really done for. There is a balance to be had between mobility and defence. If you put a medieval suit of armour on, I think most people would be surprised at how light it is, and just how freely you can move, particularly your arms and your legs. You want to be able to swing a sword or a mace or something like that. You want to be able to move and turn around and face an enemy. Helmets are all about getting the right balance of protection and vision, because it's all well and good

• 36:41Matt Lewis?

  being well protected. But if you can't see anything, you're still in trouble. And there are, you know, our very own Luke Tomes of History Hit has donned a suit of medieval armour for a YouTube video and wandered around London, riding on a Lime bike. He goes to the gym and does a workout in it. You know, so go and watch that video and see how people move. There are clips all over the internet of people who've put on medieval armour and run an assault course alongside a modern day, kind of fully equipped squaddie. Most knights' suit of armour weighs roughly the same as a fully kitted out, modern, British Army person with a Bergen and all of that kind of stuff. We don't think that they can't

• 37:21Matt Lewis?

  move. So why do we think medieval knights can't? You know, Google medieval knights doing assault courses. They're jumping over things left, right and centre. Because it simply wouldn't make sense to make something that restricted your movement so much and made it so hard to fight that you're just a sitting target.

• 37:39Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I mean, I wore a suit of armour for my medieval pleasures series when we were doing sport. And I was really surprised, you know, I knew that it wasn't that heavy, but it was very doable. And it wasn't even my armour, right? It wasn't made to measure for me. I was using someone else's, so it was hanging at slightly different points. You absolutely can do whatever, especially if you're used to training with it, right? Because the key is training. And all these guys do all day long is train, right? So I think that maybe this is one of those ones where people just like to imagine a past that says medieval people are particularly foolish. They just don't know what they're doing, right? And so as a result of this, they put on silly armour that actually makes

• 38:21Eleanor Janega?

  it more difficult to fight, right? And, you know, maybe also it's us wanting to poke some fun perhaps at a nobility, right?

• 38:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 38:28Eleanor Janega?

  Like, oh, how silly it is that they're doing this when, you know, ordinary people who are just down in the muck with a pike are moving about freely.

• 38:34Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And there is also an element of, we know, for example, that people will adapt their armour to the type of battle that they're in. If you're fighting in a cavalry, predominantly cavalry battle, you might wear different amounts and different types of armour. You might leave bits off if you're fighting on foot instead. If you're fighting in the woods and you need to be super mobile, you might leave off your leg armour altogether. There is a sense in which you don't have to put that whole suit of armour on every single time. You pick the bits that are going to help you win the fight that you're in right now. Right, our next myth is a slightly problematic one for me.

• 39:07Eleanor Janega?

  Uh-oh.

• 39:08Matt Lewis?

  Uh-oh.

• 39:08Eleanor Janega?

  Uh-oh.

• 39:09Matt Lewis?

  Uh-oh. I once wrote in a book that medieval staircases in castles tend to turn clockwise. And that this is to favour the defenders, who are generally coming down the stairs and are fighting right-handed. So your sword hand has more space. And it disadvantages those coming up the stairs who can't fight kind of round the pillar in the middle on the stairs. So that this is, castles being designed in a defensive way, so that those trying to protect the castle have a huge, huge advantage in a sword fight over those who might be attacking the castle. I wrote this in a book.

• 39:47Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, no.

• 39:48Matt Lewis?

  And I'm scared.

• 39:49Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, Matt, it's, but this is really pervasive, right? I've definitely heard guides say this in castles. And then, of course, I've been like, um, excuse me, I think you'll find like, you know, because I'm the worst person in the entire world. But sadly, no, um, there is no real specific thing about them always going clockwise. I have personally been to multiple counterclockwise ones at Norwich Castle. Famously, we, we has been redone recently. We've been there.

• 40:15Matt Lewis?

  I climbed it and cried.

• 40:17Eleanor Janega?

  No, no. You know, the, the White Tower certainly has it. Uh, Kennelworth has it. So there's lots and lots of examples of this. And really, the thing about these counterclockwise or clockwise spiral staircases, they save space. It's just a really great way to get a staircase in into smaller spaces and making sure that you've got enough room for, you know, the towers or what have you on either side. You know, you want to use all the room you can on the Great Hall so that everyone can go in there and have a very nice party, right? And the truth of the matter is, by the time someone has breached the castle walls, you're in trouble, right? Like, no, no one is designing a castle with the idea that, oh, yeah.

• 40:59Eleanor Janega?

  And then when they come in, we're going to have like a swashbuckling adventure on the stairs, right? You're trying to keep them out. If they've made it in at all whatsoever, you're in trouble. And that's just the fact of the matter. Now, there will be a keep that you can retreat to, but they are not going to be coming out. But this is pervasive because, you know, it's fun. It's like a pub fact. And so it isn't, it brings me no joy to, to bust this one because, you know, many fine individuals have been taken in by it. But it is one of those ones that just gets said so often. You know, it's, it's that common sense kind of story. And that's why it's difficult to get rid of it.

• 41:37Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And James Wright, who's a, a buildings archaeologist, I spoke to him about, he was very kind. He didn't take the mick out of me too much. But he said, you know, the most surveys will say it's kind of 50 50 roughly, whether they go clockwise or counterclockwise. And that this myth seems to have emerged from, I think it's a 19th century French kind of historian who was also obsessed with fencing.

• 41:57Eleanor Janega?

  Oh.

• 41:57Matt Lewis?

  So he was visiting castles and thinking, well, if I was sword fighting here, you know, his brain was just looking for those things. He spotted it and he kind of just created this myth that then everybody latched on to. And he just made it up because he happened to have an obsession with fencing. But it does also talk about the fact that quite often castles, we, we think of them being solely military defensible positions. Now, they definitely are, they're big stone walls. But like you say, by the time someone's in, you're already in trouble. The idea is to keep them out altogether. And these places also have to be comfortable, functional homes and regal estates for people to live in as well.

• 42:39Matt Lewis?

  Not every way in which they're designed is about if someone is about to get into my bedroom and kill me, this is how I'm going to stop them.

• 42:46Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I think that's right. And, and also, you know, when castles do survive to us these days, a lot of the time we're only left with the defensive structures. You know, we just have the stairs and the walls and the apartments and the nice things that people used to live in are often fall into bits now. So it's a lot easier to forget that this is also a palace. You know, this is also supposed to be a nice place to have friends over and impress dignitaries, right? So, yeah, I think that it does take a little bit of imagination to get to that next part. I do miss those days though. You know, historians used to just be able to make things up with a convincing story. No, we're not allowed to do that anymore, right?

• 43:22Matt Lewis?

  Let me take history in my hobby and create a myth that will endure forever.

• 43:25Eleanor Janega?

  Exactly.

• 43:40Speaker 04

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• 44:31Eleanor Janega?

  I've got one. That bothers me because you and I, we're both, we're both cat lovers. Many such cases. Love to see a small animal around in the area, a creature, if you will. But there's a really persistent myth, and apparently this exists, I've heard it both from people in the global north, but I've also heard this very specifically from Turkish people. And there is an idea that Pope Gregory the Ninth, in the 13th century, declared that cats were demonic and he had them all killed all across Europe. Okay?

• 45:10Eleanor Janega?

  And as a result of all the cats in Europe being killed, it was overrun with rats. It was overrun with rats. And that is why the Black Death happened. And so, you know, it's this church's war on cats, right? Is part of the reason why the Black Death happens. And there's also kind of like this thing where people are like, oh, the, the papacy should, oh, apologize to cats, you know, because there was this cat genocide and then that led to the Black, the Black Death, right?

• 45:42Eleanor Janega?

  Do you want to start us off?

• 45:44Matt Lewis?

  There are times, my daughter has a kitten called Derek.

• 45:47Eleanor Janega?

  Derek.

• 45:48Matt Lewis?

  There are times when I'm convinced he might be slightly evil.

• 45:52Matt Lewis?

  That there might be some demonic work going on there. But generally, he's just very cute. So we do have in 1233, we do have this papal ball vox in rama, which starts to describe lots of heretical and a magical ceremonies that are taking place. And it does mention the use of a black cat during at least one of these ceremonies. So we, we do have a link there to the idea that the papacy is saying black cats are involved in demonic worship and dodgy magic and things that they shouldn't be involved in. It's only ever black cats.

• 46:25Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Matt Lewis?

  In that one papal ball. It's not all cats. And there is no sense anywhere from that, that the papacy is ordering the destruction of every cat in Europe and somehow blaming them for all of the evil in the world. And the idea that it contributes to the Black Death, I mean, for one thing, all the cats haven't been killed. But we can explain the Black Death in a, in a myriad of ways. It's human trade routes that are causing the Black Death. Kind of not saying there's not enough cats to kill the rats that the humans are bringing is a little bit like saying it's not really our fault.

• 46:58Eleanor Janega?

  Well, I, I think this is a really interesting one too, because ironically, right? They're like, oh, well, the church was so stupid. Everyone in Europe is stupid for listening to the church and doing cat genocide, question mark. Ignores the fact that, and I can't stress this enough, the Black Death happened across Afro Eurasia. It's like, cool. So why did the Black Death happen in Beijing? Why did the Black Death happen in Damascus? Why did the Black Death happen in Baghdad, where it was absolutely atrocious? It happened in Alexandria, right? It happens all across Afro Eurasia and not everyone killed cats, right? And I mean, also, it's a weird one because everyone always focuses on the rats. Leave the rats alone. It's the fleas.

• 47:41Matt Lewis?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Eleanor Janega?

  Fleas did this, not rats. So like, there are all these steps that you have to ignore in order to tell this story. And it just shows how woefully ignorant people still are about the Black Death. They seem to think that it's something that happened exclusively in Europe and nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone experienced it at the same rates. And indeed, what we tend to see is that it's worse in places where people are living really cheap by jowl, which is why places like Baghdad have it really, really bad because there's just so many people living there, right?

• 48:12Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, we did a, a great episode with Thomas Asbridge recently on the kind of global impact and the ways in which different cultures and different religions confronted and dealt with the threat of the Black Death. But it is a little bit of that kind of European exceptionalism, isn't it? And looking for some kind of reason why Europeans weren't able to deal with the Black Death. Why is it that we couldn't do this? It couldn't be because we don't understand it. They're trying to avoid it being God's displeasure with everybody. So we'll blame one pope for killing all the cats. Great, sorted.

• 48:41Eleanor Janega?

  Wonderful. And I mean, baby, we just didn't have antibiotics. There's nothing you can do about the Black Death until we invent antibiotics. It's going to be several centuries. That's it, right?

• 48:51Matt Lewis?

  So I think we probably need to say that the papacy doesn't owe cats an apology for a universal genocide in the 13th century.

• 48:58Eleanor Janega?

  Now, my cat believes she's owed an apology for every time she doesn't get more treats, but that's another story entirely.

• 49:05Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. Every cat is entitled, just not to an apology from the pope in this instance.

• 49:09Eleanor Janega?

  That's right, yeah.

• 49:11Matt Lewis?

  I'm going to bring us on to one now. I'm, I'm slightly, I'm nervous about raising this one.

• 49:16Eleanor Janega?

  All right.

• 49:17Matt Lewis?

  But we, we've got lots of myths that we could have confronted here and hopefully we'll be able to come back and do some more maybe. But this is one that I couldn't let slip by in the first episode that we're doing. For a very, very long time, people have referred to the early medieval period as the Dark Ages. It's a term that can be used for that period, but which has been used pejoratively to talk about the fact that people then were living in an intellectual and artistic and cultural darkness, that with the absence of the Roman Empire to teach us all to be wonderful, intelligent

• 49:58Matt Lewis?

  people, we all took a step backward and became stupid. We forgot how to do things, we forgot how to make things. Like, everyone woke up in the morning and couldn't tie a shoelace anymore, didn't know how to forge a sword, couldn't make any kind of art. And therefore, this period, until we get a little bit further on and we get kind of the medieval renaissance's that begin to emerge in the 11th and 12th centuries and things like that, that everyone was living in this cultural Dark Age.

• 50:29Eleanor Janega?

  This is a really frustrating one. And indeed, I've run into people who believe that the term Dark Ages refers to the Middle Ages more broadly and not just the early medieval period. And it's a really annoying one because the term Dark Ages is a specifically useful phrase for historians that breached containment and people don't know what it means, right? So it's ironic because the misapplication of the term is by people who are like, "I'm very smart, I'm a very clever person." And it's like, "Yeah, except for you don't know how to use this term," right? And we've had to just stop using it. We've had to start saying early medieval period, which I don't have a problem with, right?

• 51:06Eleanor Janega?

  But the term Dark Ages here very specifically refers to a lack of sources, not, and I underline this, not intellectual decline, right? And I've heard people say, "Oh yeah, well then why aren't there many sources then?" Because it was 1,500 years ago, bro! It's a really long time. I don't think that people really have the wherewithal to understand what a long time period this is, right? And you're writing things down on parchment, the world is lit only by fire, right? So things burn down all the time. And guess what? You lose manuscripts as a result of that. Parchment is also edible to little guys like mice and rats. And they come in and they say yum, yum, yum.

• 51:50Eleanor Janega?

  And if you don't get to it in time, they will eat your parchment, right? You also see very particularly a privileging of older things at the time. So people have such a reverence for Rome then as well, which is ironic because everyone's like, "Oh, they're idiots and they don't know anything about Rome. They only care about Rome, dude. The only thing they care about is Rome." So if you've got a choice between saving something that is Roman in character and saving something that, I don't know, Clovis wrote, well, he was king of the Frankes, they're going to be like, "Oh, keep the Roman one, who cares about Clovis," right? So there's this constant curation that is going on over 1,500 years, which means you

• 52:34Eleanor Janega?

  lose these particular manuscripts. And, you know, we see this all over the world, for example. We know that we've lost innumerable sources in tropical regions because things rot, right? So we just don't get to know what's going on there because 1,500 years is a really long time ago. And if you're writing on, say, banana leaves, as they are on, like, Sulawesi, for example, that's going to rot, right? So we don't get to know because that is just how source survival works. So you have to understand that the way things are now, yeah, that's not how things always were. And, you know, one of the big things that was really brought home to me when I was studying for my masters and I was learning how to read medieval manuscripts because it's very difficult.

• 53:16Eleanor Janega?

  You know, we have copies of medieval manuscripts that outnumber books that were published in the 1920s, right? Because people were like, "That book's not very good, pulp it, screw it." That doesn't mean that book didn't exist, right? It means that as a culture, we decided that one of these things is more important than the other. And that's a process that is happening all the time. And, I mean, ironically, anyone who wants to make this argument that the Middle Ages is uniquely ignorant, uniquely stupid, and basing it on this idea of the Dark Ages is so ignorant that they don't even know what Dark Ages means.

• 53:53Matt Lewis?

  No. And I mean, I'm talking about rotten things, you know, let's talk about Henry VIII.

• 53:56Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, my lord!

• 53:58Matt Lewis?

  You know, here's an example of someone who essentially caused the loss of vast numbers of manuscripts from libraries with the dissolution of the monasteries. Those things were just destroyed. And we also do have examples of manuscripts from that kind of later medieval, early modern period that are reusing older bits of paper and bits of parchment that might be from the early medieval period. So they're just being recycled and reused, or they're being destroyed as part of purges that are going on, you know, across Europe, most famously, I guess, Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries. But it also, I mean, it's interesting how archaeology is beginning to shed more light on what was once the Dark Ages.

• 54:39Matt Lewis?

  It's becoming a great source of evidence and material for it. But even referring to written sources is ignoring stuff like, I mean, the Lindisfarne Gospels. You know, there are absolutely beautiful pieces of art that survived from this period that were being created in what people are trying to paint as this cultural backwater.

• 55:00Eleanor Janega?

  Listen, if you are really this determined to persist with this myth, I mean, I think also it has to do with this whole myth of the Renaissance, which, I'm sorry, but if you really believe in the Renaissance and this idea that, like, suddenly the world got better, I'm afraid you've fallen prey to an infomercial. And all that is, is that the Vassilius's The Great Sculptors, which was just a book designed to sell Michelangelo to you, has worked on you. Or maybe, I don't know, you are leaning a little bit too much into Petrarch. Petrarch is beefing with my favorite guy, Charles IV, the Holy Roman Emperor, and he's like, "Nothing's good if it's not Italian, you can't be in Prague, shut up, Roman things are good." Right?

• 55:44Eleanor Janega?

  And ironically, that's happening in the 14th century, which is the Middle Ages, right? So all of these things are very explicit propaganda campaigns. And congratulations, you fell for it.

• 55:54Matt Lewis?

  And again, it's also an annoyingly Eurocentric view of things because there are people in the Near East and the Middle East, Islamic scholars, who become the kind of custodians of ancient Greek and Roman wisdom, which Europeans rediscover when they go off on the Crusades in the 11th century and beyond that. And they come back to Europe and they're all like, "Look what we found it." Meanwhile, Islamic scholars are like, "What do you mean, found?"

• 56:17Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, literally, the Spanish kingdoms are like, "Uh, yeah, we have a scriptorium. We've been doing that." And everyone's like, "Oh, really? Well, I wasn't going down to the Iberian Peninsula." Maybe you should, dog, I don't know.

• 56:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, those sources do exist in other places, don't they?

• 56:32Eleanor Janega?

  Exactly. So, and the entire thing is incredibly frustrating. And I think also, it's just one of these things, again, people like to pat themselves on the back, don't they? People like to pretend that they somehow are more clever than, you know, a millennium of people who were just as difficult, intelligent, you know, sometimes silly, as anyone else. But, yeah, I mean, don't blame medieval people for stuff that early modern people, like Henry VIII did. Come on, man, be better than that.

• 57:05Matt Lewis?

  I feel like you might need a little lie down in the dark.

• 57:07Eleanor Janega?

  I know!

• 57:08Matt Lewis?

  After being wound up about that one. And that might, that might be enough myths for us to bust for today. But we've, I mean, we've got a whole list of other ones that we could come back and do another time if people would like to hear them.

• 57:16Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, absolutely. Myths are us, I will say that. And please, we really want to do more of these. So let us know if you want to come with us on a journey.

• 57:24Matt Lewis?

  Thank you for joining us today on Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you want more myths busted, just let us know. Eleanor and I will be back again next week. But if that's just not good enough, why not become a subscriber to History Hit? As a subscriber, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning, original TV documentaries, including mine and Eleanor's recent series, The Rise of the Plantagenets, plus ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscribe. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments or suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And you can tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.