Pod Insights Gone Medieval Life and legends along the Medieval coastline About this episode Matt Lewis is joined by archaeologist Ben Robinson from BBC's 'Villages by the Sea' to explore the deep historical ties along Britain's coastline, from the ancient tin trade of Cornwall to the fascinating legend of St. Bega in Cumbria.
They discuss how the seaside has played pivotal roles in shaping the nation's history, unearthing lost stories of Viking wives seeking sanctuary and the mystery of the mummified crusader found encased in a lead sarcophagus.
Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis and edited by Amy Haddow. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.
All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds.
Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast.
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0:01 Matt 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 Jarniger, and some of the world's leading historians as we bring history's most fascinating stories to life, only on History Hit. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand-new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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2:20 Matt Lewis? Hello, I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We've got the most intriguing mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the printing press, from kings to popes to the crusades. We cross centuries and continents to delve into rebellions, plots and murders, to find the stories, big and small, that tell us how we got here. Find out who we really were with Gone Medieval.
3:03 Matt Lewis? Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. There's nothing like a visit to the coast. I do love an ice cream and a walk along the seafront. It's even better if it leads to an arcade at the end. Well, what if you could add history even to this one of life's pleasures too? A new series of the BBC's Villages by the Sea has landed on our screens and on iPlayer, so it seemed like a perfect excuse to invite the host of the programme, an archaeologist, Ben Robinson, back to talk a bit more about the things that might be right under your nose at your favourite seaside destination.
3:47 Matt Lewis? Welcome back to Gone Medieval, Ben. It's fantastic to have you back with us.
3:51 Speaker 05 It's a pleasure to be here.
3:53 Matt Lewis? And you're back out around the coasts of Britain, finding wonderful villages again. It must be exciting to be back into a new series of Villages by the Sea.
4:01 Speaker 05 It is. It's wonderful, my explorations of our wonderful coastline and the great contrast that you find just within a few miles, contrasting history and environment. Absolutely extraordinary. We are so lucky in this country, so lucky to have this wonderful resource, I suppose you could call it, but also it's a resource for inspiration, isn't it? Discussion, exploration of our past.
4:27 Matt Lewis? It is, and what I find so interesting about the series is it really drives home how much we are in danger of taking for granted that you can go to almost any seaside town and there will be so much stuff all around you and under your feet is so easy to miss.
4:41 Speaker 05 We forget we're an island nation. No one is more than 70 miles from the sea. You might not think you're connected to maritime history. You might not think you've got anything to do with the sea at all. Even in Birmingham, you will be. You will find there are connections to the sea, both in its history. There's even a sea life centre there today, by the way, somewhat bizarrely. But no one, we go for a day trip, we might go for holidays, but our history has been shaped by that interface with the wider world, our coast. It's our interface with the wider world. It's not a fringe land, it's not the back of beyond, it's how we communicated with the rest of the world and where important events took place.
5:24 Matt Lewis? Yeah, and I guess that's really, really true in the medieval world. So I'm going to drill us down because obviously you cover all sorts of periods of history. But having Gone Medieval here, I'm going to drag you a little bit closer to the medieval portions of what you cover in Villages by the Sea. It obviously spans all kinds of periods of history, but we're going to really focus on the medieval ones, perhaps unsurprisingly for a podcast called Gone Medieval.
5:47 Speaker 05 Well, and you know, everything goes back to the medieval period. It's such a formative period, you know, a lot of things change. So yes, you're quite within your rights to stress that.
5:57 Matt Lewis? I'm glad you said that because I'm fond of saying that everything is medieval really. So now you've said it, I don't have to say it anymore. Wonderful. There was one episode that was particularly interesting where you visited St Agnes's in Cornwall, and that exposed some interesting information about the tin trade, which is something we haven't particularly talked about on Gone Medieval before, but the tin industry was really pivotal to England's medieval economy, wasn't it?
6:21 Speaker 05 Yeah, and it goes right back, like a lot of things originate in the medieval period. A lot of what happened in the medieval period originates a lot earlier as well. So the classical world knew about Cornish tin, knew about British tin and amazing objects, that Nebra sky disc. I don't know if you can picture it, it was on display in the British Museum. It's actually found in Germany, about a foot in diameter, a bronze disc, gold studded. An incredible object, one of the best finds, archaeological finds, that there's been, dating to about 1600, 1800 BC, so firmly Bronze Age. The tin in that came from Cornwall. It ended up in Germany, way back in prehistory.
7:06 Speaker 05 And we know that Cornish tin was being used in tools and weapons, right back into the Bronze Age, in coins, in Roman times. And clearly, that sort of legacy continued into the medieval period. Post-Roman period, they're clearly trading tin as well. But into the medieval period, Cornwall becomes one of the main providers of tin for the whole of Europe. And that's just, that's an extraordinary thing to think about, isn't it?
7:35 Matt Lewis? And I guess that gives Cornwall a fairly interesting and possibly slightly unique outlook in that presumably it had a really strong connection with the continent, perhaps more so than many other regions of England during this period.
7:48 Speaker 05 Yeah, I mean extraordinarily in immediate post-Roman times, that incredible settlement at Tintagel there, that's trading with the Mediterranean world. The rest of England might be looking towards North West Europe and becoming firmly Anglo-Saxon, Anglian, Jutish, all that kind of stuff. But in Cornwall, they're still looking to the Mediterranean world and trading with the Mediterranean world. So, you know, it's things like that. It's the history, it's the legacy, it's the cultural influences, the language. That makes Cornwall distinctive, doesn't it? Cornwall and Devon, that South West, it's very different to the rest of the country.
8:27 Matt Lewis? It is. I think even up till today, you know, Cornwall will think of itself as quite different from the rest of the UK. And you quite often get those campaigns for Cornwall to become an independent nation. And it genuinely really does hark back to all of this different relationship and different connection that Cornwall had from many other parts of Britain.
8:46 Speaker 05 We could think about the way that the country was organised. You could say that about other parts of the country. It's particularly strong because there's the language. But if we think about it, the idea of an England as a whole as being cohesive is really, really recent. Again, that's something that the medieval period starts to sort of crystallise for us, but only really late in the medieval period as well. You know, you think about those individual kingdoms in early medieval times, the East Anglias, the Northumbrias, you know, Mercias and all that kind of thing. Other places could claim to have that distinctiveness and that distinctiveness ought to persist through, but it does in some places more than others. And in Cornwall especially, it persists through, doesn't it?
9:30 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it's fascinating. And so what did you actually uncover at St Agnes to connect it to tin? What can viewers expect to see in the show?
9:39 Speaker 05 It's really, really interesting, this tin industry, because we know it was important. We know Cornish tin, when you analyse it, crops up in all sorts of artefacts, in coinage across Europe and indeed, you know, into the Mediterranean as well, as far as Israel it goes. It's traded far and wide. But finding traces of medieval tin mining is actually quite difficult because later workings tend to obliterate it. And it's another one of those extraordinary things that even in the early documents, the great source we have about what's going on in the country when William the Conqueror takes over, the Doomsday
10:20 Speaker 05 Survey, the Doomsday Books, tin isn't mentioned at all. We know it was really, really important, but it's not mentioned. I guess that's because, like a lot of things that were prominent and not mentioned in Doomsday Survey, it wasn't a matter for any dispute about taxation. This is so important. It's controlled by the Crown. The Crown's going to look after it. Thank you very much. We don't need to be worrying about assessing it. So I guess that's the reason. So it's definitely there in records and certainly into the late 1100s, there are charters and references to it. It's in the Type roles, there are mentions to it and royalty's taking a massive interest in what's going on down there. So you've got that bit of documentary evidence, but the physical
11:05 Speaker 05 traces are quite difficult to find. In Devon, which was also a tin producing area on Dartmoor, you've got these great gouges in the hillside. But again, it's very difficult to date what's going on. You have to do it by a sort of roundabout route. You're not lucky enough to find a document or an inscribed stone there on site saying, and this is where we were mining for tin in 1224, you know, it's not like that. Or even sort of pottery and stuff. It's through sediment analysis and where that sediment analysis fits in the sequence. And one of the things they were doing really early on, which again, doesn't leave much of a trace, except in sediments,
11:45 Speaker 05 is a thing called streaming, where you weren't quarrying or tunneling or digging for tin ore, you were finding it in alluvial deposits washed out of hillsides into stream beds, the ore as pebbles, rocks, gravel, sand, sediment, which you would then filter out. So you can imagine that doesn't leave much of a trace. But there are these gouges in the hillside, which seem to be very, very early on Dartmoor and various other places down the Cornish coast as well. One of which I had a look at and they'd literally, they've obviously got fed up with trying to get tin out of bits of streams and sediments. They've gone whack, we'll go straight through the cliff face here and see if we can find any.
12:29 Speaker 05 It's really quite difficult to find. It's a rare mineral. It's almost as rare as silver in many ways and really difficult to get out. The other thing you tend to find is they're stones, hard granite stones, blocks, which they use to pound and crush the ore on. And these you can find scattered all over the place. You will see them all over the place. And it's, imagine a massive pestle and mortar, huge, great bit of wood, perhaps iron shod as well, pounding down onto this stone and creating a hollow in it eventually. And when the stones got to that point where there was too much of a hollow in them, they were discarded when they were about to break. So and you find these in places as well. So this is
13:14 Speaker 05 a hard-won material, an extensive industry, but nevertheless, the traces of it are fairly difficult to find. Yeah, and how does it show itself at St Agnes? Is there physical evidence there of the tin mining? Yeah, there is. I mean, there's a big gout in the cliff face where you can sort of think, well, these must have been early workings. After they'd finished with the streaming, they've gone in and tried to find the seams directly. Highly specialised job, actually. It's not just a matter of brute force and ignorance. To identify the ore is a real skill and these miners, they had superb skills in this regard and they were obviously known for a long time. And so we had a look at those.
13:56 Speaker 05 We saw some of these stones, these blocks of granite that had been used as pounding stones to crush the ore as well. There's a collection of these in the village. And I also got an insight into how, when they started to mechanise these processes of extracting the tin from the ore, how that actually worked in practice. Because there's a place there called Blue Hills Tin. And there they operate, it's a 19th century waterwheel operated stamping mill or hammer mill as they call it. But these started to come in in medieval times.
14:35 Speaker 05 Water powered, so they stopped doing it by hand late in the medieval period and used waterwheels to create these huge crushing mills. And these machines are extraordinary. It's, imagine like a watermill, you've got a big waterwheel. In this case, it was an overshock wheel. The stream comes in at the top, the leak comes in at the top, rotates this big wheel. This rotates a drum with cams on it and those cams lift up these huge, great telegraph pole like pieces of wood that have got iron feet on them. And these pound down onto stones, onto which the ore is put.
15:16 Speaker 05 And that crushes out the ore into ever finer sediment that then washes out. Just to see this thing going, I mean, this guy, it still produces tin in that traditional method, all through water power. There's no electricity or anything else at all. And he makes the most wonderful artefacts from the ingots that he extracts from the ore. And it's a real insight into how this industry would have operated in late medieval times, right into the 19th century, all water power. I won't say it's environmentally friendly because they were whacking great holes out of the hillside and dumping spoil everywhere and actually creating a heck of a mess.
15:58 Speaker 05 It always makes me laugh, actually. People sort of say, oh, Cornwall, you know, great natural landscape, beautiful coastal landscapes there. These are industrial landscapes and they're industrial landscapes from the medieval period onwards. These are intensively worked and exploited landscapes. So, yeah, it's a real insight to hear this thing thumping and crashing away and think about the dozens and dozens of these that there would have been in many parishes throughout Cornwall and Devon as well. The smelting, you know, the ore was roasted on site very often, the busyness, the noise of it all, the industry that was going on there, just incredible.
16:37 Matt Lewis? And it must be one of the great pleasures of doing this kind of archaeology, this kind of practical archaeology almost, that you can get close to what people were doing all of those centuries ago. You know, it might be a 19th century mill that they're using now, but as you say, the principles are the same. So you can stand there and see the process and hear the sounds and watch the machinery that would have been doing this during the medieval period, hundreds of years ago.
17:00 Speaker 05 Yeah, and just thinking about the implications for everyday life and who it involved. And it was quite clear, you know, from later records that we have, that this is a whole family affair. It's not just miners, blokes going down with picks, hacking the stuff out, bringing back to the surface the ore to be prepared. Initially, they had people called bowel maidens. Women, girls would be wielding great sledgehammers to smash up the ore. And again, it's not something in history that you think about particularly, but there they were doing that work. And children overseeing the bottles or the other bits of the process.
17:43 Speaker 05 By the way, there's some wonderful language, ancient language, connected with all this stuff. So you've got the bough maidens, the bough is an old Cornish word for mine, but you'll also see the word wheel as well. Lots of mines, wheelcoats, wheel kitty, one of my favourites. And wheel means workings, and that's a very old word that goes right back. There's a sort of rich culture that goes right back to medieval times, probably even before, that you can still see written in place names in the landscape.
18:16 Matt Lewis? Yeah, so many incredible connections. Is it possible to get a sense of how important the tin trade was to somewhere like St Agnes? Do we see St Agnes maybe booming off the back of the tin trade, or is the money going somewhere else?
18:27 Speaker 05 Well, it was all about royal control. It was such an important resource that the Crown set up a series of administrative districts called stannaries. And there's an old Cornish word for tin, which is sten. Obviously, there's the Latin word, it gets its chemical symbol from the Latin word, sn. So you've got, it's stannum, isn't it, tin in Latin, so sten in Cornish. So these stannaries are administrative districts, really, that where there is a special law,
19:06 Speaker 05 there are parliaments, in fact, to determine how to control this massive resource on behalf of the Crown. And you get the stannary towns, towns that are allowed to smelt the tin and mint coins and that kind of stuff as well. So that gives you a sense of how important it was and how much control there was. They weren't going to leave this to a few local landlords to look after and hope to cream off taxes in that way. They wanted more control over it and to recognise it was something Different just to agricultural resources or fishing resources or anything else, something really quite precious.
19:48 Speaker 05 So as I say, you know, the medieval references to it, they're very concerned royalty in the medieval period about how much tin is being produced. Where according how many tons have come out of various places.
20:03 Matt Lewis? Yeah, which I guess must be a testament to the importance of the tin trade internationally, that the crown is taking a close interest in it all.
20:10 Speaker 05 Yeah, something we can export. I mean, it's not just for our tables. I mean, obviously the medieval world, you get a picture of those heaving banquetting tables. They're heaving with not just food, but pewter and pewter is tin and lead and there's tankards and platters and all that kind of stuff. But yeah, if you can export this to other countries, it's about trade deficits, it's about your international profiles, about having a resource that someone else want. And people really did want this stuff. The legacy of the medieval mining, the expertise that they had, they're industrialising it. They're starting to use horse powered pumps, water powered pumps to mine ever deeper in the medieval period. They're starting to mechanise the process of crushing the ore in stamping and hammer mills.
20:55 Speaker 05 All that feeds into what happens next, which is you start to get the steam engines taking over. And very, very early in the 18th century, people start to think, wow, this is so important, we need to apply modern technology to it. And this is where you get the Cornish engines, Newcomen engine, Travellac engines, Bolton and Watt, you know, trying to get ever deeper into these mines. And that leads to the great Cornish views, the coastal views, almost now defined in some areas by those tall engine houses built of stone, looking like church towers with their chimneys attached to them.
21:34 Speaker 05 And it's incredible. It's amazing to think that they were gearing up to that level of industry from that medieval basis of this isn't just a cottage industry, this isn't just something we do on the side, this is so important that we're going to go at it seriously.
21:52 Matt Lewis? Yeah, fantastic. And just before we leave St Agnes behind us, this blew my mind a little bit. It's still medieval, so Cornish pasties, what do they have to do with Mexico?
22:05 Speaker 05 It's the expertise, it's that long heritage of knowing how to construct, engineer and extract, construct a mine and extract this precious ore. And the expertise that goes down through generations is in Cornish families, in Cornish workers. So when in other parts of the world, they start to discover, well, we have tin ore too, we could start, but we just don't have the know-how. Then one of the major exports of Cornwall was these well-informed engineers and workers. And we talk about the Irish diaspora, we talk about the Scottish diaspora, the Cornish diaspora is extraordinary as well.
22:50 Speaker 05 And that's something I hadn't fully appreciated. So out in Australia, out in the Middle East, Asia, anywhere where there's tin resources or silver or copper or anything to be mined, and in South America too. And one of the exports, apart from the know-how, the knowledge to extract tin and silver, was the Cornish pasty, this very practical piece of food, which you could take down a mine or eat that, you know, you could discard the crust that was all dirty, the bit you were holding it on. And so in Mexico, in a town in Mexico, you have a great pasty tradition outside of Cornwall,
23:30 Speaker 05 and indeed a pasty museum and various localised variants on the recipes with chili beans and all sorts in them. But Cornish pasties nonetheless, and that, you know, what an incredible legacy that is. How influential this trade, this industry, this know-how has been across the world. Cornish miners started off mines all over the world.
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27:23 Matt Lewis? Fantastic. It's incredible legacy of the small region, you know, on the tip of the end of England, having an influence all around the world to the point where you have a Cornish pasty museum in Mexico. I mean, that's news to me. That's incredible. What other interesting medieval marvels can people expect to see in this series of villages by the sea?
27:42 Speaker 05 I hope we start to appreciate that the richness of the medieval world and the contrasting nature of it. Sophisticated world and settlements, you know, you think, oh, well, you know, they're by the coast, they're doing a bit of fishing. In Cornwall, we've seen there's a lot of industry going on. But sometimes settlements grew through other slightly strange or mysterious reasons, where ordinarily, they might not grow at all. So there's a long tradition, going back to early medieval times, of religious founders, early saints.
28:19 Speaker 05 Settling on islands or in coastal locations and either being invited there by the local kings or kind of fleeing there for refuge. And at St Bee's in Cumbria, there's this extraordinary tale. I mean, the village only really exists in the form that it exists today because of religion and this legend or tradition that an Irish lady named St Beager was fleeing a forced marriage to a Viking. And this was supposed to have happened by some accounts in the middle of the seventh century, but of course it wasn't until the middle of the ninth that the Vikings are having much to do, or certainly the late eighth century into the middle of the ninth that the Vikings are having much to do with Ireland.
29:02 Speaker 05 So it might have been around eight fifty, actually. But anyway, there's this tradition that this St Beager arrives and lives in her own cell there, probably doesn't found a monastery, but lives this quiet life. And like all good saints, she eventually moves on potentially to Northumbria. And but the sources are all really confused and where they come from later medieval sources, where they're trying to legitimise what happens next. And they, like a lot of places, they use the excuse of this saint, you can't help feeling, to grab a bit of land where they really want some land to do what they really want to do. And in this case, it was St Mary's Abbey in York, getting a claim to this piece of
29:47 Speaker 05 land and founding a priory there in eleven twenty ultimately. But there was obviously some form of religious establishment there because the stonework, early crosses, wonderful decorated interlaced crosses are there. So there was obviously some grain of truth to this story. But again, like a lot of medieval saint stories, especially the early ones, they're very obscure and you can just sort of see someone contriving to make this all work in history and to legitimise what they're going to do next. Just down the road from me, there's a place called St Ives. And it was given a market charter and became quite a famous fair. This is not St Ives in Cornwall, this is St Ives in Huntingdon.
30:28 Speaker 05 And it was Ramsey Abbey nearby that obviously wanted some land on this riverbank, bridging point, trading place, good marketplace. So some ploughman is said to have dug up a stone coffin in which they declared were the bones of Saint Ivo, a wandering Persian saint who no one had ever heard of, who no one thought should be anywhere near that area. But that was enough to say, right, well, this little place formerly called Sleep, which means muddy riverbank, we're going to call Saint Ives, it's going to have a market charter, we're going to have a priory there, it'll be part of our lands. And I suspect something similar was going on in Cumbria there. I'm not saying she didn't exist, but it was a sort of convenient thing that she alighted
31:13 Speaker 05 there. And then, of course, you have to have some miracles. Any good saint has to have a miracle or two. And of course, she has this bracelet to which miracles are attributed. It becomes, she supposedly moves on, but the bracelet is left there. And, you know, it does all the usual things of curing people, people swear oaths on it. And there's one particularly fascinating so-called miracle that really gets the cult going. And that's that in that border region, you get a lot of trouble from the Scots. I mean, the English did it the other way, of course. But there's this tale that some ne'er-do-well from Galloway has said to his mum, well, I'm going off raiding across the border.
31:56 Speaker 05 And his mum says, well, don't go on Saint Beeger's land, leave that alone, you know. And he says, what's that old woman going to do to me? Shoot me here. And he exposes his bum. And of course, he goes off, he's raiding and looting. And as he's fleeing away with his ill-gotten gains, someone loses an arrow and guess where it hits him. And this, this was attributed as a miracle of Saint Beeger, you see. And then there's all the usual stuff about, you know, curing people and all that kind of thing as well. I think it's so much fun amongst miracles of curing people and everything else, getting someone shot in the backside is enough to make you a saint. Oh, well, that's a mentally practical thing to do if you're being raided all the
32:37 Speaker 05 time as well, isn't it? So it serves as a warning to folk. So various relics, including this bracelet, are obtained there. And these have a sort of serious purpose in the medieval world as well, because people will swear oaths on this thing. Any sort of transaction, any sort of promise, you swear it on St. Beige's bracelet or on her altar in the church. And the priory that's founded there from 1120 onwards becomes a place of pilgrimage and they hark right back, even as late as the 16th century, they're harking back to the miracles and the tradition of St. Beige. So way into the 16th century. And then in
33:17 Speaker 05 the 16th century, you have borne into this small village that's only grown up really because of the priory being there, a chap called Edmund Grindle, who becomes Archbishop of Canterbury during this amazingly turbulent period, right at the end, you know, the medieval period into Elizabeth's reign. And one of his legacies there is to found a school. And that school, based on the former priory, established right at the end of the 16th century, St. Beige's School survives to this day. One of its pupils was Rowan Atkinson. Wow.
33:57 Speaker 05 And I can't, can't help feeling that he got some of his inspiration for those brilliant vicar figures that he does, those caricatures of vicar figures and schoolmasters from his time at St. Beige's. They're all very different now, of course, I'm sure. Well, they are, because I met them, very nice people indeed. But that school persists into this day. But it's only there. We only have the school there. We only have much of the village there because of this saintly figure who arrived all that time ago.
34:30 Matt Lewis? Yeah, incredible. And you also come across St Bee's Man, which is somebody that has cropped up in an episode with Eleanor recently with the fabulous Joe Buckbury, where they talked about the remains of St Bee's Man. But I was quite interested in, so they talked about his body and his remains, but I was quite interested in how he was discovered there and what he's doing buried on the coast at St Bee's.
34:55 Speaker 05 Yeah, it's really intriguing, isn't it? I mean, as an archaeologist myself, I've excavated a lot of bodies and some of them in coffins, stone coffins, some of them even in lead. And you generally find, even though the preservation can be very, very good, it's preservation of bone material. And there at St Bee's, this was utterly extraordinary. The lead capsule had led to this burial environment, which just extraordinary preservation. I mean, you know, organs still weeping blood and so forth, eyeballs still intact, all that sort of thing. It was quite gruesome, actually. They've got a little display case there, not with those remains in, because thankfully he's been reburied. But there's a sample of hair in the shroud he was buried in, that kind of stuff. It's just extraordinary.
35:40 Speaker 05 More people should know about this, because it really is one of the great archaeological discoveries. But one which any archaeologist, opening up a coffin, seeing a lead coffin inside and thinking, oh, hang on, or a lead capsule inside in this case, oh, hang on, this is a bit, and then opening it up and being confronted by that, it must have been an amazing shock to them. And then working out who this person was has been quite a story. Lots of people have thrown a lot of energy at it. And again, you're not so lucky to have an inscription or a direct account. But it seems to be a connection through his sister, actually, who was also discovered there and who married into the Percy family.
36:23 Speaker 05 And they found this joint De Lucy and Percy coat of arms in the tower and knew that the place had been connected with the Lucy and Percy families. And it's a burial that seems to have occurred because of an association with the place of Ben. A factor of the place. We know Anthony DeLucy this night. We know that he was involved in border raids and so forth. So in that part of the world, probably one of the bother boys that was going over to harm the Scots or retaliate for raids on England. And it's it's really extraordinary, actually, because he was sent back from the Northern Crusades, where they would go off and fight Teutonic Knights and so forth. They'd go off into Central Europe.
37:08 Speaker 05 And he was obviously carefully packaged up when he and sent back home or to the place where he wished to be buried. Again, just extraordinary. It just sort of shows really, history is being discovered all the time, new history. And very often it's the physical presence, it's the artifacts, it's the archaeology that is then mated with the documents to come up with an interpretation of what happened. It's so important. History happened in places. It happened to people. People were involved with it. And here you've got all of that. And new discoveries being made, you know, it's a very dynamic thing, isn't it? When you put together history with archaeology.
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39:18 Speaker 05 If you want to know more about St. Bees Man, you can go back and listen to Eleanor's episode with Joe Buckbree to discover a bit more about the remains. But just that fact of this guy who is abroad, fighting in the Teutonic Crusades and wants to be brought back to England, knows where he wants to be buried, and then his body is so well-preserved that hundreds of years later, to find it in that condition is absolutely incredible discovery. And as you say, it really plays into that idea that people have this connection to place. So he knew where he wanted to be buried. You can see the physical connections of him to that place, and he wanted to be returned there. It really shows the human connection that we have to the places around us, and in this case, a village by the sea.
40:04 Speaker 05 Yeah, and how extraordinary that this place, St. Bees, connected with this ancient story, connected with Ireland, with Scotland, with movement between these places, but also to Lithuania via this figure from medieval history, this knight. I suspect it was a bit like a rugby tour, troublemakers going off and letting off steam in this northern crusade, and they joined up with the Teutonic Knights to try and sort of hammer the Lithuanians there. But again, it opens up a little facet of history. I mean, this is something, people have heard of the Crusades and going, obviously, to the Holy Lands and so forth, but the northern Crusades, really?
40:46 Speaker 05 In the 14th century, is that a thing? Well, it certainly was, and it left its mark, not just on poor De Lucey there, but on St. Bees as well.
40:56 Matt Lewis? Yeah, it does sometimes have the ring of a lads weekend in Ibiza, heading off to the Northern Crusades for a bit of fighting. It's kind of the medieval equivalent of that sort of thing, isn't it?
41:06 Speaker 05 Yeah, not as far to go as way down into Palestine or anywhere like that. A bit more convenient, you can get there and back a bit quicker.
41:13 Matt Lewis? If you can't deal with the hot weather either, you know, just head off to the Northern Crusades.
41:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, maybe it's a seasonal thing.
41:21 Matt Lewis? Yeah, yeah, it could well be. And there are also some sea houses in Northumberland that you come across as well.
41:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, the village of Sea Houses, which many people will know as a great place to go and have ice cream, fish and chips. Lovely seafood there, trip out to the Farne Islands, another set of islands, by the way, populated by some of those early pioneer saints. And Aidan and St Cuthbert set up home out on the Farne Islands there. Can go out on a boat trip and explore the wildlife there and the history of those places. But Sea Houses itself has often been overlooked, but it has a fascinating history. But also it brings home this connection to the places around it. A lot of places on the coast were not terribly significant in the medieval period.
42:11 Speaker 05 There was a bit of fishing going on, a few cottages, but the main centre of the parish, the main village was inland. And that was the case here. It was at North Sunderland, the village just inland. And it was mostly about agriculture, farming the fields and all that kind of stuff. And the reason you get the name Sea Houses is that's actually what it was. It was North Sunderland Sea Houses. So you'll find this time and time again, the main parish church, the main centre of the medieval area was a bit inland. They were a little bit suspicious of what was going on on the coast or only wanted to do a little bit of fishing there. And of course, you're a bit vulnerable on the coast as well.
42:54 Speaker 05 And this is a place which grew Sea Houses to be the dominant settlement in the area. All under the auspices of the local landowners, the Crude Trust, based at Bambara Castle and other great movers and shakers and entrepreneurs. But that's a little bit after medieval times. It's a place that sort of rose from a bit of medieval obscurity, apart from the famous medieval saints just offshore. And became really very important in post-medieval times.
43:25 Speaker 05 So I guess it's really interesting with that idea of the sea houses that whilst we're thinking about the medieval connection to the sea, there is also that element of a kind of disconnect or a bit of suspicion or a desire to be a bit distant from the sea and maybe the dangers of it. Yeah, obviously specialised settlements growing up near the sea so you can make use of its resources. But, you know, a large part of the medieval world was very reliant on agriculture, of course, and what you could grow in the fields around. So, you know, take somewhere like St Margaret's in Kent, another village that's transformed enormously over time. The core of it is a medieval farming settlement. It's got a wonderful Norman church,
44:09 Speaker 05 absolutely spectacular, and it was obviously an important place, possibly another monastic foundation from a house elsewhere originally. But you've got this lovely Norman architecture, this great church. But it's inland, it's a mile or so inland, and it's surrounded by a typical medieval village with its high street, its back lanes, its individual plots. And obviously it would have had its medieval fields around as well. And it was mostly an agricultural settlement. But there it is, right on the coast. So there's a few fishing cottages down in the bay. There's a little bit of fishing going on, coming back. But it's mainly a traditional agricultural settlement of the type you would get all over Kent and
44:52 Speaker 05 in fact, all over England as well. But this place is utterly transformed, again, into the modern era. It goes on doing its medieval thing well into the 18th, 19th century, until some of the lords of the area decide, well, we can turn this into a resort down in the bay there. And that's what they do with the coming of the railways. They create basically a version of Hollywood. There. So a lot of people who go to St Margaret's, because it's St Margaret's Bay, will see these amazingly posh villas. Noel Coward had a house down there, right on the seafront, and that's still there. And they will sort of see this and perhaps neglect
45:33 Speaker 05 to think about the little medieval village that is the original St Margaret's that kicked it all off. It's that thing, sort of the way places transform through time and the physical evidence we can see around us. And I would just urge anyone to, well, I play a little game, actually, with myself. They say a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and it probably is, but it's also something which, if you take out into the field and walk around, you might spot things, you know, the bit of ridge and furrow, the church standing on its own, the strange humps and bump in the field, and ask yourself, what is that all about? And you might ponder it, you come up with some guesses, have a
46:15 Speaker 05 competition with who you're walking with as to what it might be. And then I'll bet, you can go home, you can go online, you can look up the local historic environment record. Many of them have now got interactive maps that you can explore that will show what has been found in various fields, what the monuments are, who's discovered what, where. You can click on these points and say, yeah, I was right, that was part of a medieval village that's no longer there, or, oh, no, I was totally wrong, those were old bits of quarry working, or whatever. For me, it's the places that these questions spring from. What can you see? Of course, the written history gives us a lot, but it doesn't give
46:57 Speaker 05 us everything. And it's that experience of being in a place and thinking, what made this place tick? What was it like? Can we think ourselves back into medieval times on the basis of what we see around us?
47:12 Matt Lewis? Yeah, fascinating. I mean, that sounds like a great game, because it strikes me that it sounds a bit like people watching, but you can go home and find the answers and find out whether you were right or wrong. Well, you can't really do that when you're people watching, can you? It's rude to go and ask them whether you're right about the things you think about them.
47:27 Speaker 05 Yeah, yeah, I guess so. And of course, it's not as if everything is totally definitive. You know, put 10 archaeologists in a room and they'll come up with 15 interpretations of what they see. But nevertheless, these records are wonderful inventories of the observations that people have made. And they're much more accessible than they were even just a few years ago. And it's really fun, actually, you know, every little hump and bump, every little meander of a road, every little fragment of walling, whatever it is that you see, will have a meaning in the past. It will have been part of something in the past. It may only be fragmentary now, but you can click on these maps and if someone has excavated or made an observation,
48:12 Speaker 05 you will discover what that is. And I don't know, sometimes you'll find that you're right about a lot of stuff. Sometimes you'll be completely wrong and everyone can take the mick out of you.
48:24 Matt Lewis? It must be great for someone in your position, though, to see that ever increasing intersection of documentary evidence with archaeological evidence and technology coming in and wider access to a lot of those things. It's kind of, it's improving the way that we do history, but also opening it up to everybody, to new audiences.
48:43 Speaker 05 Yeah, there's something for everyone. I mean, there are people who love diving into the records and there's nothing more exciting than coming across something written in someone's hand all that time ago, or, you know, that touching, getting close to the hand that actually produced this history is really, really exciting. But similarly, being in a place where events happened, where things happened in the past that developed through medieval times, that's an experience as well. And these days, I think we're much better at working more collaboratively on these things to explore our past. I think, you know, there have been times when the historians have disagreed with the archaeologists
49:28 Speaker 05 and, you know, it's been a bit of a sort of battle, been very dismissive of each other's evidence. I don't get the sense that occurs much at all now. And things like St Bee's Man, where you have to put the evidence all together to come up with answers. And, you know, King Richard in the car park as well, it just, it shows the power of bringing these disciplines together, working collaboratively.
49:53 Matt Lewis? I almost went a whole episode without Richard III mentioned then. I'm glad you made it rather than me because I mention him in almost every single episode I do. So again, you've saved me a job there.
50:02 Speaker 05 Well, St Pete's man was also in a bit of a car park area as well. This is, this is a part of the priory which was dismantled and it's just a sort of gravel area now. So, you know, I'm sorry, you can't get away from it. Car parks are incredibly important places to our understanding of the medieval past.
50:19 Matt Lewis? Yeah, brilliant. I guess just to end on, maybe this is an unfair question, but I'm going to ask it anyway. Why are villages by the sea important? What, what do they tell us that perhaps other villages inland don't about our history?
50:33 Speaker 05 I think it's at this point that on the coast where we interface with the wider world, where this was not somewhere out of the way or insignificant. This is where we did a lot of our business, where a lot of our idea, ideas of, of how we conducted ourselves, how we presented ourselves as a nation, how we interacted with the rest of the world. It's where a lot of that took place. It's where a lot of the natural resources are exposed and are brought together as well, whether it's tin deposits, whether it's fisheries,
51:12 Speaker 05 quarries, whatever. And obviously it's the point at which we connect with those trading super highways as well. When the roads were absolutely terrible, which they were until relatively recent times, and you could not move bulk goods around, long before the arrival of the railways enabled you to do that. It was trading down the coast that was important. And culturally as well, therefore there are unexpected links with up and down the east coast, for example, even right down to the south coast, the migration of Scots with the herring fisheries and so forth, right down East Anglia, down around the south coast of
51:55 Speaker 05 Britain. And the influences of people from different parts of the country bringing their way of Doing things down that sometimes their language, their terminology, even the architecture, this is why it's it's important. I'm not saying inland places aren't important for various reasons, but this is why I found coastal and I find coastal places to be especially fascinating. It's it's those influences. A lot of stuff comes together on the coast and the layers of history are quite extraordinary because these are typically not places that are abandoned. They're places that go on a journey, a sort of an arc of a story. They
52:38 Speaker 05 may be more important at some times than in others. Their time of blooming, flourishing, becoming famous, maybe in medieval times, it may be later, it may be slightly earlier. But they're all places that people have gone back to again and again and again to reinvent, rework and appreciate the importance of. And for many places now, for us, it's simply holidays. But I hope it's holidays where we enjoy a bit of discovery and a bit of understanding about our past.
53:09 Matt Lewis? Yeah, absolutely. I think one of my favourite things about these series is that they literally give you the the tools to go to places like this that you might go on holiday, but you can look up, look down, look at this and and try to understand what it is that surrounds you in those places, just how rich the history can be that you could very easily walk past. And I think the show is great at giving viewers the equipment to bring an extra level of enjoyment to wherever they might be going on holiday. So, so yeah, I'm I'm really looking forward to watching the rest of this series. Congratulations on another wonderful series and I hope listeners will go out and check it out too.
53:44 Speaker 05 Thanks very much.
53:45 Matt Lewis? Thanks very much for joining us, Ben.
53:46 Speaker 05 Thank you.
53:46 Matt Lewis? Cheers now. You can catch Ben's previous visit to Gone Medieval in our vaults and Eleanor's chat with Dr. Joe Buckbury that included St. Bee's Man just earlier this week. There are new instalments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back and join Eleanor and I for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts and tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. You can sign up to History Hit to access hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week and all of History Hit's podcasts ad free. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.
54:30 Matt Lewis? What are you waiting for? Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.
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Previous Medieval Burials Next The Haunting Medieval World of M.R.James Page updated November 5, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated