Extinct Beasts of Medieval Britain

Why have wolves often been the villains of British history? What happened to them and some of the other remarkable creatures that once roamed medieval Britain? Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by Dr. Lee Raye to explore Britain's lost wildlife and how extinct species survived long after their disappearance through medieval literature, folklore, religion and myth. MORE Fantastic Beasts of the Middle Ages Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/fantastic-beasts-of-the-middle-ages/id1564113746?i=1000657282825&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/4GaGzjKmCVEJnEo7oelQHa Monsters of the Medieval World Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/monsters-of-the-medieval-world/id1564113746?i=1000717534716&uo=4&itscg=30200&ls=1&mttnsubad=6442463604&at=1000l3ctA&itsct=podfollow_podcasts&ct=gone-medieval-eplink Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/0MjEE0GeWXq5YhKBgbN0Ps Gone Medieval is presented by Dr Eleanor Janega. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used 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 Eleanor's documentary Medieval Apocalypse when you 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.

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• 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 Yanega, 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.

• 0:42Speaker 01

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• 1:18Speaker 02

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• 2:21Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanega and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to popes, to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were and how we got here.

• 2:56Eleanor Janega?

  A thousand years ago in Britain, if you walked out into the night, you wouldn't necessarily have been at the top of the food chain. Somewhere in the dark, you might have heard a wolf pacing among the trees, a lynx scurrying into the scrub, and seen cranes soaring overhead in a ragged V, their calls scraping at your nerves like an amateur violinist. And then there were the great ox, the wild boar, the sturgeon, and the beavers, to name but a few more creatures that have today largely disappeared from our everyday experience. Wolves and lynx no longer breed in the wild in Britain,

• 3:39Eleanor Janega?

  and the crane has only more recently been reintroduced in a handful of places. And yet, these beasts refuse to die in our imagination. Just open a medieval poem, a saint's life, a hunting manual, and they are everywhere. Because before these animals disappeared from Britain's landscapes, they lived for centuries in its language. Shepherds complained about wolves in Latin school dialogues. Poets praised princes by likening them to wolves and big cats feasting with ravens on the bodies of their enemies. Law codes argued over who was allowed to hunt cranes

• 4:22Eleanor Janega?

  and what their eggs were worth in fines and blood price. Bestiary compilers calmly explained how lynxes produced gemstones from their own urine. Yes, you heard me say that correctly. And how cranes stayed awake on guard by grouping stones in their claws. According to my guest today, we can now read those texts differently, to draw on a different lens. Imagine ourselves as the animals, not their hunters. To say with a certain dark relish, "Oh, yes, indeed. I am fearsome." My guest is Dr. Lee Ray, whose interest is in the medieval and early modern history

• 5:07Eleanor Janega?

  of Britain and Ireland's wildlife. Lee's new book, Creatures of Sore and Song: Tracing Britain's Lost Species, looks at a wide range of creatures, what it meant and what it still means, to draw a line between human and wild, and how we can quickly turn a neighboring species into a monster, a luxury food, a symbol, or a moral lesson. And how long after the last creature has fallen silent, its shadow can go on living in our language. But in the medieval imagination, perhaps in ours, they are still very much alive.

• 5:52Eleanor Janega?

  Lee, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Thanks so much. I'm excited to be here.

• 5:57Eleanor Janega?

  I am absolutely delighted that you are here because I'm a real animal head. You know, I think this is a very uncontroversial thing to say, but I just really like chatting about when there is a creature. You know, I think that that is generally a good thing. And I like to see older opinions on what little creatures may have been about, which is covered very, very well in this book. Thank you very much. In it, you're kind of tracing the lost species of Britain. And you make this really great decision, I think, to not start with the moment of extinction. You know, you're really interfacing with the fact that there are stories from before

• 6:41Eleanor Janega?

  we lost these creatures on the island. And so what do we miss about these varying animals if we only focus on the very last time we saw them? You know, like the last official sighting of whatever?

• 6:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's so tempting, isn't it? Lots of people want to focus on that moment. I call it the moment trauma, where we find the extinction of the animal and maybe we can try and learn it and focus on it. But if we don't look at what happened beforehand, then we don't know how people actually did live with these species. And we're only focused on what might have gone wrong rather than what went right, what it was like when the humans and these species did coexist in Britain.

• 7:23Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I really like that. I mean, it's a really interesting framework that you've given because you're sort of pushing against this idea of your deep ecology, where humans are kind of just giving animals a voice, you know, and kind of scare quotes around that. And what you end up doing is sort of saying that there should be a distinction between humans and nature, but that doesn't mean that we aren't taking animals seriously, right? So can you talk a little bit about how that tension shapes not only the way that we read bestiaries, for example, but, you know, saints' lives or hunting manuals? The different ways that we could look at sources to think about these creatures?

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's a very big question. Essentially, lots of other scholars, when they are looking at animals, they try to give them a voice and to find the places where they've made history. But the problem with that is if we're always looking for the exceptional animals, then the story we tell about animals is not quite accurate. It's not true. A truer way to look at it is looking at sort of all animals, if we could do that, and seeing not just where they've influenced history, but how history has influenced them. And that's how we look at humans, isn't it, as well?

• 8:51Speaker 04

  We don't just look at the great makers and shapers of history. We don't just look at the great men of history. We also look at how the tides of history, if you like, have swept up individual human lives. And that's how I like to look at the animals as well. What do you mean about bestiaries? That's really interesting that you've pulled out those. How do they fit in?

• 9:12Eleanor Janega?

  Well, I guess, you know, in the same way that we sort of think about saints' lives, right? When we read a hagiography, again, we're kind of, we are, of course, looking at these extraordinary individuals, you know, individuals that have been elevated by society to a place because they are able to do even the miraculous. And indeed, when you look at a bestiary, for example, we can see some pretty incredible animals, you know, creatures that don't even exist necessarily. But even ordinary animals are given these saintly qualities. Or, and it's pretty expressed, right? They have these religious attributes to them as well. And so everything can be sort of read as an allegory.

• 9:55Eleanor Janega?

  So on the one hand, we have the extraordinary. On the other hand, we do also have the somewhat mundane.

• 10:03Eleanor Janega?

  But that can also give us an idea about how we are seeing certain animals and how they could be elevated, I suppose.

• 10:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. I see what you mean now. Just like a saint's life will tell the story of exceptional humans, they also do include these exceptional animals. So lots of bestiaries, we have these wolves, and these wolves are monstrous. They are super intelligent and able to stalk around and find sheep and never be detected. And when you take them into hagiography, they take them in the opposite direction. So you get these very holy wolves, which would never hurt a fly. When the wolf finds the delicious head of King Edmund Martir, does it eat it? No, of course not. It guards it. So yeah, you're right. We're getting this exceptionality of the animals. And it's in kind of the opposite

• 10:52Speaker 04

  direction to the bestiaries, but it is equally not accurate, not true to the life's ordinary animals.

• 11:01Eleanor Janega?

  You know, I'm not trying to shade any wolf, but I do feel as though if they were presented with a delicious head, they probably would eat it. I'm not casting aspersions on the wolf in question. I'm just saying, I think that it's perhaps, perhaps an embellishment on that particular tale. But I want to talk about wolves in particular, because you know, your book is, it covers so much. You've got 14 species that you get over, and then you've got these great headings. So you know, there's like the sea and the forest and field and town. And obviously, you know, we've only got so much showtime, so we can't cover all 14 of the animals. But I really wanted to get into wolves in particular, because they

• 11:42Eleanor Janega?

  do embody this sort of, hmm, I suppose, dual purpose. You know, there's ambiguity in the true sense of the word, where it pulls very strongly into directions, you know, like there's this ambivalence there. So when we're looking for wolves in medieval sources, how do you feel that they're most often represented?

• 12:06Speaker 04

  The most common depiction of wolves, especially early on, is as part of this beasts of battle motif. So what I mean by that is, especially in poetry, but sometimes in prose, whenever there's been a horrific battle, in order to show how terrible it was, people in, not just in English literature, but also in Welsh literature, in Old Norse, if you go back that far, in Scots and in Gallic literature, they will show the bodies of the slain being eaten by wolves, and also ravens and eagles. So this is the most common depiction of the wolf, as sort of the eater of the slain, and as showing the brutality

• 12:48Speaker 04

  and the horrors of war. So I suppose that's where our starting point is with the wolf. The wolf was really ever so hated in medieval European literature. And I get the sense that perhaps it might have been different in other countries outside of Europe, that the hatred for the wolf, to my eyes, seems to go far beyond what it was capable of. It was treated as this supervillain, in a way.

• 13:11Eleanor Janega?

  I think that's really interesting, too, because we also have this sort of tension, you know, within, if we're going far back to, you know, Norse sources before Christianization as well, because we also see, for example, this association of the wolf with Odin. I mean, all of these, all of these battlefield creatures, really, you know, where you've got Hyunan and Munin, and you've got wolves and things, and they're very expressly tied to this battlefield thing. And I find this tension so interesting, because it's almost as though we're blaming the wolves for this horrific scene on the battlefield, when it's not exactly the wolves who prosecuted the war, is it? You know, it's like, yeah, we have a bunch of slain men. And rather than saying, oh, well, isn't, you know, the horror

• 13:54Eleanor Janega?

  of war and the futility of what the powerful sort of throw bodies at, discussing, we're just saying, wolves, you know, which is, it seems to me that they're also, it's a scapewolf instead of a scapegoat, you know, for the terrible politics of men, actually.

• 14:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, definitely. Always blame the wolf. Whereas, yeah, we've, a lot of bad things happened in the medieval period, and I don't think wolves were to blame for most of them.

• 14:21Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, you've already touched on this lightly, though, because, but on the other side of this, we have the fact that in religious writings, wolves have a really different character, you know. But then also, that's, it's the same thing with heroic poetry. Can you tell us a little bit about where we see wolves in these circumstances?

• 14:42Speaker 04

  All the ways that we see wolves aren't really true to life, but we do get completely different versions. So we've got the horrible, brutal wolf of the beasts of battle poetry. And we've got the holy, very helpful wolf, showing the power of God, if you like, to tame wolves in hagiographies. But in some war poetry, we get a slightly different version of the wolf. And this is, people start to see the wolf as, because it was so powerful, and because it was a sign of these battles, we start to get an idea that the wolf is

• 15:22Speaker 04

  a companion to the soldiers. Because just like great warriors bring death to their pathetic enemies, who are nowhere near as strong as them, or in some war poetry, they're very strong enemies that show how strong they are, they themselves are as warriors. Just like that, sometimes we get warriors who are particularly aligned with wolves, and they are able to sort of walk with wolves and feed wolves, and this is a sign that they are ever such good warriors. We get that quite a lot in, especially the earliest Welsh sources. So Godovin, the earliest Welsh source, has a lot of people who chose

• 16:07Speaker 04

  to live with wolves as warriors, rather than going to the altar and getting married and living a traditional life. I think there's an element of propaganda there. So, or would you like to, do you feel a bit uncertain about getting married and living a normative life? Maybe you'd prefer to run with the wolves?

• 16:28Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, I really like that. Yeah, this idea that, you know, it's either the wolves or traditional marriage. Yeah, that's, you know, the two options. That's great. But I think it is quite interesting, because I think we certainly see the wolf still occupying this, this space, in terms of enemy of the domestic, even within, I don't know, fairy tales, in the early modern period, you know, we see them kind of traditionally associated with, you know, listen, there's, for example, Red Riding Hood, and you've got the big bad wolf, you know, there are always these things like the boy who cried wolf. And this very specific idea that wolves are sort of haunting around, and they're after your sheep, I think,

• 17:11Eleanor Janega?

  in particular, and they're after you. And I think we do see a lot of worry, especially in bestiaries, for example, talking very specifically about this threat to livestock that wolves pose. And to me, I suppose, that's almost the most understandable problem with them, because I suppose that if one is attempting to keep one's livestock alive, you know, and we know how important sheep are just from a monetary standpoint, one can understand why wolves are not the favorite animal to have around. But it's interesting, because I do think that it's almost outsized, that this idea that that is the threat, you know,

• 17:55Eleanor Janega?

  capital T threat, to anyone's life or livelihood. And that continues on for so, so long.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. We're getting a sense of demonizing the wolf there. We're making the wolf responsible for all of the problems with particular farming practices, whereas in reality, livestock die of all sorts of things, not just wolves. But you're handy, I suppose, to have a wolf as a scapegoat, just like we were talking about earlier.

• 18:24Eleanor Janega?

  But then sometimes there's this real tension, right? Because we see, for example, in romantic poetry, that sometimes we're really invited to empathize with the plight of the wolf, or at least, or at least the man wolf, right? Because, you know, I'm thinking here, of course, of Bisclaver, that we get from Marie de France. Can you tell us a little bit about, about that story?

• 18:47Speaker 04

  What a fantastic story. So after the Norman conquest, a woman writing, probably in Britain, Marie de France, not writing in Anglo-Norman, writing in sort of Frankiean French, writes this story, which she says is a bretton lay, the story of Bisclaver being a man who, at the start, she's a bit cagey about, but right in the introduction, she says, just to let you know, there are these creatures called werewolves, and they're very terrible. But never mind about that. I want to tell you about a man. And halfway through the story, we find, to our amazement, which no one could possibly have guessed, that the main character, Bisclaver, is actually a werewolf. But something that's really interesting

• 19:28Speaker 04

  is, in the introduction, she says that werewolves are these terrible, brutal creatures, and they go into a rage. But later on in the story, Renchie's describing Bisclaver. And when Bisclaver himself is describing...

• 19:45Speaker 04

  The way that he transforms, it does sound kind of romantic and it sounds like something maybe we could imagine ourselves doing. He goes into the deepest parts of the woods and he hunts there. And it's almost like a sort of fantasy wish fulfillment. So we get the sense again that maybe there's another side to the wolf, that we don't have to demonize it. There's some people might have found it quite a powerful symbol. And there's other wolfish characters within the text as well. So in Latin, the term lupus, especially in the Roman period, was used for sort of sex workers as well as female wolves. And the way that the main female character in the text is sexually empowered is something really

• 20:30Speaker 04

  interesting as well. So maybe in a way, she's acting as a wolf as well. And she is maybe a wish fulfillment figure for medieval audiences in the same way. Yeah, what a text.

• 20:40Eleanor Janega?

  Now, I find it so interesting because I think to an extent, you know, as you've pointed out, we're using the wolf to sort of stand in and subvert our ideas about how masculinity works. Because of course, Iskafai, he's this wonderful husband. His wife loves him very much. And what he does as a result is sort of lets her in, you know, shows her this, this vulnerability, says, you know, like, whatever happens, you know, like, I just have to have this time in the middle of the woods. You know, this thing where when he goes to the woods, how he folds his clothes, just so. So, you know, we're seeing

• 21:20Eleanor Janega?

  these kind of delicacy of doing things. And these vulnerabilities that come from not being wolfish, you know, not, not being the, the sort of manly man who just sort of pushes people around. And to an extent, that's his undoing, right? And I find that so interesting because we're meant to understand that he is wonderful and ought to be celebrated, even though he's a werewolf, because he's able to restrain his war base urges. But it's almost this restraint, which has led to the predicament he finds himself in when he becomes stuck as a wolf as well. Right? So it's this really difficult text to entirely get your head around. It is, it's incredibly complex.

• 22:05Speaker 04

  And thought of it like that, Eleanor, that's so clever. Yeah, you're right. The way that he gets into trouble is maybe by not being forceful enough, by letting a woman get the upper hand. We've got a sort of traditional bad girl villain going on. Although it's, you're right, it's more complicated than that, because in some ways, she is given her own dreams come true moment until the end of the text, where of course, just like in all medieval and early modern literature, all of the pieces have to go back into the box. And we have to have a properly tied together ending where everything is put back into the patriarchal norms as it should be.

• 22:45Eleanor Janega?

  It's true. It's true. You know, you could, you could say all the time in medieval literature, oh, this is a really interesting subversion. And then right at the end, it will cease to be interesting subversion. So yeah, you've got it. You've got to put the game away, don't you? You know, but so eventually, you know, we hear in Britain, we have this, this decline of the wolves, you know, and there's any number of reasons for that. Can you tell us a little bit about the, the decline of them? And, and what happens as a result of with the, the myths that we see as a part of this decline?

• 23:20Speaker 04

  Yes. So different scholars have had different ideas about when this decline happened. And that wasn't really entirely the focus of the book. From previous research, I, I put the decline into the 14th century. And the reason for that is because there were lots of licenses granted for hunting wolves by the royal court in various times. And the last of those that I can see are from the mid 14th century. And also during this period, there was an official wolf hunter hired for many years. I believe his name was Peter Corbett, who was allowed to sort of hunt the entire length and breadth of the sort of the border counties between England and Wales. And he seems to have been very

• 24:05Speaker 04

  successful at hunting wolves. And we get, I suppose, a change from wolves being a unstoppable, terrible force of nature. Isn't it awful? They've killed lots of people and eaten all the sheep to his, a license, go and hunt as many wolves as you want. And that sort of signals the beginning of the end of the wolf in England. But elsewhere in Britain, of course, in Scotland, the wolf carries on. And in Scotland, we get the continuation of literature about the wolf and continuation of, of people saying, oh, the wolf is terrible. It's quite nice to, to see that contrast. But what's really interesting is after the

• 24:46Speaker 04

  extinction of the wolf in England, there seemed to be a few people who think that it might still be here. And it's never forgotten. So when other species go extinct, we quite soon forget that they were ever here. So for example, recently in Britain, we've lost little bird called the rhynech. It's like a kind of woodpecker, which whenever it was threatened, twists its neck. Really amazing. If you get to see a video of one disappeared about 100 years ago. No one knows about it. Why would you? It's gone. It's not a part of your life. But the wolf, everyone knows about the wolf for centuries and centuries. And still today, it was never forgotten. It's like the wolf is so badly behaved that

• 25:31Speaker 04

  it refuses to go culturally extinct, even when biologically it's no longer here.

• 25:36Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, it's so interesting. It just has this hugely outsized part of, of our literary lives. You know, it's something that children are introduced to almost right away. And, and it is, you know, the, the werewolf maintains this incredible hold in literature even now. You know, this idea of this uncontrollable brutal force, when, you know, I don't know, I've got, I've got a brother who, who lives in Alaska where wolves still exist. And, you know, they're just kind of out there, right? They don't actually play very much part of his life at all, even though they're, they're around, you know? And it's, it's quite funny because I do think there, there is a kind of cultural desire to keep this piece of lore

• 26:18Eleanor Janega?

  alive that, that we're still indulging in, in the 21st century. I mean, let alone, you know, the 15th or the 14th, you know?

• 26:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. You have to wonder, if they did bring wolves back, what would happen? I think maybe they'd be blamed for everything going wrong. Maybe the wolves to blame for, you know, all of the problems of society. The wolves caused wildfires. Who knows? Maybe.

• 26:38Eleanor Janega?

  Well, we've got a lot of different examples of authors talking about wolves at all points in time from your book. And, and one of them was Alfric, of course. Can you tell me a little bit about Alfric's relationship? He's got a complex relationship, I find, with wolves. He never knows exactly what to do with them.

• 27:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. Alfric's a really interesting one. I pronounced it Alfric, but yeah, I've heard though.

• 27:06Eleanor Janega?

  Do you know what? You probably are smarter than I am on that. I gotta say.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a, I'm not necessarily an early medievalist, but I'm pretty sure I've heard both. But Alfric, really interesting because he's got this colloquy. So this is a text intended to teach students Latin. So they're expected to talk about their jobs and their lives. And he's got various jobs included. And he comes up with a shepherd. And when the shepherd's talking about his life, he says, well, I just protect my sheep from wolves. Maybe this is as close as we can come to a sort of genuine idea of what it might have been like to live with wolves, that the wolves that the shepherd is watching out for are not super terrible werewolves. And they're not the best eerie wolves that

• 27:54Speaker 04

  with their eyes burning with fire that will bite their paws if they make too much noise and tread on twigs or anything like that. That's my idea of Alfric. Were you thinking of some other texts as well?

• 28:05Eleanor Janega?

  Well, yeah, I mean, Alfric in particular does, does sort of talk about this. But I find him an interesting source because he's earlier and we have these, these kind of mentions of where wolves dip in and out. But then we definitely also see, you know, I don't know, I suppose his discussions of like the passion of Saint Edmund, you know, where the wolf doesn't eat the saint's head. And I found that very striking because, you know, as someone who works on the period a bit later and, you know, more in a continental context, I'm really reminded of like the story of the Saint Francis of Assisi and his taming of a wolf, right? You know, that this is one of his big miracles is he manages to get a wolf to, you know, stop stealing sheep and come hang out with him. And then

• 28:47Eleanor Janega?

  it's also sort of one of the big things that is promoted in the early modern period about Saint Ignatius of Loyola. Right? There's this idea that there are wolves that perhaps are attacking flocks. And rather than kill them, he puts out kettles of food for them in, in order to stop them from doing it. So there's, there's this really ongoing interest in the person of the saint and these interventions with wolves. You know, you can turn a wolf vegetarian. You can get a wolf to respect, you know, the corpse of a saint in the way that a human would. Saints can turn wolves essentially into lapdogs. And

• 29:26Eleanor Janega?

  It's just a really interesting way of looking at the wolf because we're acknowledging that there's this sort of power, but then it's like, oh, but with the right touch, then then maybe they're actually just a nice little guy. And I don't know quite what to make of that entirely. Do you know what I mean?

• 29:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. It's really interesting. Now you say it like that because with the wolf, it's like it's a force of nature. Medieval culture has created out of this ordinary animal, a unstoppable killing machine, or a force which represents death, especially in the in the early, early sources with things like the beasts of battle. And so for a saint, what an irresistible target to show the power of the saint and the power of God and the holiness, to take this irresistible natural force, representing death, and to turn it into something constructive to society. And it makes sense why no one ever shows off

• 30:27Speaker 04

  about taming a hedgehog, because they don't have that cultural connotation. But yeah, it's always dragons and wolves. And maybe that shows how people fought about wolves in the period.

• 30:39Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm. And I've read, you also have this really great discussion about the wolves as also being not just emblematic of the forces of nature, but nature itself, right? Because wolves are kind of also these talismans of landscape and hostility. Can you tell us a little bit about where we see wolves used to specifically show us that a place is hostile or frightening?

• 31:05Speaker 04

  There's a famous example of this in Beowulf. So when Beowulf goes out away from the beautiful cheery hall of Herod, when he goes into the wilderness of Grendel, how is the wilderness described? It's a wolf trodden wilderness. And that sort of shows that over this wilderness, the wild powers of nature are in charge. This is not a human dominated landscape. Get something similar in Segawain and the Green Knight as well. Yeah, this sense that there are places where humans are not necessarily the dominant force. Still resonates with us today a bit, doesn't it?

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• 33:16Speaker 02

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• 33:59Speaker 02

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• 34:14Speaker 05

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• 34:45Speaker 06

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• 35:38Eleanor Janega?

  I think so. And I always find that I'm really interested in in the forest as this emblem for medieval people as a place of magic and chaos. And it's always, you know, there might be a witch in there, there might be a dragon, and there might be a wolf. Maybe there's a boar, you know, that that comes up all the time. And those are almost interchangeable. It's as though there is the natural force that constrains humans, but there's also the supernatural forces that that could come from magic. And exactly where that begins and ends, I think with wolves in particular, is so interesting for us, right? Because, you know, wolves have died out here completely, but we still use

• 36:19Eleanor Janega?

  them as symbols, you know. And I mean, do you think that because they are extinct here, we're able to continue to use them in this way about like, kind of looking at them as almost magical, you know, and showing how if a human can triumph over them, then, you know, we can overcome anything?

• 36:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, maybe there is something to that, that because wolves aren't here and doing inconvenient things, we can make them into whatever we want. We can turn them into magic pots, which we can put anything into and take anything out of, to I suppose, paraphrase Tolkien a little bit.

• 36:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 36:59Eleanor Janega?

  I just, I really, I'm also interested, you know, you mentioned, you've touched on this, this already, when we are looking and talking about wolves, and the, you know, the figure of the Lupe, you know, the, and the idea that we kind of use the female wolves in particular, and Romans used female wolves as a kind of stand-in for talking about women who are sexually rapacious, which, you know, as, yeah, medieval people needed another way to talk about women as sexually rapacious, everybody. But we do see also in bestiaries, this is kind of picked up, in particular where they'll talk about she-wolves in a really different way. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

• 37:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, so it's very strange, actually, because one of the foundational myths of Rome is Romulus and Remus, and the dream that they were suckled by a she-wolf and brought to the city, and wouldn't have been able to do that without the care of this she-wolf. And so for them to go around and turn the she-wolf into what for them was a villain is very strange, strange choice. But yeah, in the, in the bestiary, in the medieval Latin bestiaries, we get this idea that some women are like wolves in that they are what we would think of as gold diggers and sexually rapacious. And this is, I suppose,

• 38:21Speaker 04

  is contrasted with the idea of a good Christian woman who would never be like that and would be like the Virgin Mary ideally, but also give birth to the next generation of patriarchs. It's very confusing and very contradictory. Yeah, medieval people.

• 38:38Eleanor Janega?

  I really liked the section, though, where you also discussed the fact that, you know, we've got this, this real image of the wolf that is still heavily predominant in, I suppose, the global north. But that's not necessarily true about other cultures as well, because, you know, for example, that within Japanese culture, you can see a really different relationship to the wolf. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

• 39:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So I'm not an expert in Japanese history or Japanese literature, but from what I've been able to piece together from secondary sources in

• 39:17Speaker 04

  Japanese traditional culture, the wolf was a positive creature to have around because it was great for pest control. So negative creatures were creatures like wild boar and deer that would posed threats to agriculture and would cause damage to rice fields by trampling or by eating it, whereas the wolf would control these creatures. And so the wolf was seen as positive. And in the Tokugawa period, Sunayoshi Tokugawa, the dog shogun, set out a series of edicts where essentially he was bringing in sort of Buddhist philosophy. And he suggested that everyone should be vegetarian as much as possible.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  And there were exceptions to this made for pest control on around crops for farmers. But the wolf was not among those. The wolf was a creature that should be left alone. And so this is a period when in Europe, everyone hates the wolf and everyone is suggesting the wolf be exterminated as soon as possible. But in Japan, it was possible to conceive of the wolf in a completely different way. And this to me suggests that there's something very cultural going on with our idea of the wolf. And we could say perhaps part of it is that Japan had this very agricultural society. So they wanted to protect crops, whereas Britain, in some areas of Britain, at least, they had more pastoral society. So they wanted to protect livestock and maybe the wolf was more of a threat to livestock

• 40:46Speaker 04

  than it was to crops. But I think it goes further than that.

• 40:52Eleanor Janega?

  I think this is a really interesting point, you know. And, and also it's you sort of highlight that it also depends on what you want to portray within literature, the way that you might relate to the wolf. Because for example, within the Welsh tradition, we sometimes see wolfishness as a positive, right?

• 41:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. So in the, in the very earliest poetry of the Godovin and also in Taliesin's poetry, so poetry which is associated with the north of England, but has come down to us in a Welsh form and might actually originate in Wales, depending on what you believe about how these texts were created. In this very early Welsh poetry, we get this sense that lots of warriors are compared to wolves. So they are like wolves chasing sheep and that's how powerful they are. And other warriors are warriors who have chosen, like we said earlier, to live with the wolf and feed the wolf rather than to go to the altar and to get married and live normative lives.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  So yeah, there's something a bit enticing about that. But this might just be propaganda in a similar way to the hagiography, the saints' lives.

• 42:07Eleanor Janega?

  That's such an interesting point too, because you know, at the same time as we're really worrying about wolves and we're saying, oh, they're, they're very naughty. They're going to steal your sheep, worry about them within an English context. Wolf comes up an awful lot in heroic names, right? So we've got, you know, your Beowulf, of course, you've got Ethel Wolf. And is that just underlining this, this idea that they have this separate warrior path? I mean, is, is that what we're, we're meant to understand? I mean, what wither a boy named Wolfric, I suppose, you know?

• 42:41Speaker 04

  A really good question because it hints that the demonization of the wolf, which we see in literature, might not have been the end of the story. And maybe just like today, there are many people and even children who very much love wolves, even though we've got the story of this already writing hood running around all around our modern literature and our modern films. Maybe in the medieval period, even though the mainstream literature demonizes wolves, maybe there was a sense of people actually liking wolves. Maybe just like we found in Beestlaveray, some people sort of saw wolves as this wish fulfillment. And it hints at that. But of course, it's really difficult to say with names because sometimes names just become traditional.

• 43:25Speaker 04

  And just like we don't think of someone called Arnold as being like an eagle today, it might be that they didn't think of people being called Wolfric as, as being especially wolfy.

• 43:35Eleanor Janega?

  I just like to bring up the name Wolfric because I think we should bring it back. Any, any, any listeners who are expecting a boy, please name it Wolfric and write in and tell me. That's, that's my, my request. So we see, of course, the extinction of, of wolves in Britain at the very least. Do we see this soften any of the narratives that we see about wolves at all? Or is it just sort of like, we, we wish to keep a monster and now it's a safe monster we can have in our back pocket?

• 44:06Speaker 04

  Now, funnily enough, there's really not much difference. The big difference is as it's going extinct, we get a movement from the wolf is an unstoppable predator to I give you license to kill as many wolves as you want. That's a change that we see. But after the extinction of the wolf, it still remains an unstoppable predator, still remains something which, a creature which you wouldn't want to meet. And when people do reflect on the extinction of the wolf, which they do sometimes, they're always quite glad. They say, well, we got rid of the, there's no wolves in Britain and that shows how much God loves us because we got rid of the wolf. We hunted them all to extinction. There's no more left. And that's especially the sort of perspective of the early modern naturalists to the wolf. So yeah, it doesn't really soften that much.

• 44:51Eleanor Janega?

  I hate to drag us away from the wolves because they're cool. But I also wanted to talk about, I've got a personal favorite creature, which appears in the books, which is the lynx. I've got, I've got a manx cat, so she's got no tail. And so I have a soft spot for all of the short, the short tailed cats myself. Can you tell us a little bit about the lynx and what we know about when they existed in Britain?

• 45:15Speaker 04

  Yes, so the lynx, a very shadowy beast, very difficult to piece together the timeline for it. What we do though, is that the remains of a lynx which lived on the border between England and Scotland have been found. They are from the early medieval period. So lynxes appear to have survived through the Roman occupation of Britain into the earliest medieval period. After that, what have we got? We've got a lot of shadows on the wall. There are little references in literature which might refer to the lynx. There are references to lions. Now, of course, lions, just like today, were popular in medieval Britain and everyone loved lions

• 46:00Speaker 04

  and, and talked about lions. Some of the descriptions of lions and some of the references to lions appear to be references to creatures that lived in Britain. And we know lions didn't live in Britain. So those, maybe those are lynxes. There are also references to cats. And we know that wild cats were once found not just in Scotland, but all the way across Britain until relatively recently. So those could be wild cat references, but some of the cats in medieval and early modern sources are very powerful. Some of these cats are creatures that can take down lambs. And you think would have to be a very big cat to take on a sheep or to take on a lamb. And so some of these references do suggest something else is going on.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  Um, so very shadowy sources, yes.

• 46:50Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, it's such an interesting one, right? Because we don't, there's plenty of Eurasian lynxes around the shop. Well, actually not as many Eurasian lynxes as we would like to see, I suppose, on the continent. But we're working on that one. And the lynx is such an interesting one because medieval people sort of, I don't know, almost struggled to categorize them, you know, because there's some of these things where it's like, is this a very large cat? Or is this kind of just another type of wolf? Is this a small wolf or a big cat, you know, kind of, kind of a thing? Because we do see, you know, as you say, these references to them very particularly as kind of like taking lambs, taking fowls, you know, just kind of a common nuisance,

• 47:32Eleanor Janega?

  the sort of thing that one might see skulking about the farmyard almost.

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. It's quite fun, actually. Some of the early glossaries in Old English give a gloss on the Latin term lynx as between a dog and a wolf or between a cat and a wolf. And we get this idea that they weren't sure what it was. And then when that glossary was translated to Cornish, exactly the same. They just translated the gloss directly. So we get the sense that people aren't exactly sure what lynxes are. And this happens with a lot of the big cats, actually. There are completely separate entries in the best series for the panther and the pard and the leopard. But when you look at them and when you try and work out what they were, those three are probably

• 48:20Speaker 04

  all the same creature. They're all the leopard. And so we also get the idea from literature that the lynx might have been a very exotic species that was found far away. But there's also the idea that the lupus curvarius, this sort of deer chasing wolf, was common in Northern Europe. And that's another term for the lynx. So medieval people aren't necessarily entirely sure what to call this creature. And when they do come up with terms to, to describe the creature, they seem to use it. Sometimes they split the terms in ways that we wouldn't today.

• 49:01Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, it's, it's interesting. It's like there's this sort of exoticism about an animal that is fundamentally about, you know, that this is an animal that's kind of around the shop. And instead we're kind of seeing these sort of like, ah, the lynx, it is over in Syria. You know, everything's always over in Syria to that. My, it's sort of this like catch all place for them. I found it so interesting, given, you know, that of the big cats, like a lynx, it's kind of a manageable one, isn't it? They're not that big, dog size, you know?

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, absolutely. Not a threat to humans. It's a creature that maybe they should have been familiar with and you, which you would have thought they could distinguish from wild cats. But then lynxes and wild cats, both very solitary, both hard to see. Unless you hunt one and kill one, you're unlikely to get a very good view of it compared to something like the wolf where it's very present. And if you don't see it, you probably listen out one evening and you'll hear it. So maybe, maybe that's one of the reasons why it's such a shadowy, hard to pin down creature in medieval literature.

• 50:23Speaker 02

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• 51:21Speaker 05

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• 52:09Eleanor Janega?

  I am going to force you though now, we have to talk about the linkstone, right? Because this is like the fun exoticism about lynxes, because there is this thing and it's called a linkstone and it's a sort of gemstone that lynxes were thought to make out of their urine? Like, what is this about? What is this doing as a story?

• 52:33Speaker 04

  It's a very strange story. Lots of, the best theory in lots of manuscripts is tied to the lapidary. So this sort of list of beautiful and magical stones. And one of the stones in here is lichurium, the stone which is produced when lynxes urinate. And the stone is very beautiful and it's so beautiful that the lynx doesn't want us to have it. So it will bury it, it will bury the stone as soon as it's produced it. And you have to think, what on earth was happening with this? How did they come up with this idea? Of course, there's no truth to this.

• 53:13Speaker 04

  You do see cats will bury their urine, so maybe it was based on the story, a cat? But yeah, what a strange story. I'm going to pass it back to you, Eleanor, what do you think was happening there?

• 53:26Eleanor Janega?

  I don't know. It's an interesting one, because it's sort of like, well, are we just saying that it's like a large cat and by virtue of its larger stature, it's behaving in the way that cats do, but it's got this magical quality, right? Which, I mean, perhaps it does sort of feel like a sort of magic if you do see a lynx. You know, I personally would be the most excited I have ever been in my life if I saw, you know, a lynx in the wild, or let alone a wildcat, you know? And I think that it's just quite interesting, because when you have these sort of little magical hints about an animal that is, you know, fundamentally a kind of medium-sized

• 54:08Eleanor Janega?

  predator, you know, like not that incredible. I find it really interesting, because I think it shows us at the very least that whilst they are about, there's a kind of rarity to them? I mean, that's all I can really come up with, but I'm sorry, if you're going to make a urine gemstone, I'm going to talk about it. I'm a simple creature myself, you know?

• 54:29Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I like that. Maybe there was a sense of wonder in the lynx, either because of its rarity or because of its size compared to wildcats. Yeah, wonderful creatures creating wonderful stones. What an optimistic viewpoint, I like it.

• 54:45Eleanor Janega?

  Listen, we try to be somewhat positive over here, you know, but. And they come up a little more often, though, don't they, in Welsh verse? The lynxes, you know, they seem to be a little bit more liked by the Welsh and a little bit more of an interest over on that side of things, don't they?

• 54:59Speaker 04

  Yes, so there's a few more references in early Welsh literature, which are conceivably based on or referring directly to lynxes. The most famous of these is Paes de Nogat, De Nogat Smock, which is a verse from the Godovin, which we talked about earlier. And some people think that it ended up in the Godovin by accident and other people think that maybe actually it was supposed to be in there. And you can see my arguments about that, it gets a bit technical and I do accuse some of the other authors of sexism for arguing. But thing about the lynx in Paes de Nogat is essentially a list of creatures that a

• 55:43Speaker 04

  man has gone to hunt with his dogs. And within that list, there is a reference to the llewyn. Now, llewyn is the Welsh term for a lion and we think that llewyn might have been a Welsh term for the lynx. An alternative is, it might also have been a term for the fox, if we amend it slightly. I'm not convinced by that, because fox is already mentioned on the same line. But if we take this llewyn and we look for possible other terms for it in other bits of Welsh literature, we do come up with a few. So there's a famous Welsh verse called, "What man is the porter?", from the Black Book of Carmarthen.

• 56:27Speaker 04

  And it starts off as being a sort of, someone trying to get entry to Arthur's court and it going through this, but then all of a sudden, halfway through, it breaks off and it talks about fair Cai, or Sir Cai of later English literature, one of Arthur's knights, as we might think of it, going off and fighting a monster. And the monster that he fights is called Caith Palug. And this, so this is obviously a cat, because Caith means cat in Welsh. So a kind of monster, which is a cat, very large, and in the text, it's described as

• 57:07Speaker 04

  a llewyn, which it seems very similar to the llewyn, which we see in De Nogat Smock. So there are these very strange, very old pieces of literature, which seem to describe cats or cat monsters using the same sorts of terms. And it might be that they refer to lynxes originally, but Caith Palug is a terrible, dangerous monster, almost like the wolf, after it's gone through all of its transformations and it has the gleaming eyes and it's mightier than any human and can steal people's voices. So we're not seeing an ordinary, straightforward lynx there. And this is what I mean about the lynx being difficult to pin down.

• 57:48Eleanor Janega?

  Well, you mentioned, you know, in comparison to the wolf, does the lynx kind of get the same sort of symbolic treatment in religious texts? I mean, like, is it, do we see the lynx carrying the same, I guess, weight of spiritual condemnation that we see from wolves?

• 58:07Speaker 04

  There's a little hint of this. A really common metaphor in medieval period is the idea that, I suppose, just like today, that priests are like shepherds. And this, of course, is the Latin for shepherd is pastor, someone who looks after the pastures and looks after the animals on the pasture. So within one of the lives of St Cuthbert, it's called the mythical life, because it's all in poetry, by the venerable Bede, there is a sort of admonition that, just like shepherds look after their sheep and protect them from the sort of lions and big cats, priests should look after their flocks.

• 58:53Speaker 04

  And this is a bit strange, because the people making this metaphor are living in the north of England. And so we get this sense, we're shepherds in the north of England, looking after their flocks and protecting them from dangerous big cats. That sounds like a reference to a lynx. So, yeah, we get this comparison, the comparison there is between a lynx and a threat to ordinary spiritual virtue, and that's very similar to what we get from the wolf, yeah.

• 59:25Eleanor Janega?

  Hmm. I guess the difference here is that, as you say, it's difficult to find lynx. So if we, you know, we can't have the same sort of like, oh, here's a hunter with a bounty on wolves. Do you have any, anything similar where we see a hunter's task very particularly with going after lynx, or are they just too shadowy to even get that from them?

• 59:45Speaker 04

  Very shadowy. So in The Master Game, this text from right at the end of the medieval period, the Duke of York is describing all of the animals that he likes to hunt. And he does have a section in there on the lynx, very definitely on the lynx, and very clearly on the lynx. But this text is a translation of a French original. Now, you might say, he wouldn't have included this in his translation if he didn't think that lynxes could be hunted in British papers. That's true, but it is a translation and he could have just been including it for completeness. There's a very strange reference to a lynx much later on, from the 18th century.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  And it's, it seems to be this idea that, that people might have been hunting very large cats, three times larger than ordinary cats, in the old county of Kirk Hubrightshire, which is in the southwest of Scotland, sort of within what we would now think of as Dumfries and Galloway. It's very late and very confusing, because we don't have very much in between. So the lynx is always shadowy, puzzling us.

• 1:00:55Eleanor Janega?

  Listen, I realize that I've taken up all our time talking about the animals that I find very interesting, which is wolves and lynxes, but I hasten to add, there's all sorts of great other animals in this book. But I wanted to just talk a little bit about, you know, the excellent discussion in your book about this process of extinction more generally, you know? And one of the things that you have is you have a kind of table of the best available extinction dates. And, you know, you acknowledge that it's kind of like, it's controversial, right? You know, this is kind of like a provisional way of looking at these things. How did you decide?

• 1:01:39Eleanor Janega?

  What dates you could include and what evidence suggested things in the best way? You know, was there a process by which you decided to hold a date back? Or some way that you decided you wanted to really put things forward?

• 1:01:56Speaker 04

  That's an interesting question. I hadn't really thought of it like that. I suppose I've been studying extinct animals for a long time. That was the topic of my PhD thesis over a decade ago now. So I've been thinking about these extinct animals for a long time. And so I suppose that lots of the dates are just almost the ones that I prefer, the ones that I find the most convincing. But other scholars might look at that table and say, actually, I don't think that's correct. But I thought that it was important to have it in the book for the sake of completion and also to sort of give a, here's the best I can possibly do. And for some of the creatures, I've given multiple dates. So lots of them go extinct earlier in the south of Britain than they do in Scotland. So I've listed both of those.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  Some of them I've said, look, it might have gone extinct really early, like the lynx, it might have gone extinct way later, you know, as late as the 18th century. So I've tried to do that. But yeah, it is a difficult thing because people focus and fixate so much on that moment of extinction. And that's what they've been, well, that's what most scholars have been interested in when they look at these creatures. So everyone's sort of pushed the date back and forth. And we've been doing that for 150 years. I hope that the, that my book is not just about that. And so the table at the end, I suppose, if you disagree with it, I hope you can still take something out of the book, which, which is useful from, from the main part of the book, not just the, the table conclusion.

• 1:03:25Speaker 04

  But yeah, I did my best.

• 1:03:27Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, I think one of the things that I also think is, is really interesting about this is that, you know, you, you have this distinction that I think is incredibly useful that is between purposeful extinction, you know, sort of what we see with wolves, right? Where it's sort of like, we need to get rid of these guys. This isn't, this isn't good. And accidental or incidental, at the very least, extinction. But, you know, it's also quite a blunt distinction, right? Do you think that there's animals that kind of come up that are very difficult to keep on one side or the other? You know, I'm thinking here, I guess, very particularly of our friends, the beavers, who are back, right? And on the one hand, you know, we, we hunt them because we really like their fur.

• 1:04:10Eleanor Janega?

  But then on the other hand, they're kind of a bit of a pest, right? Is there anything like this that really helps you to question this, this binary way of looking at extinction?

• 1:04:18Speaker 04

  Well, that's an interesting challenge. I think with the beaver in Britain, by the time we, we get the sources on it in the medieval period, it was very much very high status fur, you know, suitable for princes and kings. And even after it had gone extinct in Britain, people were still importing its fur from Europe. That's how important this fur was. And we get a few hints that the castorium was important as well. So that's sort of the, the chemical extracted from the glands of the beaver. So in the sources that we have, the beaver is very important. But part of that might be because the beaver was rare and rare creatures usually have a

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  higher sort of status within society. So what happened in the years before our sources started? Was the beaver sometimes just, just hunted because it was causing floods in an area? Probably. That sounds very, very plausible. How did it get to be this rare? Was it because everyone really wanted it? Or was it just because it was there? And sometimes because it was subject to pest control? That does seem plausible. There are some creatures which I suppose do definitely question the bounds between them.

• 1:05:39Speaker 04

  So the red kite might be another one where it was simultaneously hated and subject to hunting, but also very much treasured when it was in the right place, doing the right thing. So it was helpful within London city in the sort of early modern Renaissance period for garbage disposal and for getting rid of odors which might turn into health risks. So that's a creature, I suppose, which is halfway between, which is sometimes loved, sometimes hated, depending on where it was. It becomes a weed in the wrong place.

• 1:06:20Eleanor Janega?

  The last thing I wanted to talk about, because I really love this comparison that you make within the book, is you talk about looking at the way that medieval bestiaries relate to some animals and, and the way that modern tabloids look at, for example, the, like the menace of, of foxes or, or adders. You kind of invite us to find some humor in this. Ken, you tell us a little bit about the line between using humor to sort of deflate the power of a moral panic whilst at the same time taking the anxieties of people who live alongside large animals today.

• 1:07:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's, is a difficult line to walk, isn't it? I'm reminded of an episode of Peppa Pig where it was aired and it was, the aim of it was to make children less, less frightened. I can't remember now actually whether it was less frightened of snakes or less frightened of spiders. But in any case, it was aired in Britain very successfully. What a beautiful idea. Yes, children shouldn't be frightened of them. But in Australia, it was banned because maybe children should be frightened in places where the animals are more of a threat. Now, there are moral panics going on at the moment.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  For example, the adder is not really a, as dangerous a predator as tabloid authors might want us to think during the summer times. And I think to some degree, the predators on my list also fit into this camp. So the lynx, which is probably incapable of ever doing any damage to a human because it's too small, and even the wolf, which generally avoids humans and which in other countries, people just weren't as scared of as we were in Europe. But there is a sense of arrogance there, isn't there? Because I'm looking at it from a place where nature's just become a garden. I don't think twice when I leave the house about animals that I might meet.

• 1:08:29Speaker 04

  Whereas in places where these animals are still around, there are ways that they've adapted to live alongside them. Bears, as an example, in places where they've still got, bears get relocated when they start to go through people's garbage. And people wear bear bells when they go out so they don't shock bells, don't come by surprise upon bears in the middle of the wilderness. They wear bear bells. So there's a difficulty with looking into the past in that I'm trying to do away with the cultural fears that people have. But in dismissing them, maybe I'm being too dismissive in some places. And if we do reintroduce some of these animals, we might have a little bit of a learning

• 1:09:11Speaker 04

  curve to learn to live with them in harmony again. I hope we can do it.

• 1:09:16Eleanor Janega?

  Lee, thank you so much for such an excellent book and such a wonderful conversation. I'm, I'm sorry for dragging you into my special interests of wolves and lynxes.

• 1:09:26Speaker 04

  Oh, it's a shared special interest, Eleanor. Thanks so much for having me.

• 1:09:32Eleanor Janega?

  My thanks again to Dr. Lee Ray. And thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries, including my film, The Medieval Apocalypse, which has plenty of great little beasties in it, as well as ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts. And tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.