Birth of Witchcraft

How did harmless medieval healers become hunted as terrifying, devil-worshiping conspirators? Matt Lewis and Professor Marion Gibson explore the chilling origins of the witch trials; how a humiliated inquisitor named Heinrich Kramer, after being publicly defied by a local woman in Innsbruck, penned the infamous Malleus Maleficarum? This sinister manual weaponised folk magic and unleashed centuries of terror across Europe. MORE Supernatural Medieval Ireland Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/supernatural-medieval-ireland/id1564113746?i=1000691906380 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/05WoMMJK9VMM7LiKp3QQ0w Murder in Anglo-Saxon England Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/murder-in-anglo-saxon-england/id1564113746?i=1000689923011 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3tY5EpapySkL68sn0t6EKs Gone Medieval is presented by Matt Lewis. Audio editor is Amy Haddow, the producer is Jseph Knight. 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 Matt and Eleanor's film The Ascent to Power: Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II now on History Hit TV. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week, PLUS early access, ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

  From long-lost Viking ships and kings buried in unexpected places, to tales of murder, power, faith, and the lives of ordinary people across medieval Europe and beyond. Join me, Matt Lewis, Dr Eleanor 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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• 2:04Matt 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.

• 2:43Matt Lewis?

  During the 1480s, high in the cloud-cloaked spires of the Austrian Tyrell, an inquisitor arrived in the mountain town of Innsbruck. His name was Heinrich Kramer, and he'd come with a mission. He was determined to uncover a sinister conspiracy of women worshipping the devil. But when he tried to prosecute a local woman named Helena Schubrin, things didn't go according to plan. Helena publicly defied him. The local bishop threw the trial out of court, and Kramer left in disgrace. Humiliated, he retreated with his tail between his legs and spent a frantic few months penning

• 3:27Matt Lewis?

  the Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, a book that would unleash centuries of terror across Europe. But how did we get there? If you were to walk through the village lanes of early medieval Europe, the church would actually tell you that witches don't exist at all. They'd say that believing in night-flying sorcerers was a pagan delusion. So how on earth did Western Europe end up hunting down alleged devil worshippers by the thousands? Was it a sudden explosion of superstition? Or was the idea of the witch actually invented in the halls of power by theologians, lawyers, and kings

• 4:08Matt Lewis?

  who saw that sorcery was a remarkably potent political weapon? I'm Matt Lewis. Welcome to Gone Medieval. Today, we're exploring the birth of witchcraft. I'm thrilled to be joined by Professor Marion Gibson from the University of Exeter to trace how folk remedies and practical magic evolved into demonic conspiracy and the witch hunts of the Inquisition. Marion's brilliant books, Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials, and Witchland, are essential reading for anyone trying to make sense of this incredible tale.

• 4:44Matt Lewis?

  Welcome to Gone Medieval, Marion. It's great to have you with us.

• 4:46Speaker 04

  Thank you, Matt. It's great to be here.

• 4:48Matt Lewis?

  I'm looking forward to diving into this topic. I think something probably people will want to know a lot about. So I think to begin with, when people have an image of a medieval witch, they're probably thinking about a woman huddled over a cauldron, stirring and cackling away. But also, we have this other version of witchcraft, which is the kind of the institutionalized thing that the Inquisitions are trying to hunt out and seek down. Do both of those things exist during the medieval period? Or are we talking about a transition between one and the other?

• 5:14Speaker 04

  They do. It's quite a confused picture in the Middle Ages in that people are really still working out what they think witches are at this point. So you've got the kind of more traditional idea that a witch is just any kind of random neighbour. It could be a man, could be a woman, could be somebody you've fallen out with, and they might curse you or they might send a ghost to haunt you. You know, if you live in Scandinavia, they'd quite like to conjure up some horrible monster to come and have a go at you. They could, on the other hand, as you say, be some sort of herbalist, some sort of healer, somebody who might actually make things in a cauldron. And there's some sort of overlap between those kind of healer, cunning folk-type people and the people who are accused of witchcraft. And then increasingly, as the Middle Ages go on, there is this conspiracy theory idea

• 5:59Speaker 04

  that witches come in very large numbers. They get together, they meet, and they do horrible things like eating babies. And they also worship the devil. So they start to constitute this idea of an alternative church in the Middle Ages. And that's really where you get the big witch hunts kicking off from.

• 6:17Matt Lewis?

  So they become kind of an existential institutional threat to the church and its dominance. It's interesting. So if we go right back to the beginning of the medieval period, if we think about an early medieval person in their village, when they talk about magic, what do we think that they would have been thinking that was? What does that look like day to day?

• 6:36Speaker 04

  Depends how early, really. If they live in Christian times, then they're likely to think of something which might be a little bit problematic. If they lived before that, of course, it's really all one. They really don't care. So if they still have pagan ideas in their head, which some early medieval people might have done, then they're probably not that fussed about magic, actually. It's only as the period goes on that they start thinking, well, you know, what the priest does up at the church, that's holy, that's sacred, you know, that's God's work. And God has special powers. That's why he's God. He's not like any other being. He is the Creator. He is the mover of everything. So anything he does isn't magic. And that means that anything the priest does isn't magic. But anything anybody else does, well, now that might be magic,

• 7:21Speaker 04

  and that might come to become a bit more problematic. And of course, if that person is a woman, then it makes it even more problematic for people to think about.

• 7:31Matt Lewis?

  So we're heading straight into double standards for the church. They can do what looks like an awful lot like magic up at the church, but if anybody else does it, they're in trouble. In the early medieval period, are people considering magic to be something that is inherently necessarily evil? Or is it more like a practical tool that you just use as part of your day-to-day life?

• 7:49Speaker 04

  It's often quite a practical tool. You know, you might use magic if, say, you say prayers over your cows to make them better. And you might not even really think about that as magic. That's kind of religion, isn't it? But you know, maybe you make an amulet as well, or you buy an amulet off your neighbour. So maybe, you know, a stone with a hole in it or a little bit of paper with a prayer written on it which is tied up in string and folded away and made to look special. And maybe you keep it in a bag round your neck or you put it in a bag round the cow's neck or something like that. But you wouldn't necessarily think of any of that as being wicked at all. You wouldn't think of it as witchcraft. You'd probably think of it as healing or godliness or something which might be blessed by the church if they knew about it.

• 8:34Speaker 04

  And you might even think about it as just natural because after all, people didn't have an awful lot of desire to distinguish between what they thought was natural and is, as it were, scientific, as we might think of it now, and what was supposedly supernatural and different and maybe religious, but maybe also demonic. So there's a lot more continuity in the medieval mind between all of those concepts. And as you go on into the early modern period, people start chopping that up, and that's where we get some of the conflicts of that period coming out of.

• 9:03Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. I'm always surprised by how well medieval people were able to hold several thoughts in their mind at one time. You know, they didn't necessarily need to divide things up into something that's good or bad in the same way that we need to. It just is, and it's about can you use it to some extent there? They seem more capable of a lot of mental gymnastics than we still are today.

• 9:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would agree. I think the medieval period is full of really imaginative and flexible and nuanced thinking, which of course isn't the way people think about it now. You know, as you will well know, it tends to mean something completely different, stupid and backward and so on. But in fact, no, they're very modern in lots of ways, and they're very flexible thinkers and they're very interesting thinkers.

• 9:44Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. Does early medieval society then divide between good and bad magic? Are there things that are considered to be good and helpful and practical as opposed to things that are dabbling with something darker that are causing harm?

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Yes, so as time goes on particularly, but also even in the early medieval period, you know, if somebody is thought to have cursed somebody else, that's bad. There's no debate about that. But as you go on, you get more into the idea that some kinds of magic are satanic and they are linked inherently with the devil. Then you get more and more concerned about things like invoking spirits, say, because churchmen argue, you can't tell what kind of spirit is being invoked. You know, you may very well think that you are calling on an angel, say, and you know, you do some rites and you say some words and they're probably quite religious words. They're probably Latin, they're probably holy words. And you believe that something has come to you, something has come to visit you.

• 10:46Speaker 04

  But what if it's a devil rather than, say, an angel? They draw in the Bible for this. So there's a woman in the Bible called the Witch of Endor, and she supposedly raises up the prophet Samuel, which sounds fine, doesn't it? Samuel is a holy prophet, he is God's man, this is all good. But of course, if you're looking at that from the medieval period and thinking about what that actually means, you might well think, how do we know this is God's man? No, no, surely this is some kind of imposture, isn't it? This is a fake, this is the devil pretending to be the prophet Samuel. So increasingly you get those kinds of debates and therefore people get prosecuted for invoking spirits, they get prosecuted for cursing other people and doing what is seen to be harmful magic.

• 11:29Speaker 04

  And you get the idea of the witch getting more and more widespread. So by the 15th century, you've got the idea of the formal witch trial as we might recognise it now, as opposed to a sort of earlier medieval form, which is a little more localised, a lot more kind of nuanced, if you like.

• 11:43Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And that's precisely what I was going to ask about next, you know, if someone during this earlier period was to make a witchcraft accusation, what would that process look like? Would there be what we'd recognise as a trial of that person?

• 11:56Speaker 04

  Yes, there would be. And you get these kind of formal trials going back even into the 14th century. There's a new book by Anthony Bale, which talks about a witch trial in Ireland in that period, which has all the hallmarks really of the later ones. And what they looked like by the time they'd set in the 15th century and people knew what they were doing, was the person would be arrested, they might be questioned by a magistrate or a churchman or a lord or somebody who was interested in their case, perhaps a bishop. And they would be brought into a court, which might be a church court, depends what jurisdiction you're in, you know, if you're in the in the territory of the Inquisition, then it's an Inquisition court. If you're on other jurisdictions, it might be the court of a bishop, or it might be the court of an archbishop, or so on.

• 12:40Speaker 04

  If you're thought to have committed treason as part of your witchcraft, so say the person that you thought to have cursed, or the spirit you're thought to have invoked and asked questions of is thought to have made an attack on a monarch, say, then you might be called into a state court, you might be accused of treason and you know, you might have stood in front of your monarch, answering questions about what the hell you thought you were up to. So there were a variety of different processes, but they almost always involved escalation from some kind of pre-trial questioning to a formal trial, followed by a jurisdiction, you know, verdict, a determination of the case. And that would, what happened to people would depend on what kind of court they went. But punishments would range from burning at the stake through to execution as a traitor.

• 13:25Speaker 04

  So for example, by being beheaded, there were things like exile, there was imprisonment, there were a whole range of different processes that you could be put through if you were found to have been a witch.

• 13:34Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And as we get towards the end of the earlier medieval period, so we get things like the Canon Episcopacy around 900, and this seems to be trying to really categorise witchcraft a little bit more. But it's also that the church seemed to be more concerned about people's belief in witches rather than their concern about witches themselves. It's the interest or the belief in something that is heretical or dangerous or connected to the devil that the church is really worried about, rather than the witch.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  It is, that's right. And the Canon Episcopacy is this really fascinating moment when things could have turned out differently. Because what that document says is, we don't really believe in what people are saying to us. You know, if women come to us in a witch trial and they say to us, we flew with the goddess Diana, yeah, we flew through the air, we turned into animals, it was great, yeah, Satan was there with us. If they say all of that, then churchmen are told in this canonical document not to believe them, but rather to think of them as people who have fantasised, as people who have embraced heretical beliefs, who are wrong about what they're saying. And that would have been a moment where maybe we could have avoided the big period of the witch trials, because the problem is in those later witch trials, that clergymen say, well,

• 14:49Speaker 04

  yeah, actually, you know, if you say you flew through the air with the goddess Diana, well, it was probably a demon, but you did actually do that, you really did fly, you really did eat babies, you really did curse the mayor and kill him, and therefore you've got to be executed for that. So there's this wonderful moment when the church is thinking this through and it's thinking, is this real or is this imaginary? And that's a moment when it says it's imaginary, but soon afterwards it will start thinking that these are real crimes, that this conspiracy theory will spread, that witches are everywhere, they're attacking monarchs, they're attacking clergymen, they're attacking their neighbours, they're worshipping Satan, they're killing babies, they're causing storms, they're destroying crops, it's all bad, we must get rid of them.

• 15:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, it's so interesting to wonder whether, what if the church had just laughed it off and said, it's clearly nothing and we're not ever going to worry about it again?

• 15:37Speaker 04

  And again, that's a very modern moment, isn't it? You can feel the clergymen who are working that through in their minds, you can feel them thinking quite modern thoughts about whether or not human beings do say trustworthy things when they are clearly fantasising. And whether or not you can really believe that these airy spirits turn themselves into some sort of material form and intervene in human lives in the way that later they will believe they do. They have this big debate about matter and spirit, it's so interesting, it's so modern. You know, the idea is that demonic spirits are made of air. Can they actually assume a body and touch you? Or maybe the spirit can enter into you and possess you? Yeah, how would that actually work?

• 16:21Speaker 04

  Can they pretend to be animals? Can they impersonate other people like the prophet Samuel, for example? Or can't they do any of this? And is this just all in your head? Is this just the devil putting ideas in your head so that you come out with all this rubbish and then you get executed? They're having this really interesting debate about, it's actually atoms, you know, molecules, science, what stuff is made of?

• 16:40Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah, because we tend to think about them just being concerned about, do demons exist or not? But they're not, are they? They're concerned about the science of a demon, what it's constituted of, how does it get here, what does it want to do when it's here, how do you get rid of it?

• 16:53Speaker 04

  It's a lot more complex, isn't it, than we might imagine? And this is the science of demonology, so literally the study of demons, which over time becomes the study of witches as well. And these, you know, the demonology has turned from scientific texts into witch hunting manuals, really, or that is the way they are used by a lot of readers, which is a really sad thing. It feels like a road not taken and instead people go haring off down the conspiracy theory route, which as we know is never a good idea.

• 17:21Matt Lewis?

  No, never turns out well. And as we move into the kind of the 12th and the 13th century, we have a kind of a machinery within the church that builds up around the Inquisition, and that's often to do with heresies, with the cathars or chasing down things like that. How does that become turned against witches? Because it's really that instrument of the church that is then refocused from either not heretics or not just heretics, depending on how you look at witches, I guess, but that's refocused on witches, isn't it? Why does it turn its attention there?

• 17:51Speaker 04

  I think there are a whole variety of reasons. Basically, yes, they decide that they're going to class witchcraft as a heresy, so they start calling it the heresy of witches. And that's because they think that witches have started to worship the devil. And they seem to do that for several reasons. One is they're suspicious of women inherently, I'm sorry to say. In particular, some churchmen think that women are a kind of gateway for the devil. They're inherently weaker in mind and body. Look at Eve, they say, pointing back to Genesis, you know, she listens to the demonic snake or to Satan, or however you want to conceptualise him. She eats the apple of the tree of knowledge because, you know, she's vain, glorious and

• 18:36Speaker 04

  stupid, and she wants more knowledge than she has, and she wants to rebel against Adam because she is lesser. And she knows that she's lesser and she doesn't want to be his subject. And so she eats the apple and then she is damned, and then she gives it to Adam, her husband, and he is damned. Look at that and imagine the medieval women around you are like that, you're quite likely to start thinking, well, you know, Satan came to them and said, if you worship me and, you know, sacrifice babies to me and do harm in my name, I will give you all sorts of power and knowledge and it'll be absolutely wonderful. So it seems to be in part misogyny, most of the suspects are women, although men are also accused as well. It's clearly partly to do with the idea of defining what is and isn't proper religion.

• 19:20Speaker 04

  And it's kind of stopped being about, well, this branch of religion is okay, but that branch isn't, this sector's all right, but that one isn't. It's become this enormous binary battle between God and the devil. So witches are imagined not just as heretics, but as the very worst type of heretic. It's a kind of uber heretic that they're looking for by then, that actually worshipped Satan himself. What could possibly be worse in the minds of churchmen? And also there are all sorts of other factors, you know, this is actually, you know, as you will know, this is a time of enormous conflict, religious conflict, religious wars, armies marching all over Europe, a big threat from Islam in the East, which also seems to focus people's minds on the idea that some human beings are not Christian and therefore hard, they must worship the devil, right?

• 20:04Speaker 04

  And people don't really push that any further in the way that they should. So there are all sorts of external threats, as well as a suspicion of people within the community who are a problem. And this extends particularly to Jews, you know, there are more likely to be Jews in Western Europe than there are to be Muslims. So they become a focus of attention and people start horribly saying that they are demonic as well. So there's a whole lot going on there and it's about suspicion and it's about fear and it's about conflict and it's about trying to divide up the world into nice, neat binary divisions, which everybody can live their lives by. So heresy is one of those and the heresy of witches is the worst possible heresy they could, I think, imagine at the time.

• 20:46Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. Again, all of those discussions seem ridiculously modern. We live in a world that's desperately trying to make things more binary than they've ever been before and more divided. And it seems like that was something similar to what was going on at the time. And presumably, this idea from the church, that witchcraft becomes so closely associated with the devil, that if you're engaged in witchcraft, you are dealing with the devil, means that all of that stuff that we've seen before, that at the low level, at the local level, was part of everyday life, was considered to be positive and a good impact, and maybe saving your crops and your cattle. Presumably, suddenly, all of that is a huge problem now.

• 21:22Speaker 04

  It all gets swept in together. Yeah, because people are frightened, because they've been fed this conspiracy theory, they start to believe that anything that they see that is magical might be demonic. And you can just imagine how that opens the gates to all sorts of suspicions and accusations. So yeah, people who are just practising a bit of healing, might well be accused of witchcraft. You know, they would use charms, they would use charms going back to Catholic times, even as, you know, as late as the Protestant period of the 16th or 17th centuries, they were still using these old Catholic charms. But these had become suspicious. People had started to think that even if they contained holy words, they were no longer holy, they were actually demonic.

• 22:06Speaker 04

  So it's like this sweeping up of a lot of folk culture, and a lot of kind of folk healing, and put it all into this bag marked demonic heresy, at which point you can get a witch trial out of it.

• 22:17Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And you talk in your book about this clash that develops between the village reality of day-to-day life with this stuff around you, and what an elite, particularly within the church, are moulding into something about demonology that is an existential threat to the, this is part now of a cosmic war between God and Satan. It's not you trying to save your cow with something you're hanging around its neck. This is the very real fight on earth between God and Satan. I mean, are the church making a conscious effort to really make that clear to everyone that if you do this, you are in big trouble?

• 22:55Speaker 04

  In some cases, they are, yeah. So we know of priests who preach whole series of sermons on this matter, because they're really trying to ram home to the ordinary folk sat in front of them in church, what it is that you're doing that might be wrong. You don't want to go down that path, you want to do it this way instead. So there is, yeah, this attempt to draw a line, really, under what people are doing and tell them that it's wrong. And the trouble is that it only gets stronger and stronger over the period. And then, as the church starts to split, so you have the Protestant heretics, they also start to develop their own understanding of what witchcraft is, which is, if anything, even more problematic than the one the Inquisition has, you know, compared with the later Puritans. The Inquisition is moderate and mild in dealing

• 23:39Speaker 04

  with heresy. Later on, people get even more fussed about it, and they get even more concerned about folk magic. So it's really a horrible story of people starting down a road where things are relatively open, and gradually cutting off one avenue after another of escape from this conspiracy theory, until in the end, they're staring at the fact that they want to burn their neighbours, or they want to hang their neighbours, again, depending on which jurisdiction you're in, because they think they're these demonic people.

• 24:24Matt Lewis?

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• 25:04Matt Lewis?

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• 25:41Matt Lewis?

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• 28:07Matt Lewis?

  And that's reflected and exacerbated by the legal process to get through this, isn't it? Because we see this shift as well, from these really open accusatory trials that happen in communities, in which the accuser could be at much as risk of punishment as the person being accused, if it turns out that they're telling lies. And that gets replaced by something with the Inquisition, which is much more secret, much more clandestine, will use torture to try to extract what it needs. So rather than all of that happening out in the open, all of a sudden, it's happening behind closed doors, and people don't know what's going on, which presumably

• 28:46Matt Lewis?

  can only work to increase the fear of it, and the sense that it is a growing threat. You know, it's no longer out in the open, it's suddenly hidden, and it could be coming for you at any time.

• 28:58Speaker 04

  Yes, and the fact that a lot of these trials are top-down is part of that. You know, it's happening up at the big castle, it's happening over at the abbey, it's not happening in the market square or the town hall. And people who have come forward with accusations lose control of that process, once it's passed into the hands of people who consider themselves to be experts. And as you say, yes, they will use torture, so they have this enormous problem of confirmation bias. They have come to believe that the people who have been put before them by the villagers are in fact witches. So their job is now to discover exactly how they are witches, not whether they are or not, but when they became a witch, how long they've been a witch, how many people they've bewitched, you know, did they change the weather on this particular day when there was a terrible storm?

• 29:43Speaker 04

  When they worship Satan, what did they say to him? How many babies did they eat? And it becomes that kind of process. And of course, because they are using torture, they do get the confirmation that they want in an awful lot of cases, because people just can't resist. And when they're asked leading questions about things like witches' Sabbaths, you know, where the witches all meet together to do these terrible inverted heretical acts and to pray to Satan, people are only too happy to run off down that road because they think, and you know, in Catholic places, this is, this is a perfectly fair supposition. They think that if they confess, they may be absolved and, and released. They don't always think, well, yeah, I'm going to be burned at the stake at the end of this.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  And even if they do, under extreme torture, there's almost nothing they can do about it. There's almost nothing they can do to resist. So they do end up confirming those, those mad conspiracy theory stories. And they end up naming lots of other people as witches because they're asked to do so.

• 30:40Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And then it becomes a self fulfilling thing, doesn't it? Because all of a sudden you're torturing people into saying they are witches, which go, well, there you go. It proves there's witches out there. So all of the people they've just named must be witches, we'll torture them and they'll confirm that they're witches because they're being tortured. And all of a sudden, that conspiracy begins to look like it just might be something real.

• 30:57Speaker 04

  Yes, it does. It spreads and it spreads and it spreads. And that's the kind of story of the era of the big witch hunts, really. It spreads from one community to another. Individuals move from one community to another, fermenting these trials. And as more and more people are accused and more and more demonologies are written, the whole thing assumes this tremendous solidity, which is part of what you should believe if you're a good Catholic and later a good Protestant. And, you know, by then it's too late to turn back.

• 31:24Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And you mentioned the witches' Sabbath there. I wonder if you could just tell us a little bit about what people really believed that was and how does it emerge as, as a concept of what people are doing?

• 31:34Speaker 04

  Hmm. You kind of imagine sometimes today, don't you, that witches are solitary creatures? You know, people who are modern pagans will often say, oh, I am a solitary witch. And, you know, that's quite a sort of accepted idea. But once you've got a conspiracy theory in which, you know, tens, sometimes hundreds of individuals are named as witches, you have to try and imagine some way in which they might come together. And this is the witches' Sabbath. And it presents itself as, as very much the, the inverse, you know, the, the reverse image, the negative image, if you like, of a church service. And I don't think that's an accident. You know, we've talked about how people are thinking in quite binary ways at this point. So where in a church service, you know, you would go to a church

• 32:14Speaker 04

  building and you would pray to, to your deity god there. And you would do certain kinds of ritual acts, like you might wash yourself, you know, you might drink wine, you might eat holy bread, you might anoint yourself with holy oil, you would probably make certain gestures like crossing yourself or kneeling, stuff like that. That all gets transposed over to the witches' Sabbath. So when you go to a Sabbath, instead of just walking down to your local church, you might fly there through the air, you know, perhaps on a broomstick or a demonic goat, or really anything that you care to imagine. And when you get there, you would pray to the devil and you would do certain rites to him. So, you know, instead of anointing yourself in holy oil, you might anoint yourself in the

• 32:57Speaker 04

  fat of murdered babies, because that's the worst thing they can think of. And instead of, of bowing to the altar, say, or genuflecting, or any of the sort of religious gestures that Christians would make, you would kiss the devil's backside. Because again, that's the worst thing that they can think of. And you would fornicate there, instead of sitting next to your neighbours, you know, in, in kind of Christian communion and shaking hands, maybe, or, or going out after the service, you know, feeling in charity with the world. Instead, you hold this orgy and you, you commit incest and, and you do again, all the most terrible things that medieval people can think of. So the, the Sabbath is about inverting everything that is good in the form of a kind of demonic church service.

• 33:41Speaker 04

  And I think it enables medieval people to, to bring together all of their worst fears and imagine people who are enacting these in some sort of magical, never, never land space that nobody ever sees, of course, but a lot of people describe.

• 33:57Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, everybody knows what it is, but no one's ever seen it. Obviously, it's horrible, but it's almost amusing to think of the idea of them, you know, listing everything that happens in church that's good and positive. And kind of next to it, trying to think of what's, what's the absolute worst inversion of this that we can create? And that must be what the witches are doing. It's like, there's almost a game of, of every activity that you undertake in church that saves your soul. What would you do is the opposite to damn it? And that's what we'll accuse the witches of.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  It's like a checklist, isn't it? Yeah. You just work down it, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. They've done all of that stuff. And it is inherently funny. That's one of the problems of talking about this, this kind of thing, because it, of course, it tips over into, into idiocy. And, you know, even in the 16th century, people were saying, this is nonsense. Yeah, let's have a good laugh at this. You know, there's stories, there's an amazing story in one demonology about this nun who eats a lettuce. This is the most innocent thing you could possibly imagine. But it's not a lettuce, it's the devil in the form of a lettuce. And it's, it's impossible to think about that, isn't it, without grinning? The devil in the form of a lettuce. But if, you know, if you're the person writing that demonology, that's the most threatening thing you can think of. You know, this lovely

• 35:04Speaker 04

  green leafy plant that, that is good for you. And, and you, you know, you've picked in the, the convent garden and it's all sacred and fine and lovely and the nun's going to eat it. It becomes, it becomes this demonic thing that enters the nun's mouth and, and then possesses her. But it is inherently funny. These are crazy, crazy things that people are saying. The thing is that at the time, they did not examine them in those terms because they'd become so convinced that the devil could do anything. He could become anything. He could make himself look like your next door neighbour. He could enter your body and make you do stuff. He could enter into a pact with you and give you infinite power, which of course he would then take away. And, you know, you would be damned and burned and all the rest of it. But he could do pretty much anything that he wanted.

• 35:49Speaker 04

  And then they had to explain why, you know, they had to explain why God would let him do that. Which again, sounds mad, doesn't it? Why would a good God allow all this to happen? And they explained it by saying, well, it's, yeah, it can be a test of human beings. So, you know, maybe evil people fall into this, or maybe some good people are seduced into it. And then, you know, it's, it's about trying them and it's about getting them back from this horrible heresy. Or, you know, maybe it's because he wants to show the power of the devil. And he wants to show that, you know, when the devil imitates him, he's not really powerful at all. He's just pretending to be God. And you, you, you good Christians, you have to see through this. And they just tie themselves up in all these theological knots, trying to explain it, when actually what they should have done is laugh and move on.

• 36:34Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. I mean, that would be ideal. I, see, I don't like lettuce, but it's not because I think it's the devil. I don't think eating it is going to lead to being possessed.

• 36:41Speaker 04

  Well, there you go.

• 36:43Matt Lewis?

  But maybe I'm just playing it safe. I don't know. Maybe. Um, we, we talked a little bit about how the chasing down of, of heresies within the church has led to this structure that becomes the Inquisition, which will target witches. As we move into the 14th century, we've got the catastrophes like the, the great famine and the Black Death and, and all kinds of economic turmoil and war erupting and all of that kind of thing. Do we see that affecting people's views on witches as well? You know, the church is very keen to say that something like the Black Death happens because people are, are being wicked. Are they also ramping up the idea that there's too much witchcraft around and we need to target it more?

• 37:18Speaker 04

  Yes, I think they are. It's always difficult to find a smoking gun. It would be really lovely if we had examples where people are saying, oh, you know, the plague was caused by the witches. And, and occasionally they do say that sort of thing, but it doesn't seem to be a kind of conscious linkage of, of the kind that, you know, you might hope for. But I'm sure that all of those factors come together to make people feel under greater pressure, more suspicious of their neighbours, more concerned that the devil is at work in the world. You know, we know from the times we live in, if you live through a pandemic, it does horrible things to you. You do become more anxious and more suspicious and more concerned and more frightened about the world. You know, we just know this stuff now. So

• 37:58Speaker 04

  plague does that, war does that, famine does that. It's a time of immense social strain. And that's one of the ways historians have explained the rise of the witch trials. It's about social strains that get out of hand.

• 38:11Matt Lewis?

  And kind of throughout this period with the Catholic Church, sort of all powerful in Europe, its ability to define who is aligned with God, who is good, who is doing the right thing, and therefore also by definition, who is doing the, the wrong things and is in danger of being aligned with the devil. It's, it's one of the most potent tools that they have, isn't it, to be able to say that you're heretical? Does wrapping in witches with heresies? Serve a slightly different purpose in that normally heretics are kind of groups of communities that you can go after, whereas witches means you can get into rural communities everywhere and just be thinking about one person in a village or a few people in a town. And instead of having to target an entire community, you can get right down

• 38:53Matt Lewis?

  into the grassroots of the community, which is more power for the church, but is also more frightening for those communities, I guess.

• 39:00Speaker 04

  That's really interesting. Yeah. So you don't have a label like Jew to go with. You can't pick out a group of people in society and say, oh, you are ethnically and religiously different, we will hunt you down. Instead, it could be almost anybody. And that's, I think, one of the things I find most horrifying about witch trials. You know, you have your stereotypical witch who's probably an older woman, you're kind of socially isolated, poor, somebody's perhaps fallen out with her neighbours, is a bit grumpy, people don't like her, or she's committed some kind of sin, as the community sees it, like having an illegitimate child. That's your kind of classic witch, if you like. But then you also get examples of, you know, really high ranking men who are accused, clergy folk are accused, duchesses

• 39:44Speaker 04

  are accused. You can go after more or less anybody, because almost anybody can be a witch. And yeah, that does make it a much more flexible tool. You know, going back to the flexibility of the medieval mind, this is one of the ways it shows itself, in that it's a very flexible persecution tool.

• 39:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And I wanted to go back to talk about some of those higher profile ones as well, because it's also around the 14th century that we begin to see this idea of charges of witchcraft as a political weapon, as well as perhaps something that people genuinely believed in. It becomes much more of a cynical, political tool as well. And you know, the creation of a love potion that might have been innocent 100 years earlier is all of a sudden something that can bring about the fall of someone at the highest ranks of society. I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about how it becomes politically weaponised as well?

• 40:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, it does. It's very often used against high ranking court women, or quite high ranking social women in, say, merchant circles. So people might know that the Duchess of Gloucester, Eleanor Cobham, is accused in the 1440s. And she's accused of, if you like, bewitching her husband to fall in love with her. She'd previously been his mistress, his wife dies, she marries the duke, you know, this is a great outcome for her. And naturally enough, people are jealous and angry and feel that he shouldn't have married her. And then later on, she's also accused of having some clergymen in a circle around her who raise up spirits to find out when the current king, who is her husband's nephew,

• 41:10Speaker 04

  because it's Henry VI, when he will die. And she's accused of witchcraft for that. She doesn't seem to have done the spirit raising herself. So it's not even that that she's accused of doing. But she is accused of maybe making love potions and also commissioning other people to do magic for her, if you like. And her accomplices are executed. She is exiled to the Isle of Mam. So from that point of view, she's very lucky, but she's also forcibly divorced from her husband and essentially booted out of court life. And that's a great political outcome for her enemies. You know, they've got rid of the duke's wife, they've got rid of somebody who appears to be a threat to the king, who is maybe intriguing to replace him with his uncle, her husband. And there's nothing

• 41:52Speaker 04

  to worry about her anymore, she's gone. So it's that kind of very flexible tool that in a political situation can be, can be really useful.

• 41:59Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that it's often, you know, in that case, in Eleanor Cobham's case, it's meant as a weapon against her husband Humphrey. You know, people aren't necessarily as concerned about her as they are about what Humphrey's motivations are and his desire for war with France. And you see Henry V accuse his mother-in-law of witchcraft, ostensibly so he can imprison her and steal all of her lands and money until he's on his deathbed and he's kind of like, can you let her go and say, I'm sorry, because I didn't mean it, I just wanted her money. And throughout the 15th century in England, that escalates to, we get to the Wars of the Roses, and you're getting witchcraft allegations thrown around all over the place against all kinds of powerful women, which is really about destabilising the power that their family have. So it's maybe more targeting the man by targeting his wife.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  Yes, I think it is. And people go for the women, of course, because they are more plausible suspects. Because, you know, see above, all the stuff we said about women being the devil's gateway and being like Eve and being very easily susceptible to satanic temptation and so on. And, you know, in those cases also, also like Eve, you know, being ambitious, wanting to rule in places where there shouldn't be ruling, wanting to tell their husband what to do. These are all the characteristics that Eve have. And in the Middle Ages, they get transferred over to high ranking women.

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• 45:41Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. I also really interested in, there's a case of Gilles de Rais in France, isn't there? You know, mine a noble man, who is accused of trying to summon demons so that he can learn all of the knowledge in the world. And he confesses to murdering lots of children and kind of fitting many of those ideals of witchcraft and everything else. But again, he confesses that under torture. And the politically interesting thing about him is he's a very close ally of Joan of Arc when she is becoming politically problematic.

• 46:24Matt Lewis?

  So again, is it just a weapon that's deployed against him to shift him out of the way, to make him a pariah and remove him from the political playing field? I guess we don't know, because it's tricky, because he admits to it all, but you would.

• 46:35Speaker 04

  This is why it's so difficult, isn't it? And you find yourself thinking, is this just an excuse? Do the people accusing him really believe that he has done all of these things? Well, yes, they might actually, because people did believe that kind of thing. But at the same time, isn't it awfully convenient that he's the head of this religious order that you actually want to sweep aside so that you can steal the lands and money and so on? There's a real tension, isn't there, between interpreting that in a way which is about understanding that people in the past think very differently in some cases, and in a cynical way, which points to the really obvious material consequence of the thing that they've said that they think, and what they've actually done with it?

• 47:16Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And I wonder if we could move on further into the 15th century as well. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about Helena Schubrin. So kind of, when is she? Where in the world is she? And how does her story begin?

• 47:30Speaker 04

  I could. I love talking about Helena because I think she's one of the really interesting accused witches of the Middle Ages. So she's a kind of merchant class woman, a wife from Innsbruck in Austria. And in fourteen eighty-five, she is accused of witchcraft along with six other women. These are all women in this case, you know, we can kind of see how misogyny is working in this one, I think. And they are accused by an inquisitor, Heinrich Kramer, who people might have heard of because later on he goes on to write a famous demonology called Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches. And this is a kind of test case for him. So he's, he's been busy in southern Germany before this.

• 48:10Speaker 04

  He's, he's gone to the town of Ravensburg and he's had two women burned there as witches after torturing them and extracting all the kind of confessions that we've been talking about out of these poor women. And now he's moved on to Innsbruck and he seems to be interested in extending his power into that territory. It's ruled over by an archduke, Sigismund, and he seems to want Sigismund's attention and to, to kind of extend his idea of the witch hunt more broadly and become the kind of accepted regional authority on it, if you like. So he comes on to Innsbruck. He picks on Helena and this is a foolish thing that he has done, which is why I particularly like this story.

• 48:53Speaker 04

  Because Helena fights back, so he starts to accuse her, but she starts to accuse him as well. She won't attend his sermons. He's one of those guys who goes around preaching a lot about witchcraft that we talked about earlier. And she won't go to his sermons and she keeps her friends away from them. And when he says, why are you doing this? She says, but you only ever talk about witchcraft, you know, what do we want to come along to these for? And she starts to even accuse him of heresy as well. She says, you know, you have all these mad beliefs about magic. These are actually heretical beliefs, you know, you're saying that the devil has powers that in fact many churchmen don't think that he has. What are you doing?

• 49:29Matt Lewis?

  Which is interesting because it sort of goes back to what we mentioned before about the idea that the church is less worried about witches than they are about the belief in the power of witchcraft.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. Yeah. You know, he, in a sense, is more heretical than she is because he's giving the devil greater influence in the world. And surely that is a bad thing. Doesn't that make him a little bit like a devil worshiper? Doesn't that make him one of Satan's parties? So she's really got a point.

• 49:54Matt Lewis?

  I bet Heinrich loved this. I bet he was really appreciative of the feedback.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, he absolutely hated it. Of course he did. Yes. He says at one point she curses him in the street, you know, she says, she hopes he gets the falling sickness and, and dies. So I imagine they've got pretty heated between them. And certainly I can imagine him standing in the pulpit thundering away, denouncing people like her. And he brings her to a witch trial along with these, these six other women. But things do not go according to plan. Things don't turn out the way that you might have expected. Helena goes out and she gets herself a lawyer and she starts to fight back. One of the things that's interesting about the case is that she doesn't do it alone. And I do think this is really important. There are men in that community who wanted to defend her.

• 50:40Speaker 04

  So there are also these kind of allies of accused witches that I think we ought also to, to notice in this period. Absolutely not all medieval men thought that the witches are running rife in their communities and ought to get rid of them. There's a spokesman for the local bishop in Innsbruck who stands up for her. Her husband stands up for her. Various other people in the community also either refuse to give evidence against these women or help to arrange legal support for them. And eventually they are freed. They are fine. They managed to turn the case around so that, like we were saying earlier, it's really the inquisitor is on trial. Ecclesiastical structures have decided that he's the interloper, he's the problem.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  He's the one with the weird religious ideas. Let's get rid of him. He takes absolutely ages to leave Innsbruck. He doesn't, he doesn't go quietly. No, he is, I am sure, a horrible man who is deeply upset by all of this and, and yeah, feels himself to be victimized and, and picked upon and, and has this kind of paranoid belief that the witches are going to attack him. He doesn't go for absolutely months and they more or less have to throw him out of the diocese. But it's this great example of, of a witch trial where, where somebody is trying to stage a witch trial for political purposes and trying to spread their own influence in a region. And on this occasion, the woman he picks is the wrong woman and she stands up to him.

• 51:58Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And I guess, you know, we know from, as you say, Heinrich Kramer doesn't back off from this. He doesn't think, oh, I've got this wrong. Is there an extent to which his experiences in Innsbruck with Helena and the others actually intensifies his belief that he's right and that he needs to, to simply go further and, and harder in his treatment of witches?

• 52:21Speaker 04

  He's a classic doubler down there is Heinrich. So it's a great story of Helena, what a heroine. But one of the outcomes is that Heinrich goes back to Germany where he sits down and he writes Malleus Maleficarum, which is this fat, ugly treatise about demonology, which particularly lays into women and, and describes them as all the things we've talked about are really weak, stupid, stubborn, gossipy, demonic, lustful, ambitious, all of that kind of stuff. And it really spreads the idea that witches are more likely to be women and this is why. And he gives a whole variety of different instructions for how to hold a witch trial.

• 53:04Speaker 04

  One of them is really interesting, he don't have any lawyers present. And you can tell where he got that from. That's his experience in Innsbruck.

• 53:11Matt Lewis?

  Heinrich, we can see what you're doing. We can see what you're doing.

• 53:13Speaker 04

  Yes, he's so transparent. It's a revolting book. And, you know, when I've studied it with students in the past, the, the response is just like, oh, this is horrible. How can he be saying this? This is so offensive and wrong. And yes, of course it is by modern standards. Even at the time, many people thought it had gone too far and, and they did not agree with him. Again, lots of medieval churchmen were much better people than Heinrich Kramer. But it was influential in a variety of ways. And because it tells all these stories of sex with the devil and a whole bunch of other sordid stuff about boiling babies and, and, you know, holding orgies and stuff like that. People read it because it's salacious and, and it's kind of interesting and it's fun. And that's where the story of the devil and the lettuce comes from. And people, who wouldn't want to read that story?

• 53:58Speaker 04

  So it does become quite popular from the point of view of, of being read as a textbook. Whether people put its lessons into practice or not, it spreads the idea of the witch. So ultimately the outcome of the Innsbruck trial of fourteen eighty-five is a pretty bad one because it creates this conspiracy theory booklet that can be accessed by quite a lot of people all across Europe.

• 54:18Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And is there an extent to which as well, given Heinrich's experiences in Innsbruck, he's now adding the idea of women who stand up to authority as potentially being a witch as well? Does he go that far?

• 54:30Speaker 04

  He does. Yeah. You know, if women are, as he puts it, immodest,

• 54:36Speaker 04

  then they are particularly likely to be witches. So in, in a sense, you know, the stereotype of, of the witch is Helena. That's who he thinks is a witch and that's who a lot of other churchmen and ministers and magistrates and kings ultimately also come to believe is the stereotype of a witch too.

• 54:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. I mean, I guess if you give him any kind of leeway, if he genuinely believed in witches, he might be looking at Helena as the model of the one that got away. And, you know, how do I stop a witch getting away from me ever again? This is what she's done. So I need to make sure no witch can do that again. But it is also just vile and it just smacks of it. Was, was he like five foot tall and, and not very popular? I don't know.

• 55:14Speaker 04

  It would be nice to know, wouldn't it?

• 55:16Matt Lewis?

  A fairly horrible man who was using this as a tool to make himself feel big and feel important. I don't know. I don't like him.

• 55:24Speaker 04

  No, I don't like him. I always try to find some commonality with any historical person. You know, it's, it's always important to try and see the point of view that they are coming from. But when you read Heinrich's books, you know, people can get it online, have a look at it. It does have this horrible, sneering, malicious, angry, satirical kind of tone. And you do feel like this is a man you would not have wanted to spend any time with. And, you know, he's kind of the godfather of, of the witch craze in a lot of ways. And he's just the man you would expect him to be.

• 55:55Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And because partly, I mean, what, what his book seems to do also is take all of that theology that's been going on for a while, all of that debate and that sort of almost abstracted idea of what is a demon and, and what can they do and what can't they do? And what he gives you instead in Malleus Maleficarum is, is like an instruction manual for how to go out and do this stuff. You know, it's not sit at home and think about the universe and how it's comprised. It's like, get out there, find a witch and this is how you try them.

• 56:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's not a philosophical book. No, it's a manual. And that does make it particularly terrifying. It's the culmination of that drift that we've talked about from the early medieval understanding of magic as being something that anybody might do. And it's probably fine. So we to the idea that there is this enormous conspiracy of witches and that finally something must be done about it. And that something is killing people in very large numbers.

• 56:45Matt Lewis?

  Yeah. And presumably the timing of this is significant as well because you've got the printing press emerging, which makes it easier to reproduce these books and spread them. And so Kramer's kind of fear and panic can be much more easily spread around Europe and everyone can get a hold of a copy of this book and be, be terrified.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's right. It's a bit like the internet really. You know, the way I think about it is the printing press is kind of like the internet. It spreads mad conspiracy theories as well as spreading, you know, excellent philosophical and religious ideas and, and new, new science and new knowledge and all the good stuff. It brings all the bad stuff with it and it enables anybody to access it. It is no wonder that a big period of witch hunting follows.

• 57:28Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And I wonder as well, we've talked a bit about how this sort of conspiracy of witches has grown from something else and become polarized, politically charged and all of those things. And I wonder whether you can still see parallels of that today. When you think about the kind of the moral panics that can run through society. We literally talk about political witch hunts when people go after politicians for something. Are we seeing something very, very similar happening? Because, because again, I think there's a temptation to think, you know, witch hunts, medieval, they were clearly stupid and believed in witches. The principles of a lot of what happens today aren't actually that different, are they?

• 58:04Speaker 04

  No, I don't think they are. You know, you do see witch hunting in contemporary culture. Every time I see a persecution, I always think about the features it has in common with a witch hunt. And yes, of course, politicians have started using the word witch quite frequently. Sometimes in ways that we might not necessarily approve or when they're claiming to be witch hunted and we're not really sure they are. But absolutely, it's brought the idea of the witch hunt into political discourse in a way that I think is really quite helpful because it makes us notice unjust persecution and think about that. And of course, around the world, hundreds of people are every year being killed as witches. You know, it happens in Indonesia, it happens in Africa, it happens in India. There are even cases in Western Europe sometimes.

• 58:45Speaker 04

  So the idea of the witch is absolutely not dead. This is a medieval idea that has not gone away at all.

• 58:53Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, yeah. And I wanted to finish on, kind of looking across this, the whole medieval period, as witchcraft kind of evolves and changes and develops, or at least society, the Church's view of it, changes and evolves and develops. Is there a single kind of big myth, or a big misconception, or a big misunderstanding about medieval witchcraft that you would like listeners to be disabused of, that you would like to kind of wipe away now?

• 59:21Speaker 04

  I guess, yeah, the idea that it is medieval in the sense that it is stupid. Yes, and I bet you get that a lot. You know, the word medieval is not code for stupid and backward. No, the witch hunters were often among the foremost thinkers of their time. Sadly, they were churchmen who bothered to think about what the universe was made of, how it worked, what was the relationship between God and the devil, what was the relationship between man and woman, how did categories work, how did we decide who was a good person and a bad person, what was a heresy, what was the true religion. They're asking themselves all these really high level questions, and they come up with the wrong answer. But that is not because they are stupid, and it's not because they're medieval.

• 1:00:04Speaker 04

  I think it's just because they're people, and this is a conspiracy theory that happens to take root in that time. But we still think like that now. I think it's, I think it's who we are as people. It's not because they were medieval people, it's because they were people.

• 1:00:18Matt Lewis?

  Yeah, I mean, again, you say people equate, and you quite still often hear it in modern rhetoric, don't you, that if someone wants to say that something is brutal, or unnecessarily violent, or somehow backward, they will describe it as medieval. It's still a really pejorative term. But we also live in a world that is absolutely jam packed with conspiracy theories, that lots and lots of people do believe. So, are we really any different from the people who believed in witches five, six hundred years ago?

• 1:00:45Speaker 04

  No, I think we're medieval now. If that's what medieval means, we are medieval too.

• 1:00:51Matt Lewis?

  Well, I mean, that feels like a perfect note to end a medieval podcast on. We're all still very much medieval. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Marian. This has been absolutely fascinating to explore the kind of, the origins of the idea of witches. And we'll leave the audience on the explosion of the real witch trials, and the witch hunts, and the witch craze, which is really an early modern thing, rather than a medieval thing. So thank you so much for joining us and helping us work our way all the way through that. It's been very, very interesting.

• 1:01:19Speaker 04

  It's been a pleasure. Thank you.

• 1:01:21Matt Lewis?

  I hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you want a deeper dive into the human stories behind these trials, then make sure to go and pick up Marian's book, Witchcraft: A History in Thirteen Trials, and also Witchland. They're essential reading for anyone who's interested in the history of magic and persecution. There are new installments of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please come back to 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 also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week at historyhit.com/subscribe. Anyway, I'd

• 1:02:05Matt Lewis?

  better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just Gone Medieval with History Hit.

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