Medieval Treasures at the National Archives

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Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Matt Lewis. The National Archives is any medieval historian's treasure trove. Ancient documents, some of them central to the greatest stories in history fill boxes, aisles and whole rooms. My guest today is Ewan Roger, the Principal Medieval Records Specialist at the National Archives and a man whose job title might as well to me be Child in a Sweet Shop. Thank you very much for joining us, Ewan. Thanks, Matt. It's great to be here.

Brilliant. So just as our opener, what is the National Archives? How did it come to be this big depository of important documents? Yeah, so the National Archives, or TNA for short, used to be known as the Public Record Office, or PRO, and we're the official archive and publisher for UK central government.

and for England and Wales. And we hold records sent to us from UK central government and the central law courts for permanent preservation. So our collections contain over a thousand years of iconic national documents, from Doomsday to Downing Street tweets. And the public record... office was founded in 1838 to safely keep the public records. After centuries of rather suspect record keeping across different archives associated with each part of government,

and the law courts. So originally at the time of the Norman kings the monarch would have conducted the practical business of state through an itinerant court, so following the king around the country in the course of his travels. And the business of the courts produced written records which formed part of the king's treasure.

And so they were kept basically whichever royal palace the king was staying in. That's where the records would be kept. But as government becomes more complex in the 13th century.

The departments of state, such as the Royal Chancery, so the writing office, they stop travelling around with the king and start to settle down in permanent places. And consequentially, the different departments of government... all came to have their own treasuries or record repositories, including at the Tower of London, the Chapter House at Westminster Abbey, and the Rolls Chapel on Chancery Lane, where the PRO would later be housed.

But from the earliest days onwards, the practices of those in charge of storing and accessing records in the pre-modern period could sometimes be a little bit... questionable. And one of my favourite stories about how they're keeping these records is that the records of the Court of Common Pleas, so that's one of the main central law courts which sits in Westminster Hall, they stored their records in the medieval period.

in a chamber called hell underneath the hall so the room's official title was the common pleas treasury but they called it hell And it was staffed by the clerk of hell, which is quite frankly one of the best job titles I think I've ever heard. And there's a lovely reference in one of the records about this. So they actually try and stop people going into hell, saying none other shall have their recourse into hell at their pleasure.

And by the reign of Edward IV, they have a second chamber, which is named heaven or paradise in the same vicinity. And later on, we also find purgatory among the offices around Westminster. And these names come to represent yards, rooms, and even taverns on the Westminster estate. But by Henry VIII's reign, and this is something that, again, happens in the 19th century.

It turns out that several of these records become damaged. So Henry VIII's reign, it was by the moisture of the floor of the said house and the rotting of the chest standing in the floor of earth in the same. And they were greatly broken by both rats and mice. and some be rotten and some destroyed. And so they try and make repairs at this time. But it was a similar concern which would lead to the foundation of the PRO in the 19th century, the problem of rats.

So after a series of inquiries by committees within the House of Lords into the storage of historical documents in the 18th century, at the start of the 19th century, a man named Henry Cole. begins working with the records of government. And he's shocked by the poor condition they're being kept in. And so he helps to create what becomes known as the Public Record Office.

And as part of his evidence for how poorly these records are being stored, he presents to Parliament a mummified rat. And we effectually call that Henry Cole's rat today. And he'd found this rat with a stomach full of chewed documents, which helped secure the passing of the Public Records Act in 1838. And what's fascinating is in doing this...

the rat actually ends up becoming part of the PRO, and now TNA's, collections. So the rat has its own document reference, which is E163 slash 24 slash 31 slash 9.

and you can sometimes see it on display today and you can also buy a slightly cuter fluffy version in our shop. So our early record collections have this very long and complicated history and in terms of the type of records we hold they're very much focused on administrative and legal records that side of medieval life so what's reflected on the government side of things rather than personal collections which might be held in for example local archives so

For example, the records of a royal grant in medieval times, but made using a royal charter, for example, we will hold the process of the issue of that charter. So all the administrative warrants that kind of come into being while that's being granted. and the official crown copy of the grant enrolled in the chancery roles. But the physical charter that was given out to the grantee won't be in our collections. So that will be held at a kind of local or private collection. In a modern example...

We would have Department of Education correspondence about the policy and inspection of schools, but we wouldn't have internal records of the schools themselves. So pupil lists, they'd be at the local level. And where we do have some private deposits of individuals, they tend to be very high profile people. So the papers of Lord Kitchener, for example, or collections such as the Sealy and Stoner letters from the 15th century may also have come into.

central records by another means often linked with the seizure of individual papers or estates when someone was charged with treason or through for example a legal case So what this means in practice is that all of our collections include the kind of big hitters such as Doomsday Book and copies of Magna Carta, for example, the vast bulk of our pre-modern collections.

are the millions of administrative and legal records produced by central administrations through their everyday activities. And these can sometimes be a bit intimidating to try and search through initially, but they can shed light on a huge number of subjects.

And basically, it's a case of looking for where the state and an individual institution or group intersect. So it's a great place to work and to research for that very reason, because there are so many different rabbit holes you can go down and new discoveries to be made. It's incredible to think there's everything from Magna Carta to a mummified rat with a belly full of chewed up records. It's an incredible range of materials to have in there.

So how does the TNA work? Can anybody go? Could I go down to the TNA and look at some of these records? Yeah, so our collections are open to absolutely anyone to access at our site in Kew in West London or through our online resources. And that's whether you're an Oxford professor or simply an interested amateur. So all you need to do to get a reader's ticket is bring along... couple of forms of ID.

And then you can use our research library, access online resources on our computers, visit our exhibition space and cafe without any ID requirements at all for those. And you can also ask our specialist staff for advice about doing your research. to welcome as many people from different backgrounds as possible. Sounds like an incredible day, week, month out, somewhere to get lost. I know one of the projects that...

I've been keeping a particular eye on that you and the TNA have been working on, and not in a weird stalkery way, but because it's something I'm interested in, is the readaption of Henry VI. So this is his brief return to the throne in late 1470 until early 1471.

kind of called the re-adaption as an invented word for what do you call a king who's been booted off the throne and then comes back for a while. But it was a famously poorly documented period due to lots of the materials being destroyed when the Yorkists... come back to the throne. So was it a challenge to work in that apparent vacuum of material or was there more that survived than you'd expected or was it a case of looking in slightly different places?

Yeah, the readaption is a period that has absolutely fascinated me for several years now, because for me it's such an important period in the Wars of the Roses, and Edward IV's reign in particular, but it's often overlooked in part of the histories of this period.

because of both the shortness of Henry's return to the throne, which, as you say, is called the readaption, and it's actually called that in documents from the time, even if perhaps Henry is not quite with it. He's suffering mental illness at this point. So it's kind of a puppet king at this point.

But because of the shortness of his return to the throne, and as you say, because some of the most crucial records being destroyed in the aftermath of the re-adaption, it's often overlooked. And I think this is particularly evident when you look at, say, royal biographies of both Henry VI.

and Edward IV, where for Henry it's often treated as an epilogue to his life and reign, given that he was basically king as a figurehead, while Edward's biographers have naturally tended to focus on his movements when he's in exile. rather than events in England. So it's a really complex period. But as I say, I think it's a real turning point in which Edward IV secures his legacy.

removes almost all of his chief rivals and it leads to relative peace in England for the next decade until Edward's death. But it could easily have gone the other way so I think it is really important to study this very short period in detail. despite the difficulties and challenges associated with this. And I think it's as fundamental as we know Parliament sat during that period, but we don't have any records of what might have been discussed or decided there.

Yeah, exactly. So the one main document which might have shed light on the events. the account of the parliament, which took place over the winter of 1470 to 71. The parliament role does appear to have been compiled, but then likely destroyed in the following years. And so we know very few items of parliamentary business for certain.

We know kind of what institutions and individuals would likely have been doing. They'd have been trying to secure confirmation of their various grants and privileges under the returning administration. But we can only get hints of these interactions in what survives.

And particularly as it was the 550th anniversary of this key date in 2020, we decided to try and take a really deep dive into what does survive to see if we could find new angles for what's happened. So one approach we took... was to try and link the records held in TNA's collections with records held elsewhere. So the local end of that interaction between state and individual. So this was something I was able to do previously, which kind of led to my interest in the readaption.

by looking at the clerk of the parliaments, a man called Baldwin Hyde. Now Hyde was also a canon of St George's College at Windsor Castle during his time working at the readaption parliament. And for the period 1468 to 79, the college has an amazing surviving attendance register in which Hyde's movements during the parliament were recorded. So in this register, it records official attendance in chapel each day, but it also records where

official absence was being granted by the college and one of the community was essentially being paid as being present but he's not there, he's away somewhere else on official business. So I guess it's a medieval form of kind of official working from home. And in Hyde's case, he was actually working as the clerk of the parliaments. So from linking these two sources...

types of documents, we can actually identify the likely start and end dates for each parliamentary session. And we know that hides there throughout, even if we can't tell exactly the type of records that he's compiling. in his records. Now we were hoping to do more of this but unfortunately Covid meant we weren't able to get into these local archives to try and match them up.

to what's held at TNA. So we're hoping there'll be lots more opportunities for new angles yet to come. But I think it does show the benefits of comparing different archival sources to try and tell a fuller story. It's a good example, I think, of lateral coming at it from a sideways view. And we don't have those documents, but can we piece together some of the key figures involved? And can we try and recreate as much as possible from almost nothing?

Yeah, exactly. And the other thing we tried to do was we tried to think about where, but more importantly, when different documents might have been produced or recorded. or come into the Crown's collections. So one of the most useful types of documents which give a flavour of medieval life just generally at this time are legal records, because as disputes arise and are settled in court, they often pick up lots of...

The flavour of what's going on around different times, if you get insults being recorded, for example, or additional material that's not really legally relevant, but is being used to support a case. And what we found with the readaption... is because England's so unsettled at this point, one of the things we realise is you actually have to look several years later to try and find these disputes being recorded, because people don't want to rock the boat in periods of political uncertainty.

So we do find you have to look several years later to try and find cases to do with the readaption. And likewise, we find later government officials.

looking back on the events of the readaption, and sometimes preserving material from earlier periods, which might otherwise have been lost. So we found, for example, among the records of an exchequer official, In Henry VII's reign we found a copy of the Manifesto put forward against Edward IV by his brother George Duke of Clarence and his former ally the Earl of Warwick in 1469.

So this is part of the events building up to what would become the readaption. But we find these almost a couple of decades later being reflected on, looked back on, studied. when Henry himself is facing a bit of unrest in the country. So again, it's trying to think, where will things be? And how long do these disputes take to come out into the open? The other thing we're able to dig into is...

We kind of think of this period as being quite sparse in terms of records. But what we also found is there's a lot of background administrative work going on. throughout the readaption, with things like warrants producing these grants. These are documents that often go understudied in comparison to the more popular series, which have been published, calendared, made available in various publications.

The way we were thinking about this was no matter the political intrigue, people still need to be paid for things. The crown still needs to pay for food and drink and wealthy goods and jewels and clothing. So all of this still needs to go on. And that material does survive. So it can be in places a bit dry, a bit tricky to try and work out exactly what's going on. But the administration of both the Exchequer and the Chancery does keep ticking over.

And we can start to track day by day how the administration of royal favour proceeds in these difficult times. And what we found, I'd say, is that once you look beyond the initial view of this vacuum of records... and start to dig a bit deeper, there is more that meets the eye sometimes. And these records can be quite intimidating to look at at first, as they're sorted in several different ways. Sometimes they're sorted by the official they're being sent to, sometimes alphabetically.

most commonly by date alone. So they can be very difficult to get your head around how these documents are structured and how they will fit together. But by piecing together these little hints and linking between different series, different collections...

you can start to build up a more nuanced picture. Sounds like trying to do a big 10,000-piece jigsaw that's all one colour and desperately trying to make sense of it all. Exactly. And sometimes these records, these kind of warrants that are... producing grants and gifts to people sometimes they do just copy what you get in the patent rolls so the patent rolls are the kind of final product where the letter is being sent out to someone

to grant them a position, a title, amount of money but sometimes you do get more information hidden away in this administrative mass.

And one of my favourite examples of this comes from a little bit later, in June 1497. So as part of my research into a charitable foundation at Windsor Castle, who are called the Poor Knights of Windsor... And they're now known as the military knights. So this is a group who are meant to provide a living and accommodation for men.

who have been injured or retired, who had served in the king's wars and become impoverished as a result. So it's a kind of early form of Chelsea pensioner. And I was examining the appointments and grants of these men in the 1480s and 90s. So for the earlier periods, you often get loads of details about their war service. These are veterans who have served in various places in France. But for the later period, you don't get as much detail in these grants.

mainly because the Hundred Years' War is over by this stage, and so knights aren't getting ransomed by the French all the time. But one appointment I came across was a man called John Lyle, and the enrolled grant gives basically no information. So it says grant to John Lyle of the place of one of the Knights of Prayers or Arms with the College of Windsor on the next vacancy. Not a huge amount of information there. Nothing really to dig into this man's career.

But if you look at the warrants which provided this grant, you get more information because the warrant is actually a petition to the Crown requesting this grant. And Lyle himself asked to be granted this position. And in his warrant, which isn't in the grant at all, he states that he was servant to Giles Lord Daubney. And on the basis of this, Giles had requested he be rewarded. If we look at the date of the grant, however...

and we see the date of the grant is the 20th of June 1497, and the grant was accepted by Henry VII, we find a clue about the real reason for his reward. Because three days earlier, the Cornish Rebellion of 1497... had reached Blackheath just outside London and the rebels in that rebellion were defeated in the Battle of Blackheath by royal forces and one of the men at the very heart of this battle

was Giles Lord Daubeny, who finds himself surrounded and wounded in the fighting. And so it seems entirely likely that Lyle is getting this reward. probably for his service during the battle, whether he saves Dorbany's life or at least kind of serves him loyally in the fighting. All that information is lost from the final grant. So it's an example of where...

These grants, the patent rolls, have been published and they're widely available and historians around the world use them regularly. But without digging into this... puzzle this material behind the final product you'd never really see that full picture and it is tricky to try and piece this all together but I think it's worth it a lot of the time to find out more.

It sounds like what we think of as being these wealth mines of information actually only tell us a fraction of the story and there's so much there to be bolted onto and built around.

that bare minimum that tells a much more colourful story about an individual or an event. Yeah, definitely. And I should say as well that not all of our records are even accessible in this way at the moment because... We have a salt mine where we keep lots of records that haven't been sorted. And because of various reasons, including damp and mould on some of these documents, they may never be accessible. But there are millions and millions of records that have never really been looked at.

So I think sometimes we think medieval history, what more is there to know? But there's this vast ocean of documentation still to be properly looked into. I feel like I need to get in there and get into one of those boxes. Ha ha ha. Hi, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and in my podcast, Not Just the Tudors, we talk about everything from sex to spying.

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So are there any interesting or exciting projects going on at the moment that you could tell us a little bit about? So, yes, one of the most exciting things is that some of these warrants are starting to be calendared and made more available. So particularly for those interested in the Wars of the Roses, the exchequer warrants for the Yorkist kings are currently being worked on, calendared, with the aim to make them more available.

So the Richard III Society have funded this for the Ricardia Morants, which will make available a huge amount of fascinating material in the near future, I believe. about Richard III's reign with payments for all sorts of things from royal gifts at Christmas to the purchase of clothes and jewels. And that's very much a Ricardian society project, but it's going to be amazing when it comes out to properly look through.

and find out more about Richard's reign but at TNA we've also been working with some volunteers and placement students to try and make a start at least on the huge number of warrants for Edward IV's reign although this will probably take a lot longer before it's finished because just lots and lots of them. So that's definitely one to watch out for in the future.

And I am hoping we can at some point do something similar with more of the chancery style warrants. But for the moment, I've been busy trying to explain some of the oddities I've been finding in these collections, including that of John Lyle. But there's also some weirder things that we've been looking into recently. So we found in some of these warrants, they randomly start writing part of the documents in mirror writing. So in the kind of style of writing that Leonardo da Vinci...

it was quite famous for doing, literally writing so that if you hold a mirror to the document, you can read the document in the mirror. So it's written backwards. And we have no idea why they started writing like this for a short period in the 15th century. And a specialist, record specialist, when you find something weird like this, you often end up going down these kind of research rabbit holes to try and explain these oddities.

So in this case, I think it's to do with how these warrants are being sealed. And it opens up more and more questions, which ultimately add to our knowledge about these documents and how they were created. Chancery warrants one for the future, hopefully. At the moment, it's a bit complicated, but we're trying new ways. It's a fascinating, odd detail that for some reason, at some point, they started using mirror writing for presumably a fairly brief period.

with no kind of explanation of why they were doing it, really. Yeah, I think it's an attempt to essentially make the contents of a document, or the kind of summary contents of a document, more accessible. and readable when a document's been sealed. So you don't seal all these documents and then forget who each one's meant to be sent to. So once you send them off to the Chancellor, you can still tell who they relate to. But...

I think it's ultimately unsuccessful because it doesn't last very long. So I think it's a kind of a failed attempt at reform potentially. Yeah, an experimental reform that didn't quite work out. Yeah, exactly.

We've also been thinking a lot about how we can explore our pre-modern collections in new ways. And so a lot of the history of the medieval period... has been the kind of traditional constitutional political history. But we're trying to work out where there are new areas to explore new themes to look at. So I've recently been working quite a lot on pre-modern state responses to pandemics and disease, including the earliest known quarantine and social distancing measures in England.

So these were put in place at Windsor Castle in 1517 because Henry VIII was terrified that people with the plague were getting into his castle. And it was instructed that alongside quarantine measures... Those suspected of infection had to use a four foot long white stick to mark signs of infection while leaving quarantine to collect provisions. And you can probably imagine it was obviously fascinating.

to see how closely some of the measures taken over the last year, two years, compared with those in the 16th century. So this is something I'm thinking about more and more in terms of... the aftermath of the recent pandemic and trying to expand this research a bit more to think about regulation of medical malpractice and

medical regulation more broadly in the years leading up to the foundation of the Royal College Physicians. So it's a kind of reflecting on recent research in line with kind of modern thoughts and experiences. Yeah, it's those echoes of history. And I'm just thinking of a few moments where I would have quite liked a two metre social distancing stick. Seems like a tool that could have come in handy several times over the last couple of years. Yeah, definitely. Do you have any kind of...

favorite documents are they big ones or are they unusual little gems that you come across do you find yourself turning the page and finding something unexpectedly amazing yeah so i'm a little bit obsessed with pre-modern marginalia So the doodles that you find and the kind of lyrics and riddles, which provide really human side to the individuals who compiled these records hundreds of years ago. And a lot of these tend to appear in our legal records the most.

probably the result of kind of long days copying out parchment sheet after parchment sheet, a very repetitive legal text. But there's such an insight into real life and real people in the past. And we've got loads of examples of these from children's exercise books.

through to records of the highest royal courts, people doodling and instilling the documents with their own personality. So I've got a couple of doodles to show you and also a riddle. And with the riddle, I cannot for the life of me work out the answer to it.

So if any of your listeners can work out what the answer to this riddle is, please let me know. So this is a Tudor riddle, which is recorded in the records of the Exchequer. And it reads like this. Because you will know the certainty... of us whose children these be to these children we be mothers and to our husbands they be brothers uncles to each other these children below and our sons be fathers to our husbands take here here is no outrage

For all this is in true marriage. And I've got no idea. It's one of those kind of puzzles that you still get today where you're trying to work out my cousin's father's son's sister. I've gone through this time and time again and I have absolutely no idea.

what it's meant here. But it's a fascinating kind of insight into the types of riddles that are around in early Tudor England. Now, I'm going to have a good think about that. And maybe if anybody who's listening has any thoughts, you can track Ewan down on Twitter and tell him what you think that means.

Yeah, definitely. And I've got some amazing kind of marginal doodles here. So this one that I'm looking at now is from I think a 13th century legal record. And what... is going on there's a whole tableau of images at the top of the document so we've got a lion and the lion is being poked by a man and the man is poking the lion's rear now we don't know the lion is often a symbol of royal authority

So we don't know whether this is the clerk himself kind of putting one over the king for having been out on this trip for so long. We don't know. We've got some lovely images of a horse and horses do feature quite prominently in some of our records but most entertainingly in the top right hand corner we have a small man sat on the toilet.

And there's a bit of Latin text above his drawing, which says, blessed are those who go down and hear the word of the Lord. Now what this actually probably represents is the word descendo. for going down. Here is being used as a bit of a pun to represent the descending of the bowels of this man while he sat on the toilet in quiet contemplation. So it's a very interesting doodle.

I suspect that whoever drew it probably wasn't particularly popular with his superiors if they saw this, but we have no idea whether they ever saw this or not. They must have been pretty sure they were going to get away with anything that was cheeky or naughty or... as you say, aimed at the king maybe even directly. They must have felt like they were anonymous enough that no one would ever find out. Well, the one I'll show you in just a second is very much not anonymous. They must have been...

working on the basis that no one was ever actually going to check these records. Although we know on occasion that lawyers and clerks would check them, but they're clearly hoping they could get away with it. So this second image I've got for you is again from that similar period from the 13th century. In this one, the clerk has drawn his favourite horse. And it's a very large horse and kind of full flight in the image. But what I love about this one...

is that the clerk has written the horse's name next to the doodle. So the horse's name is given as rusty. It's written in Anglo-Norman, but it's the Anglo-Norman for the kind of rusty coloured word. So... I just love the fact that this clerk was maybe riding around on this horse and he's just taken a bit of time to sketch him into the bottom of his record. And it's a fascinating drawing, this one. Yeah, maybe Rusty had been a particularly good boy that day.

And the clerk felt the need to immortalise him. Exactly. You know what's wild? Most people are still overpaying for car insurance just because it's a pain to switch. That's why there's Jerry. Jerry is the only app that compares rates from over 50 insurers in minutes and helps you switch fast with no spam calls.

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And get $10 when you trade a hundred. This is an investment that carries. We have some more images from the 15th century as well. So this isn't just the kind of 13th century thing. and there's one clerk that absolutely fascinates me so this is from 1471 this record and so just after the events of the readaption what we have is a clerk called Forster drawing himself on several occasions throughout one of the records of the Court of Common Pleas. So one of these main central legal records.

In these records, they would write their names at the bottom to authorise each bit of parchment, and Forster turns the F of his surname... into elaborate doodles. So on one occasion he turns himself into a centaur and it's a centaur who has to stab himself to give that crossbar of the F. But in this image here we've got what appears to be Forster's night out in London.

Because we have Forster, who's bleeding quite profusely from his forehead, seemingly accosting a young woman whose breasts are out. And in her hand, she's got a glove and she's got some sort of... either a purse or something that she's whacked him around the head with and we see her featuring in other images from this same role carrying a barrel of beer so we think she's probably a barmaid and this image

has nothing to do with the records and the cases around it. So we think it's just Forster potentially kind of narrating his night out in a visual form. But there is some interesting iconography. So there's a stalk with a snake in its mouth. which may indicate perhaps that she's a prostitute. But we don't really know. We've just got this image of Forster profusely bleeding. So I think he definitely got what he deserved in this occasion. Yeah.

Lad's night out in London went a bit wrong, as it has been doing for 600 years since. Exactly. And Forster does this, I think, about six or seven or eight times within this role. But what is absolutely fascinating to me... is that I think he gets told off for it because he carries on as a clerk in the next legal term, but he reverts back to a very small signature of his name. There is no elaboration whatsoever. It is just forced to have written very neatly, very professionally.

at the bottom of his entries. So I think someone does see this and gives them a bit of a telling off. Gets a slap twist. Yes, exactly. And I'll just show you one more image, or talk about one more image, which is my absolute favourite. i don't think i can ever top this as a doodle as finding another doodle better than this so this is from the 13th century and again it's from the records of the court of king's bench it's a role of essentially excuses from people not coming to court and

At the bottom of one of the entries, we have the text, my Lord's is like this, followed by a very, very, possibly the smallest he could draw, set of genitals. And then the line below, it reads, but Gerrard's... is like this. Cue a very large deal of genitals. So this is literally Gerard, who we think must be the clerk, having a go about his master, the person he's writing for, and claiming that Gerard is substantially

better endowed than his master. So it's a sign I think that things don't really change across hundreds of years. People are still kind of sketching these things on their records, although perhaps not on the records of the central law courts these days. Yeah, maybe not. But I was going to say, it's amazing how the kind of people we're insulting, the bosses, and the ways in which we're insulting people haven't changed in 700, 800 years.

Yeah, exactly. And there's another one from around a similar time where one of the clerks has written his name to authorise the parchment sheet. And then someone else has come along afterwards. and added the words Old Shrew above this guy's name. So yeah, it's clearly kind of this subterfuge, this, yeah, having a go at the masters in the court.

sticking it to the man yeah exactly i should say we've actually just released a set of playing cards based on some of our nice marginalia examples and some seals although sadly i wasn't allowed to include the naughty ones but you can buy these in tna's shop in queue and online as well oh fantastic

I'd say for listeners as well, if Ewan can send me some of these images, we'll try and pop these up on social media when the episode comes out so you can have a look at what Ewan's talking about. If you want to have a look, particularly at the Gerard one, maybe you don't, but we'll try and get some of those images up on social media so that everyone can look at them. what it is that Ewan is talking about there. And so do you have...

Any advice for anyone who might want to go to the National Archive to research something? So maybe people don't know where to start. Is there a good way to make the most of the trip? Do you have any tips on how people should interact with the National Archives? Yeah, definitely.

The main one I would say is do as much research as you can before you come. So work out what it is you want to look at. Think about where the type of records you might want might exist. Is something being paid for by government? If so.

You want to look at Exchequer. It's something being written by government. You might want to look at Chancery. So think about that. And the best way of doing that... is we've produced a whole series of research guides which draw on decades of research and specialist knowledge at... the National Archives and indeed based on material we had at the public record office previously so this information is all freely available on our website and it gives you

both a breakdown of where you can find things, but also then when you do find them, how are these things structured? How are you going to find things within a particular series? Because this will change depending on what you're looking at.

By having a read through those research guides in detail, then you're starting with a head start. And do as well... use the research expertise that we have at the archives so we have like a live chat service we have an email inquiry service if you're not sure about something and the research guide doesn't really explain it properly or you're not understanding what it means

just get in touch. We are here to help you do your research, to help you do the best research you can possibly do. So particularly if you're coming to Q from a long way away, just... prep in advance, talk to us, read our materials and just make sure you can then spend the best amount of time that you can in the archives.

I can feel myself in danger of getting banned from the live chat for being on there too much and asking too many stupid questions. And just to end on, you gave me a little teaser before we started recording that you might be able to give us a little bit of an exclusive.

Yeah, so I'm really excited about this. I can't say too much in terms of content as we've not quite finished the final prep for this yet. But at the moment, we're currently developing a major exhibition at TNA on the history of high treason. from the 1352 Treason Act through to the modern day. And it's hopefully going to be an amazing exhibition which will tell some of the biggest stories in the nation's history, from the Wars of the Roses to the Second World War, from Richard II to Charles I.

from Eleanor Cobham, the royal witch, to Anne Boleyn. And as well, we're going to try and tell some of the lesser known stories of those branded as traitors. So at its most basic, treason was a violation by a subject of their allegiance to the sovereign or the state.

And so in some ways, the story of treason is also a story of power and the relationship between the state and its subjects from the medieval period right through to the modern day. And it's been absolutely fascinating to research this. As we've been exploring across different specialist teams at TNA, the ways in which different generations would interpret, tweak and alter the definitions of treason in line with the concerns of their age. Adding new legislation where required, but...

What fascinates me the most is that the core of that 1352 Treason Act remains in force relatively unchanged today. So it's a story of how we've come from the 14th century to the country, the state that we are today, but how... At the core of this legislation is we still have those same acts in force. So it's a history of an act, a piece of legislation.

but I think it tells a much bigger story and we're all very, very excited for it. So do keep an eye out for this exhibition at the end of next year at TNA and come to queue if you can to come and see some of these iconic documents together on display for the first time.

It sounds like it could be an incredible opportunity to, as you say, chart the development of trees and how much of it has stayed the same and how much of it has changed as the kingdom changed into a state and the nation and the world around us changed.

Has treason really changed at its core? Or as you say, is it still very much the same as it's always been with things around the fringes being updated and altered a little bit? So that sounds like a fascinating one to definitely keep an eye out for. Thank you very much, Ewan. That's been absolutely fascinating. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me. It's been great. It's been wonderful to have a peek behind the scenes at the National Archives.

So don't forget to join Dr. Kat Jarman on Tuesday for another fantastic brand new episode. Don't forget to subscribe to Gone Medieval wherever you get your podcasts and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. I would like to give a quick mention to an episode of The Ancients, also from History Hit. In the lost tomb of Alexander the Great, Tristan is joined by Dr Chris Norton to talk about just where Alexander's resting place might be.

Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with History Hits.