In 897, in Rome, Pope Stephen VI was strangled, in prison. There. That's the True Crime. We don't know who did it -- a representative of the people of Rome, we suppose. The interesting part of this crime is not that he got murdered, but why he got murdered. Which was that he had dug up the 7 months dead corpse of a predecessor and put it on trial. In fancy papal garb. With a deacon giving answers to questions, since the dead pope on trial couldn't do it. We bring you The Cadaver Synod! And Miche...
Oct 28, 2021•38 min•Season 2Ep. 51
One day, after the Saxons won one of the many battles in the Saxon Wars, Charlemagne, who was pretty annoyed, ordered the mass execution of 4,500 warriors. This didn't really tarnish his golden reputation until the 18th century, when it began to bother people. We discuss the Saxons, Charlemagne's reputation, the trouble that the Nazis had in figuring out how to talk about him, and, oddly enough, Christopher Lee and his heavy metal Charlemagne albums.
Oct 14, 2021•46 min•Season 2Ep. 50
Edward I invaded Scotland in 1296, on account of (he said) their broken feudal obligations. Amongst the usual spoils of war -- prisoners, horses, weapons, nice gold stuff -- he took a rock. Weighing about 335 pounds. We discuss the theft of the Stone of Destiny, and its subsequent history. Including, to our delight, a 20th century liberation of the Stone, wherein four university students break into Westminster Abbey and take the stone back to Scotland. Then it went back to England. Now it's in S...
Sep 29, 2021•50 min
As a true crime subject, our Viking child is problematic: who is he? We don't know. How did he die? We don't know. Why did he get thrown in the tidal pool that's now the back gardens of Dublin Castle? We don't know. When did this happen? We don't know. But we know something bad happened. And Michelle gets to talk about archeology and awesome civil disobedience in the service of history.
Aug 27, 2021•44 min•Season 2Ep. 48
The Primary Russian Chronicle tells us much about the revenge that Olga of of the Kievan Rus took on the Drevlians after they killed her husband. And most of it is surely mythological. Entire boatloads of ambassadors being dropped into a trench, dug overnight in the royal hall? Two groups of ambassadors slaughtered, without the Drevlians getting suspicious? Flocks of bird set on fire, and then burning a town down? No, no, and no. However, Anne stands firm on the blood feast, and Michelle stands ...
Aug 11, 2021•52 min•Season 2Ep. 47
We interrupt our regular programming to explain that COVID hijacked our schedule. Don't worry, all is well; it's just busy around here. We will be back in two weeks for our usual discussion of the bad behaviour of long dead people. Stay safe!
Jul 28, 2021•3 min•Season 2Ep. 46
After the Normans conquered England, the pope sanctioned them, on account of how much slaughtering had gone on. So, being sanctioned, they were very sorry. Which is why William the Conqueror founded Battle Abbey, where the Battle of Hastings was. And when he did that, he gave the monks some special rights (mostly having to do with not being required to listen to the bishop), but they didn't get written down, because nobody needed to; the king, after all, had said so. But time moved on, and writt...
Jul 14, 2021•55 min•Season 2Ep. 46
From the middle of the 5th century until 1204, Constantinople was the largest, the wealthiest, the most sophisticated, the most important city in Europe. Then the 4th Crusade, which had intended to go retake Jerusalem, went to the center of Eastern Christianity and besieged it, sacked it, crippled it, and destroyed -- for at least 800 years -- the relations between the Roman Christians and the Byzantine Christians. None of this makes any sense, except that money was involved and people behaved b...
Jun 30, 2021•52 min•Season 2Ep. 45
If you are an Earl, and you are sent a safe conduct pass to go talk to the King, you're safe, right? You can go meet them, and calmly discuss that alliance you made with a couple of other noblemen, one that is not in favor of the king and his kingly position. Calmly, yes, and then you can go home. Unless it's 1452, and you're in Scotland, and you're one of the Douglases, and the king is known for having a very bad temper. In which case you might get stabbed 26 times and thrown out a window. Real...
Jun 16, 2021•53 min•Season 2Ep. 44
It's very rude to copy books secretly whilst staying with one of your old teachers, even if you are very careful not to harm the books, and don't use cheese sandwiches as bookmarks. That's what we learn from this episode. Also that the ancient kings of Ireland liked to use cattle as examples of just about everything. And that the O'Neills were willing to go to war with the High King over a book. Michelle and Anne discuss the meaning of copyright law, which really has nothing to do with copying a...
Jun 02, 2021•53 min•Season 2Ep. 43
At the end of May 1593, the most important and influential playwright in England died at the age of 29. Rumor and gossip and a great many history books and literature collections would say, over the centuries, that he died in a tavern brawl. To be fair, his earlier history with drunken brawl involvement makes this plausible. But the evidence -- or rather, the lack of evidence -- given at the inquest makes it clear that he was being got rid of. Oh, besides being a writer, he was involved in Walsi...
May 19, 2021•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 42
Joanna of Naples had a hell of a life. There were unhappy marriages, there were murders, there were invasions, there was the Black Death, there was the Papal Schism, and there was a tangled ball of plots and tussles over the inheritance of the Neapolitan throne. At the end of it all, she was murdered and thrown into a well. And then she enjoyed hundreds of years of a Very Bad Reputation. But recently, scholarship has turned the tide! She was an excellent leader, who was beleaguered by a whole lo...
May 05, 2021•59 min•Season 2Ep. 41
First some undergraduates got drunk over in a tavern, and then they didn't pay, and so the townspeople beat them up. That was Shrove Tuesday. Fair enough. On Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, when they were supposed to be repenting and thinking about their sinful lives, the students got some buddies together and went and trashed the pub, beat up the taverner, and looted and trashed the nearby businesses. But the townspeople couldn't do anything about it, cause the local law couldn't do anyth...
Apr 21, 2021•58 min•Season 2Ep. 40
Everybody knows that the Droit de Seigneur (the right of a feudal lord to sleep with a bride on her wedding night) existed. Except it didn't. Why, then, did Ferdinand II of Aragon abolish it in 1486? Why indeed. We discuss this. Also we discuss the history of the first night myth. And Michelle explains why you should buy books when you see them, instead of waiting till later.
Apr 07, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 39
One day the King of England went out hunting, and did not come back, on account of having been shot by one of his hunting companions. Henry, his younger brother, became King in just a few days, and there was no inquest. Nobody at the time thought anything of this, really, because dying whilst hunting in the New Forest was pretty common, but later, lots of people Got Suspicious. We discuss this. Also the fact that the Face of Lucca doesn't really have anything to do with the Face of Bo.
Mar 24, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 2Ep. 38
In honor of St. Patrick's day, we have no snakes, no druids. We talk about Irish pirates capturing young Patricius, which was a crime, and then St. Patrick being all remorseful about something which was some sort of crime but nobody knows what it was, and then, having done all that, we talk a whole lot about St. Patrick movies, including a silent film from 1920 with which we are totally impressed, and another from 2000, which involves David Tennant and has us bemused. Also there is information a...
Mar 10, 2021•51 min•Season 2Ep. 37
After being hired to help run victuals into Stockholm through Queen Margaret of Denmark's blockade, the Victual Brothers turned to piracy, decimating the herring trade and annoying the Hanseatic League. Anne explains all that stuff, and Michelle waxes poetic about the medieval cog, which was apparently an awesome sort of ship. And as a special treat, we append the recording we made wherein we figured out why our sound issues hadn't been solved.
Feb 24, 2021•51 min•Season 2Ep. 36
Mabel de Bellême, wealthy Norman landowner, belonged to the de Bellême family. They were infamous for cruelty and general wickedness. Mabel exercised her share of the wickedness and cruelty; eventually one of the many Normans she impoverished gathered his brothers and murdered her. We discuss the de Bellêmes, when we're not discussing Orderic Vitalis, the monk who chronicled their history. (For those of you who have forgotten, it's Orderic who thought that the White Ship crashed on account of so...
Feb 10, 2021•48 min•Season 2Ep. 35
Sir Thomas Malory of Newbold Revel got into lots of legal trouble in 1443, 1451, 1452, and might or might not have done the things he got accused of, but he did indeed enter into a plot, along with Richard Neville, to overthrow King Edward IV, for which he ended up in prison. Too bad for him! But lucky for us, because that's when he wrote The Hoole Book of Kyng Arthur and of His Noble Knyghtes of The Rounde Table, which got published, after his death, by William Caxton, which is why we know it. ...
Jan 27, 2021•1 hr 3 min
Happy New Year! An episode without any deaths! The "chief treasure of the western world" (as the Annals of Ulster reported) was stolen from the Abbey of Kells in 1006, surprisingly, not by Vikings. The thieves tore off the cover, which was encrusted with gold and jewels, we figure, and threw away the manuscript itself, which was found 2 months and 20 days afterwards, "under a sod." Besides the book itself, and some other book which was like it in being thrown in a bog, and Kells, why we want to ...
Jan 13, 2021•1 hr 2 min•Season 2Ep. 33
It's a Special Episode! Peter Konieczny joins us, to share his knowledge and stories about frauds in medieval London. A fake Earl's son, who needs you to help a lot, really, no kidding. Fake government inspectors who need you to hand over the ale so they can test it, bye-bye. Bakers who steal bits of your dough so as to make extra loaves and shortchange you. Merchants who put dirt in cinnamon. London's a scary place. Many thanks to Peter and medievalists.net.
Dec 30, 2020•48 min•Season 2Ep. 32
After years of annoying each other, and fighting about the boundaries between church power and royal power, Henry II of England lost his temper with Thomas Becket, at Christmas, and said something (we don't actually know what, exactly) which caused four knights who didn't know him very well (and hence didn't realize that he lost his temper all the time and would be getting over it in a while) to go down to Canterbury and murder the Archbishop. Bad career move, really. And Thomas Becket, who was ...
Dec 16, 2020•1 hr 20 min•Season 2Ep. 31
Once the Latin Church figured out how to justify slaughtering people who weren't believing the things they were supposed to believe, according to the Latin Church, it was a short leap from slaughtering them in the Holy Land to slaughtering them in Europe. The Cathars were being very wrong, very wrong indeed, on account of being dualists and not believing in things like baptism and the resurrection. So the Pope called a crusade against them. And the French monarchy was glad to help, since the Lan...
Dec 02, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 2Ep. 30
At the end of 1095, Pope Urban II called for the first of several crusades, wherein the Latin Christian Europeans were supposed to go take the Holy Land away from the Islamic rulers who held it at that time. So the nobility of Europe, mostly from France, started putting together forces and money, so as to travel and fight. That was the Prince's Crusade, the First Crusade, and it would leave Europe in the summer of 1096. It takes a while to gather the wherewithal needed for such a venture. Unless...
Nov 18, 2020•50 min•Season 2Ep. 29
On Easter Monday, 1282, the Sicilians revolted against the French government that had been in place since 1266; in the course of a few weeks 4,000 to 8,000 French people were slaughtered, depending on what source you are reading. We explain how things got to such a pass, and Michelle has a lovely trip down a rabbit hole wherein she discovers the awesomeness of Stephen Runciman. George Orwell makes a cameo appearance.
Nov 04, 2020•43 min•Season 2Ep. 28
When Arche the Miller and a bunch of his cohorts got very very drunk and pretended to be ghosts, they were living in Early Modern England, but they were pretending to be Medieval Ghosts, new ghosts having not been invented yet. In this episode, we explain medieval ghosts and how to pretend to be one, tell medieval ghosts stories, and try to wrap our minds around the well-known medieval forensic tool wherein murdered bodies bleed when the murderer comes by. Happy Halloween!
Oct 21, 2020•1 hr 10 min•Season 2Ep. 2
Robert the Bruce was not yet King of the Scots when he stabbed John Comyn in front of the high altar in Greyfriars' Church in Dumfries. But he would be, pretty soon, in spite of being excommunicated for violence in the church. We explain the fight for the crown of Scotland and the interfering bossiness of Edward I of England, but we don't explain whether the Bruce murdered Comyn or it was self-defense, because we don't really know. Because chroniclers.
Oct 07, 2020•1 hr 16 min•Season 2Ep. 1
It was quite a shock to the rest of Europe when the Vikings, who had been raiding in Scandinavia and making little raids occasionally in Europe, pillaged The Holy Isle of Lindisfarne. The Vikings were pumped, though; it was a very profitable day. That was the beginning of the Viking Age. We discuss the Viking Age, why it was clear to the Vikings that raiding (as opposed to thievery) was not a crime, and why Hnefatafl, which everybody calls Viking chess, isn't really like chess at all.
Sep 23, 2020•1 hr 8 min•Season 1Ep. 25
After having lost Cyprus, their last holding in the Middle East, the Knights Templar no longer had a bunch of Christian pilgrims to protect, so they tried to figure out what to do next. Find new mandate? Join the Hospitalers? Well, no, neither one, darn it. Philip IV of France, who owed a whole hell of a lot of money to the order, strong armed the Pope, with the result that the order got disbanded and the French Templars got exterminated. We're both annoyed at Philip, Pope Clement V, Sir Walter ...
Sep 09, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 24
It's true that Edward II was a very bad ruler; one of his problems was that he would adhere loyally to his favorites. And though his loyalty to Piers Gaveston gave him difficulties, his loyalty to Hugh Despenser got him dead. Why, oh, why, did Edward think so highly of Hugh Despenser, the greedy dangerous, annoying chancellor who was so very dreadful that the queen invaded the country to get rid of him? And is the only Englishman to have a war named after him? Why? We don't know that. But we do ...
Aug 26, 2020•1 hr 14 min•Season 1Ep. 23
