1000 years of people behaving badly.
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In April, 1321, the lepers of Southern France found themselves accused of poisoning the community wells, with some sort of powder. They were, the theory went, attempting to spread leprosy to the rest of the population. They weren't doing that, or anything like that, but they were tortured and executed, and the leprosaria, the houses where they lived, were taken over, and all of the goods and…
It's our April Fools' Episode, in which we explain how it is we know that things purported to have existed in the Middle Ages did not actually exist! It's late, for April Fools' Day, by any known calendar, since it's the end of June, and also the Bisley Boy, who did not exist, did his not existing after the Middle Ages, thereby qualifying this episode as a Special Episode. Anne explains the…
In this episode, True Crime Medieval brings you two crimes, a father and son, both murdered in churches, though for different reasons altogether. Canute had enraged the peasants and nobility both, by enforcing the collection of tithes, while Charles had infuriated a badly behaved but powerful family which took it amiss when Charles attempted to make them stop gouging peasants during a famine.…
Béla of Macsó was still in his twenties when he went to a meeting on Margaret Island (which is in the middle of the Danube, in Budapest), which wasn't a meeting at all, but a trap. There had been fairly complicated struggles for power in Hungary among members of a strikingly dysfunctional family -- Béla's grandfather, the king, had caused problems, handing out lands to his children, and Béla of…
In the medieval scriptoria, amongst all the holy books, and the hagiographies, and the books of philosophy, and the legal charters, not to mention the beautiful illuminated manuscripts, there were often, we are sorry to tell you, forgeries being created. Sometimes monasteries needed to codify some history that hadn't gotten written down when it happened, or to provide documentation of some land…
The Vikings impacted European history -- west and east -- for centuries, from 793, when they attacked Lindisfarne Abbey in England, up until 1066, when they attacked England and lost to Harold Godwinson (though Harold would lose the next battle, at Hastings, in his fight against the Normans or, "French Vikings," as your hosts like to call them). These dates aren't really true, since the Vikings…
As far as we are concerned, a book entitled "Crusader Criminals: The Knights Who Went Rogue in the Holy Land," is, obviously, a book to read. To our joy, that book is informed, and readable, and full of Things We Did Not Know. And to our further joy, the author, Steve Tibble, who came to talk to us for this episode, is engaging, deeply informed, and kind hearted, and, of course, full of Things We…
To be fair, the Vikings attacked Paris several times, but it's the major sieges that get remembered -- the one in 845, when they invaded Paris on Easter Sunday, got bought off with a fairly large ransom, and then the one that started in 885 and ended in 886, after nearly a year of a siege wherein the Vikings, branching out from their usual plundering, used catapults and battering rams and other…
If you were living in Western Europe in the late middle ages and early modern age, you might well come across partly eaten humans, whilst walking around in the woods, or even, alas, strolling in Paris. OBVIOUSLY these partly eaten humans had been attacked by werewolves! Duh! There were a lot of real wolves roaming around, attacking humans, if the wolves had rabies, or there was a widespread famine…
The battle of Agincourt was almost over when Henry V ordered the prisoners killed. Nowadays, this would clearly be a war crime, but in 1415, it wasn't, though nobody liked it. Henry did not expect to win the battle, which involved a fairly small bunch of muddy unarmored Englishmen with dysentery up against a formidable line of armored Frenchmen on horses. So he didn't know, when a group of…