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Mysterious Anglo-Saxon Bone Chests with Cat Jarman

Mysterious Anglo-Saxon Bone Chests with Cat Jarman

Released Thursday, 28th September 2023
 1 person rated this episode
Mysterious Anglo-Saxon Bone Chests with Cat Jarman

Mysterious Anglo-Saxon Bone Chests with Cat Jarman

Mysterious Anglo-Saxon Bone Chests with Cat Jarman

Mysterious Anglo-Saxon Bone Chests with Cat Jarman

Thursday, 28th September 2023
 1 person rated this episode
Rate Episode

Episode Transcript

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1:05

Welcome to this episode of Gone

1:07

Medieval. I'm Matt Lewis. I had the great

1:09

honor and pleasure of speaking at the Gloucester

1:12

History Festival this autumn. That's

1:14

not really anything to do with this episode. I kind of just wanted

1:16

to brag. It's a bit of a massive personal highlight

1:18

for me. Thank you for the applause that

1:21

I'm imagining right now. On the last day of the

1:23

festival though, there was one speaker I really

1:25

wanted to get a chat with for the podcast. I

1:27

also wanted to find out what she's up to now because

1:29

that speaker was the brilliant Kat Jarman,

1:32

former co-host right here on

1:34

Gone Medieval.

1:35

Kat's new book, The Bone Chests, is

1:38

newly released into the world to tell

1:40

fascinating stories of the birth

1:42

of England and of history and science

1:44

meeting to go further than either could

1:47

alone. Kat agreed to sit down with me just

1:50

before her first ever talk on

1:52

the new book to get to the bottom of the real

1:54

mystery. Why on earth did

1:56

she leave us? Oh, and we talked

1:58

a bit about those incredible bone chests.

1:59

Welcome

2:09

back to Con Medieval Cut. It's so nice to

2:11

have you here again. Yes, I'm absolutely delighted

2:14

to be back. It feels like a lifetime since

2:16

I left the podcast so delighted you'd have

2:18

me again. Really

2:19

excited about the new book so that's the perfect excuse

2:21

to have you back here to talk to us about

2:23

the bone chest. What are the bone chests?

2:26

Sounds cool.

2:27

Yes, I hear the title

2:29

pretty much first really. The bone chests are these absolutely

2:34

incredible chests in

2:36

Winchester Cathedral. Six wooden

2:38

chests. If you go into Winchester Cathedral today,

2:41

you walk down the nave, you get to the

2:43

choir and then to the presperatory and there are

2:45

these huge big stained screens and

2:48

you could quite easily miss these

2:50

chests but if you look up and you

2:52

can see high up on a ledge on either side

2:54

of you. Six carefully

2:57

carved and painted decorated

2:59

chests. You can sort of possibly

3:02

just about make up some writing on them but

3:05

these chests actually contain some of the most

3:07

illustrious royals of

3:09

early medieval England. They've

3:12

got, according to the outsiders

3:14

inside them, there are eight

3:16

kings, two bishops and

3:18

a formidable queen all buried inside

3:21

and we actually know that they've got much

3:23

more of an exciting history than that but

3:26

that's the core of

3:27

it really. I feel like I just heard a sharp intake

3:29

of breath from everyone who's been to Winchester Cathedral and not

3:31

noticed these things hidden away and now I've got to go back

3:33

and have a look at these. Easy to miss. How

3:36

long have they been at Winchester Cathedral

3:38

if they're Anglo-Saxon? Presumably

3:41

the cathedral wasn't as it is now so they must have been

3:43

moved around a little bit.

3:43

Yeah, so the current cathedral is a Norman Cathedral.

3:46

That was built in the 11th century but that

3:48

was built and it was part of the big story.

3:50

It was built after two other

3:52

churches so there were two former churches

3:55

there, one of them dating way back to the 7th

3:57

century so you have Oldminster and Newminster.

4:00

And then when the Normans came in, they sort of essentially

4:02

replaced everything with their own work. So

4:04

the current cathedral has only been there for that long. So

4:07

the bones inside, some of these royals

4:10

actually date back to the 7th century as well. So

4:12

they've been around for a very, very long time. But

4:14

the chests themselves, the current chests that you see now,

4:17

date really from the 16th century mainly.

4:20

But they are replacing earlier chests. There

4:22

are certainly some that were made

4:25

in the 1400s, some early forerunners to

4:27

these that are still in the cathedral as well. And

4:29

we know that there are other, even

4:32

earlier ones that go back to the 12th century. So possibly

4:34

even before that. So

4:36

we know that the idea of having these

4:38

mortuary chests, housing these remains,

4:41

goes back practically a millennium.

4:44

And

4:44

those remains have had an incredible story of

4:46

their own then, if they've been moved around all of that much. But

4:48

the book focuses, at least in the beginning,

4:51

around the 14th of December 1642. So

4:54

we're horribly in the future here from a medieval

4:56

point of view. So what are those terrible

4:59

future people up to in Winchester Cathedral? Yeah,

5:01

so this is a really key moment in the history.

5:04

And it's interesting because in some ways,

5:06

if the story starts, if my story starts there, somebody

5:08

actually asked me in another interview recently, where does this start?

5:11

And you think, well, which one? Which start? But

5:14

what happens, so this is during the Civil War, the English

5:16

Civil War. So the whole country really

5:18

is at terrestrial level, especially churches,

5:21

places like that, know that they are in danger

5:23

really. And a couple of days before

5:26

Winchester had been targeted by parliamentarian

5:28

troops, so they'd come into the town, started

5:31

raiding and looting. And on that

5:33

morning, this is all according to an eyewitness

5:36

account, between the hours of 9 and 10, suddenly

5:40

the parliamentarians burst through

5:42

the west door, these huge big doors,

5:45

into the church, storming in, some

5:47

of them on horseback. They come with

5:49

flares lit, with colours flying,

5:52

riding down the nave, and essentially

5:54

starting a complete scheme of destruction

5:57

of the inside of the cathedral. destroy

6:00

absolutely everything they can find. And then at

6:03

one point, some of them find

6:05

this spot as a precipatory with their

6:07

stone screens, clamber

6:09

up them up to these chests.

6:12

Now at that point, there were actually 10 chests,

6:14

or 10 mortuary chests. They start

6:16

to rifle through them, finding

6:18

these remains, these bones inside, throwing

6:21

them to the floor, several of the chests themselves

6:23

pushed to the floor, and then apparently, allegedly,

6:26

the bones themselves were hurled at the

6:28

stained glass window in the cathedral, used

6:31

as missiles, essentially, to shatter the

6:33

glass. And in fact, the entire,

6:35

this huge, big, beautiful stained glass

6:37

on the western front, everything

6:39

was shattered. So if you go there today,

6:41

if you look up and see the replacement,

6:44

that was actually the pieces of the glass that was

6:46

broken and pushed up as

6:48

a mosaic, so you can see the fragment of destruction.

6:51

But at one point, some of the

6:53

leaders called out, according to this Iverson

6:55

discount, told them to stop when they were targeting

6:58

these bones. So some of the chest remains,

7:00

four of them remained, the rest were broken,

7:02

so two of them are replacements made just after.

7:05

And whatever bones could be found were

7:07

essentially just gathered up and placed back in.

7:10

It's terrifying from a historian's point

7:12

of view, whatever the political and religious

7:15

motivations and beliefs behind that, the destruction

7:18

is absolutely shocking, really, isn't

7:20

it? It really is, I mean, and to think that

7:22

these had been there since the seventh

7:24

century, so at that point, we're talking already

7:26

about a thousand years, people have preserved and protected

7:29

them and kept them safe. So yeah,

7:31

this idea that you would do that, it's like

7:34

what we've noticed, things like Palmyra Arch

7:37

being destroyed or something like that, it seems so

7:39

alien to us that anybody would do that.

7:41

Yeah, those are the things that were playing in my mind and

7:43

it's still happening to some extent today,

7:45

that destruction of history for whatever reason

7:47

is equally horrific today as it was 500 years

7:50

ago. But getting back to the book, let's not get too

7:52

morose about 17th century history. You

7:54

divide the story of the chest into

7:56

six, so each one tells roughly

7:59

the story of the...

7:59

chest and the remains that may

8:02

be inside them because if they've been disturbed we're not entirely

8:04

sure.

8:05

So does each one of those chests manage to tell its own individual

8:08

story within that greater narrative of Anglo-Saxon

8:10

England?

8:11

Yeah to a degree, now this was a little bit difficult

8:13

when I was trying to tell the story because

8:16

unfortunately when they were named

8:18

on those chests they weren't put into chronological

8:20

order so they were quite mixed up and that is actually

8:22

part of the big story that I'm talking about how they

8:24

got mixed up and you know who might be in there

8:27

but the individuals themselves do really

8:29

tell that story very much from the seventh century

8:32

so we've got them right from really

8:34

the beginning of the Anglo-Saxon

8:36

period so the beginning of the kingdom of Wessex

8:40

right up to the

8:41

Normans so the latest burial

8:43

is William Rufus, the son of William the Conqueror

8:45

who died in 1100. So you have

8:47

this incredible sun these individuals through

8:50

the chest are actually telling

8:52

that entire story which I think is just so wonderfully

8:54

fascinating.

8:55

Yeah it's incredible in the book they provide

8:57

a framework to tell the story first

8:59

of the emergence of the kingdom of Wessex and then

9:02

how Winchester becomes kind of dominant within

9:04

Wessex, Wessex becomes dominant within England

9:06

and then kind of England becomes a

9:09

single entity to be able to tell

9:11

that through the stories of individual people who were

9:13

within these mortuary chests it must have been incredible to find

9:15

those individuals and follow them around.

9:16

Absolutely and I really enjoy that

9:19

actually I mean it's hard work because there's so many people

9:21

involved and I think well you can't really

9:23

tell the entire story of

9:25

every single person who was involved in all of

9:27

that but by picking those and

9:30

focusing on those and trying to think

9:32

why are they there you know what's the reason why

9:34

they've ended up why they've been kept what's

9:36

their sort of significance but

9:38

also thinking about who's not there I do also

9:41

go into who's missing and who are we looking

9:43

for really still and who's part

9:45

of the story but actually what we do see when

9:47

you entangle it all everything that's

9:49

happened to the bones everything that's happened to the chest

9:51

since it's really quite deliberate it's not accidental

9:54

it's not completely random so in that

9:56

same way that in the 1640s in

9:58

the civil war they were targeting

10:01

these chests. They were doing this for very specific

10:03

reasons. It wasn't just random looting. It was

10:06

done deliberately and over time both in

10:08

the more modern period and back

10:10

in the early medieval period itself, people

10:12

were using these bones strategically.

10:15

And it's actually when you look

10:17

at it quite carefully, you see that the way that

10:20

we tell that whole story

10:22

of the history of England actually and how

10:24

it's created who was involved, who they

10:26

fought against, especially, that's

10:29

all tied up in those chests and

10:31

the bones within

10:32

them. Yeah, and sometimes in the grand

10:34

narratives you can lose that kind of granular

10:36

idea that this is happening to real people, but

10:39

following those individuals is a really

10:41

nice window to look on that whole span

10:43

of history and say these were the people or

10:45

some of the people who helped craft it. And following

10:48

their journey through that period,

10:50

I think it builds a real picture of the emergence

10:52

of England as a country through the whole book, just through

10:54

that little window.

10:55

Yeah, precisely. And I think what was

10:57

really interesting to me was that how much

11:00

south-west of England and west-sixth and especially

11:02

Winchester was such a key part

11:04

of that. And I think there's something that people don't necessarily

11:07

realise unless you know that history already.

11:09

You don't necessarily learn it at school

11:11

that actually the south-west was really the focal

11:13

point for such a long time. And Winchester

11:16

was essentially the capital really for

11:18

a

11:19

really long time and for such a sort of essential

11:21

part of

11:21

the story. Yeah, and the fact that William II,

11:23

William Rufus is buried there, suggests that Winchester's

11:27

importance remained long after the conquest and after

11:29

we assume London was the centre of everything.

11:31

Absolutely. And it's interesting because there's a shift

11:33

towards the end of this where at the

11:35

beginning with these earliest kings, as

11:38

I go through in the book, it's got political

11:40

importance, it's got, essentially, logistical

11:42

importance and religious importance. But

11:44

over the years that changes. So when you do

11:47

have that shift, it's very much a political

11:49

shift towards London, but it still retains

11:51

a very strong historical

11:54

importance, religious importance and

11:56

sort of symbolic as well. So it's

11:58

not a coincidence that there's no...

11:59

Norman elite has this sort of focus

12:02

on Winchester and they are quite deliberately

12:04

trying to connect themselves to that past.

12:06

And that's something we see again and again, people

12:09

are using the place, they're using the

12:11

bones to connect themselves to this

12:13

sort of important, formative

12:16

part of England's history.

12:17

Yeah. So I guess in that sense, it's

12:19

almost like attaching these people to your family

12:21

tree. You tie yourself back to those

12:23

people because they represent something absolutely

12:27

in the origin story of England, I guess.

12:29

Absolutely. And if you can show that you

12:31

have a link to them and to

12:34

that story, then that's crucial. And especially

12:36

for those whose grasp

12:39

of power and of the country was

12:41

actually quite fragile. It was very easy to

12:43

lose it, especially for anyone coming in.

12:45

So someone like William McGoncra coming in,

12:48

he's actually making some really quite clear statements

12:50

and some quite clear links, especially to

12:52

one of the people in there and Emma of

12:54

Normandy, who is what a great

12:57

aunt, I think, or a great, great aunt, and

12:59

she's buried there. And part of the reason why

13:01

she remains is because of the

13:04

significance that was placed on her link

13:06

to William himself and the fact that he

13:08

then had a physical link to

13:10

the sort of former royals, essentially.

13:13

Yeah. September special

13:15

month was on queenship and we managed to get Emma

13:17

of Normandy in there because she's such an

13:19

important figure who doesn't get talked

13:22

about anywhere near enough. So

13:24

yeah, so you go and listen to a bit more about Emma

13:26

if you haven't listened to that episode.

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Some of the remains you mentioned the book were

16:24

buried elsewhere potentially even outside

16:26

of Winchester and eventually translated

16:29

to there. So I've got a bit of a chicken and egg question

16:31

just to be completely unfair to you. To welcome

16:33

you back to Gomedy. Were these people then

16:35

interred at Winchester because

16:37

it was emerging as a seat of government or did the presence

16:40

of that many significant people make

16:43

Winchester more important? I mean, you're talking

16:45

the book a bit about the idea that Southampton

16:47

or Hamwick as it was called then was

16:51

in many ways more important but yet Winchester

16:53

overtakes it. So did those people gravitate to Winchester

16:56

because it was important or did Winchester become

16:58

important because they went there?

16:59

Yeah, so it seems to be a bit of both actually. So

17:01

in some ways it does not actually answer. Did

17:03

that chicken and egg question always at the same

17:05

time? No. So I think Hamwick

17:08

certainly starts certainly from the kind

17:10

of eighth century. We have these Wicks,

17:12

these Emporia really around the North Sea

17:15

going all the way up to Scandinavia and Hamwick

17:17

was one of the really important ones. We don't quite

17:19

know the royal links to Hamwick. There's lots of

17:21

things about it we don't know that much about but

17:24

we also know that Winchester emerged as a

17:26

city around about the same time. So this really

17:29

early stage of Wessex,

17:31

we don't have that much. We know that Winchester

17:34

starts out as a Roman town

17:36

and in the Roman period that was really important. It

17:38

was important because it was a nodal point

17:41

so there were lots of roads going through it. It was

17:43

really near the coast and then in the post-Roman

17:45

period something continues there.

17:48

Seems like Hamwick being on the coast is much more

17:50

important. So you have two places seemingly

17:52

emerging but I know one coin certainly

17:54

from the 650s that seems to be when

17:56

the first church is established there and

17:59

that's just really crazy.

17:59

crucial because the earliest of

18:02

the individuals in the Morshu chest, so one of the

18:04

kings called King of the Gills, one of the earliest kings of Wessex,

18:07

he actually introduced Christianity

18:09

to Wessex. So that's

18:12

a really crucial point as well. So from that point

18:14

on, it starts to have this religious importance.

18:16

And so the political importance, religious importance

18:19

seem to go hand in hand to a degree really.

18:21

So with that, we then

18:23

have the burials as well. But then over time,

18:25

it's already established as an important place in

18:27

itself, you then get more and more burial because

18:30

it's an important place. And then yeah, it just sort of

18:32

follows on. A self fulfilling prophecy. Yeah,

18:34

it does. Yeah, the bit about Wix, I'd never heard

18:36

before that was news to me. So that was something I learned, amongst

18:39

many other things from this book that Wix were like

18:41

trading ports on the coast kind of thing, marketing

18:44

sort of places I found that absolutely fascinating. I love

18:46

little bits of nuggets of information like

18:48

that. So part

18:50

of what research has been going on with

18:52

these mortuary chests, it was done by the mortuary chest

18:55

project. What did they aim

18:57

to achieve when they started this kind of 10 years

18:59

ago? Why were they looking to examine these remains

19:02

again?

19:02

Yeah, so this is such a brilliant project.

19:04

This one I haven't been directly involved in myself,

19:06

this one I started in 2012. And

19:09

the idea was really to try to understand who actually

19:12

is inside these chests.

19:14

We have these names on the outside. And they

19:16

have been looked at and examined

19:19

at different times. I described that a little bit

19:21

in the book as well, by antiquarians opening

19:23

them with great excitement, trying to

19:26

identify people. And we've

19:28

known for a long, long time that there's

19:31

certainly more people than those who

19:33

are just written

19:33

on the outside. There's other records recording about 15 people

19:36

at least. So part of it was to look

19:38

at the remains and see with modern

19:41

forensic methods. Coming now with the methods

19:43

we've got available to us, everything from isotope

19:46

analysis, for things like looking at diodes and geographical

19:48

origins and DNA, proper

19:51

radiocarbon dating, actually established

19:53

who's really there. And interestingly,

19:56

this all happens around the same time as

19:58

Richard observed, identification is taking place.

19:59

place as well. And there's a bit of a sort

20:02

of revolution going on in archaeological

20:04

science of what we suddenly

20:06

could do at that time. So the idea was really

20:09

to try and establish who was in

20:11

there, if it was those people. Quite

20:13

often you get relics and things in churches and

20:16

they're said to be saints such and such from

20:18

the 7th century or whatever. And actually turns out to

20:20

be

20:21

15th century complete saints.

20:23

So

20:23

this could have been the case with these as well.

20:25

So that was

20:26

part of what the project was. When I talked

20:28

to people about you, I was saying you're a Viking bioarchaeologist

20:30

is probably the coolest job title I have ever

20:32

heard in my life. This seems like a really good example

20:35

of where history and science can, I

20:37

was going to say collide, but not collide, work together

20:39

to come up with

20:41

information that helps both

20:43

artists so that the science can inform the history,

20:45

but the history can also inform the science. Is that fair?

20:48

Absolutely.

20:48

It's one of those where neither

20:50

of them can answer it all on their own.

20:53

So you can't just have a team

20:55

of complete scientists with no historical

20:57

knowledge or anything like that. They will never be

20:59

able to give you those answers. So none

21:02

of these phones, you can't just do

21:04

DNA analysis and get

21:06

the answer and that won't just tell you who it is.

21:08

So you have to really look at

21:10

all the other evidence. I mean, in these cases,

21:12

for example, we don't have any known

21:15

descendants. So you can't actually take

21:17

that 8th century king or 9th

21:20

century individual and actually try and match

21:22

it to somebody

21:23

else. It just doesn't work. And also

21:25

anyone who is alive in the 7th century who had

21:27

descendants is going to have millions of them.

21:29

So it's meaningless. Pretty much everyone will be related

21:31

to them if you're from Northwestern Europe. So

21:34

that on its own won't work. There's other

21:36

things we need to know. So if you look at things like geographical

21:38

origins, you need to know that. You need to know

21:40

about age. So one of the things

21:42

that I identify with things like age of these individuals,

21:45

and they need to have that historical knowledge and say, okay, well,

21:47

who was at that age when they died in

21:50

the 11th century or whatever who could potentially

21:52

be in Winchester. So you need

21:54

to have all that context and that knowledge, both

21:57

of those basics, but also things like family

21:59

relationships. So that's I think one

22:01

of the most promising things for the future is looking at family

22:04

relationships between these individuals. But

22:06

yeah, that in itself as well isn't

22:08

enough. They need to have the science to help

22:10

inform those

22:11

questions. Yeah, and I think one

22:13

of the interesting things that I found coming out of all

22:15

of the Richard III stuff in particular was being

22:18

able to tell his diet and how his diet changed

22:20

and how that affected his bone formation and all of that

22:22

kind of stuff. Because that's something as a historian. I

22:24

mean, apart from looking at maybe receipts for

22:26

buying food, which we don't have

22:28

for the seventh, eighth, ninth century at all, really.

22:31

But that's an insight that you would never be able to get in any

22:33

other way.

22:34

Precisely. And also, you know, those records

22:36

that we do have, especially the further back you

22:38

go in the early medieval period, we don't know anything

22:41

really. We don't have much written

22:43

evidence at all of what people ate. I try

22:45

to look at that as I'm doing for the research of this, what

22:47

do we actually know? And from written records, it's

22:49

practically nothing. And again, archaeology,

22:51

some more traditional archaeology is also

22:54

quite difficult to know. But actually, the

22:56

bones tell you something very different. And then you can

22:58

look at things like difference between

23:00

sex. So men and women are eating

23:02

different things, adults and children.

23:04

And these are really very wealthy

23:06

and very privileged people. What do they eat

23:09

compared to the rest of the population? So all of a sudden,

23:11

you get answers to questions that you could

23:13

never

23:13

answer before. Do things like the mortuary

23:15

chest, maybe not even them in particular, but

23:18

does science and history working together

23:21

have more secrets to tell us where else could it

23:23

go?

23:23

I think it absolutely can, because

23:25

even seeing, so not to want to give too many

23:27

spoilers, because

23:28

I love people to actually read

23:30

it. But there were

23:32

certainly one thing I can say is that the preliminary

23:34

results have come out of this project. There

23:36

were certainly a hell of a lot more than 12 people

23:39

or 11 people in there. There were 23

23:42

in total, including some completely

23:44

unexpected ones. So there were two adolescent

23:47

boys actually in there. We have

23:49

no record of at all. Now, we do think

23:51

we know who they might be. So there's

23:53

some really important evidence. But the fact that

23:56

we didn't know that is actually telling

23:58

us quite a lot. And there's

25:59

and what's that actually come from and

26:02

what's it really true. So I think that's also really

26:04

interesting to interrogate.

26:04

And as you mentioned about not knowing who's

26:06

not in the chest, who do we not talk about that we

26:09

ought to talk about a lot more so it informs all of those kinds

26:11

of narratives as well. Well, thank you so much for joining

26:13

us, Kat. I mean, I've thoroughly enjoyed the book. I will recommend

26:15

it to anybody. We're talking in launch

26:17

week so everybody go out and grab a copy

26:19

of it now. And just before we finish, obviously you

26:21

abandoned us here at Gone Medieval. Where

26:24

can people find you now? Sorry

26:25

about that. I do miss you and

26:28

awful. I miss doing this and it's been great to be back.

26:30

But yes, I do have a rival podcast. Well,

26:33

it's not a rival. It's very different. It's not

26:35

a friendly podcast. It's very friendly. Yes, it's a different

26:37

one. So my podcast I work on now is called The Rabbit

26:39

Hole Detectives, which is looking

26:41

at the origins of historical objects, both

26:44

real and metaphorical. So

26:46

that's a great fun list with me, Richard Coles and Charles

26:48

Spencer. I can be found anywhere you find

26:50

your podcast. Perfect,

26:51

Clark. And have you got another project

26:54

lined up? What's next for Kat?

26:55

Yeah, lots of things going on. Lots of things in progress.

26:57

Wonderful books. But yeah, well, the CEO also

27:00

work for the Council of British Archaeology. So I've got

27:02

my own archaeological projects and British Archaeology

27:04

magazines. So there's lots

27:06

of things

27:07

going on in the background. Fantastic.

27:09

It's been an absolute pleasure to have you back. And I hope you'll come

27:11

back and see us again when your next project is ready

27:14

to be talked about with a Gone Medieval audience. It's

27:16

been brilliant to have you back. Thanks, Kat.

27:17

Thank you so much for having me. It was great to

27:19

be back.

27:20

I hope you enjoyed that chat

27:22

about the fascinating bone chest. So

27:25

maybe it's wet your appetite to go and dig

27:27

out Kat's brand new book, The Bone Chests,

27:30

which is available everywhere right now.

27:33

There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every

27:35

Tuesday and Friday. So please do join

27:38

Dr. Ellen Arjannega next time for more

27:40

from the greatest millennium in human history.

27:43

Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever

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Anyway, I better let you go.

27:59

I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone

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medieval with history.

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