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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
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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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27:47
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27:50
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27:53
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27:55
It really does help new listeners to find the site.
27:58
Anyway, I better let you go.
27:59
I've been Matt Lewis, and we've just gone
28:02
medieval with history.
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Hey, checking in? It is not
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just your flu shot appointment at Walgreens. Yes.
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Mom? Hand a snack on the
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