Rievaulx Abbey

Posted on November 2, 2020Leave a comment

Rievaulx was the first Cistercian Abbey in the north of England, begun in the 1130s under the patronage of Walter Espec, a lord who came to England with William the Conqueror. He was one of the justiciar’s of northern England under William and his descendants, and one of the most powerful men in England as a result. The Abbey is located in Yorkshire, in a wooded dale by the River Rye, which the monks actually diverted to the west in order to have enough flat land to build on. They also used the river to provide fresh water to their monastery. By mining lead and iron and raising sheep to sell their wool, the abbey eventually built itself up to be one of the most powerful in England, with a hundred and forty monks (Norman, of course) and over five Read more…

Battle Abbey

Posted on November 2, 2020November 2, 20202 Comments

Aren’t ‘Battle’ and ‘Abbey’ a bit contradictory? Not to Normans! And not to the Norman church either, in that the idea of a religious war was not very far down the road (the first Crusade was 1096). The battle in question, however, had already taken place, because William the Conqueror built Battle Abbey on the site of the Battle of Hastings, at which he defeated/killed Harold, the Saxon King of England and took his throne. Dan: So he built the abbey in honor of the battle? From its shape and size, that’s pretty much the case, though ostensibly the reason for building the abbey was out of guilt or to atone for the number of people he killed in conquering England. According to the Chronicle of Battle Abbey, William made a speech along those lines after that battle: I make Read more…

Halloween in Wales

Posted on October 30, 2020October 31, 20231 Comment

As I sit here munching candy corn (which my son at one point declared ‘the best candy’–even better than chocolate–though he can’t have any because he’s allergic to corn), I’m thinking about the Gareth & Gwen Medieval Mystery, The Fallen Princess, which takes place at Halloween. Except that during the Middle Ages, it was called ‘All Hallow’s Eve’, the day before All Saint’s Day, and it was less about candy and more about a belief in actual spirits. All Hallow’s Eve, or Halloween, has its roots in an older, pagan tradition, called Nos Calan Gaeaf , Welsh for Samhain, a Gaelic word meaning ‘Summer’s End’. This is the most well-known Halloween tradition in Wales. http://www.controverscial.com/Samhain.htm The Welsh translation, interestingly, is ‘the first of winter’. From the National Museum of Wales: “A pagan holiday dating back to the Iron Age Celts, Samhain was Read more…

Norman Christianity

Posted on October 19, 2020Leave a comment

Today we’ll be talking about Norman Christianity. Dan: In an earlier video, you said the Normans were descended from Vikings, who were pagan. But they weren’t pagan when they conquered England? No, they had converted to Christianity in the same time period as most of the Danes from whom they were descended, such that by 1066, when Duke William fought Harold at the Battle of Hastings, his people had been Christian for a hundred and fifty years. To recap, because I think it’s worth repeating, the Normans are called “Norman” because they came from Normandy, a province in France. But as we said in a prior video, ‘Viking’ is an occupation, not an ethnic group. They are descended from the same Danish diaspora that invaded Ireland, Britain, Sicily, and western Russia. They were eventually either defeated or assimilated in all Read more…

Dumbarton

Posted on October 19, 2020Leave a comment

Dumbarton has the longest recorded history of any castle in Scotland, and back in the era we are talking about, it was actually controlled by the Welsh. Dumbarton actually means “Fortress of the Britons” in Gaelic. Dumbarton Rock, on which the fortress is built, is an in-filled crater of a volcano that was active 350 million years ago. The first mention of Dumbarton is by St. Patrick, whom you may recall was a native Briton, who mentions it in a letter written in the 5th century. It was also named by Nennius, whom we discussed in our video about King Arthur, as one of the 28 cities of sub-Roman Britain. According to legend, both Merlin and Arthur visited, and Geoffrey of Monmouth (who we also mentioned in the context of the Arthurian legend) writes that the castle was besieged by Read more…

Lindisfarne

Posted on September 30, 2020Leave a comment

Lindisfarne is an island off the northeastern coast of Britain, and accessibly only when the tidal flats are exposed. The island started out, as all of England once did, as a British settlement. But by the 6th century, the Angles had taken it over, and the Historia Brittonum recounts the last attempt of the British, led by Urien of Rheged, to retake the island. The British were defeated, and the Saxons maintained control of the island ever since. As we talked about in the introduction to Saxon religion, the initial conversion to Christianity of the Saxons of northern England and Scotland was led by Christian missionaries from Ireland, having been converted earlier by the British Saint Patrick. The monastery at Lindisfarne was actually founded by the Irish saint, Aiden, and became the seat of Christian evangelism stretching all the way Read more…

St. Mary’s in Castro (Saxon Church at Dover)

Posted on September 23, 2020Leave a comment

We talked about Dover Castle last season, but it’s worth revisiting, in large part for the same reason we devoted a video to it before: the long history of occupation. Specifically, in regards to the Saxons, Dover was one of the first places William the Conqueror conquered—and thankfully, he left the original Saxon church intact for us to visit to this day and, according to English Heritage, is the ‘largest and finest Saxon building in Kent’. The first record of the church at Dover is around 630 AD, when the records talk about a church built within the castle, which is where it gets its name Saint Mary in Castro. This is in the time of Eadbald, son of Æthelberht, the first Saxon king to convert to Christianity. Credence is given to the idea that the structure we see today Read more…

Saxon Religion

Posted on September 16, 2020Leave a comment

Are you saying the Saxon religion wasn’t Christianity? Not initially. We’ve spent the last ten videos or so talking about Christianity, but as I discussed way back in the beginning of last season, Britain was conquered by waves of ethnic groups. I mentioned five at the time: Celts, Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Normans. The Romans brought Christianity to Britain, after which a significant number of Britons converted to it. By the time the Romans left, there were enough Christians in Britain to create a contrast to the Saxon invaders who were polytheistic. This contrast between pagan and Christian was highlighted by the Britons themselves at the time and after the fact. The worst crime, according to the annals, was that, in the middle of the 5th century, the British Christian king Vortigern invited these pagan Saxons into Britain, as a Read more…

Tintagel

Posted on September 16, 2020January 27, 2026Leave a comment

We are talking about Tintagel today because it is associated with King Arthur as the place he was conceived. This comes only, however, from Geoffrey of Monmouth, who wrote his highly fantastical History of the Kings of Britain in the early 12th century. Honestly, Geoffrey’s work is so ahistorical that the fact he claims Arthur was there is reason enough to doubt the veracity of the legend. As he tells it, Arthur’s father was turned into the likeness of Gorlois, Igraine’s husband, and thus he slept with her, and she conceived Arthur. Even with the unlikeliness of this particular aspect of the story, Tintagel does have a fascinating history. The castle, as it exists today, was begun in the 12th century by Earl Reginald, brother to Robert of Gloucester, for whom Geoffrey wrote his history to justify the Norman Read more…

King Arthur: did he exist?

Posted on August 31, 20201 Comment

I have A LOT to say about King Arthur, most of which can’t fit into a five minute video. But we can make a start. Perhaps the most important question everyone wants answered about King Arthur is: did he exist? Whether or not King Arthur was a real person is an either/or query. He either lived or he didn’t. Many scholars, researchers, and Arthurophile’s have strong opinions on this topic, both for and against. Because of the paucity of written records, much of the academic work has come down on the side of ‘didn’t—or at least if Arthur was a real person, his name was not ‘Arthur’ and he possibly wasn’t even a king. I, however, look at the poetry and tales from the early Middle Ages, and choose to believe he did actually exist. Medieval people certainly thought he did, and throughout Read more…

Kentigern and Asaph

Posted on August 25, 2020January 13, 2026Leave a comment

Today we’ll be talking about St. Kentigern’s Monastery in St. Asaph. Wait a minute, that’s two saints. Yes, it is, and in the case of this particular monastery, it’s a bit confusing because the monastery was founded by St. Kentigern, and then it was taken over by a second saint, Asaph, for which the town was named. In fact, unless you do some research, you might never know that the monastery in St. Asaph was initially founded by Kentigern at all. In my introduction to early monastic houses, I explained that they weren’t organized along the lines that we have come to know from the later Middle Ages, in that each would belong to a particular order: Benedictine, Cistercian, Augustinian, Franciscan, or Dominican. Each had their particular ‘rule’ they followed, the monks wore different colored robes, had different tonsures, as Read more…

Gwenffrewi

Posted on August 11, 2020Leave a comment

Today we’ll be talking about Gwenffrewi, an early Welsh saint, who endowed an abbey and a sacred well. She is the only woman so credited, which seems a woeful gap in the record. Still, the legend of Gwenffrewi, or Winifred in English, follows a similar pattern to that of her male counterparts in that she was born noble. After that, her story takes quite a dark turn. As was written down in the 12th century, she had a suitor who was enraged at her rejection of him to the point that he decapitated her. A healing spring flowed from the spot upon which her head fell, and then St. Bueno, her uncle, restored her head to her body. After this miracle Beuno turned to her suitor, Caradog, who is described as leaning on his sword and unrepentant, called up to Read more…