Welcome, everyone, to another episode of then again, a podcast of the Northeast Georgia History Center. My name is Leslie Jones and I'm the director of archives and curation. And today we have a guest you know and love, my pal, my buddy, my chum, my mentor, Glenn Kyle.

Hey, everybody.

Hey.

I'm back from the die.

Tell everyone how you been. What are you up to? How are you?

I've been good. I've been good. The new job is I'm good. I miss history.

I'm sure you do.

I miss the crew. I miss the people, the audiences.

You miss us specifically?

I miss y'all specifically. And I miss Leslie desperately.

Me specifically.

You specifically. But yeah, no, it's good. I will say, however, that having been unshackled from the bonds of leadership of the History Center, I actually got to go camping this past weekend, and I've been spending time outdoors and with my family, so it's been good.

Did you get to keep your phone off for once?

Not only did I keep my phone off, but I didn't even mind that we didn't have signal because we were so far up in the mountains.

Gasp.

I know.

It was nice. So today I think we're going to talk about the medieval period and all the death and spooky stuff happening during that period. Right?

Right. Yeah. That's why I said I'm back from the dead, to kind of set the mood. Yeah, no, you had asked because this is October. This is Leslie's October.

Shocktober. Shocktober. Yeah.

So being the medieval history buff, she said, well, what can you talk about that's spooky from the medieval period? And I was like, well, there's death.

Which is pretty spooky.

It can be spooky. But we see death here in the early 21st century. We see death from a particular perspective, from a societal point of view. Right. We all deal with it, think about it individually, but our culture sees death very, very differently than they did from the medieval period. And the way people viewed death in the medieval period changed over that, depending upon how you count it, 800 to 1000 year period. Death was much closer to people in the past. Right. Part of it was the food. Right? The food ways people would go when they lived on farms and they slaughtered animals. They killed an animal and cut it up and eventually ate it either then or later after it was preserved. So death was very much a normal part of the food chain for humans.

Plus, I imagine they got death from eating that lifestyle well, if they were not careful. Yeah.

And disease. One of the greatest changes in history was the discovery of antibiotics. And before antibiotics, a scratch from a nail on your hand could lead to death, literally, you could get sick. And so it was not uncommon for people to simply be aware, to be part of their life, that someone could get sick and die. You could die from eating the wrong thing or from getting scratched by an L or someone you love. Oh, my gosh.

It was more likely, right, that people around you died all the time. So you were kind of used to it, too.

Comparatively, yes. People died all the time, young and old. And the birthing process, infant mortality, there's a quote I can't remember. I think it is from a lady from the medieval period who said that she would rather go into battle ten times than go into labor once wow. Because she had been through labor. And you have to remember that the pregnancy process and labor was the primary cause of death for females in this period. There were no modern obstetrics. There were midwives. And they basically knew the process of how to give birth. But all that nine months leading up to the birth, you could get sick, you could get ill, you could fall over. You were still expected to do a lot of work.

They also didn't know about hygiene yet.

With birthing, they knew that clean is good.

Yeah.

But beyond that, no, not much. And infant mortality, depending upon exactly when we're talking about and exactly where we're talking about infant mortality, could be 25%. In other words, 25% of every pregnancy ended in the death of the child. That's not counting the mom, the maternal mortality. That's the infant mortality. So 25% of births up to birth, and from that first two years, a quarter of the population dies in that time period. And the culture learns to deal with that. Right. When a man and a woman have a baby, the baby comes along, they're aware that there's a good chance this child might not make it. Yes, there's a good chance the mom might not make it through childbirth or.

Even the dad might not make it.

Depending on how angry the mom gets. Yeah, the dad I mean, this is the thing. If something happens to the male of the house, the fathers of children that the woman has, if he gets sick and dies, if he has a wagon wheel crush his leg and trying to take things to market yeah. Then she has to marry quickly and immediately. It's not just for love. It is a matter of survival, which.

Was for quite a long time, even after the medieval period.

Exactly. And that's not necessarily poor women had it so bad. Look how men treated them. That was the facts of life. That is how life works.

Survival.

It was survival. And if a mother died in the middle of a family, that man had to marry another woman as quickly as possible to take care of the children, to do all the things that the household needs to do to survive. So death factors into everyone's equation in this time period. Right. I mean, you're a modern woman, Leslie, I reckon. How often do you factor death into your day to day calculations of work and play.

I try to ignore it, as I'm sure some people, maybe many people do. What about you? I don't want to think about it.

Exactly. We don't think about it until it hits us.

Yeah.

And then when it does hit us, there are lots of mechanisms in place. There's doctors and hospitals and health care to try to ward it off when it happens. There are funeral homes that take care of the mechanics of death, of dealing with bodies.

Right.

There's embalming. There are more, not universal ceremonies, but here in America that funerals tend to go very similarly.

Again, there's a structure.

There's a structure to it. And there was a structure back then, too, but there weren't morticians who would come along and gather the body.

Right, bring out your dead.

I'm getting there.

Okay. All right.

So when someone died, they laid their body there in the home, and then there was not much embalming.

Much? Don't you mean any?

Well, not for the common sort of folk. There might be some for the elite.

Really?

When I say embalming, I'm not talking, like, modern chemicals through their body. I'm talking like they may be packed in salt for a long journey.

Oh, wow.

If such and such duke wanted to be buried in Normandy rather than in England, they might pack his body in salt in a box, take it over there so it wouldn't decompose as quickly, and then bury it.

That makes sense. Yeah.

But yeah, when I say embalming, I mean really basic stuff. Here's a gross story for you.

All right, I'm ready. Isn't everyone ready?

So tied into the Norman conquest, right? William the Conqueror, when he reached his death, he was an old man and he had grown quite rotund in his old age. And so when he died, there was a scramble for the kingdom. And so people were not as concerned with taking care of his body. They were riding off in every direction, trying to get the support of his son or trying to get a hold of the treasury. So his body was left, and the servants who were there in the castle with him ransacked the room and his body for valuables, including the rings on his fingers.

Yikes.

When they finally remembered to go get the King of England, Duke of Normandy, they had a coffin built for him. And the coffin, it turns out, they built too small. So when they're trying to cram his body into the coffin, apparently it burst, because this had been several days, and so the decomposition of his internal organs and everything had already begun and his body was loose.

He, like, blew up, basically, yes. All right.

And a great stench arose therefrom.

I can imagine.

So even the high and mighty, when death comes for them, it's not going to be nice and clean and neat and then again, that's part of life. So the elites, they get buried in cathedrals or something like that. The common folk get taken out to the churchyard to holy ground and buried there, usually by close friends and family, the priest, to say a benediction and things like that, and that's it. And the body stays there and it decomposes. Well, for the common sort, again, dependent upon time and place, you don't really have marked graves. You just get buried in holy ground. Right.

So if you want to go see your mom or something, you just go to the ground, but you don't know where she is.

If you participated in burying her, which you probably did, then you know exactly where she's at. But there's not so much not necessarily a permanent headstone. There's certainly not a stone headstone or something like that. You may put up a simple wooden cross and then after a couple of generations, that wooden cross goes away. And people keep wanting to there's more people that need to be buried in the holy ground. So you would go dig another hole and oh, you'd come across these bones that you may or may not know who they were. Right. This you got that grave digger scene from Hamlet. Right. That's what that's about. And so many times the process was sort of understood. Well, you get buried in the holy ground for the flesh to come off of your bones, and then if your bones are happened upon while they're trying to bury someone else, they'll take your bones and put them in the crypt or just rebury them in another pile. Right. The bones are still in the holy ground.

So were the catacombs around this time? Were they building it at this time? In the later half of the Middle Ages, yeah. And it was because of this, right?

Yes. They would start running out of holy ground, so when they brought the bones up, they would start putting the bones you love Tales from the Crypt.

I do.

What's the background of the crypt? A crypt, which is?

Which is a church. A holy ground.

And what's all tucked away in the crypt? The crypt keeper and the bones. Right. There's bones and body remnants all over the place.

No.

Well, there should be.

There should be. You're right. They should add that.

It'S death. We're not even going to get into the immortal soul. And what happens after that? We're talking about the bodies.

Yeah. We're talking about the spooky stuff.

The spooky stuff, yeah. So that's where you get the bones, in the graveyard and things like that. But the medieval world has this system that it's very close to death. And again, this is not to say there is no grief that people just shrug it off.

Right.

There is still significant grief. But the systems culturally, socially, are in place to sort of process the dead, which there are a lot more of, and it is a lot more close to each person to each community, and then in the 13 hundreds, we get the plague.

Dun dun dun.

The Black Death. Right. And everyone knows about the plague and the Black Death, and there have already.

Been multiple plagues at this point. Right. But this is the big one, right?

Yeah. When we say the plague again, people were not microbiologists, and they didn't know what disease really was. They had no idea of bacteria or viruses or anything. They just know that sickness would come to an area and it could spread, and you could succumb to the disease and die. You could get the disease and then get better, or you may not get the disease at all. It seemed very random, which, of course means that one of the main ways to explain that is that there must be some supernatural force at play, punishing the wicked and protecting the innocent or the good.

That's what they always did. They started with supernatural causes and then went down the line.

Well, how else are you going?

Oh, no, I know. First they start with astrology, like, I wonder what's going on today that could be causing this. And then they go down the line of different supernatural occurrences. Right?

Yeah, exactly. You can't discount the supernatural in all this, but there were smaller like you say, there's smaller plagues here and there diseases. But the Great Death, the Black Death, comes in 1300 not 1300, the one three hundreds. And we're pretty sure now that it comes from, you know, this. Did you study this in the schools?

I did not. I know what I know from just being interested, but I never actually learned it in class.

Oh, they didn't want to be so morbid and depressing. Maybe in a nutshell, it spreads across the Mediterranean, sort of from east to west, and comes on the fleas of rats that come on ships that go into port bringing grain or wine or whatever trade items. And so this is a bacteria that travels on the fleas of the rats in the ships, and it goes from port to port.

You hear that? It's not rats. Everyone always thinks it's rats that brought the plague. Well, technically, it's not.

It's not the rats. But again, they don't necessarily see the fleas, they see the rats. And where the rats go seems to be that the plague follows. So their observation seemed to lead them to that conclusion. But yes, it's not the rats, it's the bacteria on the fleas, the rats on the ships.

Yeah.

And so this very virulent bacteria, this very virulent disease starts to spread through Europe, and it starts to kill a lot of people. Right. Not just here and there. This is again, it's worse in cities because cities are crammed together, people are closer together, and it spreads through cities more. It spreads through certain cities, worse, depending upon where you're at. And it varies around Europe, but depending upon where you're at, a third to a half of the population dies from the plague within a year or two.

A year?

Well, when it arrives in that particular area, it happens that quickly. Across Europe, you're talking about a ten to 15 year period. So from in a ten to 15 year period, europe's population decreases by at least a third. In some places, the percentage is way higher, in cities, especially. So everyone just take a step back and think about this. Now, you're probably thinking to yourself, oh, this is like COVID that we just went through a few years ago. There are some similarities, but the trick is that one out of every three people are not dropping dead around you. Right?

And it didn't come from fleas.

It didn't come from fleas. Yeah, our rats. But put yourself in the mindset that you are living in the world. The world is set, there are higher powers, there is a social hierarchy, and things happen for a reason. And here you are in this world, and then all of a sudden this thing starts to happen and loved ones, strangers, everyone around you gets sick and dies.

You're just considered lucky if you live.

Yeah. If you live, not only are you lucky, but what does that do to your worldview? What does that do to society? If you have people well, you have people and they do jobs, right? They work. They work in the fields, they perform trades, they weave the cloth, they make the clothes, they're the blacksmiths, they transport goods here and there. When suddenly a third of the population or more disappears very quickly, that brings incredible pressure on the rest of society. What do you eat? You may starve.

Yeah, I never really thought about that. If the bread maker is gone, there's no bread, right? The clothing makers are gone, there's no new clothes.

Yeah. If the people bringing the wheat in from the fields goes to the bread maker and they're not bringing in a third less wheat or even less so it starts this societal breakdown. It's Quasi. Mad Max folks, right? It's post apocalyptic. And that's very often how they saw it, because how are we going to describe this? What is going on? This is not Bacteriological disease that we need to find a cure, a medical cure for something in the world has changed. Something in the world is fundamentally flawed. We are being punished. Why did I live? Why did they die? And so it causes a lot of friction between how people interact with one another, with how these societies operate, with how the economy operates, with how people see their roles in the world and how they see the world as a whole. It shakes their faith in a lot of different things and they react to that, as you can imagine, in a lot of different ways. Let me get the boring thing out of the way first. So, for example, if there's a third to a half less people. That means that the people who are left are going to be the ones doing the work. Which means the laborers are suddenly way more valuable than they used to be. So they can command a lot more wages because there's not that many people to go to to do the work.

The one perk everyone around you is dead. But you're going to rise a lot more money. Congratulations.

But that's the thing. For the people that are left, the economic situation in Europe improves from 1300 to 1400 because people are making more money. There's a lot more freedom involved. They can move around more. That's not what this podcast is about. But know that that's part of it from a faith perspective. It begins to shake people's belief system. Why is this happening? How could this happen? How could a god let this happen? What has society done wrong? How can we fix it? And this doesn't always creep everyone out, but this always creeped me out.

All right, I'm ready. The flagellants creeped you out.

Think about it. So in your society, there's been this huge plague that has killed a lot of people. And there's a group of people that think this is because our society is bad and we have to fix that. So we're going to take it upon ourselves to bear the sins of all the evil that caused this. So they go from town to town, whipping the skin, flaying the skin off of their back as penitence for all of society. The flagellance just going from town to town. That just seems really weird and creepy to me. Not you.

I mean, it's weird. Is it creepy? Not really, but it's weird.

I guess I just imagine closing my eyes and living in my little village and all of a sudden hearing these people shuffling down the path. But you also moaning, screaming, because they're whipping themselves.

You're not into horror or anything spooky. So that could be creepy to you because you don't know anything else. That's creepy, right?

Yeah, it's history creepy.

Yeah. I'll give you that.

It's historically accurate creepy. But one of the things that this also does too in this world shattering change is people have to psychologically deal with this. And again, a little taste of this is looking back to 2020 and the COVID days and all of us sort of had to change how we interacted with others and sort of change how we worked and went out and how we saw the world. And again, not quite this grand away, but it gives you that connection. So in this time period, you start to see as the system's, psychological, social, cultural, get overwhelmed with all this death, they start to deal with it, right, because they can't just stop. And so you start to see this fascination, more so with death. And that starts to reflect itself in a lot of different ways, including art and popular culture. And you start to get into the ideas of this is when you see a lot of memento, mori and you start to see skeletons painted on and decorating in the architecture. In the architecture. Not just secular, but sacred architecture too. Right. You start to see in cathedrals and churches these carvings of death's heads. You didn't really see that before. Not before the plague, not before the big plague. And then after that, there's this I don't know. Lizzo would you call it a fascination with death?

I think so. Just like in the Victorian period, as we always go to that, because that's my thing. But that's what happened then too, is that they just got obsessed with it because it was so right.

Right. And so it starts to manifest itself in many different ways. And one of those was the dance macabre. And you've done research on that recently. So what did you find about dancing skeletons? Basically.

You mean dancing mania?

Yes.

Well, you know that one incident in 1518? Right. In Strasbourg. Yes, in Germany.

Strasbourg.

Oh, yeah. What you said. Yes. There were five plagues that hit that town at that .5. And then, like you said, because there were so many people that had died, all of the bread, everything was at an all time high. So the morale of the town was already low. So then this German housewife just starts dancing. Right. What's interesting is I found that ten years later this philosopher believed that it was because she was just trying to get out of housework that her husband asked her to do something. So she didn't want to do it. So she just went outside and danced herself to death.

So she had a quote unquote, psychiatric fit.

Yeah, it's her version of rebellion.

Does she dance to death?

There's some people who say she did and some that don't. I mean, what do you think? Because they said up to 15 people die today during this dance maintenance.

Maybe housework in early 16th century Strasbourg is way harder than the ones we have to do now. I don't think I would want to commit suicide to avoid it.

Or maybe they're just assuming.

Maybe they're just assuming and she disappeared.

I'm going to go with that.

Yeah.

So she started dancing and then it spread into the city and it went from 30 people to over 400 people. And they were just dancing and didn't stop. And they couldn't figure out what was going on because they were in excruciating pain. But they still just kept going.

Right, right. It's a psychological reaction that spreads just like the disease from person to person.

Yeah. As we know today, it's mass hysteria. But at the time, they couldn't figure out what was going on, so they asked doctors and the very first thing, of course, was the supernatural stuff.

Well, yeah.

Is it astrology, astronomy? Is it something supernatural? Like is the devil making them do it, right?

Definitely.

But obviously it wasn't. So then they believed in they believed that not obviously.

Yes.

And then they thought it was hot blood where the internal temperature of your body gets so hot that your brain melts.

Well, that fits perfectly with the medical theories of the time.

Right.

You've got the four humors, and they would be so not phlegmatic.

But that common thing they did back then was bloodletting.

Right.

So they tried that with the hot blood. Didn't work. I'm not going to say obviously this time it did not work. So then they believed that there was a curse upon the city, so they banned dancing and find 30 shillings per person that kept doing it. And guess what? They kept doing it. What's going on, man? It lasted two months.

And then what happened?

How it ended was they took all of the people and essentially threw them in a wagon and sent them to church. And the church gave them these red shoes that were covered in holy oil, and they're cured.

Did they dance? And was the town over its plagues? Yes, it was a causes B equals C, say. Very clear, logical path.

It was red holy oil shoes.

Yeah.

As it should be. Right?

Right. Especially in that wearing mine right now. That was good.

So they had multiple theories at the time, which I just wanted to get into because I thought it was interesting. One, it was the, ergot the mushroom, the poison mushroom.

Didn't they blame mushrooms on the sandwich trial stuff, too? Didn't they? I don't know if I buy that, but I'm sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt. Keep going.

No, they did. They believed that it caused hysteria, but they thought in the medieval period that it caused poisoning. Right. And then another one, they thought it was just an entire sea of epilepsy. 400 people having two months of epilepsy all at once. Yeah.

And then being cured. Yeah.

And then the other one, this one's my favorite, is that they were all secret members of a cult and they came out as a sign of rebellion in their cult to just start dancing and not listen to anyone. That one's my favorite.

That's very interesting. I doubt it was a cult, but here's the thing. If you see 20 people dancing down the street and everyone's under a lot of stress, I guess I'll go out and dance, too.

Would you, though? Because they were in excruciating pain and they may or may not have died. Some people believe they did and some don't.

How do we know they were all in excruciating pain?

Touche.

The first few might have been in excruciating pain.

Yeah. It's not like they could dance and write in their journal at the same time. This is really fun. Right?

Wait, what was that song?

Oh, I was trying to do a medieval yeah. So that's just one of my favorite things from the medieval period was the dancing mania.

I mean, because we also have to remember that these people are people.

They were under a huge amount of stress, and maybe dancing at first was.

Really fun for them, just a way to take their mind off of it, right? Or to find misery, loves, company. And again, not that it's the exact same thing, but think back to COVID, man, didn't we all just want to go out and be with other people, even if it was doing something crazy?

Didn't we all just start a hobby and then kept going with it, like podcast?

And that's the thing. So the medieval period, of course, again, things have changed since then, but looking back on this, and we've brought some of them up, you can see some of these parallels because people are people. But it's also one of my favorite books that talks about trying to understand the past is called The Past is a Foreign Country. Oh, it's a really good book. And, I mean, it's old now. It's like, gosh, 30 years old, something like that.

It's so old.

I know, but basically the point of it is they're like us, but the way they see the world and the way they operate can be very different. They're very much us, but they're very much different. And it's the same for folks from the medieval past. They had the same fears and things as we do. They felt pain. They worried about the big scheme of things. Will I be all right? Will my family be all right? How will we make it? But they also had things that were a lot closer to them than it's close to us. And one of the big ones, I think, is death. It was ever present in the society. It was ever present in the community. It was ever present in the household in some form or another. And like so many cultural mores, there were systems in place to deal with it and help people cope with it, until there wasn't, until something comes along that is so big that it sort of breaks the system, and the system has to reinvent itself to do that. But it did that because it was because just like the human body, the systems, generally speaking, are quite resilient. And I think that's really a really fascinating way to look at it. That's one of the things I love about the material period, because, again, they're very similar, but they're very different.

I think something to remember, too, is practically every day there was new plague then, and we've had one plague, plague COVID being plagued right. Since tuberculosis in the early 19 hundreds.

Yeah.

So, I mean, it's different in that aspect, too, is they constantly were under constant deaths all the time.

Again, death is foremost in their mind. I don't know that they would wake up every morning saying, is today the day I die? Again, take note. That we're not talking about medieval battles and things like that. We're talking about day to day life. We're talking about baking bread and working in the fields and driving a wagon of surviving of grain from one village to the other. Yeah, just stuff. And every little thing could spell doom. And so it took a lot of courage. It took a lot of courage that, quite frankly, I don't think we have. And I'm very glad that we don't have to have it.

I don't think today there would ever be 400 plus people dancing till they died. I think that was something that could only be experienced then. I mean, there actually was a dance to death before this in the one three hundreds. But again, they thought it was like a poison or something.

Right, or something.

But the point is that that's also something that we will never understand or experience.

But we hope.

Yes, but it's something we can learn, right?

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Well, you definitely have to come back because you're my pal, my chum, my buddy.

I love it. I love doing the history. I love doing the history with Leslie.

Thank you for coming today.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Senegan is a production of the northeast Georgia history center in Gainesville, Georgia. Our podcast is edited by Andrews gilles. Our digital and on site program are made possible by the ada may ioster education center. Please join us next week for another episode of then again.