Terry Jones' Medieval Lives

by Terry Jones

Which just goes to show, you should not believe everything you read in books.

Roger, casting around for the most effective, vicious and altogether intimidating relief force he could find, realized that Chester was full of jongleurs who had come for the annual fair. He gathered them up and marched them off under his son-in-law Dutton. The Welsh, seeing this fearsome body of determined musicians, singers and prestidigitators bearing down on them ready to launch into an immediate performance of their terrifying arts, fled.

These rulers understood that the existence of frauds did not mean the theory of alchemy was rubbish. If this seems gullible, just consider the extent of fraud in contemporary research.

The Bishop insisted that these possibilities must remain open because human reason cannot limit God’s omnipotence.

Anyone that argues that God cannot create a stone so heavy that he himself cannot lift it, should read this sentence.

One of the oddest of these is the widespread conviction that medieval people thought the earth was flat. This is a modern mistake – there was no such belief in the Middle Ages. Perhaps ‘mistake’ is too kind a word. It is a lie that has been elevated into a fact.

but this doesn’t mean we can dismiss the Middle Ages as a period of superstitious ignorance. The determination to insist on a major shift in thought around the time of Newton has done a great disservice to our understanding of the past.

The significance of the story, though, lies not in exactly what was going on, but in the fact that it was seen as entirely credible that a young noblewoman would abduct a man, bed him and so force him into marriage. It is not just that women were not seen as weak and helpless. They could also be seen as sexual predators.

A holy woman told Margery her weeping was a gift of the Holy Spirit, but most people thought it was just a damned nuisance.