True Crime Medieval

Surely all of us can understand how infuriating it can be when a neighbor builds some damn thing or other that blocks our view. And then won't take it down. And maybe even laughs. What to do? Take the case to court, obviously. But what if we lose the case, on account of our view-blocking neighbor is a lawyer? Well. We can resort to harassment. With maybe a machine we build that makes the neighbor and his guests think that a bad earthquake is happening, in a region constantly bothered by...

In April, 1321, the lepers of Southern France found themselves accused of poisoning the community wells, with some sort of powder. They were, the theory went, attempting to spread leprosy to the rest of the population. They weren't doing that, or anything like that, but they were tortured and executed, and the leprosaria, the houses where they lived, were taken over, and all of the goods and moneys belonging to either the lepers or the leprosaria were confiscated. Soon after the lepers starte...

It's our April Fools' Episode, in which we explain how it is we know that things purported to have existed in the Middle Ages did not actually exist! It's late, for April Fools' Day, by any known calendar, since it's the end of June, and also the Bisley Boy, who did not exist, did his not existing after the Middle Ages, thereby qualifying this episode as a Special Episode. Anne explains the stupidity of the Bisley Boy Theory, which is, in short, that Queen Elizabeth I died at the age of 9 and...

In this episode, True Crime Medieval brings you two crimes, a father and son, both murdered in churches, though for different reasons altogether. Canute had enraged the peasants and nobility both, by enforcing the collection of tithes, while Charles had infuriated a badly behaved but powerful family which took it amiss when Charles attempted to make them stop gouging peasants during a famine. Michelle is both scandalized and gratified by getting to talk about Yet Another Sacrilegious Murder I...

Béla of Macsó was still in his twenties when he went to a meeting on Margaret Island (which is in the middle of the Danube, in Budapest), which wasn't a meeting at all, but a trap. There had been fairly complicated struggles for power in Hungary among members of a strikingly dysfunctional family -- Béla's grandfather, the king, had caused problems, handing out lands to his children, and Béla of Macsó had fought for his mother against her brother, his uncle; then the uncle and the grandfather ...