November 5, 2025 • 54 mins
This year, we’ve spent some good quality time with early medieval queens, digging into their mysterious and spectacular lives and reigns. And when it comes to the spectacular, it’s hard to compete with the star of this week’s episode, a woman who arrived in Francia a slave, rose to become a queen, and then ascended to the heavens as a saint. This week, Danièle speaks with Isabel Moreira about Queen Balthild of Francia, her influence, and her lasting legacy.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three hundred and fourteen
of the Medieval Podcast. I'm your host Danielle Sebolski. This year,
we've spent some good quality time with early medieval queens,
(00:24):
digging into their mysterious and spectacular lives and reigns. And
when it comes to the spectacular, it's hard to compete
with the star of this week's episode, a woman who
arrived in Frankia a slave, rose to become a queen,
and then ascended to the heavens as a saint. This week,
I spoke with doctor Isabel Morrera about the life and
(00:44):
times of Queen bald Hills of Frankia. Isabelle is Distinguished
Professor of History at the University of Utah, co editor
of the Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World, and the
author of Heaven's Purge Purgatory in Late Antiquity. Her new
book is Baldtail Defrankia, Anglo Saxon, Slave, Maravini and Queen
(01:05):
an Abolitionist Saint. Our conversation on Baltild's life, influence, and
lasting legacy is coming up right after this, Well, welcome
is about to talk about an early French queen We've
been talking about early English queens this year a lot
on the podcast, and now it's time to cross over
(01:27):
the channel. So welcome, thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I'm really pleased to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
So we're going to be talking about a queen in
the early part of the Middle Ages. In fact, maybe
late antiquity, depends on where you draw that line. So
can you tell us where and when we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yes, so we're talking about the seventh century, and we're
talking about primarily Neustria, which is the northern kingdom of
the Merrivingian ameraving in France. So there were three kingdoms
basically in Eustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy at the time. Talking
about Burgundy has come under the control of Neustria. So yes,
(02:04):
the area around Paris especially is the center of the
narrative that I convey.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Right, So the history of France is shifting borders all
the time. So we're talking about the northern part place
that includes place like Paris and all the cities where
there tends to be a lot of action, especially action
in terms of holiness when it comes to the Middle Ages, right.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
You know, the cities are bishoprics, there are bishops, there's
a lot of Christian activity. The Merivinian kings themselves are
Christian at this date. They are very involved in founding
churches and monasteries and convents. And this really is you
correctly note, this is late antiquity, so we still have
(02:50):
a lot of things that you might think about in
terms of the later Roman Empire. So people are writing
on papyrus, for example. This is a very documentary culture,
and by and large the population is Rumano Gallic. The
Merrivingian kings are an elite that are essentially governing these areas,
(03:12):
but they are most concentrated in the north. So again,
although they govern much of what is modern day France,
the concentration of the Frankish population is.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
In the north.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
So when we're picturing the way that things are structured,
it's that it hasn't quite entered into the Middle Ages.
We still have a lot of Roman structures in place,
one of them being slavery. So this is the moment
where our figure of our story are heroin Baldhild comes in.
So who is bald Hild at the beginning of her life?
What do we know about her? Right at the beginning, we.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Really know nothing about her. Childhood. One of the fun
things about writing a biography of her was that my
editor asked me to write a chapter on her childhood,
which of course we know nothing about. We simply know
from the hageographic Life that she came from overseas and
(04:08):
that she was Saxon. That's basically the information that we
are given. We know that there were a lot of
connections between the Mehrivingians and Anglo Saxon England. By the way,
it's not called Anglo Saxon England at this time, but
that's still I think the easiest way to talk about it.
There were all these connections therefore, with Anglo Saxon England,
(04:30):
and it seems likely that this is where she's from.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yes, And when she comes over the channel, she's not
coming of her own volition, is she No?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And we know this again because the life, the hagiographic life,
tells us that she was sold for a low price
to the Mayor of the Palace Eric World. So she
was clearly a slave or an enslaved person. You know,
(05:01):
she was clearly not coming of her own volition and
she was bought.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
So when we're talking about the Mayor of the Palace,
we should probably figure out who this person is, because
in terms of if you're going to be an enslaved person,
she landed in a place where she could be taking
care of relatively well. So who is the mayor of
the palace?
Speaker 2 (05:22):
So this is Erkenwold, who, as I said, he seems
to have had some connections with England, but he occupies
the most important position apart from the king. So the
mayor of the palace is sort of like a prime minister.
The king still has most power, but by this time
(05:42):
the mayors of the palace, who are often representing the
interests of the elite. At this time, they have become
very powerful, and they are simply to go on and
become even more powerful after this period.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
So he's expected to have a pretty big household. Do
we have any idea of what Baldtild might have been
expected to do as part of her duties within the household.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
We are told that she was a cup bearer, which
is a little hard to pin down because cup bearers
could range in status, But the seat appears to have
been an honorable position in this household, and it probably
meant that she was attending official banquets and would provide wine,
(06:30):
maybe to Akinwold and his wife and to others. So
she has a visible status in the household.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Yes, and this is going to be important to her
story later. But before we move on to that, how
old do we think she is around this time? I
know that with the Middle Ages, we're always best guessing,
especially at this moment. How old do we think she
was this time?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yes, very hard to know. We don't know when she
was born. I had to make some decisions in writing
about her, and I decided that around six point fifty,
when she eventually marries, that she's probably around the same
age as her husband, in which case she would have
been fifteen. So when did she come into the household
(07:16):
of American world, We don't know, But she was young.
She must have been really quite young.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
And we find in later legends. And we'll get to
what people are saying about her in later times in
a minute. But when people are talking about her later,
they say that her origins were definitely royal. But we
don't know this, Deweye.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
No, And in fact, I really doubt this. A big
part of my argument in the book is that this
is incorrect. I do believe that she was somebody whose
status was simply not royal. She may not have been
the lowest of slaves, but she did not appear to
come from a royal family. And a really good indication
(07:59):
of that is that in the earliest documentation we hear
nothing about her family. It's only in later documentation that
she's presented.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
That way, right, And when we're talking about bald Hill
being enslaved and brought to this immense palace, well, I'm
picturing as being pretty big and I'm full of people.
She is not the only person who's being enslaved at
this time. Sort of want to set the scene for
this where enslavement and the selling and the trading of
slaves is really really normal at this time, sort of
(08:29):
from that Roman legacy, right.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
That's correct. We know from another source that the trade
was quite active. We're told that, especially around the six
forties and six fifties, that these captives were coming across
to France as slaves, and that they were as numerable
as sort of flocks of sheep. So there were a
lot of them coming over at various junctures.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
And it's going to be important later in her story
that people are starting to distinguish between whether a slave
is Christian or not. So do we have a sense
that she is Christian when she arrives in France.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Again, we don't know for certain, but I think it's
highly likely that she was. I think that it was
likely Christian slaves who would have been adopted into establish households.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yes, because there's always that concern that there's going to
be you know, this quote unquote contamination across religions at
this time, you know, so it seems like maybe a
safe choice to have a nice Christian girl to enslave
and have at your powers.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yes, although the legislation at the time, the church councils
were very against this notion that Christians should be enslaved
and transported as slaves, but evidently they were.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah. And this is the environment in which she begins
her life in terms of the history of France. So
he's there, she is serving wine to important people at
the highest echelons of France, and she gets spotted, maybe
intentionally maybe unintentionally, by the Prince.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
What happens next, Well, we're told that she was married
to Clovis the Second, who was, as I said, probably
about her age marriageable age. And this was probably arranged
by Erkenwald so that she would be a queen and
that he would gain some influence through her.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
No, I've said, prince, but remind me, was Clovis already
king at this moment?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
He was actually already king. He would have embarked on
marriage at the point where he was coming out of
the regency of his mother. So he had become a
king at a very early age through the death of
his father. He was about five, but his mother, nuns Child,
had been reagent for him.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
So he is still young at this point, sort of
finding his feet as a king, and he gets married.
What s her of sense do we have of Clovis
as a person, Because one of the things that you
mentioned in your book is that sometimes there are kings
marry enslaved people and the implication is that the king
is weak and this is a way to control him.
So what do you think is happening with this marriage.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I do think that the king at this time may
have been if not initially then over the next few
years of marriage was certainly perhaps getting sick or was
mentally challenged. It's interesting that in cases where slave girls
(11:45):
were married to kings and it's recorded it's often to
kings who are described as weak in some way or
feeble minded in some way. And you can imagine that
a mother in law, for example, it would bring in
a slave girl marry her to the son as a
(12:07):
way to continue her power in that dynamic. In terms
of Clovis, the second we hear from some sources that
he was a drunkard, that he was a lecturer, all
the bad things, but also that he was weak minded.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, it's hard to know from such a distance. And
yet these are the things that we really want to
know because in so many other areas of the world
at this time, people are marrying someone of equal status,
maybe even a higher status, so that they can make
these connections. And yet here there's the king marrying an
enslaved person, and so you really want to find out
(12:46):
what's going on behind the scenes.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
There may be some other ways of explaining this. One
is that if the king had married into noble families
at this time, Wis factionalism could have arisen from a
situation like that, and so there could have been that Merrivnien.
Kings in the previous century, some of them had married
(13:11):
foreign princesses. Those marriages hadn't on the whole gone down
very well, it seems, and so here was an opportunity
to have women bear children for the king with sort
of minimal influence themselves during the marriage. However, you know,
this idea is based on the notion that Merrivnen kings
(13:36):
that all of their progeny are royal, they have the
royal blood, they have the potentiality to rule if that
is the future that they have, and so really the
woman is simply a vessel for this powerful strength of
the king, and so he didn't have to marry somebody
(13:56):
of his even close to equal status.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yes, well, she's definitely not of equal status. And one
of the things that you mentioned in the book as
well is that she's probably not educated either because of
her background, because of the way that she had been
brought up. We don't know how she had been brought
to France as a young woman, and we don't really
know that she was educated. In fact, your sense of
(14:20):
it is that she wasn't educated, and again this is
something that sort of makes her stand out from other
queens and other points of history.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yes, and you know, again it's a hard thing to
determine exactly, and I'm reading quite a bit from the
hagiographer who, when writing about her life, says that she
was sort of a nurturing figure, but he never makes
claims that she instructs the young people at court or
(14:50):
anything like that. And that is different from some of
the other female lives at the time that very specifically
note that they had some form of it education.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Because this is part of the role as a mother
under Christian tradition, especially when we're talking about the ideals
at the time, and so this is something noteworthy and
I think it was worth you're picking up on in
the book because this is something that is an important
part I think of Baltild's life. So she does have
some children. What do we know about her children, because
(15:23):
there's a lot we don't know about her children.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
What do we know well, so first of all, we
do know their names. That's something already we don't actually
know for certain about their birth order. Again, this was
a decision that I made in the book to go
with a particular birth order that seem to make sense
of the sources. So she has three sons and they
(15:46):
each in turn become kings. They are born within five
years of marriage, which I think shows Baltild to have
been a healthy young woman who probably received good childcare
natal care, and she remains healthy too. The first son, Clotha,
(16:09):
the third was probably the sun closest to her because
when her husband dies, she is regent for him and
she is actively working with him on various policies that
she's interested in. So she can direct policies as a regent,
but she needs her son, the king, to sign off
(16:32):
on them. Even if he's a minor, he has that role.
So that's one thing we know about him is that
he is important in the early part of her regency.
The other two sons, the second son children. The second
is sent out to the Eastern Kingdom of Austrasia. He
(16:54):
becomes king of Neustria. For a short period of time,
he and his pregnant wife are murdered and it was
a great scandal. And then balt Hill's third son, Theodoric,
the third is the king who is reigning at the
time that she is living in the convent. So in turn,
(17:18):
each of these sons becomes king.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
This is an incredible rise, like this is your literal
rags to riches story, something that you definitely don't see
every day. So she goes from being an enslaved person.
She is the Queen regent, and she's the queen regent
for some time, and she starts to make some policy changes.
And one thing that I think I'd like to pick
(17:42):
up on is that you talked about her having good
care as a pregnant woman and giving birth. And there
is a really sweet story in there you have where
she's discussing her fears with the bishop. Right, and this
bishop is going to be very important, but he's comforting
her during her pregnancy.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Right. Yes, it is a lot story, and it shows
that she was very concerned. This was her first pregnancy.
She would have been concerned just for that reason, but
she was also very concerned that she should have a son,
and a son would basically keep her safe. Right, as
(18:18):
long as she is the mother of a son who
has the potential to be a king, then she is
personally safe. And I mentioned in the book that you
know there had been this past example that was probably
a cautionary tale for her. A previous Marrivingian king named
Theodebird had married a slave girl, and the slave girl
(18:44):
did not produce sons. Her mother in law decided it
was time that she go and she was murdered, so
you know, this could have been bald Hill's fate. I
think that's the important thing to think about, is that
her situation was incredibly precarious until she had sons. So
(19:06):
having three sons was obviously greatly to her advantage, and
it explains the power that she has both as a
regent and probably even during her time in the convent.
There's no reason why she could not have continued to
offer advice and be part of that even though she
(19:27):
never actually left the convent.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
So one of the things that she is perhaps most
remembered for is when she has the power in her hands,
she starts to use it to help other people. And
these are the things that are written down in the
things we remember. So we'll get into the spicy stuff
in a minute, but she's remembered for working towards helping
enslaved people. So tell us about this.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, so this is again, this is the hagiographer telling
us this information. And to be clear, it's very unusual
for saints' lives at this time to actually elaborate on
things like policy, like what a person's activities were when
they held some power, and what we're told is that
(20:16):
she was involved in rescuing slaves, male and female, but
she's particularly remembered for rescuing female slaves. And it seems
that in the six fifties, and this is part of
my argument that in the six fifties there seems to
have been some kind of crisis where somebody needed to
(20:39):
step in and help all of these people coming over
from England to France in servitude. And I think, as
a woman who had herself been enslaved, I think that
she felt a duty to rescue these female slaves, especially
(21:00):
because again, their situations would have been very precarious. They
would have been sold into households, they could have gone
into sort of menial work, agricultural work, other sort of
forms of labor. And what she does is she gives
them the option to join her convent and live there.
(21:23):
And it would appear that that offer was taken up
by quite a few of these female slaves.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
So she's leaning on, as you were saying before, there
is precedent that you're not supposed to enslave Christians to
begin with, So she is really sort of leaning on
the letter of the law here saying you can't bring
an enslaved prison from elsewhere here. Basically, as soon as
they set their feet on French soil, they should be freed.
Have I got that right? What does it look like
(21:52):
on the ground?
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Okay, so that might be a little optimistic.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, but I guess that is why we need to elaborate,
right right.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I think that, you know, a principle like that probably
would have been a little anachronistic at the time. I
think it was rather that this was a situation that
she was able to address. She may have herself wanted
to address it because she could bring these women slaves
into her convent and they could both create a bigger
(22:22):
establishment for her, and they could also do service in
the convent. So there was definitely some benefit from her
perspective in helping them.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yes, this was my thought when I was reading your
book is she gives them options, but the options are
heavily weighted towards go to the convent, and then you
start to wonder, well, how much of a choice do
you really have at that moment?
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Right? Anyway, Yeah, and to come back to the previous point,
what she says is, I mean, she has no control
about who is coming to France, but what she can control,
or think she can control, is the movement of slaves
across the Neustrian Kingdom. So that is what she prohibits.
(23:05):
She says, you must not do this, you must not
move them across the kingdom. But if you say that,
if you now say that you cannot sort of sell
them on to other places, then you have to provide
a solution for them. And that's I think the context
in which we see this activity.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Yes, and so do you have a sense again, again,
this is so far back in history, but do you
have a sense of how this was received where people
didn't just laugh her out of the kingdom when she
said this, Like, how do you think this was received
by the court? The people around her, are the people
supporting her?
Speaker 2 (23:39):
What do you think? Well, again, we only have the
statement that she did this, and that she was successful
in doing it in terms of the controlling that trade.
Her basis was her own authority. We can't tell whether
it was entirely successful. We can't tell if you know,
(24:02):
her commands were fully obeyed. But I think what's interesting
in this is that she made those commands that she
identified that as a problem that could potentially be solved
by commanding this, and that that was in her power
to do. The whole notion of rescuing captives had a
(24:27):
long history, of course, and bishops are often credited with
that as part of their piety right, that they rescued captives.
So in that respect, she's doing something that religious leaders
did or claimed to do. In her case, we know
that she was very much in partnership with this Bishop
(24:49):
Oligius of Noyon, who was also in the process of
rescuing slaves, and we know that from his vita, and
he starts earlier than her. He's an older sort of
eminence grise at the court when she is there. But
I think that he may have viewed her both as
an ally to the activities that he was already engaged in.
(25:12):
But I think that the convent solution was one that
she was particularly equipped to handle.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yes, it seems like one of those moments in history
where there is adjoining together of forces that allows things
to be possible that weren't possible before, because, as you say,
the bishop has already made moves in this direction, and
then he has a queen that is obviously sympathetic to
the cause, and together they can move forward on this
or they believe they can move forward on this, and
(25:42):
it's something that hadn't really been moved on in the
same way before. So it's an interesting moment. And this
is the whole reason that you're on this podcast today
because Baldtild has a very interesting history herself. One of
the things that she also worked on was to prevent
or help prevent or try to prevent infanticide. So where
(26:03):
does this come into her story.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, So Baldthheld was credited with a number of sort
of reforms right and in fantaside, prohibition of infanticide was
one of those. On the face of it, it just
sounds like, yes, you should prohibit in fantaside. But when
I was exploring this, it seemed to me that the
narrative around that was sort of interesting because in the
(26:30):
narrative it says that men It sort of specifies men
were killing their children because they didn't want to pay taxes,
which is a very strange kind of story. It seems
that the people who were complaining of this were not
poor peasants, you know. Rather, there seems to have been
a situation where there was unhappiness about taxation and one
(26:56):
only has to think that, you know, she is part
of the government, that she's part of the taxation process.
And I sort of made a bit of an imaginative
leap to imagine that perhaps her plowing funds into rescuing
captives and putting them up in convents and in other ways,
(27:18):
that this could have been burdensome on the treasury, and
that she is perhaps responsible for wanting taxation, and that
might be resentment that these English people coming over as
slaves are being treated in a particular way that other
people are not. There are all sorts of possibilities around it.
It did seem that it was a more complicated story
(27:41):
than simply saying, really, you shouldn't kill infants.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Yes, when you put it like that, you shouldn't. And
so this is again an interesting thing that sort of
came out. And of course this is coming I think
it's coming from the story that's written about her in
order to canonize her later. So this is something that's
sort of female encoded as well, is making sure that
you're taking care of babies. And also the other thing
(28:07):
that she sort of took under her umbrella or her
file in government was the burial of the dead, and
this is a very interesting point in the book as well,
because there seems to have been almost an obsession in
conjunction with the bishop's work here where they had to
go around and bury the dead, and there was so
enthusiastic about it that they accidentally buried someone who was alive.
(28:28):
So what's happening here.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yes, we're told that they almost buried somebody alive. It
was so enthusiastic about it. Yes, Again, it's again a
little hard to fathom exactly what is going on here.
It does seem to suggest that people were dying in
the open, perhaps as a result of being in conflict
or murdered or sickness or something, and that there's a
(28:54):
sense that it's respectable to bury the dead, and this
is something that a bishop would like do. It's interesting
that not all bishops are attributed with this desire, so
this seems to be a pious at What's interesting too, though,
is that it's a way that her hagiographer was clearly
(29:15):
linking her with the bishop who was doing this, bearing
right and sort of saying that they're in sync. They're
sort of doing the same sort of thing. This is
part of the same kind of worldview where this is
now the thing we have to do well.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
These are all good works, and before we retire her
to the convent. Some of the things that are thrown
at her, especially later, are ideas that maybe she's not
all good, maybe she's interfering with bishops in a way
that is perhaps more murderous. So what are the accusations
that are thrown at her when people want to at
(29:53):
least point out maybe the places where she's not doing
so well as a queen or actively besmirge her reputation,
What are people throwing on her?
Speaker 2 (30:03):
So the hagiographic life tells us that she militated against simony.
Simony is the purchase of ecclesiastical office, and so the
hagiographer wants us to know that she's on the up
and up. Bishops should become bishops the proper way, and
(30:24):
not because they pay for their offices. In practice, it
was probably fairly common, but also there was always going
to be a bit of a slippery slope in terms of,
you know, how do you bring yourself to the attention
of a community or a king in order that you
can be made a bishop. In Baltel's case, you know,
(30:48):
right from the beginning she is very connected to bishops
who support her position as Queen Regent. So a certain
set of bishops are very much her allies and she
depends on them. However, this is a time of really
(31:09):
unprecedented violence against bishops, and so we know that bishops
were being murdered at this time. Her entry into the
conventive shell seems to have come around the time of
the murder of Sigobrand, the Bishop of Paris, but she's
(31:30):
not accused of killing bishops in Merivnian sources. She is
accused of that, specifically in a later Anglo Saxon source
that says that she killed nine bishops, which would be
very impressive.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
That would definitely be something that you would expect the
Merevingians to notice at least.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Well, I mean, bishops at this time are political acts,
and so you know when they get involved in court
politics and factionalism as they were doing, then they were
simply being killed because people in these factions were being killed. Right,
it would probably be true to say that some bishops
(32:19):
who were on the other side of her own politics
were murdered, and that you could impute that it happens
under her watch, that she has potentially something to do
with it. It's all very vague in the mehri Vingian sources,
and I think you would rather expect that, after all,
she's the mother of legitimate kings who continued to govern
(32:42):
beyond her.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yes, and speaking of which, this is the moment where
she is sent off to the convent. Your sense of
it is against her wishes. But she's sent off there,
maybe still at the fringes of royal life, but certainly
not at the center of power anymore. So what are
the circumstances Why does she gets shoved in the convent?
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Well, because she falls afoul of the political situation she
has ebroin this very all very forceful man who becomes
Mayor of the palace. She'd initially worked with him during
her regency, but things get very complicated and it's clear
that she needs to be removed from the political arena.
(33:29):
What's interesting is that when her son, her next son,
becomes king, he doesn't take her out of the convent. So,
I don't you know, whatever her expectations were, she is
left there, even when there's greater peace in the realm.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yes, well, I think things can't have gone too badly
for her in the convent. Because she's treated well enough
that later on she is treated as a saint. As
we're talking about this biography, this haigraphy about her is
meant to make her a saint. And we even have
or there are records of her being exhumed, and when
(34:09):
you looked at the documents and all the artifacts around
her burial, it seems that she was still treated with
a lot of respect. So can you tell us a
little bit about what was found in her tomb and
why people were looking at it to be in with?
Speaker 2 (34:25):
First of all, just in terms of her situation in
the convent, it does seem that she maintained a secular appearance,
at least initially. I think that she hoped that she
would be able to rejoin the political fray that did
not happen. I think she did, however, take the habit,
(34:46):
probably right at the end of her life, and I
don't have any reason to doubt that she died as
a nun. The reason that we can make that kind
of argument has to do with her relics and what
we know of her. We're very fortunate in that we
have material items associated with balt Hild, first of all,
(35:11):
her body, her bones. We also have textiles associated with her,
and we have her hair, and her hair is an
interesting clue to all of this, because her hair was
preserved over the centuries. It can still be seen today.
There's only a little bit of it left because so
much of it was given away as relics over the centuries.
(35:34):
But when her hair was examined in nineteen eighty three,
the archaeologist and his team noticed that it had been dyed,
that it had been dyed so that it continued to
look a sort of strawberry blonde kind of color. And
it seems that you wouldn't dye your hair in a
(35:57):
convent unless it was on display in some way, and
that would not have been common. So I think that
she was still caring about her appearance, about her regal
appearance in the convent until probably the last year of
her life.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
And when we see that her life is written in
the context of making her appear saintly, that her bones
are being treated as relics, that her items are being
treated as relics. How quickly did this sort of cult appear?
Was it successful? Did you become a saint? What happened
with her?
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Yeah? So, her body and her tumor examined in eight
thirty three when she is moved to a new church building,
and at that point it was remarked that her body
was still very much intact, and they gathered up the
(36:56):
contents of the two including some of the tech styles,
perhaps not all of them, but some of them, and
they had them placed under the altar of the new church.
So her remains are being placed somewhere of prestige, and
we're told that miracles occurred. So she was definitely being
(37:19):
viewed by the ninth century as a saint, but the
formal process of sanctification I was not able to track down.
That might be something to somebody else can find. But
I saw some indications that people thought that she had
been canonized, and it would make sense that she could
(37:40):
have been retroactively canonized, but I wasn't able to track
that down. She does appear in Uzward's martyrology in the
ninth century, and that usually is as good as it
gets for early saints. Right if you are already being
listed as somebody that congregations can pray to and observe
(38:01):
their feast days, then that has put you into that rank.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
And she is remembered through the centuries. We know this
not only because she was looked at in nineteen eighty three.
They looked at her bones and all the relics associated
with her, but she also had kind of a mixed reputation.
And when we were talking before we started recording, you
were like, I want to mention this painting. Tell us
(38:28):
about this painting, because this is a story does not
look good for her. Tell us about a famous French painting,
about the story of bald Hilt.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Right, so there is this medieval story about balt Hilt
that is quite unusual. I'll explain the story first and
then we can sort of talk about painting. So the
story is, and this is a medieval story. The story
is that she and her husband have their sons, and
(38:58):
that her husbands decides to go on crusade. So you
can already tell the story is not a merath engine story. Right,
She's going the husband goes on on crusade, and in
the meantime, she's left as regent and her sons, who
appeared to be fully grown, are colluding with the nobles
(39:23):
to take over the kingdom. While their father is away,
she quickly recalls her husband and tells her you know,
this is going on. Come back. He comes back, and
he issues justice against the nobles, He executes them and
so forth. But what are they going to do about
his two sons who were responsible for the rebellion, And
(39:48):
he decides to basically hand the problem off to their
mother Bultld, who we're told prayed to God and was
divinely given this solution that the Suns should have their
hands strings dissolved away with a poker hot poker, so
(40:09):
that they could they were lame, they could not walk,
and that they would be placed on a barge in
the river Sene without a rudder and just allowed to float,
so that God could do with them whatever God wanted
to do with them. The story has a somewhat happy
conclusion in so far as they drift down river towards
(40:33):
Ruin and towards the monastery of Jumiash, where they are rescued.
The story continues. They become penitent, they enter the monastery.
The king and the queen are so happy about this
that they give lots and lots of money to the
monastery of Jumieresh, indeed a quarter of the fisk, we're told.
(40:56):
And so this is a story that clearly is trying
to make a connection of the medieval convent of Jumiege
with this royal family. The story was not very well known,
i think, until it was sort of rediscovered and published
in the early nineteenth century. But this painter, a very
(41:20):
fitar Lumine, decides to paint this image of the two
boys on the barge having been hamstrung. First of all,
the picture was considered scandalous at the time when it
was exhibited at the Paris Salon in eighteen eighty, but
(41:42):
it also sort of becomes a meme. It becomes a
cultural moment that people associated with Baltilde, and so you know,
for all these centuries, you know she's this good saint.
And this story was also, by the way, supposed to
indicate her being a good mother, a pious mother who
(42:03):
finds an ideal solution. But it was clearly shocking to
the visitors to the Salon in eighteen eighty when they
saw this painting.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Well, it totally fits with that nineteenth century idea of
what's medieval, right, it's shocking and horrible and tied with
royals and with religion and all of those things. And
so you have a picture in the book. So people
can check it out when they look at the book,
and next time they see two sad looking boys on
(42:35):
a river to do with friends, will know that it
has to do with bald Tild. And I also, I
also wanted to thank you because one of the pictures
that you have in the book is from the Luxembourg
Gardens in Paris, and that reminded me. I've only been
to Paris once, but that was one of the places
I went, and I took some pictures of those beautiful
statues of queens and women over French history, and I
(42:58):
didn't have a picture of Balti statue. I do have
Anne of Austria because I like the Three Musketeers. And
it turns out that I also have a picture of
the statue a Valentina Visconti, who is somebody who you know,
I had no idea was going to be a medievalist
when I was visiting, but she's somebody that I ended
up talking about this summer on my miniseries to Glass King.
So thank you for allowing me to go back and
(43:20):
visit these statues. There is a beautiful statue of bald Hild,
and yet tell us about this statue because she is
becoming a symbol in this nineteenth century moment of abolition,
if nothing else, So tell us about this statue before
we go.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
The context for her statue is this civic beautification program
that was being carried out by King Louis Philippe in
the eighteen thirties and forties, and these were meant to
be statues of queens and illustrious women, and bald Hild
is there as one of them. I was very interested
to know why why did she get picked? And the
(44:04):
immediate answer, the sort of easiest answer, is that she
is connected, her cult is connected with the family of
King Louis Philippe. But what I discovered when I started
to do some research on the gardens was that on
(44:25):
the book that she holds there is a text, and
the text says abolitio seratuta, so abolition of slavery. Interestingly,
that text is really hard to find anywhere else. If
I hadn't come across that in research, I would not
have known that that was what is on there. You
(44:48):
cannot see it from the ground. You can only sort
of see a little bit that there's some kind of
text there, but you can't identify it from the ground.
But that sort of gave me a clue that this
was an intro sting version of Baltild that was worth
exploring further, and so I started to do some research
into this sculptor of that statue, Victor Tarrass, to see
(45:12):
why Baltild was being portrayed in that way. Up until then,
the most common way that she was portrayed was as
a nun, as a royal nun, so this was definitely different. Now,
all through the centuries they knew that she had been
(45:35):
a slave, although they now think they thought she was
a royal slave, and that she had been involved in
rescuing slaves, but it never really stood out to them
as the most important thing to know about her. So
it is noteworthy that for Victor Tarrass, when he does
(45:57):
just a little bit of scratching beneath the say to
find out who is Baltthild that he's going to get
to actually make a statue of, he sees this, I
think as an opportunity to make her relevant, right because
this is precisely the moment really just before France ultimately
abolishes slavery. France was the latest European country to do so.
(46:21):
Slavery's not abolished in France until eighteen forty eight, and
RAS's statue with this engraving on it predates that by
a year or so, so it very much seemed to
be again a moment in time where Baltthilde could be
(46:42):
used to convey a political message in a royal context,
which was necessary because this was the time of King
Louis Philippe. But eighteen forty eight was also when King
Louis Filipe was booted outright, and so the project of
putting up queens in gardens became far less appealing after
(47:09):
they carp rid of their king.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Yes, well, I mean this is one of the reasons
why it's so interesting is because if you're going to
have a statue of someone, there needs to be a
reason for it, and it's not. It can't just be
these women are beautiful, because they're all they're all beautiful.
How can you tell the difference between them? One of
the ways of their outfits, one of the ways of
the labels. But they have to have symbols attached to them.
(47:32):
And so I think this is so interesting because baldtilt
I think has fallen out of fashion again. I don't
think people are looking at her very much right now.
But it's interesting how she is brought forward as being
this sort of icon in a way that maybe she
might have approved of, you know, in the nineteenth century,
which is not something you can always say about the
way people looked at the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
I mean, she was put up there also because she
was a regent, so a lot of the people in
a lot of the statues are of queen regents, and
that was sort of had some historical importance for Louis
Philippe's family also, So she's there as a powerful woman
as a regent of France, and she's there as somebody
(48:19):
who has policy in her name, and that is being
represented on this statue. It's actually a very strong image
of a political woman in the public sphere at a
time when that was not that comment. So I think
her statue is very interesting in that way. I also,
(48:43):
thinking about it later, feel that what might be just
as important is the representation of her as a woman
as an abolitionist. Because abolitionism was so much associated with men.
Women were writing books, you know, anti slavery books, they
were involved in the movement, but they weren't statues weren't
(49:06):
being made to them, so I think this is a
little unusual there as well.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Yes, Well, as we get to the end of this,
I'm hoping people will look online, find the statue because
it's absolutely gorgeous, find it in your book. But this
sort of gives me an opportunity now to say, we
are again further past the nineteenth century. This is your
moment to tell us why do you think that Baltilde
should be remembered.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
Well, I think that she should be remembered because she
was a powerful woman who had an extraordinary life, who
did something with her life, and who has this sort
of long cultural afterlife. I also think that it's helpful
to know individual people for an era that you might
(49:55):
be interested in. I've always felt like, what would it
be like to do Tudor history and not to have
biographies of Henry the Eighth and Anne Berlin, Right, I
think in creating a biography of balt Hilt, I'm hopeful
that people will come to know the Merrivngin era better
through the vehicle of her extraordinary life.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Well, I'm hoping that that wish comes true and that
people will find your book read about it because you
have so much in here that is beyond just one
single figure, that lets people know about the Merravnjine world
in general, and of course this is something that a
lot of us need to learn more about. So thank
you so much Isabelle for coming on the podcast and
telling us all about Baldtild's extraordinary life.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
Well, thank you, Daniel. This has been a delightful conversation.
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
To find out more about Isabelle's work, you can visit
her faculty page at the University of Utah. Her new
book is baldt Hilda, Frankia, Anglo Saxon, Slave Maravni and
Queen an Abolitionist Saint. Before we go, here's Peter from
medievalis dot Net to tell us what's on the website.
And we're not going to keep him long because Peter,
(51:07):
it sounds like you're pretty sick.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
Hey, yeah, a little bit, a little bit under the
weather this weekend.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
And yet you're here. You're here ready to tell people
about the Middle Aged.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
Indeed, indeed, and you know, because we know our audience
at medievalist dot net loves medieval phrases, we have created
a piece called Ten Medieval Phrases to deserve a comeback.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
We were just talking about this a few weeks ago,
how we need to bring back the wolf and the story.
What a cool phrase that is. So what have you
got for us on your list?
Speaker 3 (51:37):
Yeah, like one of them actually has made a comeback.
In the fourteenth century, people would say at six and seven.
So we can find that in Chaucer, for example, And
it's a way of saying confusion or disorder. It's kind
of based on dice. And now the people at dictionary
dot com have come out with their twenty twenty five
word of the Year, which apparently all the kids are
(51:59):
saying is six'.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
Seven, yes, YES i have to. SAY i have teenagers
and it's driving my teenagers crazy how often that the
younger people are saying six to. Seven so what you're
saying is the young people have been reading Their chaucer
and they mean at sixes and. Sevens that's what they.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
Mean that's undoubtedly, Right like that's it has to be
so because it kind of has the same kind of uncertain.
Meaning so it's kind of a very loosely defined phrase
that right now it kind of means maybe, this maybe.
Speaker 1 (52:30):
That, YEAH i think that there's lots of competing definitions
for what it, means AND i mean that is definitely
something that you can connect back to The Middle. Ages
what do people actually mean when they say these?
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Things, indeed, INDEED i love how language has changed and
evolve and in this case come back.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
Again there we. Go, well thank You peter for getting
out of your sick bed long enough to tell us
about these medieval phrases that should make come. Back i'm
sure there's gonna be lots of people who want to
read that.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
Article Thanks.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Thank you to all of, you, kings, queens and saints
alike for being here and supporting indie, history whether it's
letting me ads, play sharing episodes with your, friends or
becoming patrons on patreon dot com like the saintly patron
Has queen ball. Tailed your support makes good things. Possible
to find out how to become a, patron please visit
(53:23):
patreon dot. Com Slash medievalists for everything From Frankish queen's
Two dankish. Scenes Followm medievalist dot net On instagram at
medievalist net or Blue sky At. Medievalists you can find
Me Danielle sebalski across social media at five Min medievalist
or five minute, medievalist and you can find my books
(53:44):
at all your favorite. Bookstores our music is By Christian.
Overton thanks for, listening and have yourself a wonderful day
Speaker 2 (54:01):
One
Hi everyone, and welcome to episode three hundred and fourteen
of the Medieval Podcast. I'm your host Danielle Sebolski. This year,
we've spent some good quality time with early medieval queens,
(00:24):
digging into their mysterious and spectacular lives and reigns. And
when it comes to the spectacular, it's hard to compete
with the star of this week's episode, a woman who
arrived in Frankia a slave, rose to become a queen,
and then ascended to the heavens as a saint. This week,
I spoke with doctor Isabel Morrera about the life and
(00:44):
times of Queen bald Hills of Frankia. Isabelle is Distinguished
Professor of History at the University of Utah, co editor
of the Oxford Handbook of the Merovingian World, and the
author of Heaven's Purge Purgatory in Late Antiquity. Her new
book is Baldtail Defrankia, Anglo Saxon, Slave, Maravini and Queen
(01:05):
an Abolitionist Saint. Our conversation on Baltild's life, influence, and
lasting legacy is coming up right after this, Well, welcome
is about to talk about an early French queen We've
been talking about early English queens this year a lot
on the podcast, and now it's time to cross over
(01:27):
the channel. So welcome, thank you.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I'm really pleased to be here.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
So we're going to be talking about a queen in
the early part of the Middle Ages. In fact, maybe
late antiquity, depends on where you draw that line. So
can you tell us where and when we're talking about.
Speaker 2 (01:43):
Yes, so we're talking about the seventh century, and we're
talking about primarily Neustria, which is the northern kingdom of
the Merrivingian ameraving in France. So there were three kingdoms
basically in Eustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy at the time. Talking
about Burgundy has come under the control of Neustria. So yes,
(02:04):
the area around Paris especially is the center of the
narrative that I convey.
Speaker 1 (02:10):
Right, So the history of France is shifting borders all
the time. So we're talking about the northern part place
that includes place like Paris and all the cities where
there tends to be a lot of action, especially action
in terms of holiness when it comes to the Middle Ages, right.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
You know, the cities are bishoprics, there are bishops, there's
a lot of Christian activity. The Merivinian kings themselves are
Christian at this date. They are very involved in founding
churches and monasteries and convents. And this really is you
correctly note, this is late antiquity, so we still have
(02:50):
a lot of things that you might think about in
terms of the later Roman Empire. So people are writing
on papyrus, for example. This is a very documentary culture,
and by and large the population is Rumano Gallic. The
Merrivingian kings are an elite that are essentially governing these areas,
(03:12):
but they are most concentrated in the north. So again,
although they govern much of what is modern day France,
the concentration of the Frankish population is.
Speaker 3 (03:23):
In the north.
Speaker 2 (03:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (03:25):
So when we're picturing the way that things are structured,
it's that it hasn't quite entered into the Middle Ages.
We still have a lot of Roman structures in place,
one of them being slavery. So this is the moment
where our figure of our story are heroin Baldhild comes in.
So who is bald Hild at the beginning of her life?
What do we know about her? Right at the beginning, we.
Speaker 2 (03:48):
Really know nothing about her. Childhood. One of the fun
things about writing a biography of her was that my
editor asked me to write a chapter on her childhood,
which of course we know nothing about. We simply know
from the hageographic Life that she came from overseas and
(04:08):
that she was Saxon. That's basically the information that we
are given. We know that there were a lot of
connections between the Mehrivingians and Anglo Saxon England. By the way,
it's not called Anglo Saxon England at this time, but
that's still I think the easiest way to talk about it.
There were all these connections therefore, with Anglo Saxon England,
(04:30):
and it seems likely that this is where she's from.
Speaker 1 (04:34):
Yes, And when she comes over the channel, she's not
coming of her own volition, is she No?
Speaker 2 (04:41):
And we know this again because the life, the hagiographic life,
tells us that she was sold for a low price
to the Mayor of the Palace Eric World. So she
was clearly a slave or an enslaved person. You know,
(05:01):
she was clearly not coming of her own volition and
she was bought.
Speaker 1 (05:07):
So when we're talking about the Mayor of the Palace,
we should probably figure out who this person is, because
in terms of if you're going to be an enslaved person,
she landed in a place where she could be taking
care of relatively well. So who is the mayor of
the palace?
Speaker 2 (05:22):
So this is Erkenwold, who, as I said, he seems
to have had some connections with England, but he occupies
the most important position apart from the king. So the
mayor of the palace is sort of like a prime minister.
The king still has most power, but by this time
(05:42):
the mayors of the palace, who are often representing the
interests of the elite. At this time, they have become
very powerful, and they are simply to go on and
become even more powerful after this period.
Speaker 1 (05:59):
So he's expected to have a pretty big household. Do
we have any idea of what Baldtild might have been
expected to do as part of her duties within the household.
Speaker 2 (06:09):
We are told that she was a cup bearer, which
is a little hard to pin down because cup bearers
could range in status, But the seat appears to have
been an honorable position in this household, and it probably
meant that she was attending official banquets and would provide wine,
(06:30):
maybe to Akinwold and his wife and to others. So
she has a visible status in the household.
Speaker 1 (06:38):
Yes, and this is going to be important to her
story later. But before we move on to that, how
old do we think she is around this time? I
know that with the Middle Ages, we're always best guessing,
especially at this moment. How old do we think she
was this time?
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Yes, very hard to know. We don't know when she
was born. I had to make some decisions in writing
about her, and I decided that around six point fifty,
when she eventually marries, that she's probably around the same
age as her husband, in which case she would have
been fifteen. So when did she come into the household
(07:16):
of American world, We don't know, But she was young.
She must have been really quite young.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
And we find in later legends. And we'll get to
what people are saying about her in later times in
a minute. But when people are talking about her later,
they say that her origins were definitely royal. But we
don't know this, Deweye.
Speaker 2 (07:35):
No, And in fact, I really doubt this. A big
part of my argument in the book is that this
is incorrect. I do believe that she was somebody whose
status was simply not royal. She may not have been
the lowest of slaves, but she did not appear to
come from a royal family. And a really good indication
(07:59):
of that is that in the earliest documentation we hear
nothing about her family. It's only in later documentation that
she's presented.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
That way, right, And when we're talking about bald Hill
being enslaved and brought to this immense palace, well, I'm
picturing as being pretty big and I'm full of people.
She is not the only person who's being enslaved at
this time. Sort of want to set the scene for
this where enslavement and the selling and the trading of
slaves is really really normal at this time, sort of
(08:29):
from that Roman legacy, right.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
That's correct. We know from another source that the trade
was quite active. We're told that, especially around the six
forties and six fifties, that these captives were coming across
to France as slaves, and that they were as numerable
as sort of flocks of sheep. So there were a
lot of them coming over at various junctures.
Speaker 1 (08:55):
And it's going to be important later in her story
that people are starting to distinguish between whether a slave
is Christian or not. So do we have a sense
that she is Christian when she arrives in France.
Speaker 2 (09:06):
Again, we don't know for certain, but I think it's
highly likely that she was. I think that it was
likely Christian slaves who would have been adopted into establish households.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Yes, because there's always that concern that there's going to
be you know, this quote unquote contamination across religions at
this time, you know, so it seems like maybe a
safe choice to have a nice Christian girl to enslave
and have at your powers.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Yes, although the legislation at the time, the church councils
were very against this notion that Christians should be enslaved
and transported as slaves, but evidently they were.
Speaker 1 (09:53):
Yeah. And this is the environment in which she begins
her life in terms of the history of France. So
he's there, she is serving wine to important people at
the highest echelons of France, and she gets spotted, maybe
intentionally maybe unintentionally, by the Prince.
Speaker 2 (10:12):
What happens next, Well, we're told that she was married
to Clovis the Second, who was, as I said, probably
about her age marriageable age. And this was probably arranged
by Erkenwald so that she would be a queen and
that he would gain some influence through her.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
No, I've said, prince, but remind me, was Clovis already
king at this moment?
Speaker 2 (10:40):
He was actually already king. He would have embarked on
marriage at the point where he was coming out of
the regency of his mother. So he had become a
king at a very early age through the death of
his father. He was about five, but his mother, nuns Child,
had been reagent for him.
Speaker 1 (11:02):
So he is still young at this point, sort of
finding his feet as a king, and he gets married.
What s her of sense do we have of Clovis
as a person, Because one of the things that you
mentioned in your book is that sometimes there are kings
marry enslaved people and the implication is that the king
is weak and this is a way to control him.
So what do you think is happening with this marriage.
Speaker 2 (11:25):
I do think that the king at this time may
have been if not initially then over the next few
years of marriage was certainly perhaps getting sick or was
mentally challenged. It's interesting that in cases where slave girls
(11:45):
were married to kings and it's recorded it's often to
kings who are described as weak in some way or
feeble minded in some way. And you can imagine that
a mother in law, for example, it would bring in
a slave girl marry her to the son as a
(12:07):
way to continue her power in that dynamic. In terms
of Clovis, the second we hear from some sources that
he was a drunkard, that he was a lecturer, all
the bad things, but also that he was weak minded.
Speaker 1 (12:25):
Yeah, it's hard to know from such a distance. And
yet these are the things that we really want to
know because in so many other areas of the world
at this time, people are marrying someone of equal status,
maybe even a higher status, so that they can make
these connections. And yet here there's the king marrying an
enslaved person, and so you really want to find out
(12:46):
what's going on behind the scenes.
Speaker 2 (12:49):
There may be some other ways of explaining this. One
is that if the king had married into noble families
at this time, Wis factionalism could have arisen from a
situation like that, and so there could have been that Merrivnien.
Kings in the previous century, some of them had married
(13:11):
foreign princesses. Those marriages hadn't on the whole gone down
very well, it seems, and so here was an opportunity
to have women bear children for the king with sort
of minimal influence themselves during the marriage. However, you know,
this idea is based on the notion that Merrivnen kings
(13:36):
that all of their progeny are royal, they have the
royal blood, they have the potentiality to rule if that
is the future that they have, and so really the
woman is simply a vessel for this powerful strength of
the king, and so he didn't have to marry somebody
(13:56):
of his even close to equal status.
Speaker 1 (14:00):
Yes, well, she's definitely not of equal status. And one
of the things that you mentioned in the book as
well is that she's probably not educated either because of
her background, because of the way that she had been
brought up. We don't know how she had been brought
to France as a young woman, and we don't really
know that she was educated. In fact, your sense of
(14:20):
it is that she wasn't educated, and again this is
something that sort of makes her stand out from other
queens and other points of history.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yes, and you know, again it's a hard thing to
determine exactly, and I'm reading quite a bit from the
hagiographer who, when writing about her life, says that she
was sort of a nurturing figure, but he never makes
claims that she instructs the young people at court or
(14:50):
anything like that. And that is different from some of
the other female lives at the time that very specifically
note that they had some form of it education.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Because this is part of the role as a mother
under Christian tradition, especially when we're talking about the ideals
at the time, and so this is something noteworthy and
I think it was worth you're picking up on in
the book because this is something that is an important
part I think of Baltild's life. So she does have
some children. What do we know about her children, because
(15:23):
there's a lot we don't know about her children.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
What do we know well, so first of all, we
do know their names. That's something already we don't actually
know for certain about their birth order. Again, this was
a decision that I made in the book to go
with a particular birth order that seem to make sense
of the sources. So she has three sons and they
(15:46):
each in turn become kings. They are born within five
years of marriage, which I think shows Baltild to have
been a healthy young woman who probably received good childcare
natal care, and she remains healthy too. The first son, Clotha,
(16:09):
the third was probably the sun closest to her because
when her husband dies, she is regent for him and
she is actively working with him on various policies that
she's interested in. So she can direct policies as a regent,
but she needs her son, the king, to sign off
(16:32):
on them. Even if he's a minor, he has that role.
So that's one thing we know about him is that
he is important in the early part of her regency.
The other two sons, the second son children. The second
is sent out to the Eastern Kingdom of Austrasia. He
(16:54):
becomes king of Neustria. For a short period of time,
he and his pregnant wife are murdered and it was
a great scandal. And then balt Hill's third son, Theodoric,
the third is the king who is reigning at the
time that she is living in the convent. So in turn,
(17:18):
each of these sons becomes king.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
This is an incredible rise, like this is your literal
rags to riches story, something that you definitely don't see
every day. So she goes from being an enslaved person.
She is the Queen regent, and she's the queen regent
for some time, and she starts to make some policy changes.
And one thing that I think I'd like to pick
(17:42):
up on is that you talked about her having good
care as a pregnant woman and giving birth. And there
is a really sweet story in there you have where
she's discussing her fears with the bishop. Right, and this
bishop is going to be very important, but he's comforting
her during her pregnancy.
Speaker 2 (17:57):
Right. Yes, it is a lot story, and it shows
that she was very concerned. This was her first pregnancy.
She would have been concerned just for that reason, but
she was also very concerned that she should have a son,
and a son would basically keep her safe. Right, as
(18:18):
long as she is the mother of a son who
has the potential to be a king, then she is
personally safe. And I mentioned in the book that you
know there had been this past example that was probably
a cautionary tale for her. A previous Marrivingian king named
Theodebird had married a slave girl, and the slave girl
(18:44):
did not produce sons. Her mother in law decided it
was time that she go and she was murdered, so
you know, this could have been bald Hill's fate. I
think that's the important thing to think about, is that
her situation was incredibly precarious until she had sons. So
(19:06):
having three sons was obviously greatly to her advantage, and
it explains the power that she has both as a
regent and probably even during her time in the convent.
There's no reason why she could not have continued to
offer advice and be part of that even though she
(19:27):
never actually left the convent.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
So one of the things that she is perhaps most
remembered for is when she has the power in her hands,
she starts to use it to help other people. And
these are the things that are written down in the
things we remember. So we'll get into the spicy stuff
in a minute, but she's remembered for working towards helping
enslaved people. So tell us about this.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Yeah, so this is again, this is the hagiographer telling
us this information. And to be clear, it's very unusual
for saints' lives at this time to actually elaborate on
things like policy, like what a person's activities were when
they held some power, and what we're told is that
(20:16):
she was involved in rescuing slaves, male and female, but
she's particularly remembered for rescuing female slaves. And it seems
that in the six fifties, and this is part of
my argument that in the six fifties there seems to
have been some kind of crisis where somebody needed to
(20:39):
step in and help all of these people coming over
from England to France in servitude. And I think, as
a woman who had herself been enslaved, I think that
she felt a duty to rescue these female slaves, especially
(21:00):
because again, their situations would have been very precarious. They
would have been sold into households, they could have gone
into sort of menial work, agricultural work, other sort of
forms of labor. And what she does is she gives
them the option to join her convent and live there.
(21:23):
And it would appear that that offer was taken up
by quite a few of these female slaves.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
So she's leaning on, as you were saying before, there
is precedent that you're not supposed to enslave Christians to
begin with, So she is really sort of leaning on
the letter of the law here saying you can't bring
an enslaved prison from elsewhere here. Basically, as soon as
they set their feet on French soil, they should be freed.
Have I got that right? What does it look like
(21:52):
on the ground?
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Okay, so that might be a little optimistic.
Speaker 1 (21:56):
Yeah, but I guess that is why we need to elaborate,
right right.
Speaker 2 (22:01):
I think that, you know, a principle like that probably
would have been a little anachronistic at the time. I
think it was rather that this was a situation that
she was able to address. She may have herself wanted
to address it because she could bring these women slaves
into her convent and they could both create a bigger
(22:22):
establishment for her, and they could also do service in
the convent. So there was definitely some benefit from her
perspective in helping them.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
Yes, this was my thought when I was reading your
book is she gives them options, but the options are
heavily weighted towards go to the convent, and then you
start to wonder, well, how much of a choice do
you really have at that moment?
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Right? Anyway, Yeah, and to come back to the previous point,
what she says is, I mean, she has no control
about who is coming to France, but what she can control,
or think she can control, is the movement of slaves
across the Neustrian Kingdom. So that is what she prohibits.
(23:05):
She says, you must not do this, you must not
move them across the kingdom. But if you say that,
if you now say that you cannot sort of sell
them on to other places, then you have to provide
a solution for them. And that's I think the context
in which we see this activity.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
Yes, and so do you have a sense again, again,
this is so far back in history, but do you
have a sense of how this was received where people
didn't just laugh her out of the kingdom when she
said this, Like, how do you think this was received
by the court? The people around her, are the people
supporting her?
Speaker 2 (23:39):
What do you think? Well, again, we only have the
statement that she did this, and that she was successful
in doing it in terms of the controlling that trade.
Her basis was her own authority. We can't tell whether
it was entirely successful. We can't tell if you know,
(24:02):
her commands were fully obeyed. But I think what's interesting
in this is that she made those commands that she
identified that as a problem that could potentially be solved
by commanding this, and that that was in her power
to do. The whole notion of rescuing captives had a
(24:27):
long history, of course, and bishops are often credited with
that as part of their piety right, that they rescued captives.
So in that respect, she's doing something that religious leaders
did or claimed to do. In her case, we know
that she was very much in partnership with this Bishop
(24:49):
Oligius of Noyon, who was also in the process of
rescuing slaves, and we know that from his vita, and
he starts earlier than her. He's an older sort of
eminence grise at the court when she is there. But
I think that he may have viewed her both as
an ally to the activities that he was already engaged in.
(25:12):
But I think that the convent solution was one that
she was particularly equipped to handle.
Speaker 1 (25:20):
Yes, it seems like one of those moments in history
where there is adjoining together of forces that allows things
to be possible that weren't possible before, because, as you say,
the bishop has already made moves in this direction, and
then he has a queen that is obviously sympathetic to
the cause, and together they can move forward on this
or they believe they can move forward on this, and
(25:42):
it's something that hadn't really been moved on in the
same way before. So it's an interesting moment. And this
is the whole reason that you're on this podcast today
because Baldtild has a very interesting history herself. One of
the things that she also worked on was to prevent
or help prevent or try to prevent infanticide. So where
(26:03):
does this come into her story.
Speaker 2 (26:05):
Yeah, So Baldthheld was credited with a number of sort
of reforms right and in fantaside, prohibition of infanticide was
one of those. On the face of it, it just
sounds like, yes, you should prohibit in fantaside. But when
I was exploring this, it seemed to me that the
narrative around that was sort of interesting because in the
(26:30):
narrative it says that men It sort of specifies men
were killing their children because they didn't want to pay taxes,
which is a very strange kind of story. It seems
that the people who were complaining of this were not
poor peasants, you know. Rather, there seems to have been
a situation where there was unhappiness about taxation and one
(26:56):
only has to think that, you know, she is part
of the government, that she's part of the taxation process.
And I sort of made a bit of an imaginative
leap to imagine that perhaps her plowing funds into rescuing
captives and putting them up in convents and in other ways,
(27:18):
that this could have been burdensome on the treasury, and
that she is perhaps responsible for wanting taxation, and that
might be resentment that these English people coming over as
slaves are being treated in a particular way that other
people are not. There are all sorts of possibilities around it.
It did seem that it was a more complicated story
(27:41):
than simply saying, really, you shouldn't kill infants.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
Yes, when you put it like that, you shouldn't. And
so this is again an interesting thing that sort of
came out. And of course this is coming I think
it's coming from the story that's written about her in
order to canonize her later. So this is something that's
sort of female encoded as well, is making sure that
you're taking care of babies. And also the other thing
(28:07):
that she sort of took under her umbrella or her
file in government was the burial of the dead, and
this is a very interesting point in the book as well,
because there seems to have been almost an obsession in
conjunction with the bishop's work here where they had to
go around and bury the dead, and there was so
enthusiastic about it that they accidentally buried someone who was alive.
(28:28):
So what's happening here.
Speaker 2 (28:30):
Yes, we're told that they almost buried somebody alive. It
was so enthusiastic about it. Yes, Again, it's again a
little hard to fathom exactly what is going on here.
It does seem to suggest that people were dying in
the open, perhaps as a result of being in conflict
or murdered or sickness or something, and that there's a
(28:54):
sense that it's respectable to bury the dead, and this
is something that a bishop would like do. It's interesting
that not all bishops are attributed with this desire, so
this seems to be a pious at What's interesting too, though,
is that it's a way that her hagiographer was clearly
(29:15):
linking her with the bishop who was doing this, bearing
right and sort of saying that they're in sync. They're
sort of doing the same sort of thing. This is
part of the same kind of worldview where this is
now the thing we have to do well.
Speaker 1 (29:32):
These are all good works, and before we retire her
to the convent. Some of the things that are thrown
at her, especially later, are ideas that maybe she's not
all good, maybe she's interfering with bishops in a way
that is perhaps more murderous. So what are the accusations
that are thrown at her when people want to at
(29:53):
least point out maybe the places where she's not doing
so well as a queen or actively besmirge her reputation,
What are people throwing on her?
Speaker 2 (30:03):
So the hagiographic life tells us that she militated against simony.
Simony is the purchase of ecclesiastical office, and so the
hagiographer wants us to know that she's on the up
and up. Bishops should become bishops the proper way, and
(30:24):
not because they pay for their offices. In practice, it
was probably fairly common, but also there was always going
to be a bit of a slippery slope in terms of,
you know, how do you bring yourself to the attention
of a community or a king in order that you
can be made a bishop. In Baltel's case, you know,
(30:48):
right from the beginning she is very connected to bishops
who support her position as Queen Regent. So a certain
set of bishops are very much her allies and she
depends on them. However, this is a time of really
(31:09):
unprecedented violence against bishops, and so we know that bishops
were being murdered at this time. Her entry into the
conventive shell seems to have come around the time of
the murder of Sigobrand, the Bishop of Paris, but she's
(31:30):
not accused of killing bishops in Merivnian sources. She is
accused of that, specifically in a later Anglo Saxon source
that says that she killed nine bishops, which would be
very impressive.
Speaker 1 (31:50):
That would definitely be something that you would expect the
Merevingians to notice at least.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
Well, I mean, bishops at this time are political acts,
and so you know when they get involved in court
politics and factionalism as they were doing, then they were
simply being killed because people in these factions were being killed. Right,
it would probably be true to say that some bishops
(32:19):
who were on the other side of her own politics
were murdered, and that you could impute that it happens
under her watch, that she has potentially something to do
with it. It's all very vague in the mehri Vingian sources,
and I think you would rather expect that, after all,
she's the mother of legitimate kings who continued to govern
(32:42):
beyond her.
Speaker 1 (32:44):
Yes, and speaking of which, this is the moment where
she is sent off to the convent. Your sense of
it is against her wishes. But she's sent off there,
maybe still at the fringes of royal life, but certainly
not at the center of power anymore. So what are
the circumstances Why does she gets shoved in the convent?
Speaker 2 (33:04):
Well, because she falls afoul of the political situation she
has ebroin this very all very forceful man who becomes
Mayor of the palace. She'd initially worked with him during
her regency, but things get very complicated and it's clear
that she needs to be removed from the political arena.
(33:29):
What's interesting is that when her son, her next son,
becomes king, he doesn't take her out of the convent. So,
I don't you know, whatever her expectations were, she is
left there, even when there's greater peace in the realm.
Speaker 1 (33:46):
Yes, well, I think things can't have gone too badly
for her in the convent. Because she's treated well enough
that later on she is treated as a saint. As
we're talking about this biography, this haigraphy about her is
meant to make her a saint. And we even have
or there are records of her being exhumed, and when
(34:09):
you looked at the documents and all the artifacts around
her burial, it seems that she was still treated with
a lot of respect. So can you tell us a
little bit about what was found in her tomb and
why people were looking at it to be in with?
Speaker 2 (34:25):
First of all, just in terms of her situation in
the convent, it does seem that she maintained a secular appearance,
at least initially. I think that she hoped that she
would be able to rejoin the political fray that did
not happen. I think she did, however, take the habit,
(34:46):
probably right at the end of her life, and I
don't have any reason to doubt that she died as
a nun. The reason that we can make that kind
of argument has to do with her relics and what
we know of her. We're very fortunate in that we
have material items associated with balt Hild, first of all,
(35:11):
her body, her bones. We also have textiles associated with her,
and we have her hair, and her hair is an
interesting clue to all of this, because her hair was
preserved over the centuries. It can still be seen today.
There's only a little bit of it left because so
much of it was given away as relics over the centuries.
(35:34):
But when her hair was examined in nineteen eighty three,
the archaeologist and his team noticed that it had been dyed,
that it had been dyed so that it continued to
look a sort of strawberry blonde kind of color. And
it seems that you wouldn't dye your hair in a
(35:57):
convent unless it was on display in some way, and
that would not have been common. So I think that
she was still caring about her appearance, about her regal
appearance in the convent until probably the last year of
her life.
Speaker 1 (36:17):
And when we see that her life is written in
the context of making her appear saintly, that her bones
are being treated as relics, that her items are being
treated as relics. How quickly did this sort of cult appear?
Was it successful? Did you become a saint? What happened
with her?
Speaker 2 (36:35):
Yeah? So, her body and her tumor examined in eight
thirty three when she is moved to a new church building,
and at that point it was remarked that her body
was still very much intact, and they gathered up the
(36:56):
contents of the two including some of the tech styles,
perhaps not all of them, but some of them, and
they had them placed under the altar of the new church.
So her remains are being placed somewhere of prestige, and
we're told that miracles occurred. So she was definitely being
(37:19):
viewed by the ninth century as a saint, but the
formal process of sanctification I was not able to track down.
That might be something to somebody else can find. But
I saw some indications that people thought that she had
been canonized, and it would make sense that she could
(37:40):
have been retroactively canonized, but I wasn't able to track
that down. She does appear in Uzward's martyrology in the
ninth century, and that usually is as good as it
gets for early saints. Right if you are already being
listed as somebody that congregations can pray to and observe
(38:01):
their feast days, then that has put you into that rank.
Speaker 1 (38:07):
And she is remembered through the centuries. We know this
not only because she was looked at in nineteen eighty three.
They looked at her bones and all the relics associated
with her, but she also had kind of a mixed reputation.
And when we were talking before we started recording, you
were like, I want to mention this painting. Tell us
(38:28):
about this painting, because this is a story does not
look good for her. Tell us about a famous French painting,
about the story of bald Hilt.
Speaker 2 (38:38):
Right, so there is this medieval story about balt Hilt
that is quite unusual. I'll explain the story first and
then we can sort of talk about painting. So the
story is, and this is a medieval story. The story
is that she and her husband have their sons, and
(38:58):
that her husbands decides to go on crusade. So you
can already tell the story is not a merath engine story. Right,
She's going the husband goes on on crusade, and in
the meantime, she's left as regent and her sons, who
appeared to be fully grown, are colluding with the nobles
(39:23):
to take over the kingdom. While their father is away,
she quickly recalls her husband and tells her you know,
this is going on. Come back. He comes back, and
he issues justice against the nobles, He executes them and
so forth. But what are they going to do about
his two sons who were responsible for the rebellion, And
(39:48):
he decides to basically hand the problem off to their
mother Bultld, who we're told prayed to God and was
divinely given this solution that the Suns should have their
hands strings dissolved away with a poker hot poker, so
(40:09):
that they could they were lame, they could not walk,
and that they would be placed on a barge in
the river Sene without a rudder and just allowed to float,
so that God could do with them whatever God wanted
to do with them. The story has a somewhat happy
conclusion in so far as they drift down river towards
(40:33):
Ruin and towards the monastery of Jumiash, where they are rescued.
The story continues. They become penitent, they enter the monastery.
The king and the queen are so happy about this
that they give lots and lots of money to the
monastery of Jumieresh, indeed a quarter of the fisk, we're told.
(40:56):
And so this is a story that clearly is trying
to make a connection of the medieval convent of Jumiege
with this royal family. The story was not very well known,
i think, until it was sort of rediscovered and published
in the early nineteenth century. But this painter, a very
(41:20):
fitar Lumine, decides to paint this image of the two
boys on the barge having been hamstrung. First of all,
the picture was considered scandalous at the time when it
was exhibited at the Paris Salon in eighteen eighty, but
(41:42):
it also sort of becomes a meme. It becomes a
cultural moment that people associated with Baltilde, and so you know,
for all these centuries, you know she's this good saint.
And this story was also, by the way, supposed to
indicate her being a good mother, a pious mother who
(42:03):
finds an ideal solution. But it was clearly shocking to
the visitors to the Salon in eighteen eighty when they
saw this painting.
Speaker 1 (42:14):
Well, it totally fits with that nineteenth century idea of
what's medieval, right, it's shocking and horrible and tied with
royals and with religion and all of those things. And
so you have a picture in the book. So people
can check it out when they look at the book,
and next time they see two sad looking boys on
(42:35):
a river to do with friends, will know that it
has to do with bald Tild. And I also, I
also wanted to thank you because one of the pictures
that you have in the book is from the Luxembourg
Gardens in Paris, and that reminded me. I've only been
to Paris once, but that was one of the places
I went, and I took some pictures of those beautiful
statues of queens and women over French history, and I
(42:58):
didn't have a picture of Balti statue. I do have
Anne of Austria because I like the Three Musketeers. And
it turns out that I also have a picture of
the statue a Valentina Visconti, who is somebody who you know,
I had no idea was going to be a medievalist
when I was visiting, but she's somebody that I ended
up talking about this summer on my miniseries to Glass King.
So thank you for allowing me to go back and
(43:20):
visit these statues. There is a beautiful statue of bald Hild,
and yet tell us about this statue because she is
becoming a symbol in this nineteenth century moment of abolition,
if nothing else, So tell us about this statue before
we go.
Speaker 2 (43:39):
The context for her statue is this civic beautification program
that was being carried out by King Louis Philippe in
the eighteen thirties and forties, and these were meant to
be statues of queens and illustrious women, and bald Hild
is there as one of them. I was very interested
to know why why did she get picked? And the
(44:04):
immediate answer, the sort of easiest answer, is that she
is connected, her cult is connected with the family of
King Louis Philippe. But what I discovered when I started
to do some research on the gardens was that on
(44:25):
the book that she holds there is a text, and
the text says abolitio seratuta, so abolition of slavery. Interestingly,
that text is really hard to find anywhere else. If
I hadn't come across that in research, I would not
have known that that was what is on there. You
(44:48):
cannot see it from the ground. You can only sort
of see a little bit that there's some kind of
text there, but you can't identify it from the ground.
But that sort of gave me a clue that this
was an intro sting version of Baltild that was worth
exploring further, and so I started to do some research
into this sculptor of that statue, Victor Tarrass, to see
(45:12):
why Baltild was being portrayed in that way. Up until then,
the most common way that she was portrayed was as
a nun, as a royal nun, so this was definitely different. Now,
all through the centuries they knew that she had been
(45:35):
a slave, although they now think they thought she was
a royal slave, and that she had been involved in
rescuing slaves, but it never really stood out to them
as the most important thing to know about her. So
it is noteworthy that for Victor Tarrass, when he does
(45:57):
just a little bit of scratching beneath the say to
find out who is Baltthild that he's going to get
to actually make a statue of, he sees this, I
think as an opportunity to make her relevant, right because
this is precisely the moment really just before France ultimately
abolishes slavery. France was the latest European country to do so.
(46:21):
Slavery's not abolished in France until eighteen forty eight, and
RAS's statue with this engraving on it predates that by
a year or so, so it very much seemed to
be again a moment in time where Baltthilde could be
(46:42):
used to convey a political message in a royal context,
which was necessary because this was the time of King
Louis Philippe. But eighteen forty eight was also when King
Louis Filipe was booted outright, and so the project of
putting up queens in gardens became far less appealing after
(47:09):
they carp rid of their king.
Speaker 1 (47:11):
Yes, well, I mean this is one of the reasons
why it's so interesting is because if you're going to
have a statue of someone, there needs to be a
reason for it, and it's not. It can't just be
these women are beautiful, because they're all they're all beautiful.
How can you tell the difference between them? One of
the ways of their outfits, one of the ways of
the labels. But they have to have symbols attached to them.
(47:32):
And so I think this is so interesting because baldtilt
I think has fallen out of fashion again. I don't
think people are looking at her very much right now.
But it's interesting how she is brought forward as being
this sort of icon in a way that maybe she
might have approved of, you know, in the nineteenth century,
which is not something you can always say about the
way people looked at the Middle Ages in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2 (47:56):
I mean, she was put up there also because she
was a regent, so a lot of the people in
a lot of the statues are of queen regents, and
that was sort of had some historical importance for Louis
Philippe's family also, So she's there as a powerful woman
as a regent of France, and she's there as somebody
(48:19):
who has policy in her name, and that is being
represented on this statue. It's actually a very strong image
of a political woman in the public sphere at a
time when that was not that comment. So I think
her statue is very interesting in that way. I also,
(48:43):
thinking about it later, feel that what might be just
as important is the representation of her as a woman
as an abolitionist. Because abolitionism was so much associated with men.
Women were writing books, you know, anti slavery books, they
were involved in the movement, but they weren't statues weren't
(49:06):
being made to them, so I think this is a
little unusual there as well.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Yes, Well, as we get to the end of this,
I'm hoping people will look online, find the statue because
it's absolutely gorgeous, find it in your book. But this
sort of gives me an opportunity now to say, we
are again further past the nineteenth century. This is your
moment to tell us why do you think that Baltilde
should be remembered.
Speaker 2 (49:32):
Well, I think that she should be remembered because she
was a powerful woman who had an extraordinary life, who
did something with her life, and who has this sort
of long cultural afterlife. I also think that it's helpful
to know individual people for an era that you might
(49:55):
be interested in. I've always felt like, what would it
be like to do Tudor history and not to have
biographies of Henry the Eighth and Anne Berlin, Right, I
think in creating a biography of balt Hilt, I'm hopeful
that people will come to know the Merrivngin era better
through the vehicle of her extraordinary life.
Speaker 1 (50:18):
Well, I'm hoping that that wish comes true and that
people will find your book read about it because you
have so much in here that is beyond just one
single figure, that lets people know about the Merravnjine world
in general, and of course this is something that a
lot of us need to learn more about. So thank
you so much Isabelle for coming on the podcast and
telling us all about Baldtild's extraordinary life.
Speaker 2 (50:42):
Well, thank you, Daniel. This has been a delightful conversation.
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (50:47):
To find out more about Isabelle's work, you can visit
her faculty page at the University of Utah. Her new
book is baldt Hilda, Frankia, Anglo Saxon, Slave Maravni and
Queen an Abolitionist Saint. Before we go, here's Peter from
medievalis dot Net to tell us what's on the website.
And we're not going to keep him long because Peter,
(51:07):
it sounds like you're pretty sick.
Speaker 3 (51:09):
Hey, yeah, a little bit, a little bit under the
weather this weekend.
Speaker 1 (51:14):
And yet you're here. You're here ready to tell people
about the Middle Aged.
Speaker 3 (51:18):
Indeed, indeed, and you know, because we know our audience
at medievalist dot net loves medieval phrases, we have created
a piece called Ten Medieval Phrases to deserve a comeback.
Speaker 1 (51:29):
We were just talking about this a few weeks ago,
how we need to bring back the wolf and the story.
What a cool phrase that is. So what have you
got for us on your list?
Speaker 3 (51:37):
Yeah, like one of them actually has made a comeback.
In the fourteenth century, people would say at six and seven.
So we can find that in Chaucer, for example, And
it's a way of saying confusion or disorder. It's kind
of based on dice. And now the people at dictionary
dot com have come out with their twenty twenty five
word of the Year, which apparently all the kids are
(51:59):
saying is six'.
Speaker 1 (52:01):
Seven, yes, YES i have to. SAY i have teenagers
and it's driving my teenagers crazy how often that the
younger people are saying six to. Seven so what you're
saying is the young people have been reading Their chaucer
and they mean at sixes and. Sevens that's what they.
Speaker 3 (52:17):
Mean that's undoubtedly, Right like that's it has to be
so because it kind of has the same kind of uncertain.
Meaning so it's kind of a very loosely defined phrase
that right now it kind of means maybe, this maybe.
Speaker 1 (52:30):
That, YEAH i think that there's lots of competing definitions
for what it, means AND i mean that is definitely
something that you can connect back to The Middle. Ages
what do people actually mean when they say these?
Speaker 3 (52:42):
Things, indeed, INDEED i love how language has changed and
evolve and in this case come back.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
Again there we. Go, well thank You peter for getting
out of your sick bed long enough to tell us
about these medieval phrases that should make come. Back i'm
sure there's gonna be lots of people who want to
read that.
Speaker 3 (52:59):
Article Thanks.
Speaker 1 (53:02):
Thank you to all of, you, kings, queens and saints
alike for being here and supporting indie, history whether it's
letting me ads, play sharing episodes with your, friends or
becoming patrons on patreon dot com like the saintly patron
Has queen ball. Tailed your support makes good things. Possible
to find out how to become a, patron please visit
(53:23):
patreon dot. Com Slash medievalists for everything From Frankish queen's
Two dankish. Scenes Followm medievalist dot net On instagram at
medievalist net or Blue sky At. Medievalists you can find
Me Danielle sebalski across social media at five Min medievalist
or five minute, medievalist and you can find my books
(53:44):
at all your favorite. Bookstores our music is By Christian.
Overton thanks for, listening and have yourself a wonderful day
Speaker 2 (54:01):
One
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