The <em>BBC</em> has dispensed with a significant portion of its budget to hire a star-studded cast for its upcoming eight-part historical epic on 1066, the pivotal moment that transformed England.
First <a href="https://www.bbc.com/mediacentre/2024/king-and-conqueror-first-look"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">glimpses of this series</mark></a> once again give cause to disappoint and frustrate historians and Catholics alike. Early signs suggest that <em>King and Conqueror</em> (2025) shall in all likeliness fall into the usual, farcically inaccurate tropes and caricatures about the medieval era.
Once again, clothing consisting only of drab colours and ubiquitous filth are inaccurately the rule. While informed historians have, even before its release, already been quick to <a href="https://onceiwasacleverboy.blogspot.com/2025/03/how-not-to-represent-norman-conquest.html"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">deride</mark></a> its repetition of these directorial costuming mis-choices for the medieval era, commentators and journalists such as <em>The</em> <em>Spectator</em>’s David Abulafa have also <a href="https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/should-this-anglo-saxon-drama-have-a-diverse-cast/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">criticised</mark></a> its predictable anachronistic casting choices based on "diversity".
The latter point isn’t merely “woke”. It’s a symptom rather than a cause of a much larger problem surrounding contemporary attitudes towards our own past and above all toward the Middle Ages.
What are these attitudes? Why do they persist? And why should this matter to Catholics and to those who care about resisting nefarious attempts at social engineering?
First on the attitudes. They’re nothing new. Medieval historiography has been contentious ground for some five centuries. Those who spark contention and reinterpretation, then as now, do so because they recognise a truth well-articulated by George Orwell: “Who controls the past controls the future.”
From Renaissance humanists to Protestant “Reformers”; from men of the “Enlightenment” to men of the Hollywood narrative-making machine; the seeds of anti-medieval propaganda have been sown in waves. Each has helped to construct the image we’re all familiar with today – an era of unremitting destitution and backwardness in a dreary world of injustice, superstition and violence.
While the Renaissance scholars who hurled polemics against the Middle Ages – foremost among whom was Florentine poet Petrarch – did so through wistful nostalgia for the exaggerated virtues of the ancient world, the rest sought to tarnish the thousand years following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire for a different reason: anti-Catholicism.
Simply put: Protestants, Enlightenment thinkers and even Hollywood directors and producers have had either vested religious, political or personal gripes with the Catholic Church – the dominant force in Europe in the Middle Ages. In slandering the one, it was thought the other’s reputation also would suffer.
Hence the anti-medieval denigrations of Philip Melanchthon (Luther’s successor); or the period’s description as “the triumph of barbarism and religion” by Edward Gibbon (a freemason and a once-Catholic-convert-turned-apostate after his father’s threats of disinheritance); even Ridley Scott’s films such as <em>Kingdom of Heaven</em> (2004) or <em>The Last Duel</em> (2019) get polemical about medieval Europeans.
All of us, even those interested in history, thanks in large part to the influences of the likes of those mentioned above, carry around with us plenty of misperceptions about life in the Middle Ages.
When I became a Catholic, things began to change for me. During my journey into understanding this great and ancient Faith, I was unavoidably introduced for the first time – we well as properly – to the medieval cathedrals; the catacombs of the early Christians; Byzantine basilicas; ancient mosaics, icons and frescoes; medieval, renaissance and baroque paintings; the stories of great, humble, learned, heroic saints; the deep Catholic religiosity and science within the medieval universities; ecumenical councils; canon law; the orderly founding of great nations and cities; medieval craftsmen guilds, and all the rest that went with this "drab" era, as some would have us believe.
As my understanding of my own Faith grew, so too did my appreciation for the past. History is not a linear line of progression from barbarism and stupidity to wisdom and justice and beauty – the impoverished world of contemporary architecture alone shatters this preconception.
So, when travelling in the charming medieval city of York one November, making my way down its famous winding, timbered, cobbled Shambles street, I overheard a tour guide describe comedically to his followers how refuse used to be tossed out of upper-storey windows into crowded pedestrian streets. Unfortunate passersby would, he contended – as many before and since him have – be left to wade through stinking human sewage, accumulating it on their hair and clothes.
Horrible indeed. Except…it simply isn’t true.
Sensing the cracks in the meta narrative and beginning to trust less uncritically conventional wisdom pushed by the likes of the <em>BBC</em>, I felt that the tour guide's claims didn’t seem to tally with the sophistication and feats of the medieval era I was coming to know of.
So, I took out my phone as I walked past the tour guide and back to my hotel to investigate the matter. Sure enough: it was largely nonsense.
Despite even the British state broadcaster repeating this false generalisation, most towns levied “onerous” fines on shopkeepers and residents for the upkeep and cleanliness of their streets. Medieval historian Tim O’Neill describes: “[o]ne account talks of an outraged mob badly beating a stranger who littered their street with the skin of a smoked fish; since they didn't want to have to pay the heavy fine for his laziness. In an environment like that, people are hardly going to be dumping buckets of excrement out of their windows.”
He continues: “People in the Middle Ages were no less sensitive to foul odours or disgusted by human waste than we are. They also did not understand exactly how human waste could spread disease, but they knew it did – they just thought it was something to do with its odours.”
It is actually now accepted today that medieval folk washed three-times-weekly, took great care of their clothes which frequently sported bright colours, and washed their hands before and after every meal or work even with soap.
Another egregious lie – taught in US schools for decades, courtesy of the anti-Catholic 19th-century fiction writer Washington Irving – was that medieval Europeans believed the Earth was flat. Commonly repeated, but they didn’t. They knew it was spherical.
There’s so more which could be said in favour of the Middle Ages – about the generous working hours and nutritional diets of regular people; about how illiteracy was much lower than is frequently believed and stated; about how buildings like the <em>Duomo di Firenze</em> and the town hall at Leuven surpass anything built in the ancient world or since; about progresses in learning, mysticism, scholarship and science.
It suffices to say: don’t rely on popular media presentations like <em>King and Conqueror</em> for your impression of history. Read its writings from the source and heed the wisdom and understanding of its authors. Walk into a gothic cathedral and consider why the Shard doesn’t give you the same sensation. Scratch beneath the surface and you’ll be liberated.
The Catholic Faith is not wedded to any one era it may have incidentally lived through. It belongs to a realm beyond time. Though, as a thing divine and human, it was incarnated and came to us through our ancestors in history.
The Middle Ages in Western Europe were a time in which the Faith and its culture developed and spectacularly flowered. Many of our inheritances, from the teachings of our greatest saints to elements in our liturgy and our music and church buildings come to us from this time. To dismiss the wisdom and mystery of the time is to misunderstand the richness of our Faith and our world.
Certainly, the medieval period was full of saints and sinners. It wasn’t perfect. But this era in which Catholicism dominated witnessed a remarkable resurrection in civilisation and was far <em>less</em> terrible and <em>more</em> remarkable and admirable than its detractors admit.
Simply reading Dante and Aquinas or walking the streets of Venice, Senlis, Colmar, Annecy, Bruges, Salamanca, Bamberg, Krakow, Fribourg or Lucerne reveals glorious feats of excellence, achievement, virtue and charity which clearly in many ways surpass our own age. This time has something to teach us.
Deprogram yourselves and observe that maybe a medieval and Catholic world isn’t such a bad one after all.
<a href="https://thecatholicherald.com/nottingham-cathedral-gets-1-69m-national-lottery-grant-to-bring-pugins-vision-back-to-life/"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color"><strong><em>RELATED: Nottingham Cathedral gets £1.69m National Lottery grant to restore Pugin’s vision</em></strong></mark></a>
<em>Photo: The Earl of Wessex (played by James Norton) in the BBC's new drama series 'King and Conqueror' (screenshot from <a href="https://www./2024/king-and-conqueror-first-look"><mark style="background-color:rgba(0, 0, 0, 0)" class="has-inline-color has-vivid-cyan-blue-color">bbc.com/mediacentre</mark></a>).</em>
