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History behind the headlines: Trump's win – parallels with the past
00:45:28
Rana Mitter and Hannah Skoda discuss Donald Trump's recent US election win, and consider which historical parallels are most apt
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- [00:01]
Wendy
This is Wendy from Science Versus. This month, our friends at Ford are the presenting sponsor of Science Versus. If you're curious to learn more about things like electric vehicles, Science Versus is a great lesson. We dive into topics like how beavers are helping the fight against climate change, what the greenest way to die is, and what a 100% renewable future looks like and more. Listen to Science Versus on Spotify, brought to you by Ford. This episode is brought to you by Allstate. Some people just know they could save hundreds on car insurance by checking Allstate First.
- [00:39]
Rana Mitter
Like, you know, to check the date of the big game first before you accidentally buy tickets on your 20th wedding.
- [00:46]
Wendy
Anniversary and have to spend the next.
- [00:48]
Rana Mitter
20 years of your marriage making up for it.
- [00:50]
Wendy
Yeah, checking first is smart. So check Allstate first for a quote.
- [00:54]
Rana Mitter
That could save you hundreds.
- [00:55]
Wendy
You're in good hands with Allstate Savings. Vary terms apply. Allstate Fire and Cash Insurance Company and affiliates, Northbrook, Illinois.
- [01:04]
Hannah Skoda
Hello, and welcome to our monthly series, History behind the Headlines. In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month, I'll be joined by our two regular panelists.
- [01:19]
Wendy
I'm Hannah Skoda. I'm fellow and tutor in medieval history at St John's College in Oxford.
- [01:24]
Rana Mitter
I'm Rana Mitter. I'm St. Lee Chair in US Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School. And I'm a special on modern Chinese history.
- [01:33]
Hannah Skoda
Thank you both, so much, as always, for being here. We're going to start by talking about the recent U.S. election results and the historical parallels that you both think we can meaningfully draw to what's just happened in the United States. Hannah, did you want to start?
- [01:47]
Wendy
Yes. I think it's really striking that in some of the media commentaries, there have been potential comparisons or explorations of the ways in which Trump's inner circle may or may not resemble medieval and Tudor courts. And obviously, as a medievalist, that's something that rather interests me. So I think we're all very aware in the UK at the moment of what Henry VIII's court was like and just how terrifying it was to be a member of that court, because, of course, we have this amazing new adaptation of Wolf hall on the BBC at the moment, and it's a court in which it really matters to be as close as possible to the king himself, but where if you fall out with the king, you're likely to be accused of Treason, which is his favourite way of getting rid of former friends. But it's quite interesting that, as well as this sense of the Tudor court being really a very toxic arena of favourites and the unfavoured, it's also a moment which is associated by historians quite often with what we call the Tudor revolution in government. So this was an argument developed by Geoffrey Elton about the ways in which the Tudor revolution in government apparently saw the rise of, broadly speaking, sort of centralized, bureaucratized administration and expansion of royal law, systematization of fiscality, a kind of regularization and formalization of a lot of this. So actually, the Tudor court is a very interesting place, both in seeing new governmental developments, but also this amazing sense of favor and disfavor in this very toxic atmosphere. It also got me thinking about the most magnificent medieval court of all, which is, in my view, at least, the Burgundian court. So the Dukes of Burgundy are in the ascendancy to an extraordinary extent in the 15th century, building up what looks like an incredible state. Of course, Burgundy does not become a state, but in the 15th century, it's an incredibly sort of rich, expanding polity, and at the heart of it is this incredible court culture. So, largely, courts in this period are itinerant, though, from the 1450s, increasingly settled in one place, and they are centres of artistic endeavor of many, many kinds. So sometimes we talk about the Northern Renaissance, we think about painters like Jan van Eyck and these enormously important artistic developments, all of which are associated with the Burgundian court. It's a center of music, it's a place of vernacular theater and then forms of cultural expression, which might seem rather odd to us now. So the Duke of Burgundy hosts this extraordinary banquet in 1454 in Lille, called the Feast of the Pheasant. I thought I'd tell you a little bit about it, just because it's completely bonkers. It's a feast which is ostensibly there to launch a crusade to Constantinople, which never happens, but it is lavish in the extreme. Just to give you a little taste, there was an enormous pie served at this feast, out of which 28 musicians emerged during the course of the banquet. According to Olivier lamarche, there were 48 dishes served at every single course of this feast, though he actually says he forgets the exact number because there were quite so many of them. I've seen on Instagram that tablescaping is a big fad at the moment, and people could learn a thing or two from the Duke of Burgundy's tablescaping. They had in this banquet, a model ship in the middle of the table. Olivier de la Marche writes, I hardly think that the greatest ship in the world has a greater number of ropes and sails. They had mechanical animals which wandered amongst the diners during the banquet. They even had a real lion. And we even have the record of expenses of the man who had to hold the lion on a chain, who in this receipt is called Gilles le Cat. There was a model church in the middle of the banquet and an entire choir housed inside this model church. There was an elephant brought into the room, probably a mechanical elephant, though it's not quite clear from the records. And it goes on and on. It's just the most extraordinary, lavish display.
- [06:08]
Rana Mitter
Hannah the accounts we have from various chronicles, Les Trails de Donald Trump, suggest that at the court, if you want to call it that, of the once and future, most of the evening delicacies would be cheeseburgers and fries that are ordered from McDonald's. I wonder if this really counts as comparable, perhaps, to the feast or the pheasant, in some ways a kind of modern presidential version of this same tendency. But actually, what you've said reminds me extraordinarily of courts in China as well, the imperial tradition there, because you've outlined in talking about the Burgundian court and the other courts, what I think is attention that sits in courts between the bureaucracy that emanates from it and how that systematic ordering of government actually works, and the desires, the orders, the whims, you might say, of one very powerful figure, usually a man. And I think that in a very different, very modern context, is what is likely to happen with this Trump administration. Because, of course, you have someone at the heart of it who has an absolutely central view of his own will, his own desire. And yet, of course, there's a huge bureaucracy around the country that he's in charge of, which he's obviously trying to bend to his will, but at the same time also is going to provide the framework that has to carry those orders out. This was an eternal sort of tension in the Chinese imperial system. Certainly when you start getting from the Song dynasty, so about 1000 CE or AD onwards, right up until the late 19th, early 20th century, you have the growth of bureaucracies, and yet at the same time, the court, court, the place where the emperor ruled supreme, was absolutely at the center not just of secular life, but religious life as well. You know, literally, the emperor was the son of Heaven. And this meant that his connection as a human point of pivot between the spiritual world and the Earthly world was absolutely central. I mean, some people have commented, I couldn't possibly comment myself, that President Trump has a certain view of his own standing. But even he, I don't think, has claimed to be the pivot between heaven and earth. And that really is a very, very central ele to a court being anchored by someone who has that very strong sense of personal destiny. How much would those medieval courts have been an attempt to try and either navigate that bureaucratic versus the personalistic, but also a sense of the religious versus the secular?
- [08:36]
Wendy
Yeah, it's a really fascinating question. So that tension between the individual person of the king and the governmental mechanisms and bureaucracy on which this all depends, I think is a tension which sort of runs throughout the Middle Ages and is worked out in different ways. I think. In an earlier podcast, we talked about the usurpation by Henry IV in 1399 and the accusations that he levels against the previous king, Richard ii. And those accusations are really about the ways in which Richard II was trying to stand above the law, with obvious interest. Now, to certain things you might be thinking about, but in a sense, those deposition articles are also sort of trying to think about this relationship between the person of the king and the wider administration on which he depends. Henry V, Henry IV's successor, obviously, the great victor at Agincourt, and so on. He's a really interesting example of this kind of tension being worked out as well. Henry V is, as an individual, an enormously charismatic and impressive figure, and one who is kind of adulated, I think, even now, really as an individual with this incredible charisma. But at the same time, he was someone who worked very, very hard to develop the sort of administrative governmental mechanisms on which the kingdom was increasingly dependent. There's a wonderful book by Malcolm Vail on Henry V called Henry V the Conscience of a King, where he's thinking not just about the great soldier, but about the ways in which Henry was so focused on the sort of administrative apparatus which sustained the whole enterprise. And then the second point about the potentially sort of sacral nature of kingship or the idea of rulers as a sort of pivot between heaven and earth. I think what's interesting about the Middle Ages, actually, in many ways, is that that's not, at least in the sort of central and later Middle Ages, that's not as prominent a theme as we might assume. I think it becomes a much more prominent theme as we move into the 17th century. And when we see a figure like Charles I being quite obsessed with his standing as a kind of Divine representative on earth with the enormous divine right.
- [10:47]
Rana Mitter
Of kings is the phrase that just received.
- [10:49]
Wendy
Exactly. With the enormous controversy and distress and anger and rage and obviously fracture with the civil war that that then produces. I don't think in the Middle Ages, there's quite such a strong sense that kings are divinely ordained in quite the same way, though obviously their coronation ceremonies draw very strongly on this sort of sacral dimension. And we do find k doing things like touching for scrofula, which is a weird ritual by which kings can apparently touch people who are suffering from this horrible disease and cure them, in which they're kind of a direct vessel of sort of godly miraculous power.
- [11:27]
Rana Mitter
So one of the other things, Hannah, that I associate with courts getting into the sort of 16th, 17th, 18th century is the idea of patronage. And that, I think gives us another link to what may be to come with the second administration of President Trump. Because in some senses, a court or governing body being able to kind of hand out jobs is something that's been with us for a very long time when it comes to history. And one of the things that we've also discovered. I don't know if obviously I'm hoping that our listeners listen to no podcast except this one where they get everything they need to know, but some of them may have heard the famous Joe Rogan podcast where Donald Trump was interviewed before the election at some length. I can't claim they've listened to the whole thing, but I have listened to a part where Donald Trump gets very exercised in a very enthusiastic way about late 19th century American history, the period often known as the Gilded Age or the Reconstruction Age, between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and really up into the 1880s, 1890s, you might say, but with a particular set of turning points within that. Now, one of the reasons that period is now in the news is that it was the period when the American system of patronage from the president began to come to an end. And this has some rather dramatic elements that led towards it because it was known as the spoils system. It really started with Andrew Jackson, who was president a few decades before that, 1820s. And Andrew Jackson basically handed out, you know, jobs for the boys, no girls in those days, but jobs that were available to his supporters who had voted for him. And this became a whole industry in itself. I mean, Washington, D.C. would be besieged by people after each election coming and seek employment. So the spoil system, well, the flaw with it appeared in a rather dramatically awful way in 1881, when the recently acted president, President James Abram Garfield, was receiving office seekers and he turned down a man named Charles Guiteau. Maybe not personally, but, you know, he had been turned down by the machine. And as a result, Charles Guiteau turned up and shot Garfield dead in retribution for her not getting a job. And this was, if anything was needed, an indication that maybe the spoil system was not a brilliant way of handing out employment. And in fact, the successor to Garfield, a man named Chester Arthur, went a long way towards reforming that spoil system. So some people might suggest, with the very interesting and quite broad range of people who are being suggested for cabinet positions and other jobs in the US at the moment, that maybe some version of the spoil system might be with us again. But the particular date during that era is a moment that we could call perhaps one of the most transformative elections, US Presidential elections in really the history of the Republic. I say that because, you know, some people are arguing too early to say, but we'll see that this year, 2024, with the election of Donald Trump to a second term, maybe when the American Republic turns in a radically different direction, both in foreign policy and in terms of domestic policy and how government is run, you know, we'll see that is the case. But although people tend to think of 1860, the date of the election that triggered the American Civil War, as perhaps the most momentous in the entire history of the Republic, 1876, just 16 years later, actually runs a close second in some ways. And the reason is that it was probably the closest election, one of the very closest elections in U.S. history. And it triggered a set of consequences that went on to have importance in American society for, you know, well over a century in many ways. So this was an election that by this stage was held between the two parties that are now still at the center of the American establishment, the Democrats and the Republicans. They were rather different sorts of parties in those days, but political parties do tend to adapt. And Republicans at that point were still the party of anti slavery. I mean, obviously slavery had been abolished at the end of the Civil War about a decade earlier. But nonetheless, the Democrats were associated particularly with the south of the us, the old slave owning parts of the country, whereas the Republicans were associated more with the north of the country and strong anti slavery sentiment. And although elections went back and forth during that period, essentially the Republicans had a pretty strong hold on the presidential office and the White House, particularly after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. But this election, 1876, saw something pretty much like a dead Heat. And the reason I mention this is that people remember. It's already fading from people's memories. But in September, October of this year, there was lots of speculation about what would happen if there was a very close result in the American election and whether or not the election might be thrown to the House of Representatives. As we know, in the end, it was a pretty clear victory for Donald Trump. So that didn't happen. But that wasn't the case back in 1876, where essentially both sides went to dispute the results because they counted up the electoral votes and neither side could agree who exactly had won and what the margins were. Everything that was threatened this year, but didn't actually happen in practice. Justice has also been threatened. There were paramilitary organizations on the street today. You hear these names like the Proud Boys. Again, not much sign of them, but they were rumoured to be out there. But back in 1876, it was the Red Shirts, the White League, all of whom were out there threatening to, you know, knock heads and cause trouble if their candidate didn't get in. And to make it worse. Again, one of the things that was talked about this year was supposing one party won the popular vote, but another party won the American Electoral College. And indeed, the Republicans, who has the splendid name of Rutherford Burchard Hayes, won 47.5% of the total vote, whereas his opponent, Samuel Tilden of New York, Hayes was from Ohio and Tilden's from New York, he got 50.9%. So if it was popular vote, well, Tilden gets the job, but not in the United States, then or now. So what happened was that the dispute over the electors actually did go to Congress, and they couldn't decide exactly what should happen either. And don't forget, this is also a very contentious time, because secret ballots had not yet been introduced at this point. So the election had happened with people openly having to go into the polling station and announce who they're voting for. You didn't get secret ballots in the US until about 10 years after that. And finally, a Congressional committee was set up. And in March 1887, quite soon before the inauguration, they came up with what a later historian, C. Van woodard, called the 1877 Compromise. And what was the compromise, and why was it important? Essentially, Hayes won. The Republican was given the White House by the thinnest of margins. 185 electoral college votes for Hayes, 184 for Tilden. So poor old Samuel Tilden never got to become president. However, the deal that was done, as Van Woodard argued it was that the Southern United States got what it wanted, which was the end of Reconstruction, that period in which African American men, not yet women, were given the vote and were essentially given a full role in becoming citizens of the United States. And that set of horrific racist policies, known even today colloquially as Jim Crow, were put fully back into place in the Southern states. These became once again segregated states. Slavery was no longer legal, but as is now well known, discrimination on the grounds of race became embedded in the system. And essentially the Republicans, despite being the anti slavery party for the price of the White House, decided that they weren't actually going to push back against us anymore. Up to that point, for about 10 years or so, there had been black congressmen, black legislators, people who were beginning to take full citizenship. And that was pushed back in a big way in the south at that point. Other promises were made that there'd be, you know, spending on railroads, although as in the case of HS2 in Britain, those railroads were actually built, or most of them weren't. But the promise was made also the promise of industrial development, infrastructure spending. But overall the deal, such as it was, was that Hayes gets the presidency for the Republicans, but the south no longer has to, as they put it, suffer under the Northern yoke of breaking down racial discrimination. Now, I should add that later historians have argued that Woodard didn't get it exactly right and that there was no formal compromise. That's not the right way to put it, but the historical fact is that Reconstruction ended really after that point. It sort of petered out pretty quickly. And Therefore looking at 1876 as the election that turns off the tap of real reform on questions of race for nearly a century makes it, I think, one of the most pivotal elections that there's been in American history. And again, it came through all those sorts of thin margins that people suggested might happen in 2024. They didn't actually do that. But many of the arguments that people were suggesting might have to be used were in fact used way back in 1876. Sometimes a very thin margin, 50, 50 or 51, 49 can be the basis on which huge epoch, changing historical moments are made. Now that's in the era of elections. But I wonder, is there that sense of a kind of knife edge decision, a sort of 50, 50 decision in the pre modern era? Is there any kind of medieval or early modern equivalent of a decision that sat on that kind of knife edge?
- [20:55]
Wendy
It's very difficult to find precise parallels because as you say, this is a pre election kind of era. But what we certainly can find is moments of succession crisis, which then do generate two very different ways of looking at the world. One comparison I was thinking about was with the papal schism of the late 14th century. So this is when Pope dies in 1370s and the cardinal electors choose a new pope, who is urban VI in 1378 in Rome. And having elected him, they swiftly realized that they really can't stand him and they wish they hadn't done. So they elect a different pope instead, who is Clement vii, which is a bad idea because Urban's not just prepared to step down at this stage. So he continues being pope, Clement VII continues being pope. One is based in Rome, one is based in Avignon. They represent rather different things. And Europe then has. I'm not very good at the maths of this, but until 1417, at least two popes, and in an era when supposedly people believe in the pope as like, the ultimate authority in the Church, this is rather problematic. And what's very interesting is to see the ways in which actually this really hardens political identities across Europe. So different polities, increasingly what we might describe as different nations, choose which pope they're going to support. So in France, they decide to support the Avignon Pope. In England, they decide to support the Roman Pope. The Holy Roman Empire largely goes for the Roman Pope. Castile, southern Italy largely go for the Avignonese pope. So it's a rather dismal example, actually, of an election which wasn't exactly split. One election and then another one which failed to overturn the result of the first one, really hardens these kinds of political identities. They then summon another council at Pisa in 1409, because they realize having two popes is not good. It's a very significant problem. And they elect another pope, but what they fail to do is depose the existing two. So then they end up with three popes, which fractures things even further and is even more catastrophic. And then the whole thing is sort of finally resolved in the Council of constance, summoned in 1415, and they elect a new pope, Martin V, 1417, and just about managed to depose the existing three popes. But it is a pretty transformative moment, partly in this sort of shoring up of political partisan identities, so that, you know, France and England are owing their allegiance to different popes. The notion that they're different nations starts to look even more concrete, really, but it's also transformative in governmental terms. So how do you resolve a papal schism? You need to summon a council of people to decide who is going to be the new pope instead. So church councils had always existed, but they'd never had this kind of power where they could depose a pope and make a choice about who should replace a deposed pope. So the success of the Council of Constance in doing this really intensifies the power of the council, sort of constitutional power of the council. And we then see a movement emerging over the course of the 15th century called conciliarism, where church councils themselves have a great deal more power vis a vis popes. And it produces a whole series of political theoretical discussions about the relationship between conciliar authority and ultimate authority. And these are discussions which then sort of flow into secular government. So it's an example of a contested election which really shifts the way people think about government.
- [24:28]
Rana Mitter
And also, actually, Hannah, when you mentioned there the kind of tension between conciliar authority and supreme authority, I'm just reminded that earlier this year we had a judgment at the U.S. supreme Court, really with Donald Trump in mind about how far his presidential immunity or anyone's presidential immunity as president might go in terms of the carrying out of their official duties, as opposed to things they might have carried out under their own esteem. So many of these things, I think, have parallels, too. There's another one that actually came up, and again, it sort of relates in a sense to that comparison I made earlier with the late 19th century. But I think it has a wider significance too, because of those late 19th century characters. The one who Donald Trump has mentioned and specifically talked about it in that Joe Rogan podcast is William McKinley, who was president at the end of the 19th century. And rather like Donald Trump, he faced an assassination attempt. Sadly for McKinley, unlike Trump, who survived, of course, McKinley tragically, was. Was killed, as indeed was Garfield, who I mentioned before. There was rather a lot of it around at that time with Lincoln as well as part of that series of victims. But McKinley had spent some years pushing forward a different sort of policy, and it's one that appeals very much to Donald Trump, which is why he mentioned it. Trump called him the tariff king. In other words, a guy who implemented the idea of import taxes on goods coming to the United States as opposed to charging people income tax, which again, Donald Trump, along with many other well off people, is not so keen, I think, on putting it at too high a rate. So that is something that was very much central to the debate of the late 19th century, as it turns out now to the debates of the first quarter of the 2020 first century. But I wonder again if that question of taxation on goods as a means of funding governments, as opposed to something of the modern era like a personal income tax, which I think really doesn't emerge. Certainly much of the west until about the 18th century, 17th or 18th century, is the subject of debates as well. We talked about medieval courts earlier, but where's the income flowing in from? Is it the equivalent of tariffs? Is it. It ties, you know, how are these places funding themselves? Because obviously that's central to the way in which Donald Trump wants people to rethink the question of US Government in a very different era.
- [26:39]
Wendy
Yeah, it's a really interesting question. The history of taxation is surprisingly interesting, I think. So in the Middle Ages, England looks very different from other areas in that they have a kind of precociously developed system of regular taxation, nevertheless dependent on grants from Parliament, which gives the House of Commons quite a instrumental role vis a vis the king. But. But taxation is regularized from quite an early point. If one looks to other European states in the period, taxation becomes a lot more problematic. France is really interesting in that they are very much dependent on tax on particular goods, notably on the Gabelle, which is the salt tax. There are various attempts to impose some form of regular taxation which don't tend to go very well. So Charles V, for example, institutes a hearth tax, and it does go okay, but then on his deathbed, he revokes it because he says it just makes him feel so guilty that he'd done this. He's not going to go to heaven if he doesn't revoke it before he dies.
- [27:35]
Rana Mitter
So a hearth tax, meaning where people light their fires. If you have one of those, you pay so much tax. If you have three of them, you pay sort of three times as much tax as the idea.
- [27:44]
Wendy
Precisely. And it's to try to ensure that everybody in the realm is being taxed on a regular basis.
- [27:50]
Rana Mitter
It's not sort of council tax in the uk, sort of the number of the kind of size of your property.
- [27:54]
Wendy
Yeah, exactly. What really strikes me about moments in the Middle Ages when we can just about see a sort of 50, 50 divide, where we can at least see a succession crisis or two sides vying for power, is how often these disputes aren't just about rulership itself and the nature of rulership. So if the wars are the Roses, for example, in 15th century England, I think we have a tendency to see this as like a great factional struggle between different people who want to be king. But there's quite a compelling line to see this actually as, in many ways, competition between Two very different visions of how one thinks about the common weal or the common good. And, of course, taxation is really bound up in that. If one thinks about the Civil war in the 17th century, when England literally becomes completely fractured again. And the clue is in the title with the Commonwealth. So much of that is about the nature of kingship, but it's also about how you assure the common good, how you define the common good, how you tax to assure the common good, how you run the wider political community in a way that is equitable. These are the kinds of questions which really motivate people.
- [29:09]
Rana Mitter
And tax is also one of those issues that has absolutely run through the history of most other policies as well, I suspect. But. But it's a reminder that tariffs and the ability to impose your own taxes in general has, in many societies over much of time, been a real touchstone. People don't just feel these things in their pocketbook, although of course they do feel it there. They also feel it as an issue of national pride or shame. And the fact that Trump has tied his MAGA agenda, Make America Great Again, so closely to tariffs, a once rather obscure tax policy, which actually many people have thought had disappeared in the wake of globalization, I think is no coincidence. There's a long history of tariffs being. Well, he says it's the most beautiful word in the English language as far as he's concerned. And there is that wider sense, I think, that it is a quite potent word politically, if you know what to do with it.
- [30:04]
Wendy
I think, in terms of this question of what tax is for as well, an interesting comparison might be with a rather extraordinary episode in early 14th century France where the king Philip Ivan, levies a tax for a war that he's fighting against Flanders, and he has levied the tax for a particular military campaign, which for a range of reasons then doesn't actually happen. And the towns of France make him pay the tax back according to the Roman law principle of casenta causa, which means when the cause has ceased, you don't get to take the tax any longer, and he actually has to pay the tax back. It's an extraordinary moment when you see the kind of limit midst of his fiscal and political power, but also an extraordinary moment where there is effectively a public debate about what the point of tax is and how it relates to the common good more widely and how it relates to the kind of national territorial interests of that particular kingdom as well.
- [30:59]
Rana Mitter
So, in a sense, you know, thinking way back to the medieval era, when taxes certainly existed, tithes another way of thinking about how you use the authority of the Church to charge against wealth all the way to the 21st century, where taxes and tariffs are still absolutely central to economic life. I suppose it's a reminder that some things really don't change over a thousand years or more.
- [31:21]
Hannah Skoda
Before we go any further, just a warning that the next section will discuss historic child abuse. So this is a story that's been in the news in recent days because the Archbishop of Canterbury has resigned following a damning report into child abuse in the Church of England over the past decade. Decades. We're not obviously going to be talking about that story in any detail, but it's an opportunity to talk perhaps about the role of the Archbishop and of the Church in past societies. Hannah, did you want to start us off on this one?
- [31:50]
Wendy
Yes. I mean, the medieval Church is such a wildly powerful institution, both in sort of self regulating and in deciding what it's going to regulate, but also in sort of setting up cultural and religious mores and so on. I was reminded of a book published by an American historian a couple of years ago called Diane Elliot, and the book is called the Corrupter of Sodomy Scandal and the Medieval Clergy. And it's a book which traces the ways in which clergy in the medieval Church were eventually forbidden from doing public penance and encouraged instead to do private penance when they had sinned. And the ways in which this shift was part, at least the book argues this was part of a wider attempt to make sure that the Church was kind of containing uncomfortable actions and experiences within itself and not drawing wider attention to it. Evidence about abuse within the medieval Church is really extremely limited. It's a book about the evidence that we can identify to think about how the Church tried to control scandal. Very broadly speaking, though, what this reminds us is that in the Middle Ages, the Church was a distinct kind of jurisdictional unit. Jurisdictionally, it was supposedly responsible for everything that went on within this institution. And that sense of sort of self regulating, I think, is really interesting and often produced the kind of points of conflict between medieval archbishops and medieval secular rulers that tend to attract a lot of historical interest because they're quite dramatic and melodramatic even. These are points when the Church, which supposedly exercised jurisdiction over anything involving any member of the clergy, would find itself being subjected to jurisdiction from secular authorities and objected very, very strongly to this. And of course, the really famous cataclysmic moment in this, this regard was with the Archbishop of Canterbury in the 12th century, Thomas of Becket. So Becket was Lord Chancellor in 1162, and then he was Archbishop of Canterbury until his murder in 1170. He had a gigantic conflict with the King of England, Henry ii. I think part of this was probably a clash of personalities and the fact that Thomas Becket became more and more sort of ascetic and austere and committed to his religious life over the course of being archbishop. But it's also a dispute about the jurisdiction of the English courts over the clergy. And according to the chronicles, Henry II was overheard saying, what miserable drones and traitors have I nourished and brought up in my household, who let their Lord be treated with such shameful contempt by a lowborn cleric, referring to Thomas Becket's unwillingness to submit to secular jurisdictional authority. Anyway, group of noblemen overhear him saying this and march off and murder Thomas Becket, who rapidly after his murder acquires this saintly reputation. And the shrine of Thomas Becket in Canterbury becomes an incredibly popular international pilgrimage site. And for us, it's a kind of testimony to this extraordinary conflict between jurisdictional authorities in the Middle Ages. There's another very dramatic example with a French bishop in the early 14th century called Bishop Saisy, who is, I think, the Bishop of Pamier. And he comes into cataclysmic conflict with the King of France, again over jurisdictional issues. Who has the right to exercise jurisdiction over a bishop or an archbishop? Or should the Church be solely responsible for regulating itself? And the King of France, Philip iv, wants to arrest this bishop, and the Pope says, you can't arrest a bishop because the Church deals with its own internal problems. And this leads to a conflict between king and pope, where the King of France actually sends men to arrest the Pope. In the 1300s, Bishop Cese's offense, which the French king was so angry about in the first place, was to have been heard to say in a tavern that Philip IV of France was the most beautiful of lords but worth absolutely nothing, and that he apparently looked like an owl. And this insult, his appearance, was what Philip absolutely could not stand. But fundamentally, the dispute is about, again, about jurisdiction. How far should the Church self regulate and how far can secular jurisdiction step in?
- [36:34]
Rana Mitter
Well, I think that tension between the secular and the religious, it's a theme that's run a little bit through our conversation today in different ways, even when veering through the US presidential election. But we started with medieval courts, and as we get near the end, I suppose I wanted just to sort of bring up that question of archbishops in early modern ones and modern courts. One of the things that strikes me as being almost eternal is that continued tension that you mentioned, Hannah, between the secular religious and f. I think, for instance, of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury during the period of Henry viii, and of course, someone who was at the forefront of the Reformation in England, it's come to a little bit, because actually, as we're speaking for listeners who are based in the uk, the new series of Wolf hall, based on the last book in Hilary Mantell's trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, the the Mirror and the Light, is now going out. But what is worth noting is that, of course, that whole dilemma about how secular authority, when it subsumes religious authority in the case also the Reformation, in this particular case, is something that brings us attention to the fore. And the fact that this is still fascinating, that, you know, Hilary Mantel and indeed, you know, BBC Television in the early 21st century, would still think this was something that was well worth bringing to the fore as an issue for debate and consideration. That's relevant to our culture, I think, shows how central it is. I mean, is that sense really of archbishops of Canterbury, that they've always been political figures and perhaps, you know, even in our own era, the 20th, 21st century archbishops perhaps tend to be associated more with the idea of protest, perhaps against government policies that they don't consider to be. To be suitable. But although perhaps their voices are quieter than they would have been, you know, 200, 300 years ago, actually there is no real division between their religious role and their secular one. It's always been part of the same mix.
- [38:27]
Wendy
I think that's right. And I think sitting here in St. John's right now, it's a very interesting context to think in these terms. We actually have at St. John's the cap that Archbishop Laud apparently wore onto the scaffold for his execution. So it's one of our more macabre pieces in the collection. But absolutely there's an archbishop who is engaged politically in the most most dramatic way possible. Another archbishop who I find rather interesting at Oxford was Chichely, Henry Chichely, who became Archbishop of Canterbury. His tomb is in Westminster. It's a magnificent transy tomb, by the way, which means that you have a statue of Henry Chichley on the top, an effigy, the sort of thing that we'd expect on a medieval tomb, looking very grand in his archbishop's robes, but underneath, a second effigy of Chichele as a cadaver with the flesh falling off his bones and Maggots crawling out of his eye sockets and this kind of thing. And the point of these transi tombs was to make the point that you can be Archbishop of Canterbury, but we all turn to dust in the end. But he was a figure who started off. He came, we think, from a family of grocers, and he went to Winchester College as a scholarship boy, and then he got a scholarship to New College, and then he rises up through the ranks and became Archbishop of Canterbury. So the most powerful churchman in the land who exercised an extremely powerful political role. And he founded the College of All Souls in Oxford in 1438. And in the founding statutes for that college, he said he was doing it, quote, to provide unarmed soldiery. So there's a really explicit sense that you train up churchmen such as himself, who became Archbishop of Canterbury precisely because they will contribute to the nation as unarmed soldiery. So their political role is absolutely embedded in who they are.
- [40:15]
Rana Mitter
Well, let's hope the political debate in our own era remains unarmed and remains in the realm of discussion and discourse, and then maybe we'll all get through whatever the next few years bring, both at home and abroad.
- [40:27]
Hannah Skoda
Hannah Rana, thank you both so much. We'll be back in December when we'll be taking a look back at the year's events. But for now, thank you both again for your time.