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8 Episodes 2004 - 2004
Episode 1
29 mins
THE YEAR: 1278. THE PLACE: open country near Le Hem, in Picardy. A court is assembled; the field is laid out for a tournament and splendidly bedecked ladies are watching from a platform. At their center is a queen, none other than King Arthur's wife, the lady Guinevere. Alongside her is an even more surprising figure: the Lady of Courtesy. A herald in full finery has proclaimed that Queen Guinevere requires all who want to pursue love in arms to appear before her; and before they can join her court they must joust. Now seven identically dressed knights appear and surrender themselves to the queen, saying they have been defeated by the knight with a lion. The knight in question then arrives with his lion and seven damsels, Guinevere's ladies, whom he has rescued from the seven knights in a week-long quest.
Episode 2
29 mins
THE MEDIEVAL MONK is an emblem of unworldiness. Shut away in his cloister, he dedicated himself to a life of prayer, hard work, poverty, self-denial and silence. He cut himself off from the temptations of the ordinary world in order to give himself to God. The life of a medieval monk was literally 'out of this world'. The story of the monastic life should be uneventful from beginning to end. But of course it isn't. Monks couldn't totally cut themselves off from the material world, even when they wanted to. And there were times when they didn't want to. On the morning of Sunday 18 October 1327, for example, the monks in the abbey of Bury St Edmunds ended their prayers, filed out through the abbey's crenellated gate and proceeded to the parish church. This was full of men, women and children. The monks threw off their habits - revealing that some of them wore armor under their robes - and burst into the church. They seized a number of citizens by force and dragged them back to the abbey as prisoners.
Episode 3
29 mins
There were three medieval King Richards of England or so history textbooks tell us. Richard the Lionheart spent most of his life fighting battles with scant time actually in England. Richard II was murdered to prevent an uprising against those who overthrew him. As for "child murderer" Richard III, his disfigurements were probably inventions. We may not have a true record of the medieval kings.
Episode 4
29 mins
HELPLESS, THREATENED AND FOREVER IN NEED OF RESCUE, the medieval damsel-in distress is an archetype deeply bound up with the image of the chivalrous knight in shining armor. It's easy for us to understand that back in the brutal world of the Middle Ages women should be at the mercy of forces beyond their control, and that they should need rescuing by heroic males. William Maw Egley's 1858 painting of the Lady of Shalott and her distant hero, Sir Lancelot, seems to convey, in its antiquarian detail, an authentic medieval vision (at least if one overlooks the very nineteenth-century appearance of Mrs Egley): the helpless lady sealed in her chamber, the armored man emblematic of freedom and courage. But the picture evokes a world that would have been incomprehensible in the age it is meant to represent.
Episode 5
29 mins
Since the age of science and reason, the Middle Ages has been dismissed as a period shrouded in ignorance and superstition. But the reputation of medieval scientists, known then as philosophers, has been unfairly blackened. They understood far more than we give them credit for, and had a more ethical approach that we could learn from today.
Episode 6
29 mins
THE STORY OF NORMAN ENGLAND began with a song. At about nine o'clock on the morning of Saturday 14 October 1066, the minstrel Taillefer rode out on his horse and began to juggle with his sword. As he juggled, he sang the Song of Roland. He was at the foot of Senlac ridge, a few miles from Hastings. Above him on the ridge, stretching for nearly three-quarters of a mile and seven lines deep, was the entire army of Harold, King of England, in battle order. A solid wall of shields was punctuated only by bristling spears and great double headed battleaxes.
Episode 7
29 mins
Unlike the altruistic Robin Hood of legend, outlaws were often members of society who robbed the poor to give to the rich. Remarkably, however, these outlaws gained a place of respect in society. They had lawyers, were more litigious than Americans, and paid their bills in butter and cheese. Tripping over a crack in the cart track could be a profitable business even hundreds of years ago.
Episode 8
29 mins
The stereotypical medieval peasant is a toothless, filthy, ignorant wretch, a slave to his feudal lord. Terry discovers a very different reality. They had more holidays than us, their houses were bigger, they frequently ate better and had more influence in the corridors of power. The average peasant knew the law, as he was often left to manage his own land and community affairs.