I’ll trot out the old possibly-apocryphal story about the burial of William the Conqueror. Apparently he was prone to put on flesh in his later years. Then when he died his family were so busy fighting each other that no one claimed the body. By the time someone finally arranged his funeral, his body was… ripe. And too large for its tomb. And as it was lowered in and got stuck, it burst open, filling the cathedral with an unbearable stink.
Ewwww.
Post #19 In the 1960s we called it “bash.” Nobody made it to 9. ((Maybe it was the tequila.)
Peasants consuming wine? It was frou-frou even back then. Silty meade maybe. (The water wasn’t fit to drink.)
It was Thomas Becket who was found to be wearing a verminous hair shirt – most medieval people, when they had the means/opportunity, tried to keep themselves clean. That he, an archbishop with access to riches and fine clothes, wore a filthy hair shirt to mortify his flesh was taken as proof of his piety.
Not really. Drinks went in and out of fashion, or were more expensive depending on the taxes, and there was a lot of wine made in Europe. One of the reasons wine features so prominently in local culture is that for centuries it was a common drink of laborers. It gave them a lot of calories in a compact form to get through the day, plus large quantities were exported from several major ports.
Speaking of Richard I - the most bizzare tale told of him is in a passage in the romance Richard Coeur de Lion where the author has Richard as a - cannibal. :eek:
That’s right - he eats man-flesh. What’s more, so does his whole army!
First, he comes down with a fever and gets an irresistable urge to eat pork. Being in the middle east, pork was scarce, so his servants substitute - human. First, without his knowledge, but when he finds out, rather than being horrified, he is delighted. Now, he’ll never go short of meat!
The rest of his army, seeing the king smacking his lips over human meat, decides they will eat man-flesh, too - after all, if the king does it, it can’t be wrong.
When Acre surrenders, he has a whole town of people as a larder to choose from - once Saladin refuses to pay the ransom for the prisoners. He invites Saladin’s ambassadors to a friendly feast - of their friends.
What’s more, he then threatens to eat every Saracen in his path …
King Richard I, honorary Orc. 
I remember reading about this in “Rats, Lice, and History” by Hans Zinsser. The relevant passage is quoted in an article by Gerald Weissman.
Since the consumption of wine has come up, here’s a fun vignette appropriate to the subject!
In 1201, when King John of England visited the French king, Philippe Auguste, at Fontainebleau, he was given the run of the place, including access to the wine cellar. The anonymous author of Chronique des rois de France tells us that after John left:
The king of France and his people had a good laugh among themselves at the way the people of the English king had drunk all the bad wines, and left all the good ones!
If it was his brother Richard, no doubt he would have drunk all the nice chiantis …
I do have to wonder how many of these stories of vermin, gluttony, or thievery were just the political propaganda of the time.
Thy friend spells funky, señor. Gonzales is Portuguese and the compuesto is Gaitán de Guevara or Gaytán de Guevara (no e in the first word).
These doesn’t have any long form certificates, but they kind of make one wonder about the mental health of the participants. I’ve probably told it before, but I think I hadn’t looked for the bit from the romancero.
Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, el Cid, married a woman whose father and brothers he’d killed in legal duel. Doña Jimena’s father had gravely insulted Don Rodrigo’s, causing him to have to leave the court altogether back when Rodrigo was a child; the two children had met in court and spent a lot of time making puppy eyes at each other before don Diego forced his son to avenge the ancient insult. Oops. Doña Jimena, now her father’s sole heir in a land whose laws considered women incapable of making legally-binding decisions, went to the King to ask him for a tutor. The king called for Rodrigo, called for a bishop and said “marry me these two”:
Maté a tu padre, Jimena,
Pero no a desaguisado;
Matéle de hombre a hombre
Para vengar cierto agravio.
Maté hombre, y hombre soy;
Aquí estoy a tu mandado.
Y el lugar de vuestro padre
Cobraste marido honrado.
I killed thine father, Jimena,
but this death murder was not;
I killed him as a man kills another
to avenge proven offense;
A man I killed, a man I am,
thy humble servant I am.
In thy father’s stead
now true husband you have.
King Carlos III of Navarre was a nerd, what can you do. No, seriously, he was. So was his grandson, the first Prince of Viana, for that matter. Anyway, back to the grandfather: he decided he wanted to have a clock built in his usual see of Olite and sent for clockmakers, but he had a condition which many refused. He wanted to be apprenticed to the tradesmen working on the clock. He evidently wasn’t going to be able to work for them as much as a true apprentice would, but he wanted to know how the clock worked and he wanted the learning to be hands-on, and if he was given a task and he didn’t do it right he wanted to be corrected.
Eventually a Frenchman, Thierry de Bolduc, accepted the condition, so we do have a nifty early-15th century mechanical clock in Olite.
While the historical Richard I probably never ate anyone, we know from several sources that the Crusaders of the First Crusade did commit cannibalism, most famously from this incomparable line from the chronicler Albert of Aix: The men did not shrink from eating not only dead Turks and Saracens, but even the dogs!
but even the dogs
but even the dogs
but even the dogs.
Raoul de Caen, in his Gesta Tancredi, likewise notes cannibalism at the seige of Ma’arra (the same incident Albert of Aix is talking about), but adds these gruesome details: At Ma’arra our troops boiled pagan adults in cooking-pots; they impaled children on spits and devoured them grilled.
An Arab chronicler, Kemaleddin, is kind enough to let us think the Crusaders ate people who were already dead, instead of hunting down and killing them for the express purpose of cannibalism: The Franks [Crusaders], wracked by hunger, were reduced to feeding themselves on cadavers and whatever animals they could get.
I could eat somebody if I had to. Meat is meat and though I prefer vegetables, survival is of paramount importance. But where were they that was so desolate? Why did it come to that?
That’s not just the kind of joke that might have seemed funny back then. It’s an actual joke that DID seem funny back then, It’s the second story in the Decameron.
The First Crusade was a very primitive affair by military standards - part of the army was made up of survivors from the so-called crusade of Peter the Hermit (though most of those were massacred by the Turks before the nobles showed up). They were literally hundreds of miles from anything resembling supply-lines. They were, in theory, to be supplied by the Byzantines - who, while nominally on their side, regarded the Crusaders as an army of human locusts (they had good reason for this) and did not willingly provide supplies.
The Crusade bogged down in lengthy sieges of fortified cities, during which supplies that could be stolen from the locals by ‘living off the land’ dried up (peasants will not plant food if they are being massacred and pillaged). Hence, mass starvation - leading to cannibalism.
The Third Crusade, by contrast, was an expressly royal affair, and Richard obviously was unlikely to be hungry for a slice of Turk.
Yup, I’d read of the cannibalism occurring during the First Crusade - of course, cannibalism during starvation isn’t all that uncommon. There are hints in the chronicles that the crusaders even began to use the threat of cannibalism for terrorist purposes, to some effect.
The notion of it occurring during the Third Crusade, and imposed from the top down, is surely an anachronism though. Perhaps a deliberate conflation of historical memory from the First Crusade. Richard was cruel even by the standards of his time - his massacre outside of Acre was disgraceful - but much as I’d like to, I can’t really see him sitting down to a tasty haunch of Turk. 
Certainly not to Richard’s taste. The Turks were horsemen, all dark meat, poor fare for a prince.
To continue on the Holy Land theme, here’s some verses from Rognvald Kali Kolsson. Rognvald was a Norse nobleman and* jarl *of Orkney who journeyed to the Holy Land in 1151 through 1153. He was an accomplished poet and patron of poets, and in one of his poems he boasts that he knows chess, he scarcely forgets runes, he can ski, and that he likes listening to the harp. He survived a shipwreck, played pirate against Saracen ships, swam the Jordan river, and composed lots of poetry in the troubadour tradition to Ermengarde of Narbonne. He was murdered in 1158 and venerated as a saint.
His description of raiding an Arab vessel:
There went onto the dark dromond –
the warrior was swift for booty –
up with sufficient valor
first Auden the Red;
there were we able to redden –
mankind’s God brought it about,
a black body fell on the planking –
weapons in people’s blood.
Seeing the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem:
A cross hangs for this poet –
uproar should be lowered – before my breast;
men flock forward onto the hill-slops –
but a palm-branch between my shoulders.
Longing for Ermengarde:
Ermengarde’s words long
the glorious warrior must remember;
the noble lady wishes us to ride
Ranworld [the sea] to Jordan;
but when the wavesteed’s trees [ship’s sailors]
go back north across the sea,
home in autumn, we shall score
the whale’s land [sea] to Narbonne.
Translations from The Triumph Tree: Scotland’s Earliest Poetry (ed. Clancy, 2008).
William Rufus is probably best known from the terse statements of many historians that he was one of the worst kings England ever had. In this, they ape the sentiments of the chroniclers of the day, almost all of whom were churchmen and almost all of whom, to a man, despised William Rufus’ lifestyle. As a king and as a man he seems to have been no worse than many others. Hell, he probably wasn’t the worst of his brothers – his elder brother Robert allegedly let his mistress poison his wife, and his younger brother Henry had umpteen-dozen illegitimate children. No, the problem with William Rufus, according to Eadmer and Orderic and all their ilk, was that he liked to party, he liked to get crunk, and he was maybe kinda gay.
Anyway, here’s a good one about William Rufus, from Wace’s Roman de Rou. Wace’s story goes that while William Rufus was off on one of his many wars, he came across two small rivers called Con (“cunt”) and Cul (“arse”) on his way to the city of Le Mans. For a bit of fun, William Rufus took a detour, following the rivers “up to the hilt” (to their sources) so he could cross both without getting his feet wet!
The monk Eadmer has an incredible story about William Rufus. His story goes that the father of a young Jew who’d converted to Christianity approached the king and offered him sixty marks if he could return his son to him. William Rufus summoned the youth to him.
The king said to him, "Your father complains that you have become a Christian without his consent. If this is so, I order you to comply with his wishes and become a Jew again without delay.
The youth replied, “Surely you jest, my lord king!”
“Me jest with you, son of a dungheap?” replied the king indignantly. “Get out of my sight immediately and obey my command, or by the face of St. Luke I will have your eyes torn out.”
The youth, quite undismayed, replied in a firm voice, “That I cannot do. But you can be sure, if you were a good Christian, you would never have given me such a command.”
The young man was taken from his presence and his father brought before the king.
“Now then, I have done what you asked me to, so pay me as promised.”
The man said, “My son is more a Christian now than ever and more hostile to me than before, and you say, ‘I have done what you asked me to, so pay me as promised’? First, do what you agreed to do, and then we will talk of promises.”
“I have done what I could,” said the king. “Although I have not succeeded, I will not have worked for nothing.” In the end the Jew with difficulty agreed to paying half the promised sum to the king and keeping the other half.
William Rufus: Where’s My Money, Honey?
Just a thanks to Mississippienne for this delightful and entertaining thread. Also…
but even the dogs
Well, hey. Obviously, according to the accounts, dogs taste worse than Scaracens, so it is more of a hardship to eat 'em.
Aw shucks y’all 
Here’s a little more of Richard I’s catty bitchiness, courtesy of Roger of Hoveden. This is Richard’s own account of the Battle of Gisors in 1198, as told to Philip, Bishop of Durham. The battle was part of Richard I’s ongoing conflict with Philippe II Auguste, king of France, his arch-nemesis/ex-gay lover?/former BFF.
[Philippe], however, with his forces made a descent in the direction of Gisors, on which, we put him and his people, after taking to flight, into such consternation on their way to the gate of Gisors, that the bridge broke down beneath them, and the king of France, as we have heard say, had to drink of the river…
Poor Philippe Auguste, slogging out of that river in his waterlogged clothes, cursing loudly, while Richard and his men laughed and mocked him!
Richard I: Total Nonstop Asshole.