How Pagan Was Medieval Britain?
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- čas přidán 7. 08. 2024
- Did paganism survive all through the Middle Ages, as scholars once thought, remaining the religion of the common people, while the elite had embraced Christianity? Or did it die out earlier?
This lecture will consider a broad range of evidence, including figures in seasonal folk rites, carvings in churches, the records of trials for witchcraft and a continuing veneration of natural places such as wells. It will also compare ancient paganism and medieval Christianity as successive religious systems.
A lecture by Ronald Hutton recorded on 7 June 2023 at Barbican Centre, London
The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/m...
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It is ironic to see the hostility among some observers to Prof Hutton regarding his interpretation of historical evidence. From what I have read, he is personally sympathetic to paganism. But his task is not to evangelise for the tradition but to explore a historical question. Such an approach should be judged according to evidence not personal preferences. He gives an interpretation of evidence and should be judged by the standard of his research and not by what we might like or dislike.
Well I mean, Christians do NOT appreciate the history of Christianity, just the mythology of it.
Agreed
I didn't see any hostility - they were simply subjecting the matter to scrutiny.
That really wasn’t hostility it was very polite academic discusssion!!
There's no debate. People used to debate not scream at each other
Lovely to hear an articulate, rational scholar going into granular primary sources instead of pushing some wish-fulfilling ideology. Please keep it up. Real scholarship is endangered.
Even as a half German and half Hungarian guy (whose mother tongue is not English) is a joy to hear professor Hutton's beautiful and sophisticated English.Last but not at least his lectures are highly interesting !!! 👍 Greetings from Hungary🇭🇺
He is an arresting sight if you cross paths with him, as i did in Oxford one day. Totally unique style. Historical style but not reproduction. I think his dress says “we have something to learn from the past. Don’t throw it all away. “
I could listen to Prof.Hutton endlessly. What a treasure! Even his asides are crammed with knowledge you just won’t find anywhere else.
Ooooo! A new one. So excited! I enjoy Ronald Hutton's presentations on these topics so much more than others out there. Thank you, Gresham, for posting and Ronald Hutton for another excellent lecture.
266 views in less than an hour.. He is a favorite of mine too
Couldn’t put it better! Thank you Gresham!
He's a Marvel....loved when he would visit Ruth and tom and Alex on their historical farms and provide for the social aspects1❤
And next year, Magic? Right on!
And keep them coming, Gresham College!
Love Prof. Hutton. What a treat his classes are! Please have him on again!
10 minutes in, and I already feel the urge to put on some Jethro Tull (Songs From the Wood; "jack o' the green") and some PJ Harvey ("sheela na gig"). Thanks for the new Ron video.
Thank you Gresham College , and thank you Prof.Hutton for all you bring us , but most of all just being ; You . Brilliant !
Perfect lecture for the summer Solstice ☀️
Winter solstice here in Australia! Pork and apples. Pine, cedar, frankincense and juniper smells in the house. Giving of gifts, chocolate actually 😄
Superb presentation, well marshalled facts, arguing for a conclusion that is probably disagreeable to many members of the audience. Hutton is a great scholar, and we're lucky to have him.
This talk was so enjoyable! I adore Prof. Hutton’s work and I love his style.
Sincerest thanks for sharing it with us here. This midwestern millennial has the opportunity to benefit from talks I wouldn’t normally have access to simply because cool people share them online! It’s one of the few benefits I have noted as a person of a certain age… haha
Yes! I love the Prof's lectures. Thanks for giving us another one.
Have you ever noticed how, if someone else were speaking so slowly, it would be either frustratingly annoying, or soporifically boring, but Prof Hutton's inflections make it draw you in to a deeper interest and understanding, as we have longer to understand the information and take it in. It is a marvellous skill.
I love it when I can keep my ears busy with something I'm interested in while doing boring daily things, and Prof. Hutton makes it so easy. Next thing I know I've finished three chores I normally despise doing lol.
Always exceptional to see our favourite Prof gracing us ❤😊
Thanks to Ronald Hutton and Gresham. I enjoy all of his lectures!
A Professor Hutton lecture is always a highlight! Fascinating and absorbing as always. Thank you!
What I like the most here is that the introduction to the lecture makes a point to acknowledge that there are beliefs and traditions which were misattributed to a pagan past but are still nonetheless important to people right now, so the misattribution has had an impact on how we now see the world. I cannot wait for a talk on Edwardian paganism, which was delightful!
That was a great lecture! My tuppence observation is that it's interesting that although the names of Germanic deities are preserved in the days of the week, and in the festival of Easter, and of course we still have Roman months, this wasn't enough to protect the deities from being abandoned.
I was hoping for an explanation for how these came to be preserved, despite the elimination of paganism.
@@Cat_Woods I think Portuguese is the only language that replaced the pagan names of the week. The Portuguese must have been serious pagans to have had their days of the week taken away from them! Also maybe Russian does this as well.
@@megamanusa5 Interesting, I didn't know that. Thanks.
Prof Hutton explicitly excluded anything pagan absorbed by Christianity (26:18) and discussed only paganism where it existed solely as an alternative belief system.
@@Cat_Woods Prof Hutton spoke briefly about this in the earlier lecture in this series about Anglo-Saxon paganism. It's at around 51.00 in that lecture
Every time I see this man I cant help but smile :) Thank you professor and thank you Gresham.
Fantastic, fascinating. Professor Hutton, as always, had me hanging on every word.
Bravo Professor Hutton, informative and entertaining as always!
Again, a marvelous lecture. Professor Hutton is just so very interesting and informative, and I really like his lecture style
Being interesting isn't enough. You need to be accurate too. See my comments 7 days ago.
What a delightful and educational lecture. Thank you so much.
Well, the story of an unbroken Pagan tradition may only be a fantasy, but obviously there has always been something that people have needed from the old Pagan ways. Something in our hearts kept them alive, if only as a sort of dream, throughout the years of their obscurity. The proof is that we, the Pagans of today, are here. We dance to the tunes of the Old Gods even if we have to compose them all ourselves. And thanks be to the gods that this is so!
Sorry, but your 'Old Pagan Ways' are just 18th/19th/20th century made up stuff.
The beating of the bounds, wassailing, etc probably originated in paganism.
@@MarmaladeINFP
No evidence for a pagan origin for either.
Or the etc's.
Considering that everything christians is unoriginal and derives from something and somewhere and someone else, I think it's safe to say all things have an unchristian origin.
A plagerized, erroneous work of theological fiction is perhaps something that is best described as wholly unoriginal.
@@xunqianbaidu6917 I'm not.
Please explain what you mean?
I have thoroughly enjoyed professor Hutton’s lecture series. I eagerly await next years series.
Brilliant! I never knew Hutton during my time at Oxford although I saw him about town. He undoubtedly belongs in All Souls like the “rest” of the world’s best. Make me scream; “eureka!”
❤ these history videos from Gresham College, more, please.
….A new Professor Hutton lecture? 1. Ringer “Off” …. 2. “Do Not Disturb” on Doorknob….3. Cup of Hot Tea in Hand……❤
These lectures were brilliant, enjoyed every single one of them. 👍
Fascinating! Dr Hutton always delivers well researched and informative talks.
Loved him on Philomena Cunk! And also this lecture
Thanks, I found the unraveling of symbols and created historical roots very interesting.
Thank you for bringing up the facts about aging Yew trees.
This man's knowledge is very impressive. Thanks for this..
On the matter of yew trees in church yards, I believe there is mention in Gerald of Wales of while doing a preaching tour to raise recruits for the Crusades that they were encouraged to plant yew trees for the making of Longbows.
My favourite lecturer. Always interesting, thank you.
Stumbled across this and thoroughly enjoyed this informative lecture.
If Hutton, then click the like button.
Excellent video ... well done Prof. Hutton.
Thank you, another lecture both educational and entertaining.
Wonderful teacher! Thank you for sharing this!
Hi Ronald. I have a degree in horticulture and have never heard that Yew trees do not have rings. This is fascinating! Is it because of the density or growth rapidity of the Taxus wood or do rings develop, but they're just absent because the original trunk becomes gutted over time? Really intriguing. Sadly, there are few ancestral Yews in the US, but, fortunately, a very old one in Spring Grove Cemetery about an hour from me.
Happy find! My dude! 😊
Great as always, if but a bit strict in the definition of Paganism. A bit more emphasis on folklore and traditions would have painted a better picture
Interesting to learn that church-going was not compulsory in medieval times.
It all went wrong (in England) with Henry VIII. The church had gathered great wealth, so he seized it all for himself and his friends, while switching from being a devout Catholic to an equally devout Protestant. The religious nuts (on both sides) made church-going compulsory, but they never managed to hold onto power for very long. Fortunately the hard cases decided to emigrate to America, where they have been given their head to do their worst.
Fascinating lecture!
Enjoyed this lecture a great deal.
Informative and very relaxing.I use to cure insomnia.
Wonderful lecture. Sheila-na-Gig is obviously an Irish term, I wonder if in origin it was "Síle an Ghogaide" (Síle on her hunkers)
Oh well done you that makes a lot of sense.
He did actually talk about how the image came from France and Spain, how the Irish developed their own story for her and earlier the usage of the Irish name.
Thank you so much for sharing this wonderful lecture.
Thank you very much indeed for this lecture!
Coming from Germany raised in a protestantism area I never was exposed to any kind of the worshipping of saints. The connection between those and the former pagan polytheism was an eye-opener to me. This approach makes a lot of sense to me in understanding of the transition into the new religion.
Always love the profs lectures My observation being a Brit is that we are and probably have never been a very religious population in general
The Britons of the 1st century were apostolic Christians.
The Anglo / Saxon arrivals eventually adopted Rome’s version (Augustine).
It has been said that Edward 1st wore a Papal ring, etc., etc.
So, whereabouts, and who, are the Britons in question?
@@megw7312They also fought very hard to keep their Druid traditions alive, according to the Romans.
I think the British have never been big on centralized religion, but to me the point of this lecture is that people had very strong local traditions that were more concerned with everyday life than the abstract theology of the parish or monastery.
@@grimble4564 I suspect this is true of a wide majority of people all over the world.
Fantastic as always. Thank you! It's nice to imagine a continuous line of folk tradition and paganism, but the evidence clearly doesn't bear that out.
Irish Christianity, and Welsh and Scottish were considered barbaric while not under the control of Roman priests. Roman Christianity substituted the superstitions of one semi-pagan people for another. That underlying non-roman-ness fueled the heresies and eventual Protestantism all over Europe.
Only in neo-pagan wishful thinking did it somehow survive.
But then actual historical evidence is not one of their strong points.
The beating of the bounds, wassailing, etc probably originated in paganism.
@@MarmaladeINFP
No they didn't.
@@MarmaladeINFP”probably” doing a lot of heavy lifting there
Great stuff , love it
❤ Prof Ronald Hutton
Thank you for this lecture.
Superb.
Anyone who's interested in the stuff about medieval atheism/scepticism there is another lecture on this channel about exactly that. It should come up if you just search "Gresham medieval atheism"
Yes, that's a really interesting lecture too!
thank you well explained interesting and informative.
So nice to see Prof. Hutton drinking water from a glass rather than glugging from a plastic bottle.
Well the first question brought up a whole new line of questions.
I wish I could remember where I read this, but whilst studying Hardy I found an account of a village an early 19c traveller had stumbled upon deep in the woods. To his amazement it had no church, no minister and the inhabitants 'knew nothing of the gospels'. The evangelisation of Britain seemed to have missed them out completely.
That would be interesting to document. I think it's fairly unlikely as it's very hard to conceive of any area of Britain so remote and wild in that time period that it would have remained untouched by Christianity. It's a big island and prior to railroads had it's less traveled areas, but it wasn't like the farthest reaches of the Baltics or Siberia.
@@kenofken9458 That's why I've remembered it. I suspect the writer might have been being a bit Romantic, and the villagers were just totally neglected by the local church. But without the source who knows.
@@tbjtbj7930 You suspect the Victorian poet Thomas Hardy might have been "a bit Romantic?" I suspect he might have had his novelist's hat on at the time.
This is an authors ghost story told at the fire place. The Sami where the last population to be converted into the Abrahamic religions in Europe. They where converted as late as the beginning of the 18th century and even with them living in the Arctic and many of them being nomadic as late as the 19th century, Christianity reached every nook and cranny of their society. That there would be a place in the the British Isles overlooked by Christianisation in 19th century is so extremely statistically unlikely that you got to guess that is exactly why the story was enticing for Hardy to tell because if he could get you to belive that he truly would be the master of storytelling.
How Pagan was medieval Britain?
Not as Pagan as Britain today😁
Ronald does it again
I would have thought that summertime was the very time that chimney sweeps would’ve had the most work. The fires not going would’ve made it so much easier to clean the chimneys, ready for the winter when they would be burning again, but what do I know?
Invented tradition and the historicity of historical investigation - delicious!
My family celebrated May Day by going door to door with flowers and with a Maypole in the backyard.
Is Sheela Na Gig why "Sheila" is coarse slang in Oz?
It might be worth studying saint's lives very carefully, because in other countries Christianized pagan gods aren't always as obvious as St Brigit. In Russia, a story featuring St Nicholas and St Elijah seems to be very much a Christian veneer over a story about the Slavic gods Veles and Perun respectively.
11:00 what? No one cooked or heated water all summer? As someone who grew up in a house with a Rayburn and remembers it blazing away all year...
As I understand it current academic view is that Sheela na gigs did not in fact come from france
His voice is familiar. Has he ever been in a historical documentary about the English civil war?
Thank-you!
➡️ So, the origin of the green man was medieval ppls belief in a wild man of the forest, and that belief just popped up out of nowhere? Puts me in mind of the subject of the archetypal wildman creature that appears in the folk history of many cultures across the world, a belief which goes far deeper into history than the middle ages and touches on the subject of sasquatch/yeti type entities. I'd love to see someone do serious research into the history of folk beliefs around this subject.
As always a very entertaining and informative lecture from D̶r̶ ̶W̶h̶o̶ ProfRonH but...
I may have missed it as I was cooking dinner while listening but the title of the lecture on CZcams was How Pagan was Mediæval (that's my style, what's yours?) Britain but there was no mention of Wales or Scotland. And the mediæval period is generally taken to run from the end of the Roman occupation to the start of the Renaissance, rounded to 500-1500 AD. So early mediæval Britain was very pagan.
There were prayers to Odin found in some north English Barn deriving from the 18th century.
source?
@@PILLOWKVLT I wish I could remember. Some book having to do with folk beliefs.
Welsh saints, reaching the parts you didn't know you had since the 5thC
Of course yew trees do have tree rings! This may just have been a slip of the tongue of Prof. Hutton. Every real tree of the temperate climate does have tree rings. Maybe he heard that it doesn't have any resin canals. Yew has exceptionally conspicuous rings that you cas easily count to tell the age of the tree... In churchyards they are often several hundred years old.
Only one thing I would take issue with: Would not May, and the beginning of summer, represent the start of the busy season for sweeps? After all, sweeps cannot do their work while hearths are in use.
Not many chimneys in Britain in medieval times. In simple homes, the smoke wafted through the thatch or a hole in the roof.
@@megw7312Prof Hutton in the lecture stated that the Jack-in-the-Green phenomenon started in London in the late 18th century, when most homes would have a chimney. It was not a medieval phenomenon.
@@sarahmillard6401
And in the warmer months no fires means no soot, means no work for chimney sweeps.
I wonder if some of these folk traditions influenced the mind of JRR Tolkien? The Elvish realm of Lothlorien is ruled by a beautiful white-clad lady called Galadriel, whose husband Celeborn is a very secondary figure in the regime.
Thanks but I'm not touching anything today unless it's Ron Hutton. Oh wait, it is!!
It seems that paganism just seeped into English Christianity in an organic way, with later crackdowns leading to a fragmenting effect.
cool thanks
Bookmark 17:48
25:05 oh my
2:13 seems logical
Fantastic lecture!
Isn't Pagan used to describe religious/spiritual practices pre-Christianity? If so, doesn't that make everyone pagan before the Christians came along?
Yes. Though it pertains more to the polytheistic religions brought in by Indo Europeans (Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Slavic, Greek, Latin) as opposed to the religions pre-Bronze age, though they were most definitely nature based polytheistic.
The word Pagan was introduced in the 4th century by Christians to refer to people who aren't Christians. I wouldn't try to use it as a general term outside of Christian cultures.
Not "everyone" ! there were already other religions like Judaism and Hinduism. Not everyone turned to Christianity.
Re the witch trials of the 16th-17th centuries (53:35), my understanding is that it wasn't Christian (at this stage Catholic) theology that mutated from the late 15th century, but rather that the cause of witch-hunting was taken up by some oddballs and opportunists in the face of opposition from the Church hierarchy, then adopted at the height of the frenzy by some local episcopal rabble-rousers and their Protestant counterparts as central ecclesiastical control waned during the Reformation, the authorities in Rome throughout resisting the notion of evil being able to manifest itself through human supernatural action. There may have been some dilution of the official line as the hysteria took off, but the pre-Reformation Church was unreceptive to such lunacy. I suspect Prof Hutton' would say much the same, and the formulation just came out a bit garbled in answering a question "off the cuff", as often happens.
4:30 The Sheela na Gig here looks a little bit like an alien.
Do most Sheela na Gig representations have this alien-like appearance?
Did you know we evolved from aliens just look at hithight man
❤ As Pagan as The Witchfinder General !❤
Oops, YT unsubscribed me! I fixed that right away.
With no reference to Graves' White Goddess, Fraser's The Golden Bough, and the wider Victorian creation of a very rough estimate of history, there's no way to treat the possible fabulation fairly.
So it was very pagan but in a fully Christian way?
Back in iron age roman times they straight up freaked the romans out. One time they made landfall and women were throwing themselves on them attacking them. So the romans cut them down. But then the women gathered in a pile and a briton came out of the woods with a torch and lit the pile on fire. They were greased up in pitch or something and the romans had unwittingly participated in human sacrifice. Which freaked the romans out.
I`m sure that many old pagan customs and traditions survived in medieval Europe without people even thinking that they were pagan traditions!
It`s well recorded that here in Finland the people brought bear pelts to churches as offerings and making other offerings to forest fairies and the Church had a really tough time convincing everybody that they were not supposed to do that! And many such traditions survived well into the 19th century.
So people didn´t even think that they were doing anything "pagan", they were just doing what everybody had been doing all the time.
How did my grandmother have a green man on her wall in 1968? In Missouri, USA. She did. And she called it such.
Well it was popular in Britain so it likely influence other parts of the English speaking world.
@@chendaforest well thats not matching the times in this video and it doesn't explain things like folk magic she and her friends taught me. Folk magic from Appalachian hills. Handed down generation to generation. The craft is real, always has been and servivives today.
@@van3363 I don't doubt that area has a rich tradition of magic, which likely had many influences.
Whoot 😊
I’m a pagan guy from the viking group the black wolves Mother Earth rules I’m building a new alter in Europe paganism is growing we are getting back to are ancestry roots
The excellent lecture was slightly impaired by the ASMR nightmare of the professor drinking and swallowing