Strange Superstitions of Medieval People | Human Voiced, No Ads

Let's start with a story. It was a stormy day in the year 815, and the Bishop of Lyon found himself intervening to save four prisoners from a angry mob. You see, the local villagers were convinced that these captives had quite literally fallen out of the sky. They believed the strangers were sky-sailors from a magical cloud realm called Magonia, come to steal the villagers' crops amid the thunderstorm. The Bishop, Agobard of Lyon, later wrote how people exhibited four captives—three men and one woman—as if they had fallen from these very ships, as if these captives ought to be stoned. It took all of Agobard's persuasion and scriptural arguments to convince his flock that the whole notion of storm-raising sorcerers and cloud-ships was just a lie born out of superstition. Now, if that's not a window into the strange superstitions of medieval people, I don't know what is. And it's far from being an odd one-off event. Such beliefs in weather-magic, omens, witches—they were widespread in medieval Europe, even in the lofty halls of Byzantium. You see, medieval Europe was a world where religion and folklore intertwined, and daily life teemed with unseen forces. What we might call superstitions today—beliefs in supernatural causation or magical remedies—were just a part of how medieval people understood their world. It was an era before modern science. Any misfortune or marvel begged an explanation, often invoking God or the devil or saints or spirits. Learned churchmen used the superstitio to label excessive or misguided popular beliefs, and they preached against them as foolish or sinful. Yet many of these practices persisted stubbornly among high- and low-classes alike. So from pretentious comets blazing in the sky, to witches casting curses in the dark, the medieval imagination populated the mysterious cosmos with signs and hidden meanings. And that is what we're here to discuss today—medieval superstitions, omens, portents, protective charms, ghosts, miracles, witches, and, of course, folk cures. Through all of these stories, I think, was he not only an interesting and amusing medieval life, but quite a spiritual one—one that carries deep roots in folklore. And, of course, all that helps us to understand how the medieval mindset made sense of this mysterious world around them. And before we get into that, I'm just going to welcome you to the channel, anybody new here, I invite you to click that subscribe button. And if you're coming back, it's good to see you again. Now, this entire video, along with all the other videos in the playlist sections, is ad-free. You won't get any interruptions, so you can enjoy it all the way to the end, without having to worry about jarring ads coming in and ruining the whole thing. Well, this is made possible because we are supported on this channel by the generous Patreon members, the YouTube members, the occasional donation on Super Thanks with YouTube and the PayPal link, and, of course, the merch store. If you're interested in that, well, you'll find the links of where you need to go in the pinned comment, video channel—video description, rather—or the channel description. Now, with all that being said, let's get on with the video for today. Well, one of the most common forms of medieval superstition was the interpretation of omens—that is, unexpected and random occurrences or natural phenomena, generally seen as indicators of future events. Now, medieval people, especially in folk tradition, believed that the natural world was rich with signs deliberately placed by divine or supernatural forces. Everyday happenings could thus carry a hidden message about fortune or perhaps doom. For example, it was said that if a dog howls inside a house, someone in the house will soon fall ill or perhaps even die. Seeing a magpie bird cawing on your roof meant a visitor would arrive soon, whereas encountering a hare on the road was unlucky and pretended misfortune on your journey. But, on the other hand, finding a stray horseshoe on the ground was a token of good luck and would ensure your well-being for the day—one of many folk omens recorded in medieval sources. Now, many such omens were highly local or specific, as you might understand. A fifteenth-century English list of superstitions, for instance—which is a golden source for a video like this, of course—advised people never to begin a new project on certain evil days of the year—notably three perilous Mondays that fell in April, August, and December. Well, if you did begin a project on one of these days, superstition dictates that disaster would soon follow, and even sneezing carried a supernatural risk. A widely repeated belief was held that if one sneezed with mouth open, the devil could enter the body at that unguarded moment. The protective response was to quickly utter, God bless you. A habit that originated, it was said, as a medieval precaution to ward off Satan's intrusion. Hence the custom of saying, bless you, after a sneeze. Well, such examples show that how even the smallest incidents of daily life were certainly woven into a larger web of meaning. A medieval farmer or craftsman paid attention to the behavior of animals, the timing of seasons, odd incidents, fearing that they might signal a sickness, bad luck, or even death. But beyond the domestic sphere, ordinary portents in nature were taken quite seriously. Medieval chroniclers and histories are full of reports of bizarre phenomena interpreted as omens from heaven. Often such prodigies were believed to presage major calamities or God's judgment. An infamous example of that is Halley's Comet in 1066. When this fiery comet appeared in the sky over Europe, many, including the English, viewed it as a dreadful omen of upheaval. In fact, the bio-tapestry, an embroidery created soon after 1066, depicts onlookers marveling at the comet with the inscription, These men wonder at the star. And it became retrospectively linked to the impending Norman conquest of England that year. Likewise, earlier in 793, Northumbrian observers recorded, quote, dragons flying through the sky in flames. Likely a comet, perhaps an aurora. Shortly before a Viking raid struck the monastery of Lindisfarne. Cause to the medieval eye, the terrifying vision had been a divine warning of the Viking onslaught to come. And certainly the days following it were not very pleasant. Now it is this mindset that God or cosmic forces sent signs of future events that had deep roots. Early Christian theologians, like St. Augustine, had actually cautioned against credulous belief in omens, calling it foolish, and at worst potentially demonic. Augustine argued that any apparent pattern between an omen and a subsequent event was mere coincidence, or perhaps a trick of the demons. Medieval church authorities echoed this stance in theory, viewing the reading of omens as a superstitio that could lead the faithful astray. And we have a telling anecdote that comes from a 13th century preacher, Stephan of Bourbon, who recounted the fate of an old woman too enamored of omens. This woman heard a cuckoo bird call five times one spring, and firmly believed that she had five years of life remaining. She ignored the priest's urging to confess her sins on her sick bed, insisting that she had a few more years left before she was going to die. But she lost her speech, and she perished shortly after, without confessing those final rites. Her misplaced faith in a third omen, Stephan notes sternly, cost the woman her soul. Well, perhaps it's an apocryphal tale, but it shows how medieval clergy often repeated such cautionary tales to warn against trusting in omens. Yet the very need for so many sermons and condemnations show how persistent and appealing these beliefs were. The common folk, and indeed many nobles, simply found it natural to see a meaningful pattern in unusual events. If lightning struck the church tower, perhaps it was a sign of God's anger. A child born with a call—that is, an amniotic membrane over its head—people whispered that the child would have second sight. If a rainbow arced over the village, it might promise peace and good harvest. Every unusual or eerie encounter begged to be interpreted through a kind of supernatural lens. And in an uncertain world of warfare, plague, and early death, reading the runes of fate in this way gave people a kind of semblance of control. Omens and portents thus formed a kind of popular divination in medieval life—a way to pick at God's book of destiny through those little gaps of strange events. But perhaps no superstition in the Middle Ages had more dire consequences than the fear of witchcraft—the belief that certain people, usually women, could harness dark supernatural powers to harm their neighbors. It was widespread in Europe by the later medieval period. While in the earliest Middle Ages there were relatively few witch trials, and, of course, church doctrine often dismissed folktales of night-flying witches as delusions, by the 14th and 15th centuries the idea of a witch as a devil-worshipping villain had gripped the popular imagination. This was the most famous medieval superstition, and it led to genuine panic, and, of course, that panic led to violence. An estimated two hundred thousand people accused of witchcraft were executed across Europe in the mid-15th century, though the peak of witch-hunts did come in the early modern era. In medieval law, witches were blamed for almost any unexplained misfortune. If a sudden storm devastated the crops or sank a ship, villagers might whisper that a local witch had raised the tempest through sorcery. Indeed, as we saw, farmers in Agabard's time were paying supposed weather-wizards to prevent hailstorms, and lynching them when storms struck despite the charms. Witches were thought to curse people and livestock, spread diseases, spoil milk and butter, and just generally wreak havoc out of either malice or demonic influence. But even more fantastically, people believed witches could shapeshift into animals. Popular imagination often cast witches as transforming into cats, rabbits, or crows to sneak about and do unseen evil. A raven croaking ominously at night, or bats flitting around the eaves with dreaded signs. It was said to be bad luck if you saw bats in flight or heard their cries, because it meant that witchers who were in league with bats were active in the darkness. Similarly, black cats acquired an unlucky reputation precisely because of their association with witcher's familiar spirits. Another widespread fear was witchers interfering with human fertility and sexuality in rather monstrous ways. Medieval penitential manuals and later witch-hunting guides contained startling references to such beliefs. As early as the eleventh century, the churchman Burkhard of Worms wrote of superstitious villagers rather, who believed a witch could magically steal a man's private parts, an illustration created by the devil to sow fear. By the fifteenth century, this bizarre idea had become quite a lurid legend. The notorious witch-hunter's manual, Malleus Maleficarum in 1487, describes witchers who not only make men's members disappear through enchantment, but even keep collections of them as pets. One passage recounts with sober credulity that some witchers took members in large numbers, twenty or thirty, and shut them up together in a bird's nest, where they moved about like living things, eating oats and feed. According to this tale, a bewitched man seeking to recover his lost organ was directed by a witch to climb a tree and take any one that he fancied from such a nest. When he tried to grab the one that was particularly large—some reason they'd always go for that one—the witch quipped that it belonged to a local priest, and was thus off-limits. Now, that's a pretty strange story, isn't it? But it was recorded as fact by Heinrich Kramer, the same one who wrote the Malleus Maleficarum, and it speaks to how powerful and vivid belief in malicious witchcraft had become by this time. But it is important to note that not all medieval authorities were eager to endorse such things. In early medieval centuries, church doctrine was actually skeptical about the witcher's supposed power. A famous church law from the nine hundreds, often attributed to Regino of Broume, or the canon episcopy, declared that women who claimed to fly by night with the pagan goddess Diana were suffering, quote, illusory dreams induced by the devil. The law insisted that anyone who believed such flights were real had strayed from the faith. In other words, the official position at this time was that the night rides of the witchers and gatherings were nothing but imaginary temptations, very far removed from any reality. Bishops like Aqaba Hunt, as we saw, flatly denied that any human could conjure storms or truly transform into beasts. Those were the powers of God alone. Nonetheless, the common people's fear of Maleficium, that is, evil magic, only persisted, and by the later Middle Ages, the tide had turned. Many theologians and inquisitors came to accept that devil-worshipping witchers were a very real and present threat. They conceived of organized conspiracies of witchers sworn to Satan, meeting at midnight Sabbaths, casting vile spells, and even desecrating the Christian Eucharist in their rituals. Though exaggerated, these ideas fueled persecution, and by the fifteenth century, secular and ecclesiastical courts did begin hunting suspected witchers in earnest, especially in parts of Switzerland, Germany, and France. The result was quite tragic. Countless women and some men were executed due to panic and superstition alone. Of course, where there is fear of evil magic, there was also a thriving array of counter-magic and protective superstitions. Medieval people didn't see themselves as helpless victims of dark forces. Rather, they believed there were apotropaic—apotropaic, excuse me, that is, evil-averting measures—a new word for both of us, I suppose—apotropaic measures that one could take. Now, these often blended folk wisdom with the Christian faith, so older practices now put into a more modern light. Thus, alongside witchers' curses, we find horseshoes, herbs, amulets, holy blessings employed to guard against them. Much of daily medieval superstition was about staying safe from the myriad perceived dangers that lurked around the world. A classic example is the horseshoe above the doorway. We discussed this a little bit in the some of the folklore videos that we'd done, but we'll talk about it too today. So, as we had noted earlier, finding a discarded horseshoe was lucky. Medieval folk took that further by nailing horseshoes over the thresholds of their homes, and, of course, barns too, to repel witchers and evil spirits. An iron horseshoe, especially one lost by a horse naturally—that is, not removed by human hands—was thought to carry the horse's protective power. Now, as for the witchers, it was said that they would hesitate to enter a building guarded by a horseshoe charm, and that because iron was believed to be a metal that would ward off malign magic. And one can trace the enduring custom of the lucky horseshoe to these medieval roots. Depending on where you're listening from, you probably have something similar if you are a part of the European cultural milieu. Likewise, farmers often hung rowan branches or herbal bundles in their buyers, and painted crosses on their doors at certain feast days to shield their livestock from a nocturnal visit from a witch. The people of medieval times were also enormously fond of their amulets and talismans. Now these ranged from simple folk charms—a wolf's tooth worn on a necklace to protect a child, or a sprig of wolf's bane kept in a pouch—to more explicitly religious items like saints' medals, relics, or prayer scrolls worn on the body. In Byzantine lands, a common amulet was a pendant inscribed with the image of Christ, or the Virgin, and a prayer of protection. Now we also had the evil eye, known across Europe and the Mediterranean. There was one of these charms—one of the things that these charms aimed to defeat, rather. People believed that an envious or malicious glare, i.e., the evil eye, could invisibly strike a person. It could cause illness, bad luck, or perhaps even injury. This idea was especially rooted in Byzantine culture and southern Europe, hearkening back to antiquity. So what did you do to guard against it? Well, that's where the amulets come in. A person might wear a small blue-glass bead, an eye-like stone, or perhaps just a Christian pendant. Byzantine sources describe bloodstone amulets carved with holy figures, used to ward off demons and the evil eye. The Church taught that if harm came from a curse, it was really demons at work. So invoking Christ or Mary on an amulet was a way to enlist divine aid against demonic attacks. Such charms straddled the line between piety and superstition. Officially, trust was to be placed in prayer and God's will. But in practice, many people wanted just that extra little bit of magical security. After all, what harm could it do? But here's another fascinating medieval protection practice, and that is the use of blessed candles and objects. On February 2, that being Candlemas, priests would bless all the candles to be used in the Church and by the faithful. It became customary for people to keep those holy candles and light them during storms or at a sick bed to ward off evil. And we have an English account that notes that slim blessed red candles were burned during childbirth to protect against demons and other threatening spirits, and crosses made of Candlemas wax were affixed to plows and barn doors to safeguard crops and animals. There are instances of how Christian sacramentals, that is, blessed items, were employed in a quasi-magical way among the populace. Churchmen often tolerated such uses, even if they worried about it bordering on superstition, because it kept people within a Christian framework, I suppose, rather than just outright turning to pagan magic. Of course, if the people were scared enough of witches and evil eyes and all the rest, they'd turn to anything, at least the amulets they had, while a little bit superstitious in nature had images of Christ on them, or Mary, or a cross. So, tolerated, I suppose. Yet, folk remedies could veer into the blatantly unorthodox. A good example is the belief in the healing power of an executed criminal's touch. It was a curious superstition in parts of Europe that the hand of a man who had been hanged or otherwise executed could cure diseases, especially swellings or goiters. As morbid as that sounds, people desperate for a cure would sometimes attend public executions, and then jostle forward to touch the corpse's hand, hoping to receive magical virtue from the dead criminal. And in some cases the right hand of executed man was even tried or preserved as a talisman—notably the hand of glory, which legend says could be used by thieves to stupefy inhabitants of a house. The Church, of course, disapproved of such grisly superstitions, but the practice persisted, albeit quietly, wherever folk healing and magic intermixed. But most people saw no contradiction between using these charms and being devout Christians. After all, they were clutching their charms and praying to God for help. So what harm could it do? They would pray to God and the saints, and also carry that amulet, just in case—a little bit extra, kind of a dagger in the back pocket in the spiritual sense. It was simply part of the medieval world-view that unseen forces and spirits constantly mingled in earthly affairs, whether that be for good or ill. A wise person would take sensible precautions, whether that meant saying a prayer before a journey, or tucking a protective herb in one's shoe on a dangerous road. We can view these superstitious protections as a kind of supernatural insurance policy, born out of both hope and anxiety, in an age that was very unpredictable. But not all medieval superstitions dealt with preventing misfortune. Some, rather, dealt with confronting the uncanny, particularly the spirits of the dead. Scary. Medieval folklore and literature abound with ghosts, revenants—that is, reanimated corpses—and other undead beings that kind of blurred the line between our world and the next. Far from dismissing ghost stories as old wives' tales, some sober chroniclers reported them with a straight face, treating them as cautionary, real events. One of the earliest and most intriguing accounts of the walking dead comes from the twelfth-century English historian William of Newburgh. In his History of English Affairs, amidst accounts of political events, William kind of goes off the beaten track a little bit, and pauses to assure the reader that, quote, it would not be easy to believe that corpses come out of their graves and wander about, did not frequent examples of it appear, in our own times fully testify to it. He then proceeds to recount several hair-raising cases of revenants in England. In one story, a recently deceased man in Yorkshire rises from his grave at night, and proceeds to haunt his village. This blood-drinking corpse where he apparently attacked people, so terrorized the locals that eventually they appealed to the church. The Archbishop of York sent a holy letter of absolution to be laid on the corpse's chest in the tomb. Only after this religious ritual did the revenant cease its nocturnal activities. In another case, William relates, the restless dead body of a sinful priest was seen roaming near his former abbey, howling in anguish because he had been buried without proper penance. A brave monk armed with an axe waited by the grave one night. When the revenant emerged, the monk struck, driving it back. The next day the community exhumed the corpse and found it unnaturally decayed, or rather undecayed, with fresh blood from the wound, confirming that it had indeed been walking around. They promptly burned the body to ashes, and hopefully that put the spirit at rest. Now such stories, of course, travel the line between superstition and spiritual lesson. Medieval writers often presented ghost or revenant tales as moral examples. The dead return to urge the living to do penance, or perhaps as punishment for sins unresolved. Yet it is clear that many ordinary people believed in these nightmarish beings quite literally. The phenomenon of the vampire, though that term was not used in the overlaps with these medieval revenants who sometimes sucked blood or oppressed the living. William of Newburgh frankly remarked that if he were to record all of the stories the undead he had heard, it would make too long a digression, and that implies that such accounts were indeed numerous. Although rather unfortunate he went back to just talking about the politics, I think we'd rather hear about the supernatural stories than that, a little less dry, of course. Well, another famous specter in medieval lore was the Wild Hunt, also known as Heliquin's Hunt, a ghostly procession of damned souls sweeping through the night sky. The first known detailed account comes from Audric Petalus, a Norman monk writing around 1130. Now he recounts how in 1091 a priest named Walcolin in France encountered a phantom army of men, women, clergy, and knights riding through the darkness. They were burdened with crimes and punishments, and Walcolin realized that he was witnessing the troop of lost souls, Familia Heliquini. He even recognized some recently deceased neighbors among the woeful crowd. One of the ghostly knights seized Walcolin and scorched him, refusing to carry a message to the living, only letting him go when Walcolin cried upon the Virgin Mary for help. The frightened priest found his cloak had been singed by the demon's fiery hand, physical proof of his otherworldly encounter. Tales of this phantom army, or Wild Hunt, soon spread across Europe, often evolving into local legends involving figures like King Arthur or other folk heroes leading the furious host. Judgment interpreted it as a vision of souls in purgatory, a dire warning to sinners on earth. But we can also see it as a classic medieval superstition. The belief that on certain nights, especially around winter feasts, the barrier between the living and the dead grew so thin, the damned rode out in visible form, screaming and warning the living to be a bit more pious, otherwise end up like them. Well, for the medieval populace, ghosts and revenants were not merely entertainment for fireside storytelling, but rather they were part of a cosmology in which the dead could interact with the living. People took measures against troublesome spirits, just as they did against witchers, for example, burying bodies at crossroads, or with a stake through the heart to prevent them from rising. That is a practice attested in some medieval burials, by the way. The church by and large accepted the appearance of ghosts, usually to moral message or request prayers, though it denied that vampires or corpse devourers had any real power beyond what the devil might fabricate as an illusion. Still, as with other superstitions, the belief of the common people in literal undead beings proved to be quite resilient. It answered deep fears about death and the afterlife, fears that in a pre-scientific age found expression in folklore. So by telling spirits who walked, their communities perhaps processed the very real presence of death in daily life, envisioning it and, in some sense, mastering it, through their own stories and rituals. But what we can do now is move a little bit away from the illicit and dark signs of things. You see, many were tied to devotion and faith when we look at the realm of superstition. You could certainly drift into that definition. The medieval Catholic church promoted veneration of saints and their relics, but it struggled to keep that veneration from becoming, let us say, overly credulous or at least magical in its character. That line between piety and superstition was often quite blurry, and since a sincere prayer to St. Barbara for protection from lightning, for example, might slide into the notion that a medallion of St. Barbara guaranteed one would not be struck by lightning, effectively treating the object as a magical charm. Church writers would call the latter attitude superstitious, but to the layperson it was a part of concrete faith. Well, it just reminds me of a little story. I used to be a kindergarten teacher, if any of you know. I'm not sure if I've mentioned that before, but back in the day I used to wear a ring to school. It was a ring with a black gem in it, and the kids would sometimes ask me, they'd say, what is it? What's that ring? What is it? And I would tell them that it was a ring for keeping dinosaurs away, and they would tell me, well, that's ridiculous. I said, well, do you see any dinosaurs? Right. A few of the kids believed it. Anyway, from then on it was my dinosaur prevention ring. Well, back to the video. Just thought I'd share that little aside with you. Nothing to do with medieval superstition, but it just came into my head. In any case, the cult of relics provides an illustration of this kind of superstition. Throughout medieval Europe and Byzantium, relics, that being physical remnants of saints or objects associated with Christ and the saints, were treasured for miraculous powers. People undertook long pilgrimages to famous shrines, to touch the bones of St. Peter in Rome, or the tomb of St. James at Compostela, or perhaps a fragment of the True Cross at Constantinople, because they truly believed that these holy objects could cure illness, grant blessings, or at least intercede with God for the soul. There was a telling line from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales in 1387, or at least around 1387, that describes how pilgrims go to Canterbury to seek the holy, blissful martyr St. Thomas Becket, that them hath holpen when that they were sick. In short, they travelled to Becket's shrine, because they firmly believed that the saint has helped the sick and will do so again—a mindset where miraculous healing is, I don't know, expected as a matter of course, I suppose. Now, relics were often credited with truly astonishing miracles. In medieval narratives, restoring sight to the blind, resurrecting the dead, stopping plagues and natural disasters. In fact, in the Byzantine capital of Constantinople, the revered relics of the True Cross and the Virgin Mary's robe were paraded along the city walls during crises and sieges, with the belief that these holy objects would somehow repel the enemies. And indeed, chroniclers dutifully report that sieges did miraculously lift after such processions, reinforcing public faith in the relic's protective power. Didn't help them very much in the fifteenth century, but story for another video, of course. In western Europe, similarly tales abounded of how a local saint's relic saved a town from famine, or perhaps cured an entire village of the Black Death. Now, modern historians might view these accounts with a bit of skepticism, but at the time they were simply an accepted reality. At times, popular fervor around saints spilled over into outright folkloric cults that alarmed church authorities, sort of going into heretical territory here. And there is one extraordinary case, actually, the one of Saint Guinephore, the holy greyhound of France. Yes, that is exactly right. Not a person, but a dog. In the thirteenth century, peasants in the village of Villars, near Lyon, began venerating a greyhound as a saint and martyred them for children. Now, it comes with quite an interesting story. The legend goes that this dog, Guinephore, had saved an infant from a snake, but was unjustly killed by its master, who mistook the bloody dog for having attacked the child. Now, locals, hearing of the dog's noble deed and innocent death, made a shrine of sorts, at the well where Guinephore was buried. And mothers with sickly infants started bringing their children there, seeking miraculous healing. An old woman would instruct them in a ritual. They would offer salt and certain tokens at the dog's grave, hang the baby's clothes on the surrounding bushes, and then pass the naked infant through a split tree trunk nine times, while reciting incantations—essentially asking the spirit of Guinephore and the forest fairy being, they were called, to take away a changeling and return a healthy child. Well, unsurprisingly, some infants did not survive this dangerous rite, which involved leaving them exposed with lit candles nearby, or immersing them repeatedly in cold water. That was another test to see if the child was a fairy's offspring or human. When word of this occult healing practice reached the ears of the church, they were not very pleased. It was condemned as an insulting superstition, both idolatrous—worshipping a creature that is a dog as a saint—and just in practical terms very dangerous. Well, Stephan of Bourbon, the Dominican preacher who investigated, was horrified. He preached against the cult of St. Guinephore, unearthed and burned the dog's remains, and had the local lord forbid any future gatherings at the site. Yeah, I tell you what, Stephan of Bourbon, he has lost points with me there. They should have let the good boy be a saint. In any case, his own report preserved the memory of just how far common people's faith in folk miracles could go, and they were so desperate to cure their children that they blended a Christian saintly veneration with older pagan-like rites—that is, tree magic and fairy lore—creating a syncretic superstition at which the learned could only shake their heads. But come off it. They should have just—I mean, there's nothing wrong with it, surely. The tale of the brave dog rescuing the child fighting the snake and then getting wrongly accused—I think it's a good story. I suppose we can say that they should have left sleeping dogs lie. Well, in comparing these saint-related beliefs to other superstitions, you can certainly find an interesting difference in tone. When medieval people attributed a marvel to a saint or a god, it was seen as good magic, a miracle, not witchcraft. However, the church worried that when people treated holy things in an excessive way—you see, wearing a relic as a personal charm, for instance, or using the mass or sacramental bread in magical rituals—well, I suppose it was kind of frowned upon, at least in an official capacity. There is one medieval tale, too, that recounts a woman who tried to hide a piece of consecrated Eucharist bread in her purse after communion to use it for sorcery, only to be struck by a vision and affliction until she finally repented. The clergy wanted people to pray to saints with proper devotion, but not to treat saints like pagan deities of a bygone era that could be bribed or coerced. In reality, the popular mentality did often resemble older pagan practice, medieval Christians might promise votive offerings at a shrine in exchange for a cure—a practice not unlike offering in a pagan temple, I suppose—or they might just attribute misfortune to neglecting a certain saint's feast day. Attitudes like that, they're kind of hard to distinguish from superstition, but nonetheless it is worth noting that the church itself fosters some superstitions in the guise of faith. The ceremony of the royal touch is a case in point. Starting in the late medieval period, kings of England and France claimed the divine gift to heal scrofula—that is, a form of tuberculosis—by simply touching sufferers. Crowds of the sick would line up for the monarch's healing touch. Convinced that the king's anointed hands could channel the power of God, this quasi-magical royal ritual persisted for centuries, blowing the line between sacred miracle and, I suppose, even a little political propaganda. But similarly, the profusion of relics, whether they were authentic and sometimes they were fake, in late medieval times, from vials of the Virgin's milk to splinters of Noah's Ark, testified to an almost insatiable appetite among the faithful for tangible connections to the supernatural. Savvy observers noted the potential for fraud and superstition in this relic mania. The sixteenth-century Protestant critics would later ridicule medieval Catholicism as drowning in superstition, pointing to these flamboyant uses of relics and images as evidence. Carrying home a flask of holy water from a distant shrine was not irrational, but it was rather an act of hope and trust that spiritual forces would care for the physical world. So how do we sum all of this up? Well, the strange superstitions of medieval people, from a modern vantage point, they often evoke amazement, or even amusement. How could someone think that a cloud-ship of Magonia was stealing crops, or genuinely fear that a witch might turn into a cat and hex their cow? They seem strange, but don't worry, in a couple hundred years' time some of our beliefs might seem strange as well. But as we get into these beliefs we certainly uncover an internal logic and a window into medieval psychology. Superstition flourished in the Middle Ages precisely because it served a practical emotional need. It offered up explanations for the unexplainable. Why did a harvest fail? Maybe it was a witch that cursed us. Perhaps we neglected a certain saint on their festival. It has to be some reason, right? It provided rituals and responses to cope with dangers, from saying a blessing after a sneeze to marking the door with a cross or a horseshoe against evil. It even gave communities ways to articulate social tensions, for example the witch stereotype, often targeting outsiders or perhaps inconvenient women as scapegoats when misfortune struck. But it would be wrong to think that medieval people were simply gullible or uniformly ignorant. Not only wrong, but frankly quite rude to think so. You know, many educated minds then criticize superstitions in terms not unlike our own. We have records of feudal lords mocking auguries, theologians forbidding charms, and physicians attributing lunacy to natural causes rather than the cycles of the moon. The medieval world contains skepticism alongside its belief, but for the majority, given the scientific knowledge of the era, just believing in something, be it malevolent or miraculous, was more comforting than believing in nothing behind events. The bias towards seeing intention or agency, whether divine or diabolic, in life's little twists and turns is a deeply human trait, one that our ancestors exercised Whether you believe it's God's will, karma, the universe, we still do this today. Or even just saying bad luck, believing in the concept of luck itself, is, well, frankly superstitious. Now even within the Christian framework, official doctrine could not answer every question or heal every ill, so the common people had to fill the gaps in with folk tradition passed down through generations. Much of that tradition predated Christianity itself, rooted in the old pagan customs adapted over time. Medieval Europe and Byzantium thus inherited a rich tapestry of lore, that evil eye from antiquity, the fairy and changeling beliefs from Celtic and Germanic myths, the astrology from the Greco-Arabic learning, and so on. The Church, of course, worked to Christianize these elements, sometimes successfully, sometimes superficially, as only so far you can Christianize a deeply pagan practice. The result, by the high Middle Ages, was a syncretic culture, where a peasant might pray earnestly to the Virgin Mary at church on some day, yet on Monday consult a village wise woman for a love potion, perhaps, or maybe even just mutter an old rhyme to ward off elves from the cradle. What we've talked about today—the omens, the witchcraft, the ghosts, the miracle beliefs—they all show how the medieval cosmos was enchantingly alive. Every star and storm, every animal's howl in the night, every sickness or stroke of luck—it could carry a deeper significance. Superstition was essentially a way to read and influence that enchanted world. And, interestingly, not all medieval superstitions have vanished with time. Many have just transmuted into the little superstitions we still know—saying bless you after a sneeze, avoiding Friday the 13th, knocking on wood, or just hanging up that horseshoe for good fortune. In that sense, I suppose the legacy of the Middle Ages' strange beliefs is still quietly threaded through our own modern caudal habits. And perhaps in a few hundred years' time some new YouTube historian, when I am long gone, will be making a video about the strange beliefs of the people of the 21st century. Who knows? I suppose we'll have to wait a couple hundred years for that one. In any case, our time together today is over. Unless you want to go watch another video, which feel free to do so. I'm going to thank my top-tier patrons, who have kept this video ad-free for your enjoyment. Kimberley, Christine, Sally, Ember, Susan, Cameron, Gary, Charlene, Linda, Rhys, Katiana, Nicholas, Ulfhednir, Alexander, Charles, Christine, Dr. Neuronerd, Erin, Jayden, Jim, Jeffrey, Jessica, Madeline, Melissa, Orthodox Review, Scott, Shell, Wendy, Josie, Sarah, Ryan, Thor, Cameron, Stephan, Kevin, HMSHH, Crystal, Tauvery, Anthony, Lucy, Brandon, Gugububonic, Nicholas, Craig, Nephthys, Alexander, Gogan, Dorsey, Benita, Claire, Courtesy, Carol, Robert, Mary, Bridget, Nefertari, Yvette, Miss Mochi, Eleven, Allison, Free American, Jennifer, Brittany, David, Cody, Brian, Are You My Mum?, Rhonda, Carrie, and Getty P. Thank you so much. So tell me about your superstitions in the comments, hmm? Maybe you have some of your own, or perhaps I've missed some from your part of the world. In any case, goodnight for now. Lots of love to you all, and I will see you when you feel inclined to return. You know where I will be, right here on YouTube, making videos. Farewell for now. Goodnight.