Top Medieval Historian Reviews Famous Movie Scenes Part Two

Empower every man and you will gain strength. No one is out here like that's it I'm gonna champion for every dude in like the 13th century come on like Rusty it's not it just doesn't make sense and also sort your accent out what is this I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga and I'm a medievalist and today we are going to be reviewing medieval movies Ready good yeah Ross I have something to show you oh the siege of sterling that's a good siege that's like top 10 sieges of the medieval period we have to say friends join us we have us it's the war wolf yes okay so like fun fact because they all spoke french they they tended to call it the loup de guerre but um you know still war wolf war wolf everyone needs to understand that this surrender is final like the greek fire also it took three months to build so I don't want to waste it okay so but that's real so they built this whole thing um it didn't take three months it took like a little over two like I'm not sure if it took exactly three you know we're gonna let him round up or whatever but sterling tried to capitulate they'd already given up and the king was like homie I built this huge uh this huge trebuchet and I'm afraid we are about to use it and they did that for real they were like no we're not wasting the giant trebuchet and they were just total dicks about it they're like okay now you can surrender uh but like fundamentally I wanted to see what this thing could do so like that's accurate so what that would allow you to do in theory is be completely out of firing range from arrows which is like the main defensive strategy for a castle so like this is such an incredibly huge weapon like it's you know it's not a weapon of mass destruction but it's a massive weapon of destruction so we're gonna go with that yeah you fight for god for honor for country for family for yourselves I do not care so long as you fight you wouldn't say country there's no like real idea what a country is like you'd fight for like your kingdom or you'd fight for maybe your people but like there's no concept of a country like the word just doesn't exist but that's like a new thing that's a big 19th century thing everybody loves a country in the 19th century but they didn't know what that went ah see you know this is um this is something that happened at the Battle of Luton Hill um there were trenches although actually there wasn't just the one there is pretty famously three so the way that this panned out is that they were fighting in a really boggy marshy place and because they made all the trenches it did a couple of things one killed a bunch of horses rip uh but the other thing that all of the trenches did they kind of knew that some of them were there and it forced them up onto like the one highway that goes across the marsh so that basically it invalidated all the numbers like the numerical superiority of the cavalry I think it's good sometimes to show how nasty uh warfare is at that point like um and how many people just die on a pointy stick like pointy stick probably the number one way people died in the medieval period especially because the people who die on a pointy stick are like um you know the peasants who get forced to fight even though they don't want to because all they've got is a pike they don't have a sword or whatever so pointy stick huge method of execution we are given outlaw king we are going to give outlaw king a 7 out of 10 because we like that they got the right and basically all seven of those points are for the world war vengeance is mine god's furious rains down on you what's the plan identify oh come on sean come through sean bean i'm not telling you that people don't get tortured in the medieval period they definitely do but there is just not as much as you would think people don't go around like getting that excited about torturing methodologies oh no i think i just saw a plague mask plague masks do not exist in the 14th century plague masks are from the 17th century and they only existed in italy so no they've cast god aside in this place it's a demon oh cast god aside is it oh it's church police that's not real there is this this thing of thinking about like the medieval church as like cops who are hiding under your bed and they're gonna like come find you if you're doing paganism and that's really not the way things work like you occasionally get like them going after the cathars for example but like a village full of witches they're not gonna care nothing here is what it seems we have no fury we have no pestilence we have no god which panics don't really exist in the medieval period they're early modern you know there is like a thing where you're not supposed to be doing magic for sure for sure but like hunting down witches and like sending the church after them or sending i don't know a priest that's early modern it does play on these ahistorical tropes as i'm saying like you know there's no church cops um no one really cares if your little village is full of pagans you're just not that important um those things are kind of silly but what it does kind of work around is people's questions about what the black death was you know it is accurate that people thought well maybe this is like god punishing us because if you got like a massive music for this that kills 25 of the entire world's population you know it might seem like it's the end of the world and god's kind of mad at you so that's accurate we're going 7 10 7 out of 10 just just for sean just so you know like yell at the sky sean i'm gonna show up every time my man yell at the sky it's fine the black prince of wales the future king of england he's in disguise like me so he can compete hey it's a knight's tale i love a knight all medieval historians love a knight if you find a medieval historian who doesn't love a knight's tale they have let all joy in their hearts die and you shouldn't hang out with them so i'm gonna give you that for free you know every time i see a joust i just like i'm i'm like a medieval peasant i freak out too there is this kind of like funny tension here where it's like oh yeah well if he was the prince you wouldn't joust him correctly that's not exactly the case people do go into tournaments all the time as like the king or the prince you know as i say there are kings of france who died in tournaments um and it's a really interesting thing because you're always kind of chancing the possibility of death when you go into a tournament and as a result of this the church condemned people for being in tournament so if you died in a tournament technically you couldn't go directly to heaven so like you're gonna end up in purgatory maybe hell depending because it's like considered like tantamount to kind of like flirting with suicide so it is an interesting kind of thing they're playing with here where it's like yeah you know you wouldn't want to get in trouble for like killing the prince right but at the same time you wouldn't get in trouble for killing the prince like that's the entire point of uh jousting right what are you doing uh charging what one of the things that is kind of accurate here is that people are a little bit less thingy about nudity than we are um medieval people don't have like a same sense of privacy uh that we do because like they all kind of like live in like smaller houses they go to bath houses together they wouldn't be that shocked about like a naked dude running about it's i'm not trying to tell you it's common but like you know it would just kind of be treated more like this like that's quite funny um they also love that stuff they as far as they're concerned like nudity and fart jokes that's like as good as anything gets how are you lillium interspinus the lily among the thorns jeffrey chaucer's the name writing's the game this is also the sort of thing that chaucer would think is so funny like my man is a connoisseur of like the sex joke um fundamentally all the canterbury tales is is like a series of dirty stories that like uh end with a fart joke like that's every single one of them is like how to bang a chick in front of her husband right like that's most of them um so like having him kind of in this situation is really really nice because it plays on the fact that he's like absolutely fascinated with stuff like this and it's a nice little kind of like piece here because you know when he's like throwing out some latin there one of the things that you have to remember is that jeffrey chaucer is from the noble class like he does have latin he is well trained but he's like statedly interested in normal people which is why you get something like the canterbury tales because it's like well here's something for a broad audience i am never ever going to complain about a knight's tale because i love it it's great everyone should go watch knight's tale right now um if you don't like a knight's tale that sounds like a u problem uh 10 out of 10 we love it fantastic my crown was passed to me by my brother and my father before him i was born to be a king it is my birthright given to me by god england in the year 1215 had been under the reign of that's accurate the most villainous of england's monarchs john oh wow i mean john is nobody's favorite but he's worse than henry come on and sleeping with the wives of barons i mean he was no okay the barons not a whole lot of sleeping with the lives of barons that's a nice little like modern thing lasting for over three years and decimating both armies i mean that's true the knight's templar were drawn into this conflict oh my god no i assure you the knight's templar did not care like the the the kingly foundation the knightly foundation that is dedicated to like getting people to and from jerusalem cares about the king of england yeah sure like that's what they care about privileges of all free men magna carta haunts my dreams um because you know yeah okay sure magna carta does grant privileges to quote unquote all free men you know who all free men are like nobody okay seventy percent of the english population are serfs they're not free so it doesn't apply to you as well there is like one throwaway line about all free men but that means like people who live in cities the entire reason that we think magna carta is important is that the american revolutionaries got hyped on it and they kind of like wrote that it was important when they were making the constitution it was not important um the the bloody pope uh annulled it after it happened the pope was like i'm sorry you can't do this because technically the king of england is a vassal to the pope and he wouldn't let him sign away the right so it didn't even hold it gets reissued something like 40 times it like welcomes you does the pope hold his word oh no have faith captain tiberius his eminence is waiting to hear you hold to yours the church will stay out of your lands you have his word oh homie in 1250 oh it's way way way too late for the church to stay out of viking lands in 1250 i don't know this is i don't know what flavor of viking this is supposed to be but the last bishopric that is like established in the scandinavian lands is like 1158 so this is like so so so far past like they are all christianized at least the level that is going to be helping the king out so like it's too late and uh fyi the pope is never going to stay out of nobody's lands that is that's not how it works and the siege of russia is a really big deal um because everyone hates king john right and you know it's one of these things where historians kind of like go back and forth about now we think that like yeah he kind of was a personally unpleasant dude that was kind of part of what's going on with him but he was an okay administrator and like all things considered he was sort of like not necessarily great but he isn't that that bad right um and we know that the siege of rochester is a kind of really interesting one because even though people sort of hated him at the time in chronicles and stuff even when they're like king john sucks he's a really bad guy i hate him they're like siege of rochester was pretty cool though um and it goes for like seven weeks and they collapsed one of the towers in the end in order to breach the castle and so if you go to rochester now and you see the castle or what's left of the castle you'll note that like one of the towers is uh built differently because they had to rebuild it because john brought it down so everyone kind of agrees that even though john is not necessarily their favorite dude this siege was really well done and everyone is like kind of mad impressed by it i'm mad about this for a number of historical reasons none of the history is right and also they've done my boy paul giacometti so bad like i mean he's having a great time he seems like he's having a really nice time kind of like eating the scenery so we're going to give them two points for having paul have a nice day out but we're mad about literally every other aspect so it's going to be two out of ten for me we're like the bells of hell is that it one more castle to sack then we're home to england oh see you know one of the things that i really like about the scene is like yeah we've got uh richard cordileone as a kind of unpleasant dude and that's accurate like it's really funny because we have the same way that we talk about how uh richard's brother john is like the worst man who ever lived we give richard this free pass and like homie did absolutely nothing except like run over to the middle east like absolutely do nothing for his king he went to england like maybe four times in his life he's mostly just like some french dude who uh does stuff like siege castles um and like for no reason he was just trying to get paid out here like uh he's come back totally broke and he just sieges every single castle along the way to try to make some money back and we're like oh what a hero love this guy wouldn't it be great if he was the king of england in the robin hood story and it's like i'm afraid not i don't know why we like him more than his brother and and this is that's correct right so richard linehart does die just seizing some random ass castle the castle he's killed by a boy though like a really young boy um and funnily enough that kind of like brings the siege sort of to an end because like you know dead king has a tendency to do that and the like boy was then pardoned by richard linehart he's like ah you know lucky shot good for him like i don't want anything to happen to this kid and like the richard's forces are like absolutely not and then like skinned the boy alive afterwards for killing him so like that is uh it's true that he just got got by like some someone with a crossbow that is absolutely accurate if you're trying to build for the future you must set your foundation strong the laws of this land enslave people to its king okay well yeah homie but that's like true about everywhere like all laws in the medieval period it's kind of like the the idea of the king in a lot of ways is that he is the law like not to get too judge dread about it but like kings kind of embody like legalities they're the ones that make laws and generally people are beholden to them unless crucially you're other rich people so like if you're a baron um in england at this time in theory you're allowed to like try cases in your own land but like you know the idea that like this is something that has to do with the here that like is just ridiculous like of course the law is not like made for you dude who's a peasant like yeah your life is like bondage and captivity so sorry about it the only way that every man is considered equal really in medieval europe is from a religious standpoint and you know they'll constantly go on and on about that where it's like oh even if you're a king when you die you're judged before god in exactly the same way but the reason they're always bringing that up is because society is so massively unequal and like no one is out here like that's it i'm gonna champion for every dude in like the 13th century come on like rusty it's not it just doesn't make sense and also sort your accent out what is this this is you know you have harmed all of my friends and loved ones in the midlands with whatever this is supposed to be and um i hate to see it uh nottingham they've done you so wrong six out of ten and i feel like that's generous but you know considering all the accent crimes that happened welcome to the history hit youtube channel which we are relaunching we've got all the best exclusive content going straight with this history hit youtube channel and you can find out for example why on earth i'm standing at the top of this mast you should probably subscribe