Good evening everybody. I've posed a question in the title of my talk and for most of the 20th century the answer to that question given by most experts would've been a resounding affirmative. It was generally accepted that ancient paganism in some form had survived in Britain long after its official conversion to Christianity. There was some argument over, forgive me a moment, my clicker is not Aha, it's my clicker has just flashed into life and there we go. There was some difference over the exact form that it took. Some scholars suggesting that the aristocracy had been mainly Christian, but commoners, clandestinely, pagan. While others believed that the two faiths had long persisted amicably side by side from top to bottom of society. Jeffrey Colton, a great historian of the medieval English church, asserted in the 1920s that English peasants of the period had been cheerful semi pagans, meaning that they dutifully attended Christian services in the day, but went home to venerate older deities by the fireside in the evening. During the late 19th century, a belief caught on among British scholars that the people persecuted as witches in the notorious witch trials of the early modern period had been practitioners of a surviving pagan fertility religion. This was given its fullest expression in the early 20th century by Margaret Murray whose books turned the idea into something of an orthodoxy. By the 1960s, it was repeated by such giants of the historical profession as the medieval list, so Stephen Rman and the experts in the early modern period, so George Clark and Christopher Hill support to the idea of a pagan survival was given by the medieval carvings in British churches. In 1939, a genteel folklorist lady Raglin drew attention to one form of them in particular of human heads with foliage gushing from nose and or mouth, and she linked these to two other pieces of evidence. One was a figure found in Victorian mayday processions of a man covered in dense vegetation supported on a frame of wood. This was thought to be ancient and generally known as the Jack in the green. The other was a common pub sign labeled the Green Man and by modern times, usually showing a forester or Robin hood. But nobody knew quite how old this motif was and what Lady Raglin did was to link all these three things together as representing the same original pagan God, a deity of returning greenery and fertility to whom she gave the name appropriated from the pub sign of the green man. His place in many churches suggested that the Christian clergy had been forced to tolerate his presence in order to propitiate the ordinary people who still venerated him. Margaret Murray, who did so much to popularize the idea of the early modern witch trials as a persecution of pagans, made another important contribution to a belief in persisting paganism. During the 1930s, she drew attention to a different form of enigmatic medieval church carving, showing a woman facing the observer and displaying her genitals like this one. In Herre, scholars had generally given these their Irish nickname of Sheila Na gig. Margaret Murray interpreted these as a representation of a pagan fertility goddess placed in churches like that of the green man to satisfy those who continue to worship her. These ideas not only continue to be accepted outside the academic system during the late 20th century, but made an impact on its wider culture. Margaret Murray's portrait of the Pagan witch religion made a major contribution to the development of an entirely viable and successful pagan witch religion in the modern western world called Wicker. The pioneering scholar of British Iron Age Paganism Anne Ross accepted the interpretation of the Sheila a gig as a goddess linking the image to a deity whom she called the divine hag of the pagan celt. In 1975, Anne went even further teaming up with a good photographer to produce a popular book called Grotesques and Gargoyles. In this, she interpreted Sheila Gigs green men and other motifs carved in medieval churches as representations of pagan deities. She accused academic scholars of virtually and I quote, a conspiracy of silence to conceal this evidence for the reality of a persistent pagan religion Through the Middle ages and beyond. Radical movements appropriated these images for their own uses. Feminist artists adopted the Sheila a gig as a powerful and effective symbol of female sexuality, empowerment and self-confidence. The green movements naturally took up the green man as a motif, especially after the London poet William Anderson hailed it as an archetypal representation of the power of the endangered natural world. There's no doubt that these medieval images have become dynamic and emotive components of modern culture and are extremely valuable as such. But what is the truth concerning survival of paganism? Are these all actually as we had thought evidence for it only from the 1990s did an answer starts to emerge based upon solid research. A great deal of this was needed to pool the data to evaluate the truth of all these previous claims as the data was so disparate and so scattered. However, from the late 1970s, this work began powered by the expansion and greater dynamism of higher education and by a new mood of re-examination of Victorian and Ed Edwardian beliefs, the idea of the witch trials as persecution of Pagans most associated by the mid 20th century with Margaret Murray collapsed first sustained and widespread research into the trial records across the whole of Europe and its colonies proved that the individuals prosecuted for witchcraft had not been pagans, even though ancient ideas had played a part in creating some of the belief systems that had produced the trials. After that, the component parts of Lady Ragland's construct of the green man were dismantled. The medieval foliate heads were studded by Kathleen Basford in 1978 and Mercy McDermott in 2003. They were revealed to have been a motif originally developed in India where it seems to have represented a genuine Hindu vegetation God. And then the motif traveled through the medieval Arab empire as a decoration and arrived as such in Christian Europe. There it is, first found in monks manuscripts as a decoration for the margins, and from there it spread later into churches. The Jack and the Green was studied by Roy Judge in 1979 and proved to have appeared in London at the end of the 18th century. It was actually initially a feature of chimney sweeps, processions enacted to collect money in May. The whole problem of May for chimney sweeps is it's the beginning of summer and the whole problem of summer for chimney sweeps is that people don't tend to use their fires thereafter. So summer is a bad time for chimney sweeps business and so they would hold processions through towns at the opening of it to collect money from sympathetic observers to tide them over the dead period of work in the summer. And they found that fancy dress attracted more attention and more donations and the carrying of foliage and greenery on a frame was particularly popular. So by the late 18th century that adopted that and from the Chimney Suite processions, it got into Victorian mayday celebrations in general. The Green Man pub sign was studied by Brandon Center War, an American academic in 1997 and shown to derive from the medieval motif of the wild man of the woods. This is an imagined figure in the middle ages of a barbaric or savage race of humans who are the antithesis of civilization and therefore have all the disturbing and exciting traits of antitheses to civilization. They lived in the woods and they were either covered in hair or dressed in leaves, and they passed from the middle ages from scholarly books into Tud and Stewart Urban pageantry where having an OIC dressed up in leaves and wielding a club was a very good way of clearing space for the vea, for the procession to make its way, uh, especially if the lads with the leaves and the clubs appeared to be drunk. And this aided by the connection between vines and wine made the leaf covered man into a symbol for distillers in the 17th century, and so it got onto pub signs and has been there ever since. The point is that none of these three things actually had anything to do with each other or with a pagan god. Further research revealed the true context of the sheel and a gig. In 1977, Jurgen Anderson realized that she had come from France and was found there and in Spain as much as in the British Isles. She was part of the new style of church decoration in the 11th and 12th centuries called Romanesque and spread with the other motifs of Romanesque along major pilgrimage roots. In 1984, Anthony Weir and James German confirmed this and suggested that it was a warning against sins of the flesh. The shield gigs were never beautiful, they were always blatant and they were intended to turn people off rather than turn them on. There was no connection between them and a goddess. Their case is now generally accepted, but there may I think be an exception to it in Ireland where the motif is often found on secular buildings and where the eye cannot reach and can be linked to a genuine Irish folk tradition that a woman could avert evil by exposing her genitals to it in Ireland. Therefore, the shena gig may indeed link in to ancient pagan belief, but that's not however the original point of the image, which does seem to have been to worn against lust and nor the usual meaning that seems to have been placed upon it in medieval times, which was that now all those red herrings have been removed. What actual evidence is there for the survival of paganism in medieval Britain? There are two bodies of directly relevant material from opposite ends, the Middle Ages, and they both consist of legal records. The first comprises Anglo-Saxon law codes and Anglo-Saxon Church Council decrees that forbid pagan practices among the recently converted English. And these prohibitions certainly exist in the seventh and early eighth centuries, but they die out in the course of the eighth century. By the time you reach 800, there are no more being issued. They then reappear in the 10th century, the nine hundreds, but they are there to deal with newly arrived pagan Viking settlers who'd just been converted officially to Christianity. And that second series of prohibitions also comes to an end in this case after 10 30. Thereafter, no medieval British laws, sermons or publications forbid the worship of pagan deities in Britain no matter how evangelical and intolerant to Christian, the author at the other end of the Middle Ages in the 15th century, we have the records of church courts that dealt with religious and moral offenses among local populations. Certainly many people did offend the established church's view of proper religious belief and practice at that time. There were plenty of people in some areas with heretical Christian ideas who were known at the time by the umbrella term of loll lads and there are also a few skeptics and scoffers, especially in pubs in the evening. There is, however nothing resembling paganism with the single possible example of a guy I found in Hartfordshire who allegedly declared that there were no gods but the sun and moon. He was however rather disappointingly not a member of a cult or an advocate of the worship of the sun and moon, but an individual cynic indeed apprehended a nail house suggesting that all religious belief was pointless. Is it possible that pagans could have continued to practice their religion in secret by this time without ever being detected? It seems very unlikely if the law lads who did absolutely everything to conceal their beliefs and practices, including going regularly to the parish church, ended up in court because they sooner or later got detected. And it does seem as if every lollard cell in the nation got apprehended at one time or another. Something the church court records bring home very strongly is the sheer nosiness of ordinary people at the time and their strong sense of the need to conform to communal norms. Uh, in that sense, little changed in many areas to the 20th century, but the records of this in late medieval church courts are particularly striking. I'll take an example from my own city of Bristol in nine, in 1539, I am choosing Bristol, not just cause it's on my doorstep, but because the records there are very good and because it's big, it's the second or third biggest city in England or indeed Britain at that time. And if you are going to carry on something class de clandestinely, it's notoriously easier to do it in a big city than in the countryside because things there are more anonymous. It's much more easy to escape the notice of people who tend to have other things in their mind rather than those living in rural communities where nothing ever happens or changes for long periods. And yet it was actually very difficult even in Bristol to get away with the mildest of infringements of expected behavior. My favorite case here is Marjorie Norful, who was a bouncy widow who arrived in Bristol from the countryside in that year. We don't know how her first husband died, certainly he did so by the time she was 26 and she came to Bristol with the declared attention of finding another husband, and she then proceeded to buy several crates of wine to assist the process of inducing an atmosphere in which proposals could take place. And her first attempt was on an elderly wealthy cloth, but it didn't work out. Uh, she decided at close quarters that she preferred a pens young man to a wealthy olds one and so set about finding a handsome young man and she did. His name was Thomas Jones, recommended to her by a friend in her lodgings who was a servant in Bristol. So she invited Tom Jones to come to the house. When he arrived, Marjorie produced a bottle of wine and witnesses reported that they sat at the table drinking wine merly together, literally sherry. Together it was Bristol. After a time, Thomas Jones announced that he must go because he had folks at home and therefore he was sorry. Mary, however, refused to let him go that insisted he should stay the night so that they could talk further. Witnesses then saw Marjorie produce another bottle of wine as they retired to her bed chamber. The next day witnesses saw Marjorie and Thomas walking hand in hand in the garden and then sitting on a seat under a wood bind plant. They then heard Marjorie say to Thomas, let us not go inside. Here is a good place for there are many folks inside. Yes, there certainly were. And they were all taking notes <laugh>. And then she set the cloth there already and set a for them wine and ale and there they drank and were very merry together. After some time, Thomas again protested. He was sorry, but he must go home to attend his job. And witnesses heard Marjorie say to him, uh, with my assumed accent, remember she comes from Somerset, what need you to be sorry. Go your home, Tom to your harvest for I am your wife and you be my husband and boy, my faith and truth. We will never be departed till God to partless. The witnesses watching through the parlor window saw that Thomas likewise took Marjorie by the hand and said, by my faith and truth, or he take you to be my wife, Thomas then went home, but a few days later, he sent a messenger with an expensive present of a string of coral beads with Gordie of silver to Marjorie. In the meantime, however, Marjorie had met somebody else <laugh> and refused to accept the beads saying, God, make him a good man. I'll never have his tokens. Now the new man in her life was a weaver called Thomas Haywood, who was both young and good looking and wealthy, and Marjorie solemnly got engaged to him. However, following a complaint from Tom Marjorie got cited before the church court for breach of contract and she lost the case. We unfortunately don't know what happened to her thereafter, but given the fact that she was Marjorie, I imagine she made her own way well enough somewhere <laugh>. The point here is that, uh, this is a commonplace, an intimate and private series of conversations, but everything that Marjorie said or did with the men was observed and recorded by at least two witnesses. And this runs through the records. People loved nothing more as an entertainment than observing their neighbors, especially if their neighbors appeared to be doing something wrong. Between these two bodies of evidence are three isolated cases assembled by Margaret Murray as evidence for continuing paganism. The first was a chronicle entry for 1282 that the priest at invoking in Scotland had forced the village girls to dance around a human image while he carried a carved PHUs on a pole. This is admittedly rather un priest, likely paver, uh, even for the 13th century, but he was not the leader of the pagan community, but alone maniac who also forced his parishioners to strip and whip each other until they murdered him. The second case was from Kent in 1313 where a man called Stephen lap Pope worshiped images of goddesses and gods he'd made and set up in his garden. Unfortunately, after this promising beginning, it turns out he was clearly another solitary lunatic because he murdered his maid on the same night and that's why he ended up in court. Finally, in 1351, the monks of Ryle stock prior Devon were accused by their local bishop of Exeter of running a fortune telling racket for money and directing an image. And this is the interesting bit of proud or disobey and disobedient eve or un unchaste Diana, the pagan goddess in their chapel. The interesting thing here though is the monks protested. It was actually an icon of the Virgin Mary and it must be recognized. The bishop concerned was the most unusual one, A frenetic evangelical reformer who seemed bent in his time as bishop are accusing practically everybody of anything. It may therefore be concluded. There is no real evidence for genuine paganism in Britain after 10 30 ish defining genuine pa paganism as allegiance to pre-Christian goddesses and gods. There's enormous amounts of images, ideas, practices, and customs taken into medieval Christian culture from paganism, but it's all thoroughly assimilated to Christian culture. The obvious question to be posed is why this was, and the answer offered here is that medieval British Christianity made paganism unnecessary by reproducing its features in a parallel form united to a very different theology. Those features were number one polytheism. Paganism had many deities, the equivalent in Christianity whilst provided by saints who were likewise of both sexes and with many different individual areas of potency. There were hundreds and hundreds from whom to choose. Some had a very localized following. Cornwall alone famously had scores found there and nowhere else. Saint Walston of Barbara is a misspelling on the text was venerated by 20 parishes in Norfolk and no else. And Saint Sidwell was a great favorite in Exeter and East Devon, but not found elsewhere. Just as with the relationship with pagan deities, the relationship with peop of P with saints was very ad hoc. In other words, pagan goddesses and gods had special areas of life or the world over which they presided. And Sophie had a problem. That area you went along to that particular goddess or God and asked for help. And medieval people did the same thing with saints. They went to them for help when they had specific problems. Such approaches could be much more important to ordinary common people than mainstream religion. In many ways, the Great Trinity, God Christ Holy Ghost were simply too important, rather like important people in medieval Britain, they were simply out of reach of commoners. And so people instinctually turned to saints as they would to officials on the manor or parish officials to intercede with the higher ups for them or simply to help them because of their own specialties. This remains a feature of traditional Roman Catholic societies to this day. In the French department depart of Luger in the 1960s, which is a rural, uh, relatively economically impoverished area of France, it was found that 5% of the working class inhabitants had attended a service in their parish church during the previous year. But 49% of men and 78% of women had visited a saints shrine to pray and ask for help. The saints were the religion of ordinary people in Ger as in medieval Britain. Just like pagan deities, saints were patrons of specific trades, age groups, kis for illnesses, genders, nations, regions, farming processes and animals. Some were clearly overworked. Saint Clement ended up patron of blacksmiths anchor makers, ironworkers, workers, and carpenters. Saint Blaze cared for wool comers wax chandlers, which is why he's got candles in his hand on the screen, wild animals and appropriately for somebody with a feast day in early February, sore throats like pagan deities, also natural places as wells and trees were sacred to saints. So those seeking their help didn't even need to enter a church if they didn't wish it. And these trees and wells could be quite lonely, wild places where people could go discreetly in order to have a one-to-one with the saint. Sand on the whole Pagan temples in Britain were not changed directly into Christian churches nor pagan deities into saints. Pope Gregory the Great who sent the first Christian missionaries to the Anglo-Saxons wrote a famous letter in which he ordered that pagan English temples be transformed into Christian churches. This however doesn't seem to have happened, perhaps because Gregory mistook the sort of temples they had in pagan England for the great stone temples of his very own Rome, which could make splendid churches. Instead, the Anglo-Saxons had flimsy little wooden shrines at which were simply not suitable as communal Christian places of worship. Just for the record, this I admit stunned me only 33 out of around one and a half thousand medieval parish churches in Britain have been shown to have had any apparent pre-Christian activity, religious or secular on their site. No, British Saints seem to have been former pagan deities. In contrast, the situation in Ireland and continental Europe where you do seem to have a few goddesses and Gods turned directly into Christian Saints, the outstanding Irish case being Bridget, even sacred waters have little overlap. The medieval British Christians had lots of holy wells, so had the pagan British, but there's little continuity, major pagan sacred springs such as Covent as well at Carber up on Hadrian's wall and the wonderful hot waters of the goddess Solis Minerva at Bath were not apparently Christianized. Conversely, only one medieval Christian Holy well at low Layton in Essex has evidence of cult activity in pagan times as well. Christianity in Britain seems therefore not to have adapted pagan buildings, deities and locations for its use so much as to have provided a similar but parallel service. And this parallel service is reflected in church buildings so that by 1500 the average parish church can contained anything from three to 30 shrines dedicated to saints who weren't the parish patron saints and sometimes more than 30. And many of these were constructed and maintained and served by guilds, local societies dedicated to the saints concerned, which maintained their own priests and were open to all but the very poor. You could be a member of most parish guilds for a subscription of a penny a year, and they were of many, many different kinds. There were parish gills for the young parish, gills for the elderly, women's only gills, men's only gills and gills serving the whole range of crafts and occupations found in the parish. And again, these are uh, a parallel service to pagan organizations. They are the medieval Christian equivalent to the priestly colleges or the mystery religions dedicated to particular goddesses and gods that you find in Roman Britain. The second great area of parallel is festivals, just as in pagan times. So in the Christian Middle Ages, seasonal festivals were the main religious events. There weren't any laws compelling people to attend church regularly before the 1550s. An occasional local snapshots show that even in towns where churches are really easy to reach compared to the countryside, about half of parishioners didn't go regularly. The churches were however crowded out for the big spectacular annual calendar feasts, parishioners sang in the dawn together on Christmas day for the end of the winter solstice, the returning of the light as well as the nativity. They had candles blessed at candle miss in February to represent new light to hold up fire against the dark to drive it back and welcome the coming spring. Parishioners brought new foliage to be blessed on Palm Sunday and to protect and decorate their homes and attended the drama of the resurrection of Christ on Easter Day, represented by a consecrated wafer of bread taken from a miniature tomb in May. Clergy led irrigation, tied processions to bless the growing crops of the area. And on whit Sunday, a white dove was released in the church to symbolize the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, the priests were there to celebrate services themselves regularly on behalf of all parishioners, including all those absent just as pagan priests had maintained temples and kept up the regular rights there on behalf of the community. Parishioners provided the images, hangings, carvings, gilding, incense, and music. Churches were really houses of God and the priest functioned as the housekeeper and people turned up there when they wished or when things were exciting. Scriptural meanings were imposed on ancient calendar feasts, but the feasts themselves were kept going. Traditional secular revelry converged with religion as the middle ages went on. So that May Gaines Village Summer feasts and collections by plow boys in January all came to be means of raising funds for the parish church. What had happened here is something quite remarkable In the earlier part of the Middle Ages and up to the 13th century, Christian churchmen regularly condemned the traditional seasonal festivities of the populace as a temptation to sin mostly the sins of drunkenness and fornication. But in the 14th and 15th centuries, increasingly the church claimed those very same festivities as a means of raising cash for the parish. And the result was sensationally successful so that by 1500 in most parishes, all the expenses of maintaining the church physically were paid for by fun, by the proceeds of popular and extremely well attended rounds of traditional merry making, Morris dancing maples, Robin Hood games, all sorts of traditional dances, plays and feasts. And now the proceeds going to the church. The devil had been cheated in that the merry making which had at first been condemned by churchmen as leading to sin, became harnessed to pay for worship. And the proceeds were so considerable that rates the local taxes levied upon parishioners to pay for the church could be abolished in most English parishioners because Mary England had taken their place. There was also a place for the feminine. The medieval Christian Church had ample space for feminine power, human and divine. About half of all saints were women led by Mary the queen of heaven herself, whose images took on trappings from the pagan goddesses, Juno, Venus and Diana women functioned as parish church wardens and guild members with equal rights. Nunneries gave them private religious spaces and some women made great reputations as hermits and authors such as Julian of Norwich. All this served to erect a thick screen at parish level before a fundamentally patriarchal religion. And the fourth parallel was that in medieval Christianity as an ancient paganism, the central ritual act was sacrifice, but pagans had sacrificed animals and then ate them so that a pagan sacrifice was part act of worship and part barbecue. They also poured libations of their favorite drinks and they burned incense as sacrifice. Christianity replaced all this with the self-sacrifice of the divine savior of the religion commemorated by offering up his body and blood symbolically in the mass. And this was the essential right that had to be celebrated regularly. Preaching by contrast was popular if you had a good preacher but not essential and you usually had a good preacher because preaching was provided from the 13th century, often in marketplaces or at roadside crosses by professionals, the friars who toured areas providing a road show of first class lecturing for the locals. The priests who served parishes were not required to preach or even to be literate, and were generally local and ordinary people risen from the parish or the district to serve it related to and relating to the ordinary parishioners and to judge from the comparative absence of litigation against them in the late Middle Ages, they were generally popular. Looking to the future, it's clear that both the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic counter Reformation, which began together in the 16th century represented a massive reaction by the leaders of European and indeed British Christianity to end this system of medieval religion. By then, the intellectuals and the presiding figures of the Western church had come to think that Christianity had become altogether two decentralized folky, straying away from the central figures of the Trinity and its basis in scripture. And both movements, Protestants and Catholic sought more uniformity, better central control, better education, especially for clergy and a piety more closely based upon the Bible, the trinity, and the key teachings of the church in the British case, Protestantism, which became within two generations, the religion of 95% of the British got rid of the saints, the mass church decorations, the place of women in the church, festive customs and secular me making the link between merry making and fundraising was broken as sinful and rates and pew rents were imposed instead to raise the money to pay for the church. It was a self-conscious removal of pagan parallels. And it was hoped that what would result as an end to this process would be a much more orthodox uniform, fervent, educated, informed, and inspired kind of Christianity that will get everybody to heaven a great deal more easily. Instead, what it did was shatter Christian unity because Protestants all over Europe, including Britain, began very soon to quarrel amongst themselves over right belief and right practice. And in the 17th century, the relatively uniform if unstable Protestant churches of England and Scotland shattered in the bloodiest civil wars that both nations have ever known indeed in terms of percentage of population dead, the bloodiest wars the British have ever known. And the damage was irreparable after those civil wars. The norm was not that of uniform Protestant churches with a few Catholic dissidents, but established Protestant churches with huge numbers of other kinds of Protestants, Presbyterians, congregationalists, United reformed, Quakers, Baptists, et cetera, et cetera, religious pluralism. And in many ways religious chaos within the boundaries of a well-run state became the norm. Uh, this was in many ways a very good thing because learning to live with diversity as the British reluctantly had to do, produced a much more tolerant, diverse and dynamic, an extremely successful culture to make the transition into modest, into modernity. But the result by the late 20th century has become in many ways a modern version of the medieval situation and religion with added brutalism. In other words, whatever people's denomination, it tends to be the priests or ministers who keep churches going while among the lay population, it's the devout who choose to attend religious worship. You can see a snapshot of this in the 1990s when it was found that 10% of the British went to church or chapel regularly, but 62% believed in God, how defined 65% interestingly, still profess to be Christian, including 3% there who don't believe in God, and 90% celebrated Christmas. All that's changed since in that is that the percentage going to church and chapel regularly has diminished still further, and the number of people professing no religion in the nation has at last risen to be the greatest single group. Interestingly, among the new forms of religious pluralism to appear in the 20th century was a revived paganism to complicate and round off to date the British religious picture. But that however is a story for another course of these lectures. And so I end this course of lectures on the edge of a vista of more<laugh>. Professor Hutton, thank you again for another fascinating lecture. We've got time for some questions, so what I will do is I'll open it up to our in-person audience here before I take any from our online audience. So show of hands for me, anybody who's got a question for Professor Hutton, I've got a couple here. Thank you Professor Hutton. Um, appreciate very much what you said. Um, just interested where you think Woden fi figures in all of this. Um, with the advent of the Saxons of course, and leftovers from Ancient Britain when the Romans left. Thank you. Woden certainly features in this because he is preserved in late. That's Christian Anglo-Saxon healing charms spells which are recorded dutifully by monks, uh, as effective against various forms of disease and physical affliction, which call upon den as a helpful spirit. Uh, we have no idea how much the monks concerns knew who den was still or what attitude they had to him, but these charms are clearly pre-Christian or their, the charms are based on pre-Christian charms and they were preserved because people respected their reputed effectiveness. It would be wonderful if Woden was still there in the charms of the later Middle Ages, but he doesn't survive the Anglo-Saxon period. Yes, thank you. You said that sort of no positive belief in pagan gods. Was there skepticism of any, of any God, was there a skepticism or atheism in that period? Yes. Uh, it's, it's difficult to be an atheist in medieval or early modern Britain because the penalty is death <laugh> and therefore it's all the more significant that, uh, there's a steady trickle of cases and the church courts of people who seem invariably to have been drunk in the village pub or the parish in, uh, who sound off about, uh, how can anybody believe in this tosh and duly reported by their neighbors. Now we, we don't know, um, how many went unreported because their neighbors were benign or because their neighbors agreed with them. What one can say is that skepticism is definitely there. The, um, what we say, counter reparation period, uh, um, with the rise in witchcraft in Europe, which is almost outside of what you're talking about because mal malice Mal Malaka was 1485. So, um, how does this link in terms of England? Well, it certainly Reached with, It certainly reached England because, uh, Britain had some of the most vicious persecutions of alleged witches in Europe. In fact, of the three worst areas for witch trials, one was Scotland. Uh, Scotland because it has a decentralized system of justice, uh, executed round about two and a half, 3000 people, uh, for alleged witchcraft. Whereas England, with five times the population executed four to 500 because it had a centralized and more professional system of justice, not because it was nicer, but the connection with Paganism is very tenuous. The tenuous connection is that Pagans believed in witchcraft and in some cases persecuted it just as severely as Christians were to do. Uh, there was a, a lull in witch persecution in the early Middle Ages, largely because of a problem for Christians, which is if you have an all powerful omnipresent single good god, how can this person license evil human beings to work evil, magic? Uh, and this acts as a break on which trials for about a thousand years. And then in the 15th century, Christian theology mutates to the idea that God has licensed the devil to empower evil people with magic, to hurt their neighbors and Christianity, to test faith before the end of the world. And therefore the laws are changed to bring back the death penalty for witchcraft and lots of ancient fears and beliefs which had never quite been eradicated, now explode upwards and create a blood bath, which we call the Great Witch Hunt. I've had a question come through from the online audience very quickly. Yeah. Um, did the Mama's plays portray pagan origins? No. Is the answer plays are certainly pagan. We've always had them perform. We've always had them performed at midwinter like mama's plays, but mama's plays are an 18th century craze. They appear in the mid 18th century spread by printed texts, and you can see why they sweep England and some other bits of Britain because they're knock about comedy and they're very elastic with a stock bunch of characters you can pack in all sorts of topical references and local jokes. And it also, so it has the twin benefit of being spontaneous and full of surprises. And yet it's basically so well known that the audience can shout the punchlines at particular times and it becomes the favorite drama of the Southern English at midwinter by the early 19th century. And then it begins to become boring and it starts to die out just in time for folklores who have no idea of its origins to encounter it around 1900 and think it's neolithic. We've had some really very good research into its origins recently in the 18th century. Origin seems pretty clear even if some of the characters and lines are taken from 16th, 17th century popular drama and literature. Thank you very much. Uh, in your, uh, coverage of the various, uh, festivals, seasonal festivals, I think there's one you didn't mention. There's one I rather like, cuz there's no real theology attached to it, and that's Harvest Festivals. And what's the history of those? I left them out because they didn't appear, uh, in parishes till the Victorian period, uh, before then. Uh, they were, they, they were represented by harvest suppers. Um, the harvest supper was what a farmer would give the people who'd helped him reap his crop at the end. Uh, the hands were all given a slap up dinner the best the farmer could afford in the farmhouse kitchen, often with music and dancing as well. But in the 19th century, increasingly farmers were not just starting to mechanize, but they were also giving wages in money to their laborers and didn't see why they had to pay in kind as well at the end. And so as the parish supper, the harvest suppers died out, the vacuum was filled by a, a communal, an all village celebration, the Harvest Festival. Um, I was just wondering if, um, the unique saints we find in corn or aren't a product of pagan tism, do we have any idea where they did come from? Well, the answer is no, not really, but, uh, medieval people had an idea where they came from. Uh, they virtually all come from Wales, uh, which seems to have been, according to early medieval Cornish tradition was a missionary powerhouse that sent out its its spare saints to Cornwall, Devon, and indeed Britain. Where, where I lost them ended up. Uh, because our only authority for this is later medieval lives, which may all be fiction. Uh, we, we actually don't know. All we can say is we've never yet found a Romano British inscription to a goddess or God who has the same name, even an earlier form as a medieval saint. Hi. I was struck by, um, what you said about the how few churches can be connected to pagan locations, either structures or locations of worship. And I know that, um, quite a few people out there, you know, it's repeated that a lot of churches are connected to pagan locations. You know, people talk about you trees in church arts and stuff, and I just wondered, how can you be so definitive? Because I, I imagine a lot of pagan worship, uh, was, I mean, I dunno enough about it, but there weren't actually any structures, you know, there weren't temples as such That could well be the case. Uh, all that we can say is that where pagans regularly celebrated, you find the archeological remains of feasts, sacrifices and uh, offerings. And, uh, in the more up markets, the more important places alters, inscriptions and carvings as well. Uh, you'd expect more of these underneath medieval Christian churches, but you don't find them, uh, in virtually all cases, so much so that the emission must be deliberate. There was, uh, a great misunderstanding produced by a popular writer in the Edwardian period. Not, not an academic, uh, who declared with no fear and no research, but in a wonderfully well-written book that every English parish church has a prehistoric stone circle underneath it. And that just went into general belief. It began to airb and then along came the U trees. And the u trees are there because of, uh, literal dreamer, a wonderful visionary called Alan Meredith, who literally dreams that U trees were telling him the secret of how to judge their age. Botanically, you can't date a u tree doesn't have tree rings, you can't tell how old it is by examining it, looking at it. So they could be really, really, really old, but they might not be as old as oak trees. We just don't know. But Meredith's dreams gave him a form of calibration. He then announced as proven fact that enabled him to date you trees to thousands of years. And this then persuaded people like David Bellamy, the TV botanist who went around dating new trees all over the country in church yard to the New Stone Age and the Bronze Age. And that gave a great boost to the idea these church yards were pagan, holy places. Uh, in fact, we still have no evidence that any U tree is actually over a thousand years in age almost certainly some are, but, but very, very few and the evidence is still lacking. So there's a great deal of 20th century folklore involved in this. Yes, evidence, uh, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence in this case, but given quite how much evidence Pagans piled up in places where they did celebrate their religion, the omission of it underneath Christian churches is noteworthy. Thank you very much for your questions and Professor Hutton, thank you for taking us on this journey this year to find the lost gods of Britain. Next series will be on Magic, the Supernatural and the Lost Gods of Europe. So we hope you can all join us then. Thank you very much again. Yeah, I'm Gonna you next year. It gets down and dangerous. Uh, we're going to go to some of the darker and the creepier and the most exciting places of Pagan Europe.