Welcome to this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm Matt Lewis. For this episode we're taking a trip across to Ireland, specifically from the middle of the 13th to the middle of the 14th centuries.

To Anna Mcugun's book's social memory, reputation and the politics of death in the medieval

Irish Lordship explores how and why the English sort to rule island by harnessing intangible notions like custom,

collective memory and common fame to help them define legal truths.

I'm delighted Joanna's joining us to get under the to help them define legal truths.

I'm delighted Joanna's joining us

to get under the skin of how the law worked

as tradition began to fuse

with an increasingly written law code.

Welcome to God Medieval, Joanna.

Thank you so much. Pleasure to have you here. It to God medieval Joanna. Thank you so much.

Pleasure to have you here. It's a really interesting topic. I did my degree in law rather

than history so legal stuff is vaguely interesting to me anyway. An island is

somewhere we don't get to as often as we'd like so. To get Irish

law and to talk about some of the stuff we've got lined up in terms of death is

fascinating to me. It's a great combination. Yeah.

So to start us off with, why was there a tension between the kind of oral traditions that had

lasted for generations and the written records in Ireland and perhaps that's not unusual to Ireland as records became increasingly written down.

Adopting literate practices like signing contracts, archiving personal documents, those sorts of things.

They involved a massive shift in mentality

because oral cultures tend to prioritize social practices

and collective memory, whereas illiterate or text-centered culture might value information from written records more highly.

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