In this episode, True Crime Medieval brings you two crimes, a father and son, both murdered in churches, though for different reasons altogether. Canute had enraged the peasants and nobility both, by enforcing the collection of tithes, while Charles had infuriated a badly behaved but powerful family which took it amiss when Charles attempted to make them stop gouging peasants during a famine. Michelle is both scandalized and gratified by getting to talk about Yet Another Sacrilegious Murder In A Church, and Anne is delighted by finding a hotel in Bruges that has a hard to find museum in its basement, the foundations of the cathedral that Charles the Good was murdered in. Because apparently the French revolution took down the church but missed the basement.

Béla of Macsó was still in his twenties when he went to a meeting on Margaret Island (which is in the middle of the Danube, in Budapest), which wasn't a meeting at all, but a trap. There had been fairly complicated struggles for power in Hungary among members of a strikingly dysfunctional family -- Béla's grandfather, the king, had caused problems, handing out lands to his children, and Béla of Macsó had fought for his mother against her brother, his uncle; then the uncle and the grandfather made a peace treaty; then the grandfather died, as one does, and the uncle was king, but then he died, too, and his 10 year old son became king, and several bunches of nobles fought with each other, in the course of which Béla of Macsó entered the courtyard of the Dominican monastery on Margaret Island, for a meeting which wasn't there, and got brutally murdered. Really, this would all be, alas, just a regular Tuesday for a royal medieval family, except that Béla's skeleton has been studied by bioarcheologists using several scientific methods, and Michell has had the time of her life, and she will tell you all about the things we've learned about poor Béla of Macsó.

In the medieval scriptoria, amongst all the holy books, and the hagiographies, and the books of philosophy, and the legal charters, not to mention the beautiful illuminated manuscripts, there were often, we are sorry to tell you, forgeries being created. Sometimes monasteries needed to codify some history that hadn't gotten written down when it happened, or to provide documentation of some land sale that hadn't gotten written down, or to provide evidence for things that didn't happen at all, so that they could have more power or money -- that sort of thing. Some of those scriptoria were so good at producing forgeries that they made them for other monasteries, running forgery rings. The scriptorium at Westminster Abbey, for instance, had several master forgers -- one of them being Osbert of Clare, who produced several of the fake charters at not only Westminster Abbey, but also other abbeys, such as that at Ramsey, which didn't have the wherewithal to produce these things themselves. Anne explains medieval forgery in general, of which there was a whole lot, and Michelle, though very sad that no popular works about Westminster are out there, was gratified to find some excellent scholars, along with a medieval method for providing two factor identification. Also, nobody dies.