Medieval history, criminally examined.
True Crime Medieval follows crimes and political disasters across medieval Europe and beyond, from Westminster Abbey forgeries to Normandy family violence. Anne Brannan and Michelle Butler pair historical context with brisk commentary, letting strange details sit beside serious consequences.
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True Crime Medieval studies medieval and early modern wrongdoing with the patience of history and the snap of true-crime storytelling. The show is less interested in glamour than in records, motives, consequences, and the strange administrative machinery behind bad behavior. A forgery case at Westminster Abbey becomes a story about monks, scribes, fake seals, royal charters, land claims, relic lists, and institutions making their own evidence. That is the show's sweet spot. It can make paperwork feel criminally alive. Other episodes go straight into violence, as with Juliana of Fontrevaux trying to shoot Henry I with a crossbow after a chain of hostage-taking, blinding, mutilation, siege, and family politics. The tone stays conversational. Anne Brannan, the host in Albuquerque, lays out context without pretending that messy history can always be made simple. Michelle Butler, in Tuscaloosa, adds questions, reactions, and details that keep the discussion from becoming a lecture. The result feels like two people reading deeply, comparing notes, and refusing to smooth over the ugly parts. The show also moves beyond familiar castles-and-kings material. Columbus's capture of Arawaks is treated as crime, disobedience, and an opening onto genocide, not as heroic exploration. The Great German Peasants' War becomes a difficult knot of class, feudal crisis, political revolt, religion, later scholarship, and mass slaughter. Even a correction about the Stone of Scone turns into a miniature lesson in ownership, coronation ritual, and historical follow-through. Episodes tend to include place, date, names, and the limits of what can be known. They also admit when the material is overwhelming. That honesty is part of the appeal. True Crime Medieval works for listeners who like historical context, blunt moral clarity, and odd primary-source problems more than cliffhangers. It is serious about violence and injustice, but it is not solemn for its own sake. The show finds comedy in absurd systems, bad arguments, and the long human talent for making trouble.
Made for: For listeners who enjoy medieval history, legal oddities, political violence, forged documents, and conversational scholarship. It especially suits people who like historical true crime without sensational framing.
What sets it apart: The show treats crime as a way into medieval systems: monasteries, sieges, revolts, colonization, and disputed records. Its mix of careful context and blunt humor makes obscure cases feel legible without flattening them.
1000 years of people behaving badly.
A stolen beehive comes with medieval honey law, if your ideal crime story needs footnotes.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Westminster Abbey's forged charters reveal medieval authority being manufactured in the scriptorium.
At Westminster Abbey, forged history becomes something closer to office work. Monks and clerics turn literacy, supplies, and a scriptorium into a machine for making old rights look settled, while Anne Brannan and Michelle Butler trace Osbert's hand through fake seals, grants…
Medieval power, read with institutional gravity.
European conflict with context and consequence.
Medieval Iceland, read closely and argued warmly.
Medieval Iberia, one consequence at a time.
Empires, sieges, and final stands.
Crusades history through Byzantium’s long shadow.
True Crime Medieval turns Westminster Abbey into a case study in 12th-century documentary fraud, with Anne Brannan and Michelle Butler focusing on Osbert of Clare and the abbey’s scriptorium.
Felipe Fernández-Armesto calls Columbus a paradoxical figure who “loved adventure but could not bear adversity.”
In 1524, 1,200 exhausted serfs were ordered to collect snail shells as thread spools.
In 908 Chester, defenders dumped beehives into a tunnel to drive away besieging Scandinavians.
True Crime Medieval examines why Juliana of Fontrevaux tried to shoot her father, King Henry I, with a crossbow during a 1119 siege in Normandy.
Hosts discuss a correction about the Stone of Scone and introduce their focus on 13th century English history.