When dissecting the latest conspiracy theory that floats to the top of the murky dishwater in the tinfoil think tank, I often find myself wondering why I bother. Tinfoilers sometimes ask me that, as well - they have their own theory, as they tend to, and this theory always involves the CIA, Mossad, the Illuminati or whatever shadowy international string-puller yanks their chain.

I also have my reasons, and I once attempted to explain them to a tinfoiler. He didn't really get it. He was especially puzzled by the reason I gave as "academic interest". Somewhat tellingly, he really didn't understand why someone who was suspicious of CTs should take an academic interest in them, and eventually I was reduced to saying (typing, rather) something along the lines of "look, I could explain, but the explanation would be very long and rather complicated. I can't sum it up in the easy-to-digest nuggets you appear to thrive on". Weak, I know. I've been bothered by that ever since.

This is that explanation. It is long, and I will strive not to make it too dull.

In 1413, Henry IV of England died. That fact did not surprise anyone - he was a sickly monarch at the best of times, and the early 15th century was not the best of times to be sickly. A devout man - more out of fear of death than love of god - he was praying in Westminster Abbey, and he suffered a stroke.

Henry was praying at the shrine of Edward the Confessor, so-called because of his legendary (and possibly mythical) piety. The shrine of Edward the Confessor lies in a part of the Abbey known as the Jerusalem Chamber.

It's an interesting coincidence that, many years previously, it had been prophesied that Henry would die in Jerusalem. Henry, in common with any contemporary who knew of this prohpecy, took this to mean that he would go on a successful Crusade to the Holy Land. Chronicles record that he was told of the name of the room before he died, and was understandably quite impressed by the synchronicity. 

Chronicles do not make good sources - a fact we'll return to shortly - but we have no reason to disbelieve the story.

Shakespeare (whose eye for juicy details in dreary chronicles would have made him an excellent tabloid journalist) includes the scene in Henry IV Part II, with Henry saying:

 "Laud be to God! even there my life must end.
It hath been prophesied to me many years,
I should not die but in Jerusalem;
Which vainly I supposed the Holy Land:
But bear me to that chamber; there I'll lie;
In that Jerusalem shall Harry die."

Surprisingly articulate for a man who has just suffered a massive stroke.

Why is this relevant 600 years later? Because of the rather curious role that prophecy played in the medieval English court. English monarchs at the time were, by their nature, somewhat paranoid. Their job was near-impossible to do, and always ended in death. If you were wily or lucky enough to escape exile and/or murder by your rivals, you would almost certainly die exhausted by the effort of not being murdered or exiled.

In this atmosphere of uncertainty, everyone craved scraps of knowledge as to where they stood in the divine scheme of things. Henry was particularly paranoid because he was a usurper, having stolen the throne from Richard II. Usurpation was a terrible, terrible sin in the medieval court, because the holder of the crown had been chosen by god. Regicide was even more terrible. So in order to usurp the crown, you had to have pretty good reasons - normally, this involved an elaborate proof that the sitting monarch was himself a usurper, and that the claimant of the crown was already its rightful holder.

These proofs were always horrendously convoluted and near-impossible to understand (try picking the bones out of the Stephen/Matilda/Henry dispute over dinner - believe me, I have). The matter was nearly always settled by brute force. And Henry spent his entire reign fretting over his usurpation, because his claim on the throne had pretty much no merit whatsoever. He knew it, his supporters knew it, his enemies certainly knew it, and Henry was convinced that god knew all about it as well, and had a particularly toasty section of Hell lined up for him when he met his maker - something his enemies were repeatedly attempting to arrange, because it was very easy to come up with justifications for killing a monarch was had a lousy claim on the throne.

Consequently, Henry spent his entire (short) reign trying to think up ways to atone for the sins he commited to attain the throne while commiting fresh sins to retain the throne. It's no wonder he had a stroke, he was an anxious chap.

Atonement-wise, it was hard to top going on Crusade. Henry - who was desperately superstitious, markedly so even in the very superstitious age he lived in - loved to hear prophecies about how his coming was predestined by god, that he had been picked to make everything that he perceived as being wrong with England right again, and that god really, secretly thought he was doubleplusgood for some reason. And he particularly enjoyed hearing the Jerusalem prophecy, in which Local Boy Overcomes Adversity, Makes Good.

 In a roundabout, long-winded way, this brings us to the point - the dissertation I wrote almost a decade ago, titled Conviction or Convenience? The Uses and Abuses of Political Prophecy in the 13th- and 14th-Century English Court. Not very snappy, but these things make a priority of precision over concision. For the reasons I mentioned above, prophecy was pretty big in the medieval court, especially after the reign of Henry IV.  The Lancastrian dynasty, which he inaugurated, was not very firm upon the throne, and eventually collapsed into the horrible dynastic struggles we call the Wars of the Roses. Pretty name, ugly business.

I defined political prophecy, and identified four different types of it. Three of those aren't relevant to this argument. Prophecies of the Jerusalem kind I called "interpretative prophecy". 

Interpretative prophecy was the most interesting both to the court - which couldn't get enough of it - and to the researcher. The other types of prophecy were somewhat - for want of a better word - predictable. Take astrology, for example: "Fabulous news, Sire! I have read the horoscope, and it turns out you are the wisest man that ever lived, and a great dancer! Please don't kill me." Predicting the wrong thing was seriously bad for your health, so court astrologers tended to be somewhat obsequious, and babbling hermits in caves tended to end up on the pointy end of a stick sooner or later.

 Interpretative philosophy, however, was a lot safer, and also considered more "authoritative". It tended to rely on chronicles. Chronicles were, of course, second-person accounts written down by people who were not present for the event they describe, don't know anyone who was, have few sources to work from, don't understand historiography, and who also tend to either have a point to make, an axe to grind, or a patron to please. The chroniclers are also prone to filling in gaps with any old rubbish they just made up off the top of their heads. Or babbling insanely. A particularly fine example is Geoffrey of Monmouth, who is considered to be one of the better chroniclers for his goo stuff. His bad stuff is the most awesome nonsense, much of which was dreamed up to further his particular hobbyhorse, that London was founded by the Trojans. (It wasn't.)

 These accounts are full of prophecies and visions - experienced by people who, if they ever existed, were long dead by the later middle ages, reported by people who were long dead by the later middle ages. The great bulk of it is arrant balderdash. "A white dragon shall eat a ball of fire and then do battle with a red dragon over a great lake, over three crowns and eight banners ..." Crap. Every dismal word of it.

 However, it was safe to interpret this folderol - after all, you weren't making the prophecy, you were simply trying to understand it. You were a truthseeker on a road to enlightenment, striving to comprehend the confusing, misleading, mess of information in front of you. After all, the data itself is unimpeachable - these prophecies were made, and the rest of these reported events happened, so ergo the prophecies were made and are as valid as all the other datum points. OK, so some facts have been shown not to have happened - but we have rejected those from our analysis, and consequently the analysis remains sound.

This is par for the course for medieval thinking, pre-Renaissance, pre-Enlightenment, pre-Scientific Age.

The extraordinary thing is that these interpretations always found that the prophecy favoured whatever monarch or lord was listening to the interpretation. And what's more, the prophecies were always 100% spot on - it often took several hundred goes at interpreting them before they fitted the facts, but they always did. And when events showeced that one of the interpretations was right - almost right, anyway, Jerusalem, Jerusalem Chamber, same thing, even if everything else in the prophecy turned out to be either false or not yet understandable - why, that simply demonstrated that they were on the right track. The prophecies were retroactively re-interpreted to fit the facts, or whatever particular worldview they cleaved to at the time.

It goes without saying how badly flawed and far from empiricism and the scientific method this interpretation process was, and I happily explored it and its political uses for many thousands of words, in my attempt to answer this question: Did these guys really believe this stuff?

My conclusion was: As far as it is possible to establish within the bounds of this inquiry, yes they did. Every word. Being relentlessly proved wrong didn't dismay them or deter them - they thought it worked. They lived in a difficult, dangerous, and incomprehensible world, and they used this way of thinking as an attempt to understand and navigate it.

Does all this remind you of anyone we know? That similarity with a certain group of people in the present day - a group that existed in every age - is what I had no chance of communicating to a member of that group. A tinfoiler, god-appointed heir to the throne of the glossers of Geoffrey of Monmouth, diligent servant of the Project for the Old Lancastrian Century.

Author's note: I carry with me to this day a tremendous respect for the middle ages, which are unfairly maligned as being nothing but tedious ignorance before the Clever Ages began. There's a vast amount of good and valuable medieval thinking, grains of gunpowder that piled into the colossal explosion that was the Renaissance. Vital work was done, which we should not forget simply because the bulk of other stuff was dross. Isaac Newton is not remembered for devoting the bulk of his career to sterile explorations of alchemy. We shouldn't remember the middle ages for being all superstition and mythmaking.

Incidentally, after he died, Isaac Newton was laid out in Westminster Abbey.

In the Jerusalem Chamber.

Coincidence? I think not.

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