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.

The Vikings impacted European history -- west and east -- for centuries, from 793, when they attacked Lindisfarne Abbey in England, up until 1066, when they attacked England and lost to Harold Godwinson (though Harold would lose the next battle, at Hastings, in his fight against the Normans or, "French Vikings," as your hosts like to call them). These dates aren't really true, since the Vikings raided before and after them. They're just nice clean dates to remember. But at any rate, centuries it was, and the Vikings were very scary, and very good at snatch-and-grab attacks, except sometimes they settled down in places like York, or of course, Normandy. And during all this time, they often attacked the island of Iona, targeting the Abbey, since that was where most of the stuff was. On Christmas Eve of 986, however, when they attacked Iona again, slaughtering the abbot and 15 monks, it wasn't a raid for raiding's sake. Times had shifted, and the Vikings were becoming church patrons. Iona was attacked in 986 as part of a struggle between secular powers and church powers. There was slaughter and raiding, to be sure, but those were the methods, not the point. In somewhat of a reversal of our usual roles, Michelle explains this all to you, and Anne gets really excited about the possibility of taking a retreat on Iona, with meditative tours and, of course, a tea room.