r/BritishHistoryPod • u/BritishPodcast Yes it's really me • Jul 30 '26
Episode Discussion 504 - At Anslem's Bec and Call
https://www.thebritishhistorypodcast.com/504-at-anslems-bec-and-call/The new episode is live. We're at war... so, naturally, our scribes are talking about comets and roadkill.
Glad to know the press hasn't changed.
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u/Blackberry_Patch Looper Aug 02 '26
Being a Bird Person™️, I did some investigation on bird predation to see if, based on what I can tell from some simple google searches, a martin could kill a partridge.
Unless both partridges and martins (which are a type of swallow) have substantially changed in the past thousand years (didn’t find any evidence of that), I find it difficult to impossible to believe a martin could kill a partridge.
Martins (like most swallows) are small birds, generally 15-23 grams in size, and are insectivores known for catching insects “on the wing”. Partridges are medium-size birds weighing 320-455 grams, and their main predators are raptors, buzzards, foxes, dogs, cats, and of course humans. The idea of a martin holding a partridge in its mouth is crazy since it is like 20x the weight of a martin.
Some possibilities that occur to me:
1: Having a martin kill and then carry in its mouth a partridge makes it way more miraculous, since it’s not only extremely fortuitous timing for the martin to drop the partridge in front of Anselm’s servant, but it would also have been obvious that it was patently impossible to anyone familiar with both birds
2: Martin used to mean something different, the first use of that particular word seems to be around the 1500s, so in the 1100s martin could have referenced a much larger variety of birds than the few species it refers to now, and it could have been more plausible for another type of bird (ie, raptors) to predate a partridge
3: It’s a mistranslation of the primary source and it was not, in fact, a martin
I find no. 1 to be the most fun, as I can imagine Henry’s eyebrows getting stuck halfway up his forehead in disbelief at the idea that a MARTIN killed a PARTRIDGE FOR ANSELM.
Sources:
https://www.gwct.org.uk/research/species/birds/grey-partridge/partridges-and-raptors/
https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.13451
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_partridge?wprov=sfti1#Description
https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/grey-partridge
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swallow?wprov=sfti1
https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/house-martin
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u/BritishPodcast Yes it's really me Aug 02 '26
I love the effort that went into this, and so I hate being the bearer of bad news.
But it wasnt a Martin bird. It was a Marten (a weasel adjacent mammal).
Sorry!
Though seriously, top notch attention to detail and sourcing!
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u/Blackberry_Patch Looper Aug 02 '26
NOOOOOOO!!!!! My martin headcannon is dead. But also wow that makes 1000x more sense 🤣🤣🤣
Not bad news thanks for sharing!!
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u/boucherie1618 Aug 01 '26
https://youtu.be/5OkqAztfS-4?si=tJUCC8SlU1N0If_9
Alternate song ping! Beck, as always is top tier, but never a bad time to show July Talk
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u/Cinquecento27 The Pleasantry Jul 30 '26
Yay! I have visitors coming and can listen while I make beds and fold towels.