The result was a catastrophic defeat. In a single day, the Scots probably took about 10,000 casualties, about 2% of Scotland's population at the time, including several very important noblemen.

James IV's body was found the following day, making him the last British monarch to die in battle. 

His bloodstained surcoat was sent to the Queen of England, Catherine of Aragon, who had taken charge of the Kingdom while her husband, Henry VIII (still a long way from entering his divorcing and beheading era), was in France. James had been excommunicated, so he could not be buried on consecrated ground. Instead, his body remained in a lead coffin above ground at Sheen Priory in London, and was moved to a random storeroom after the monastery was dissolved in 1539. Nobody knows what happened to it since, although various locations close to the English-Scottish border have legends claiming them to be the King's final resting place.

Like Frederick II, James IV was an intellectual, interested in understanding the natural world. He was a renaissance man, both figuratively and, given the era in which he lived, literally. In 1490, he founded King's College in Aberdeen, which became the University of Aberdeen, the 3rd University in Scotland and the 5th in Great Britain, after Oxford, Cambridge, St Andrews, and Edinburgh. In 1505 he would found the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, and in 1507 he established Scotland's first printing press.

Something like founding the Royal College of Surgeons is the sort of way a King might expected to express his enthusiasm for the medical sciences, but James took this a step further, and developed the unusual hobby of amateur dentistry. He already had some practice bloodletting and dressing ulcers, and in 1511 he extracted his first tooth, paying the patient 14 shillings for the privilege, and then went on to extract two teeth from his barber-surgeon himself, again paying 14 shillings. Pitscottie, the Chronicler who our language deprivation experiment anecdote comes from, says of his medical skills	

"That none in his realm, that used that craft, but would take his counsel in all their proceedings".

I suspect this might be exaggerated to some extent.

In a way somewhat analogous to the presence of a Scottish sorcerer at the Italian court of Frederick II, the Scottish court of James IV played host to an Italian sorcerer. John Damian, an Italian Friar who was appointed as the Abbot of Tungland, in /kɜːrˈkuːbriʃər/ in Southwestern Scotland, and who moonlighted as an astrologer and alchemist, was one of James IV's close associates. His role at the court consisted largely of attempting to find a way to produce gold from other metals (although there's no evidence he ever succeeded), and records survive meticulously documenting the treasury's expenditures on various materials that were apparently necessary to make the Quintessence, the legendary fifth element that could be used to turn things into gold (these efforts were cut short by James's death at Flodden, no doubt on the verge of a crucial breakthrough that would have led to the investment being recovered many times over). But the alchemist is probably most notorious for an incident where he allegedly made himself a pair of wings covered in feathers, and launched himself from the walls of Stirling Castle, with the intention of flying to France. You will probably not be surprised to learn that he was unsuccessful, and fell straight down and broke his leg.

According to the 16th-century historian John Lesley,

"he ascribed the blame thereof to there being some hen feathers in the wings which yearn for and covet the midden and not the sky"

A version is narrated in William Dunbar's poem A Ballad of the Feigned Frier of Tungland, How He Fell in the Mire Flying to Turkey, where Damian is presented as a Turk who murdered an Italian friar and dressed in his habit. If I attempted to read the Scots myself I would have to do the accent, which would be confusing and offensive, so I will just post the text on the website (scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk). 


Anyway, this Turkish murderer, now dressed as a friar, travels to Scotland, and gets a job as a doctor, in which role he is described thus:

"In leichecraft he was homecyd"

After trying his hand, unsuccessfully, at alchemy, he attempted to fly back to Turkey. In the poem, his wings actually do work, and he successfully becomes airborne, only to fail when he is attacked by birds. 

What we can see here is that, like Frederick, the court of James IV was sometimes regarded as an ungodly and sinful place, on account of the edgy scientific and magical research that went on there. And to be fair, if I heard that the king was paying people to let him extract their teeth for his own amusement, and he employed an alchemist to try to turn normal metals into gold, I would also assume there was something weird going on. 

He also apparently adopted a pair of conjoined twins, one of the first pairs of conjoined twins known to history, and they became accomplished musicians and learned to speak multiple languages, and people came to stare at them and watch them sing in harmony with each other. How the twins themselves felt about being exhibited like this is not recorded, but Pitscottie actually does go on to describe how, at the age of 28, one of the twins died, and quotes the survivor, apparently saying "How can I be merry, that have my true marrow as a dead carrion about my back, which was wont to sing and play with me?"  I'm not sure about the authenticity of this quote, but it's unusual for historical records from most of the past to actually include the voices of people like this who were treated as freak show exhibits.

Like many intellectuals of the Renaissance, James IV also seems to have taken a great interest in language. He was impressively multilingual, with the Spanish ambassador Pedro de Ayala writing in a 1498 letter to Ferdinand and Isabella, the king and queen of Spain, that he could speak Latin, French, German, Flemish, Italian, Spanish (and Pedro de Ayala was particularly complimentary here, saying the King spoke Spanish as well as a Spanish Marques), his own Scots language, obviously, and what the ambassador calls "the language of the savages who live in some parts of Scotland and on the islands", by which he presumably means Gaelic. Interestingly, this makes him probably the last King of Scotland who could speak Gaelic, which had been gradually supplanted as the main language of the Scottish court over the last 400 years, first by Norman French and then by Scots.

In fact, the reign of James IV, at the turn of the 16th century, fell during interesting times linguistically in Scotland. The Scots language had just begun to be recognisable as its own language, distinct from the Northernmost English dialects. Indeed, it was around this time that this language, previously known as Inglis, began to be referred to as Scottis (and the Gaelic language, which had been called Scottis, became Erse, or "Irish"). And as befitted a King who presided over this linguistic realignment, James earned a reputation as a patron of Scots literature, and the establishment of Scots as a literary language – employing poets such as the prolific William Dunbar, who I've already mentioned, and Gavin Douglas, best known for his Scots translation of the Aeneid.

Now, back to the experiment: did it happen?

To recap, the source of this story is Robert Lindsay of Pitscottie's Historie and Chronicles of Scotland, published in 1575, about 70 years after the experiment supposedly happened. Pitscottie's Historie and Chronicles was originally intended to be a sort of sequel to the History of the Scottish People, written by Hector Boece in 1527, which runs from the life of the Ancient Athenian prince Gathelus, who married Scota, the daughter of the Egyptian Pharaoh, and sent his sons to Ireland, where they became the ancestors of the Scots (n.b. not what actually happened) up to the assassination of James I in 1436 and the accession of James IV's grandfather, James II (in fact, Scotland had a clear run of 5 Jameses, 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 in succession, with Mary Queen of Scots interrupting the sequence before her son James VI). Pitscottie picks up where Boece left off, and covers the subsequent 129 years, up to 1565, during the chaotic reign of James IV's granddaughter Mary. 

The consensus among historians seems to have been, for a long time, that Pitscottie is not a particularly reliable source of information. Robert Chambers's 1856 Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen describes Pitscottie's Historie and Chronicles as

"A strange compound of endless and aimless garrulity, simplicity, credulity, and graphic delineation; the latter, however, evidently the effect not of art or design, but of a total want of them."

And says of Pitscottie

"His credulity, in particular, seems to have been boundless, and is remarkable even for the credulous age in which he lived.  He appears to have believed, without question, every thing which was told him; and, believing it, has carefully recorded it."

"The earnest and honest simplicity of the good old chronicler, however, is exceedingly amusing. He aims at nothing beyond a mere record of what he conceived to be facts, and these he goes on detailing, with a great deal of incoherence, and all the unintellectual precision of an artificial process, neither feeling, passion, nor mind ever appearing to mingle in the slightest degree with his labours. These characteristics of the chronicles of Lindsay have greatly impaired their credibility, and have almost destroyed all confidence in them as authorities."


and to top it all off:

"If Lindsay was but an indifferent chronicler, he was a still worse poet."

Pitscottie's coverage of James IV, unlike Salimbene's consistently negative coverage of Frederick, is quite mixed in its appraisal of the King. Much of it is extremely complimentary:

"There was good peace and rest through all Scotland, and great love betwixt the king and his subjects: For the king was so liberal, that he left nothing ungiven to his lords and barons, that pertained to him, where he might leisomely give."

"This prince was wondrous hardy, and diligent in the execution of justice"

He even praises the King's jousting tournaments, saying 
	
"By this way and mean the king brought his realm to great manhood and honours, that the fame of his jousting and tournament sprang through all Europe"

He even gives us that classic trope of a benevolent king going around dressed up as just some guy and asking his subjects what they think of the King in order to obtain honest feedback.

In the run-up to Flodden, though, Pitscottie becomes more critical. James is described as hearing about the Great Michael's failure to reach France, and immediately trying to save face by calling up a huge army from across the whole country without the approval of his council.

"But every man loved his prince so well, that they would on no ways disobey him."

While James was in Linlithgow, before the invasion, Pitscottie says a man came into the church where he was praying for a successful expedition, and told him

"Sir King, my mother hath sent me to you, desiring you not to pass, at this time, where thou art purposed: for, if thou does, thou wilt not fare well in thy journey, nor none that passeth with thee. Further, she bade thee meet with no woman, nor use their counsel, nor let them touch thy body, nor thou theirs: for, if thou do it, thou wilt be confounded and brought to shame."

This ominous character disappeared before James's entourage could get to him.

Pitscottie describes the King's progress to Edinburgh, on the way to the English border.

"Yet all thir warnings and uncouth tidings, nor no good counsel, might stop the king, at this present, from his vain purpose and wicked enterprize, but hasted him fast to Edinburgh."

And then in Edinburgh, at the market cross outside St Giles's Church, at midnight, a voice was heard, proclaiming a summons. "Every honest gentleman within the town" was to appear "before his master" within 40 days. And the voice listed the names of those subject to the summons.

Every single one of the men summoned would be among the dead at Flodden. That is, all except one, who threw a coin from his stairs, saying

"I appeal from that summons, judgment and sentence thereof, and takes me all whole in the mercy of God, and Christ Jesus his son." 

The King ignored this omen too, and even ignored his wife's pleading – she was, after all, the King of England's sister.

Once James was across the border, Pitscottie tells us how his army captured Ford Castle, in Northumberland, about 6 miles inside England. Pitscottie explains how James was seduced by the extremely attractive English Lady Ford. She asked James if she could leave to see her friends, and promised to bring back intelligence from England. 

"And he again, as an effeminate prince, subdued and enticed by the allurement and false deceit of this wicked woman, gave her over hastily credence in this behalf, and believed surely all had been true that she promised."

Lady Ford departed for York, where she told the Earl of Surrey, the commander of the English army, everything she'd learned about the Scottish army occupying her castle.

In the words of the strange man from Linlithgow:
	
"She bade thee meet with no woman, nor use their counsel, nor let them touch thy body, nor thou theirs: for, if thou do it, thou wilt be confounded and brought to shame."

Further shenanigans in the run-up to the battle include the lords discussing whether to let James personally fight in the battle, only for James to angrily remove his disguise, reveal he'd been listening the whole time, and demand to be allowed to participate, and him threatening to hang, draw and quarter the master gunner who suggested opening fire on the English while they were vulnerable crossing a bridge, rather than engaging them in honourable combat in an open field. 

Pitscottie ends up saying of his death:
	
"James IV. Unhappily slain in this manner, with many of his nobles; not by the manhood and wisdom of Englishmen, but by the King's own misgovernance, that would not use the counsel of his wise nobles in defending his honour, and preserving of his army; but used himself to his own sensual pleasures, which was the cause of his ruin."

So what we have here is a very mixed portrayal of the King. It's not overwhelmingly positive, and is at times very critical, but it's nothing like Salimbene's coverage of Frederick. It's not entirely just a tirade against him. Maybe it actually is just fairly balanced and objective. James's early reign was pretty successful. He was, by the metrics usually used to assess Medieval Kings, a pretty good one. But then, Flodden was utterly idiotic. In James's early reign he'd managed to secure a pretty good peace with England, even managing to marry an English Princess. He had absolutely no reason to enter the War of the League of Cambrai at all except that he wanted to show off his big ship to the French, and then his ground invasion of England seems to have been little more than an attempt to save face after that didn't work. Pitscottie's narrative of James's reign, even if presented mostly through a disjointed series of anecdotes of questionable provenance and varying plausibility, is very reasonable in terms of its overall vibe. 

So why did Pitscottie include this story where he did? In the case of Salimbene and Frederick, it's very obvious. It's included as part of a list of other experiments he supposedly carried out, all of which serve to associate his scientific curiosity, his unorthodox religious views and his general ethical depravity with each other, to give the impression of the emperor as an unhinged, blasphemous, tyrannical sadist. But with Pitscottie's account of James's experiment it's less obvious. It's position tells us nothing. It's in-between a single sentence recounting the Massacre of /ˈmɒnivɛərd/, west of Perth (in which members of Clan Drummond burned down the local church with a large number of members of Clan Murray inside, an event notorious at the time, even by the violent standards of the Medieval highlands), and the subsequent execution of David Drummond, and almost a page about Bernard Stuart, a French Nobleman of Scottish descent, being appointed as governor of Naples (The reason there was a French governor of Naples is part of the monumentally confusing Italian wars described earlier), and then fleeing to Scotland after the King of France suspected he was going to make himself King of Naples (everything else I've read says he was in fact sent to Scotland as a French ambassador). 

And while for Salimbene, a pious Catholic friar, Frederick's rivalry with the Papacy provided an obvious reason to demonise him, the same can't be said of Pitscottie and the later James, with his excommunication, for the simple reason that Pitscottie was very much a Protestant, a bias that becomes obvious once his history gets up to the Reformation, which was well within living memory at the time he was writing in 1575. I guess maybe you could say that Pitscottie wanted to appeal to the King at the time he was writing, James VI, who was a descendant of both the Tudors and the Stuarts via James IV's marriage to Margaret Tudor, and would be in with a good chance of inheriting the English throne if Elizabeth I of England continued refusing to get married (which ended up being exactly what happened), which might have given the author an incentive to celebrate James's marriage to Margaret and the peace between the two Kingdoms that was a major achievement of his early reign, and to contrast that with his reckless and futile abandonment of that peace. And maybe the experiment was an early foreshadowing of the subsequent deterioration of the King's mental state in the run-up to Flodden. 

Although maybe he genuinely didn't have much of an agenda. If he's just writing down a disjointed series of anecdotes he's heard, which a lot of his chronicle does feel like, then he can be expected to end up with an overall impression that generally reflects how most people in the time he was writing generally felt about the time he was writing about, but with a few aberrations where there was a story just too interesting not to tell, even if it went against the overall impression you had of the time, which is kind of what this story feels like. And on top of that, there would have been many people who would have viewed James's interest in alchemy (and for that matter even medicine) as at least disreputable or suspicious if not outright satanic. 

Next, I have to address the elephant in the room, the result of the experiment – the children spoke Hebrew. 

You've probably already realised that this is clearly insane, and is strong evidence that this whole thing didn't happen – and to be fair on Pitscottie, he's also quite skeptical: "Some say they spoke good Hebrew, but as to myself, I know not but what the authors retell." 

That's certainly true but what's really interesting here is the way that at least some people at the time must have thought this was a plausible outcome. We've talked about the idea of Hebrew as the original language in the last couple of episodes – it had originated among ancient Jewish scholars and become popular among Roman Christian writers such as St Augustine of Hippo. The Bible describes how humans originally all spoke the same language, but then they decided to build a tower up to heaven and God thwarted their efforts by making it so they all spoke different languages. The Bible itself doesn't say anything about what the language was that was spoken before the Tower of Babel, but a sort of fan-fiction had developed, where Hebrew survived the Tower of Babel because Heber, a great-great grandson of Noah, had refused to help build the Tower, and so had been allowed to keep the same language he had before, which he passed on to his descendants – the Hebrews, supposedly named after this distant ancestor.  

Modern scientific linguistics didn't really emerge until at least the 18th century, so people at the time would have thought in ways like this. At the time Pitscottie was writing, with the growth of Renaissance humanism, the Hebrew language had come to be very widely studied. Cuneiform would not be deciphered until the late 18th century, and Egyptian Hieroglyphs not until the Rosetta Stone was discovered during the Napoleonic Wars, so Biblical Hebrew, which had been preserved as the language of Jewish scriptures and worship, and as such never needed to be deciphered like Hieroglyphs or cuneiform, was the language of some of the oldest texts that Europeans knew how to read. Given that most people believed that the world was created around 4000 BCE, and Adam and Eve were created with, presumably, a knowledge of language - Adam and Eve are described speaking to each other, to the snake, and to God, and the dialogue is written in perfect, fully-formed Biblical Hebrew – this makes some sense. On top of that, if you believe that the universe is only a few thousand years old, that really doesn't give you enough time before the first written history for a diverse array of languages to develop organically from nothing. If this is the case, and bear in mind that this is just me speculating, and I'm a total amateur, then the evolution of language from nothing is one of a few things, like the evolution of life, or continental drift, that seem wildly implausible until you accept that we've had an unimaginable amount of time for these things to happen. Thus, to someone at the time, it would seem very plausible that Hebrew is the original human language, and perhaps even by extension that humans have an innate capacity to understand it.

Next time, I'm going to keep talking about the same experiment, and particularly how it fits into the context of the Renaissance, when European scholars began to develop a fascination for ancient languages, and Christian scholars began to take an interest in Hebrew, leading to a proliferation of curious and fascinating characters and ideas.

Thank you for listening. Sorry this has taken so long to come out, I kind of kept finding new interesting people to write about so the timing got out of control, most of that's in the next episode, and it's worth it, I promise. Anyway, check out the website at scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk for episode transcripts, images, sources, etc. (which I'm gradually adding, starting with the earlier episodes), and check out the podcast's social media channels on Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram and the Website Formally Known as Twitter for news and interesting things I've found out about. If you've got any comments, questions, suggestions or corrections or anything like that you can email admin@scienceapeculiarhistory.co.uk, or message any of the social media channels, or use the Contact form on the website.

Thank you again, come back next time for a load of Renaissance linguistics.