Terry Jones was a writer, an actor, a director, and a member of the legendary comedy troupe Monty Python. Sadly, Terry passed away on January 22, 2020.

I had the profound (and deeply surreal) pleasure of speaking with him numerous times over the years, and always found him to be witty, insightful, and wonderfully engaging.

Below, you’ll find both of our conversations…

-Ken Plume

Conducted ~ 1/2004

Terry Jones was a member of Monty Python, as anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of comedy knows full well.

As a Python, he co-directed Monty Python and the Holy Grail with Terry Gilliam before assuming full directorial duties for The Life of Brian and The Meaning of Life.

As an ex-Python, he wrote Jim Henson’s Labyrinth and wrote and directed Erik the Viking and the recent adaptation of Wind in the Willows.

Just as fellow ex-Python Michael Palin has become associated with his frequent travel documentaries, so too Jones has also been connected with the documentary form in recent years – first with his miniseries about the Crusades, and more recently with a series of programs on ancient inventions and the hidden history of Rome and Egypt.

His current foray into the past, however, is Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives, an 8-part series examining the myths surrounding such historical archetypes as the knight, the damsel, the minstrel, and the monk. Similar to his previous ventures into this territory, the programs present a healthy does of history within an entertaining (and often humorous) vehicle. As they say, a spoonful of sugar…

A companion book to the series is currently available in the UK from BBC Publishing. He’s also authored a look at a particularly fascinating literary mystery with the book Who Murdered Chaucer?, currently available in the UK from Methuen Publishing and in the US from St. Martin’s Press later this year.

Medieval Lives is currently airing on the History Channel Saturdays at 7:00pm EST.

KEN PLUME: Going back to your youth, were you initially more interested in history or literature?

TERRY JONES: It was literature, really. I read English literature at university, and I kind of strayed into history really because I became fascinated by Chaucer – and particularly, I became fascinated by the boring bits of Chaucer. Because when you’re reading Chaucer, you see such a wonderful writer and a funny man and so full of good things, you can’t believe he’d write these boring bits! An attempt at saying why he should have written these 30 apparently boring lines about the Knight in the General Prologue is what sort of got me into looking at the history of the period and what was going on behind what he was saying.

PLUME: Why is that a question that was never analyzed by “scholars” prior to that, do you think? It seems like a logical question to ask since, as you say, why would such a good writer write boring bits like that…

JONES: You’d think that would be a reasonable question, wouldn’t you? Well, I think maybe people didn’t realize it was boring – that that particular bit was boring, really. I mean, they all liked the idea of this “perfect, gentle knight” – this perfect, aristocratic knight – and they thought that was a good thing… It chimed in with the kind of mental outlook of people in the 19th century, when people were very much in the age of imperial expansion, and it never occurred to them that anybody would have thought that somebody who’s lived by violence is not a figure of approval.

PLUME: And the 19th century is really when the mythology regarding the greatness of “chivalry” was built up, wasn’t it?

JONES: I think that’s true, yeah. We feel very much in Medieval Lives – one of the points we make in the first program about the knight is that the concept of the “knight in shining armor rescuing damsels in distress” is very much a Victorian concept. One of the things to bear in mind is that “chivalry” was a cult of violence. It was a cult of men killing other men, and that’s what “chivalry” was all about. If you took the killing away, there wouldn’t be “chivalry” there. So all this stuff about the ideals of “chivalry” is very much dressing the stuff up – it’s dressing up a cult of violence, for various reasons. The Church would sort of dress it up in godly robes because they were trying to a) utilize the men of violence to their own ends, and also trying to construct a moral code that would modify the behavior of these violent young men who were going around killing everybody.

JONES: Exactly. The violent young men themselves were quite glad to have these sort of “robes of piety” because it sort of justified what they were doing. They were quite glad to have this “code of chivalry” as well. But the whole thing is an impossible construct.

PLUME: But when you look at that 19th century way of reimagining the middle ages, they did that with more than just “chivalry”, as a means of dressing up their history, didn’t they?

JONES: Yeah. I mean, 19th century England was also very keen to find ways to justify the kind of violence that setting up an empire involved. So I guess you’ll be getting the same kind of thing going on in America over the next few decades as Prince Rumsfeld and Lord Wolfowitz start expanding their empire ever outwards, and justifying violence. You can see it happening already in Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay – suddenly, “Oh, it’s perfectly all right to suspend people’s rights and oppress people because we’ve got a justification for it!” Things don’t change, really, and I think people’s reasons for going to war don’t change at all, either. Wolfowitz, Pearl, Rumsfeld – they’re all making money out of war… That’s the whole point about it. They’ve all got their corporations or themselves. And that’s exactly why people went to war in the middle ages. The Duke of Gloucester and the Duke of Warwick hated Richard II’s peace policy with France because they couldn’t make any money out of peace – they wanted war. You see the warmongers, in any age it’s the same thing – they make money out of it.

PLUME: I think it was fascinating in watching the episode of Medieval Lives about the king, in particular the segment on Richard II and the spin campaign to discredit him and his rule after his enemies came to power…

JONES: Yeah, absolutely. I think Henry IV was very good at propaganda. He wheeled in this propaganda machine and it really got to work, and it wiped out a whole culture, in a away – the culture of Richard II’s court.

PLUME: Does it surprise you when you do these investigations and look at history with a critical eye, that previous generations haven’t asked these same questions?

JONES: Every age sort of has its own history. History is really the stories that we retell to ourselves to make them relevant to every age. So we put our own values and our own spin on it. And so I think it’s partly a difference in the age and in the outlook that I’ve grown up in, I suppose. It is surprising that people haven’t challenged the chronicle accounts more. You can partly understand it because there was such a sort of xenophobia in the 19th century. The chronicles that are pro-Richard are all French chronicles – they were mostly chronicles that were preserved in France, so they were written off, because they said, “Oh, they’re French… They’re anti-English!”

PLUME: Going back to the links between literature and history – how much of an influence was Shakespeare on defining how certain historical figures and events have been viewed?

JONES: I think he was a big influence. It was very odd, really, You look at some of the most recent biographies of Richard II, and people just can’t get away from the Shakespeare portrait – which has no sort of historical foundation. It has nothing to do with it, but it becomes the touchstone to explain what went wrong with Richard’s reign, you know? Because he’s a “tragic hero.” Well, you don’t do that with every other king – why do it with Richard? He reigned for 26 years, or something – quite a long time. He reigned under very, very difficult circumstances. He came to power as an 11 year-old boy, was constantly being opposed by barons, was probably deposed at one point halfway through his reign, and only managed to get complete control in 1397. So he did well, really.

PLUME: And the spin also took place with Richard III…

JONES: Richard III is no better than he should be, probably, but he’s certainly not a monster. One of those interesting things for me was when we went up to York… One of the great things about doing this series is actually going into the public record office and actually holding these documents from 600 years ago, and there you actually have the thing in your hand. We were up in York in the public record office there, and there we had these records from the town council, and when Richard III was killed at Bosworth Field the council records, in the official meeting it says, “Our Lord, the late King Richard, who was treacherously murdered and slain by the treason of the…” The people who murdered him were in power by then, and to actually write this in your minutes must have been an act of some bravery to say “We really think he was a good man.”

PLUME: Is that the kind of thing that would have brought swift retribution?

JONES: Well, I don’t know… Maybe the powers that be never saw the minutes of the York guild that was writing them.

PLUME: Looking at a series like Medieval Lives – even going back to your series on the Crusades – where doe the spark to do them come from?

JONES: It came very much out of my own heart, really. The actual format was proposed to me by BBC Oxford Film & TV, who I made it with. They proposed the format, but it was very much something I wanted to do because it’s a way to reexamine the middle ages, and to get away from the lies and misconceptions about the middle ages that have been mainly spread by people who regard the Renaissance as a jolly good thing. Whereas a lot of the things in the middle ages that we regard – as this age of ignorance and superstition – a lot of those things are actually things that happened in the Renaissance or after the Reformation… Not in the middle ages at all. To give you an example, witchcraft and the burning of witches – nothing at all to do with the middle ages. It is totally a figment of the post-Reformation and the Renaissance. Throughout the middle ages, witchcraft really didn’t figure very largely at all. The Church didn’t take witchcraft seriously. It was only in 1484, I think it was, that the Pope suddenly declared that witchcraft was real. They never took it seriously before then.

PLUME: Just because it could be another tool for the Church to use…

JONES: Well, it was probably a bit like the war on terror – like Bush declaring the war on terrorism…

PLUME: So we’re now on “Witch Alert: Orange”…

JONES: Exactly. “Witch Alert: Orange” was declared by the Pope in 1484. And from then on it was open season on attacking women. It was all part of the suppression of womanhood that went on after the Renaissance. Throughout the middle ages, we see the gradual empowerment of women, and in the late 14th century, women probably had more power than they had at any other time in the next 600 years. They had a certain amount of equality with men, they were in places in government, they were in trade and they did run businesses. They had quite a considerable amount of independence. It’s after the Renaissance and the Reformation that they get deprived of power and they get suppressed and pushed into the background. Part of the way that this is done by de-sexualizing them. We had a curious bit where Professor Samantha Riches, who does work on the iconography of St. George and the Dragon, she discovered that in the late 15th century and the early 16th century in depictions of St. George and the Dragon, the dragon begins to take on female genitalia.

PLUME: Which was quite a startling find…

JONES: Yeah. She thinks this has to do with the idea that St. George is rescuing the female from her sexuality. And so this is all part of this post-Renaissance, post-Reformation tradition of de-sexualizing women, which is part of dis-empowering them. So by the Victorian age, by the 19th century, women are totally de-sexualized and they’re not supposed to have any sexual interest at all. In fact, any woman with any interest in sex was regarded as being mad and usually put in the asylum. So, I mean, it’s a really extraordinary sort of turnaround and something that would have been incomprehensible to people in the middle ages.

PLUME: And it’s interesting to note how much of that spin happened, as you say, during the Renaissance and the Reformation. While watching Medieval Lives, I couldn’t help but think how much the series cried out for a follow-up explaining what happened during that period…

JONES: Yeah, I think you’re right, funnily enough. I think that’s a really good idea. A very interesting idea… The trouble with Medieval Lives is there’s so little time to do anything. In a way the story, for example, of why we think they thought the world was flat in the middle ages – that’s a fascinating story in itself. It actually comes from the American journalist Washington Irving in the early 19th century, writing his biography of Columbus, in which he makes up this thing about the Church fathers at Salamanca accusing Columbus of heresy for saying the world is round when the Church teaches that it’s flat. Which is totally made up! The Church never taught that the Earth was flat, and nobody thought that the Earth was flat in the middle ages. It was just Washington Irving, author of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle – it was just him making something up. Obviously it sounded rather good.

PLUME: Well, anyone could be historian at that point in time…

JONES: Yes.

PLUME: Does the research process for the show start with you asking a question, or does it start with you stumbling across an interesting piece of information?

JONES: A bit of both, really. What happened with this series was that, as I said, the impulse came from Oxford TV & Film and the BBC, so they started researching and came up with a whole lot of the material. But I was always very conscious that in shows like this you’ve got to have some sort of story that you’re telling. For example in [The Episode] “The Damsel,” it’s not sufficient to just have a list of spunky women who we know lived in the middle ages – that doesn’t get you anywhere. You’ve got to have a story to tell. So partly it’s me trying to work out a story out of the raw material and my saying, “Look, I think the story we’re talking about is the story about the gender roles and the relationship between the genders through this period of 600 years and how did it change.” And once you ask the right questions like that, you see how it does change and you see the dynamic that’s going on, and that gives you a bit of a story then.

PLUME: It’s also interesting to note that, in reference to that episode on gender roles, we’ve seen the recent return of the idea of the “professional religious hysteric”…

JONES: Yes!

PLUME: In going back to even how you tackled your series on the Crusades, there was that through-line of trying to tell stories within the larger story…

JONES: With Crusades, what appealed to me when Alan Ereira, who was producing the series, he sort of said, “The idea is to tell the story of the Crusades, but tell it through Arab eyes and get the Arab point of view.” And I though, “Well that really sounds interesting.” And that’s what got me hooked onto that, because it was a new way of looking at the period – which I didn’t know anything about in the first place.

PLUME: How cursory were your explorations into the period when you were doing your research for Holy Grail in the 70’s?

JONES: Well, I suppose the research was fairly cursory. We sort of read some of the Arthurian legends and things, but at the same time we were doing The Holy Grail, I was actually involved in researching my book on Chaucer’s Knight at the time – so I was kind of moonlighting off in the British Museum. So I was kind of well into the 14th century when we were doing that, so I was kind of quite comfortable doing a film set in the medieval world.

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