Monthly archives: September 2026

Life Inside a Medieval Nunnery Medieval nunneries ran on broadly the same daily rhythm of communal prayer, reading and work as male monasteries — but they were, in several important and genuinely revealing respects, a fundamentally different institution, shaped as much by their exclusion from the priesthood as by any difference in spiritual ambition. There […]

Rogation Week: Beating the Bounds With a Dragon on a Pole Rogation Week, the week before Ascension Day, sent the whole parish physically outside the church walls for three consecutive days of penitential walking — genuinely long processions accompanied, at their grandest, by carved dragon effigies, banners, and relic caskets, deliberately timed to bless the […]

Buying a New Outfit in Medieval England Getting a new outfit made in medieval England was a genuinely slow, multi-stage process, and it involved rather more separate tradespeople than simply popping to a single shop. Early in the 14th century, clothes were at their most expensive because England exported almost all its raw wool rather […]

Death, Burial, and the Business of Dying Well Death in a medieval English parish followed a genuinely careful, deeply symbolic sequence of ritual — from the moment of burial itself right through to a full year of subsequent memorial services — reflecting a society that treated dying “well,” in the correct religious sense, as almost […]

Maud Heath and the Medieval Market Economy A sixty-foot column on a Wiltshire hilltop, topped with the sculpted figure of a small, determined woman clutching a shopping bag, commemorates a genuinely modest but lasting act of medieval infrastructure — and it began with nothing more than a widow’s weekly walk to sell eggs and butter. […]

Enclosure and ‘Organic Barbed Wire’ The enclosure of common land — hedging fields that had once been shared, open resources into private, exclusive pasture — was one of the most socially disruptive economic trends of the final decades of medieval England, and it earned itself a genuinely striking nickname among contemporaries: “organic barbed wire.” The […]

Improvised Medieval Cooking Fires Fixed kitchen hearths weren’t always practical, and the surviving pictorial record shows medieval households and travellers alike coming up with genuinely inventive portable heating solutions wherever a hot meal or a bit of warmth was needed away from the main fire. One French manuscript shows a solitary winter diner enjoying his […]

Medieval London’s Sewage Problem Medieval London had a sewage problem so severe it occasionally killed people outright — and the surviving records of exactly how Londoners tried (and often failed) to manage their own waste are simultaneously grim and darkly funny. In 1355, the Fleet Prison ditch — designed to run ten feet wide — […]

War Comes to the City Gates Towns rarely fought their own wars directly — they mostly funded, supplied, and occasionally suffered them, preferring to pay someone else to do the actual fighting whenever they possibly could. Merchants, even ones who could easily afford a full knight’s equipment, generally lacked the training to lead an actual […]

Feast Days and Public Spectacle Medieval town life ran on a genuinely dense calendar of feasts, processions, and public spectacle, and it’s worth remembering that religion and entertainment weren’t remotely separate categories the way they often are today. Bruges held thirteen processions a year; Venice, sixteen. Corpus Christi, authorised by papal bull in 1264, involved […]