Author archives: martin

Forest Law and the Four Ways to Get Arrested The medieval forest law had little to do with the woods in the way we understand them today. By “forest” we must understand a special hunting ground, which was either a royal village or a stretch of land specially reserved for the king’s huntsmen. Such land […]

How the Reformation Ended Medieval Church Life The medieval Catholic ritual calendar was not simply gradually abandoned – it was actively dismantled, with a speed and determination that the authorities only managed to display during the initial phase of Edward VI’s reign. This is astonishing because the Catholic traditions had been integral to the country’s […]

Medieval Life Expectancy Wasn’t What You Think Medieval life expectancy tables have a way of misleading people, because the statistic that actually matters – how old you’d live to be if you’d survived childhood – tells a different story from the average over the whole country. Infant and childhood mortality was truly brutal, and this […]

Confirmation and Baptism After the Reformation Baptism and confirmation both survived England’s Reformation more or less intact in terms of general shape, but the details the reformers stripped out (and the ones they left in) are an extremely careful, selective edit — a clear sign, perhaps, of actual adherence to medieval practices rather than wholesale […]

Bad Behaviour in the Pews Medieval churchgoers, by the Church’s own repeated complaints, were considerably less consistently well-behaved than the solemn stereotype of medieval piety usually suggests, and the surviving disciplinary records preserve a genuinely entertaining rogues’ gallery of exactly how congregations misbehaved. Weapons and animals both turn up with startling regularity; the parishioners of […]

How Criminal Were the Middle Ages, Really? Ask how violent medieval England was, and you’ll get an answer that it was much less violent than our present-day equivalents. The murder rate in fourteenth-century East Anglia has been calculated equivalent to present-day New York; indeed, the English homicide rate overall was far higher than that of […]

Were Anglo-Saxons and Vikings Really Divided? The St Brice’s Day slaughter of 1002, when king Ethelred II ordered the massacre of the Danes, is presented as an illustration of a nation divided along ethnic lines; however, the archaeological and linguistic evidence demonstrates a more nuanced view. The new place names, personal names, tax assessments, or […]

Medieval York: A Case Study York offers an interesting English equivalent to Paris and Venice: smaller, more provincial, but with a parallel rise and fall from Roman garrison town to England’s second city and back down to a firmly-established regional centre. Founded by the Romans in 71 CE, York was taken by the Vikings in […]

How Medieval Children Actually Grew Up, Stage by Stage One of the more poignant findings buried within medieval coroner’s records is the way in which children’s development followed a strikingly similar biologically-based pattern to what we’d today recognise, tracked purely via accident’s cause and place of occurrence. Infants under a year spent the majority of […]

Hell’s Kitchen: Cooking as Eternal Punishment When medieval artists were called upon to depict eternal punishment, the imagery they most often turned to was culinary. Hell was frequently envisioned as an immense, malevolent kitchen in which devil-cooks tormented the damned using the same tools and technique as any household cook would recognize from her own […]