Author archives: martin

How Often Would You Actually Go to War? Whether a medieval Englishman went to war often depended less on training and more on simple bad timing — plenty of genuinely unprepared people ended up on a battlefield purely because they happened to be in the wrong retinue at the wrong moment. During the Barons’ War […]

The Parish Priest’s Daily Grind Forget the stained-glass image of the wise, saintly village priest for a moment. The actual job was underpaid, under-supervised, and — by the Church’s own repeated admission — often done extremely badly. Most rural priests were what the sources call “Mass priests”: poorly educated men living on a tithe income […]

What Was Actually In a Peasant’s House When a medieval tenant died or fled the manor, the lord’s officials drew up a detailed list of what was in the house. Certain items, the “principalia,” belonged to the holding and had to pass on to the next tenant — not unlike a landlord’s inventory for a […]

Running a Monastery: The Obedientiaries Running a major medieval monastery took a genuinely substantial management team, and the sheer number of specialised roles beneath the abbot — collectively called obedientiaries — reveals just how much of monastic life was, underneath the prayer and ritual, straightforward institutional administration. Below the abbot (assisted by a deputy prior) […]

The Carthusians: Medieval England’s Hermit-Monks If the Benedictines represented the comfortable, wealthy end of medieval monasticism, the Carthusians stood at the opposite extreme: monks who chose voluntary isolation and an extraordinarily rigorous ascetic life. They were widely admired for it, precisely because so few people could endure it. The order was founded around 1080 by […]

The Monks’ Secret Sign Language Talking was banned across huge stretches of monastic daily life — in church, in the dormitory at night, at mealtimes in the refectory — so from at least the ninth century onward, monks developed something genuinely remarkable to get around it: an elaborate, fully catalogued sign language, formally taught to […]

What You’d Need to Survive Medieval Travel Before setting out on any journey in medieval England, it was worth knowing what lay ahead — and the honest answer was a great deal of hard going. The main roads were old Roman routes, worn by a thousand years of use into a mess of potholes, subsidence, […]

Execution Cemeteries and the Medieval Outcast Dead Not every medieval body received a Christian burial in consecrated ground, and the archaeology of where “deviant” burials were placed instead offers a genuinely striking window into how firmly medieval society drew the line between the community of the living and the dead — and who fell outside […]

The Inheritance Loophole Nobody Talks About: Bastardy Medieval inheritance laws were particularly harsh toward bastards, for whom a claim to their father’s villein land was forbidden by the laws of England. A court of one manor summarily rejected a claimant’s appeal, stating that he was bastard “to whom no villein-land can descend.” But in practice, […]

The Risky Way Some Attackers Got Into Castles Every castle required a means of disposing of human waste, and the solution — long, vertical shafts running down through the thickness of the wall to a moat, ditch, or river below — proved to have an unexpected, genuine security vulnerability. Castle toilets, known as garderobes, were […]