Author archives: martin

What Actually Made a Settlement a ‘Town’? What actually made a medieval settlement a “town” rather than an overgrown village? Not size, as it turns out — it was the market. The defining feature was having one or more permanent, year-round markets, with guild self-regulation as the other big tell. A large village might hold […]

Tithes: The Tax That Built the Parish System Nothing shaped the medieval English parish quite as decisively as the tithe — a mandatory tenth of a household’s income handed over to the Church every year — and tracing how it grew from a voluntary biblical gesture into a genuinely enormous, closely audited revenue stream tells […]

Death, Judgement Day, and Memento Mori Death in medieval England was neither a taboo subject nor something that people generally tried to ignore. The skeleton became a popular motif in tomb effigies and wall paintings under the theme of memento mori – however glorious and powerful you are in this world, this is what awaits […]

Gilds: The Closest Thing to a Backup Family If medieval English peasants did not have the extensive and complex social webs of obligation and association usually associated with large families, then what else might serve to satisfy such needs? One answer, which was available to many, was the parish social-religious gild, a voluntary association which […]

Ale, Taverns, and the Village Drink Problem Forget the picture of a purpose-built village inn. Most medieval ale was sold from a front room and that front room was often tended by a woman since brewing was overwhelmingly a female trade both for consumption and for sale. If you had a batch of ale ready, […]

Funerals Were Expensive, and Purgatory Terrified Everyone Dying in medieval England was costly to the families who survived them. It is evident from the surviving records that the burden of both money and conscience was a heavy one – but for the right price, families could make sure that even their soul would find its […]

A Medieval Elopement Scandal Every medieval marriage was not necessarily an arrangement based on land and wealth, as there were also cases of genuine love matches, although a particularly well-documented Norfolk gentry example serves as a cautionary tale about the lengths to which families would go to put an end to a “beneath you” romance. […]

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 […]