Author archives: martin

The Real Robin Hood(s) Robin Hood, as most people picture him, is a largely 19th- and 20th-century invention layered onto a much older, considerably stranger medieval legend — and the earliest genuine evidence points not to one heroic outlaw at all, but to dozens of real criminals who simply adopted his name as their own. […]

Medieval Paris: A Case Study Paris is the single best worked example of a “subject town” — genuinely split in its governance between the crown, the bishop, and the university, each pulling in a slightly different direction, and it’s worth a dedicated look on its own merits. The city sat on the Seine roughly 280 […]

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 — […]