Category archives: Medieval

The Rise of the Middling Sort Between the labourer’s hovel and the lord’s solar sat a genuinely new social layer by the later medieval period: the “middling sort” of town-dwelling merchants, craftsmen, and tradespeople, and their domestic lives are unexpectedly well documented through surviving wills. Most town houses, even modest ones, came with their own […]

Why So Many Medieval Children Shared a Name If you’ve ever tried to trace a medieval family and found three different “Johns” in the same household within a generation, there’s a good reason, and it isn’t the one most people assume. The standard historical guess has long been that children were named after their father […]

Life on the Road: Travel, Pilgrims, and Danger Getting from A to B in medieval England was, by any modern standard, a genuinely miserable undertaking — and worth remembering next time a story has a character casually ride cross-country in an afternoon. Roads were, in the source’s own blunt phrase, “little better than rutted tracks,” […]

A Widow’s Rights Were Better Than You’d Think A widowed peasant woman in medieval England wasn’t left destitute by law, whatever the popular image of the desperate, penniless widow might suggest. She had real, enforceable rights, and on many manors those rights went well beyond the legal minimum. Common law entitled a widow to a […]

Did Monks Actually Do Manual Labour? Did medieval monks actually do manual labour, or did they leave it to servants while they got on with praying? It depends on which order you ask — and which century. St Benedict’s original rule required monks to do physical work, partly to keep idleness at bay. By the […]

How the Medieval Church Ran Everyday Life Religion in medieval England wasn’t confined to Sunday mornings — it governed when you worked, what you ate, how you dressed, and even the permitted circumstances for sex, with a thoroughness that would make any modern surveillance state blush. Time itself ran on church bells, since almost nobody […]

What Travellers Ate at Medieval Inns A medieval traveller’s evening meal depended largely on where they stopped for the night — a rough tavern offering cold, salty snacks, or a proper inn equipped to serve a hot supper. Two continuations of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales offer an unusual window into the offerings of the better sort […]

Your Odds of Surviving a Medieval Battle Surviving a medieval battle came down to a mixture of luck, positioning, and — sometimes — surprisingly effective medical care afterwards. And the bodies excavated from battlefield graves tell a less hopeless story than you might expect. Massed archery and, later, cannon fire worked as an early form […]

The Church Calendar That Ran Medieval Life Medieval England measured its year by two overlapping calendars: the familiar months we use today, and a parallel Church calendar of seasons, fasts, and feasts so deeply woven into everyday life that people often saw little reason to date anything by the other. The liturgical year fell into […]

Churching: A Mother’s Return to Church After Birth Forty days after childbirth, a medieval Englishwoman returned to church in a rite the Church called “purification” but which everyone else by the fifteenth century simply called “churching” — a true celebration of safe delivery rather than the penitential ordeal suggested by its Old Testament roots. The […]