Category archives: Medieval

Baptism Within Hours: The Medieval Rush to the Font In a world where infant mortality was brutally high, medieval parents did not wait around before naming and baptising their newborns. A baby was typically baptised on the day it was born, or the next day at the latest, because its soul was believed to be […]

Hunting for Medieval Cooks in Art Medieval artists rarely knew quite what to do with cooks. When they appear at all, it is in the smallest of roles, so tracking them down means hunting through manuscripts, misericords, and stained glass. In the most unexpected places — the margins of manuscripts, where illuminators added their own […]

Brewing: The Original Female-Owned Small Business If any trade belonged to medieval women, it was brewing — and not as a domestic pastime, but as a genuine, capital-intensive small business, one of the few areas of enterprise largely run by women rather than by their fathers or husbands. Brewing ale on any real commercial scale […]

Foreign Bankers in Medieval English Towns Long before Lombard Street became a byword for London banking, the city’s very first dedicated financial trading house had already opened for business — run not by the Lombards people usually picture, but by merchants from the Tuscan city of Lucca. The Riccardi of Lucca set up shop in […]

The Myth That Peasant Teens Were Shipped Off As Servants There’s a persistent historical claim — repeated confidently by more than one respected scholar — that medieval English teenagers routinely left home around age ten to twelve to work as servants in someone else’s household until they married in their twenties. The evidence from the […]

Borrowing Money in Medieval England Debt in medieval England was not something to take lightly — particularly when the person who owed you money might be armed and living in a castle. According to the records, landholders were perpetually in debt. Medieval society prized generosity and looked down on thrift, so a prosperous landholder felt […]

Chapter House Meetings Alongside prayer, study, and work, every monk was expected to attend a daily meeting in the chapter house — so called because a chapter of the Rule of St Benedict was read aloud there each day. These meetings combined practical business with a good dose of humbling self-examination. The monks sat on […]

The Underwear Gap: What Men Wore That Women Didn’t One of the more surprising gender gaps in medieval clothing is the lack of underwear among women, attested to in an unexpected place — the clothing allowances laid down in monastic rule books. Men regularly wore some form of linen undershorts (usually referred to as breeches […]

The Surprising Property Rights of Anglo-Saxon Women Ask most people when English women lost a great many of their rights, and 1066 probably isn’t the first date that comes to mind. But the Norman Conquest was a real turning point for women — and not a good one. Before 1066, Anglo-Saxon women could be wealthy […]

What’s In a Medieval Surname? Before 1066, English personal names were genuinely varied and distinctively Anglo-Saxon — Ethelred, Wulfstan, Cutha, Hwituc. Within about two centuries, virtually all of them had vanished from common use, wiped out by a handful of imported Norman favourites, and the practical consequences of that collapse are still visible in modern […]