Category archives: Medieval

War Comes to the City Gates Towns rarely fought their own wars directly — they mostly funded, supplied, and occasionally suffered them, preferring to pay someone else to do the actual fighting whenever they possibly could. Merchants, even ones who could easily afford a full knight’s equipment, generally lacked the training to lead an actual […]

Feast Days and Public Spectacle Medieval town life ran on a genuinely dense calendar of feasts, processions, and public spectacle, and it’s worth remembering that religion and entertainment weren’t remotely separate categories the way they often are today. Bruges held thirteen processions a year; Venice, sixteen. Corpus Christi, authorised by papal bull in 1264, involved […]

Canons Regular and England’s Only Homegrown Order Not every medieval religious community fit neatly into the four great monastic orders — a whole separate category, the Canons Regular, blurred the line between cloistered monk and working parish priest, and England even produced its own entirely homegrown version of the concept. Canons Regular were priests who […]

The Medieval Bath (Such As It Was) One of the most persistent questions about medieval life is also one of the hardest to answer with any confidence: did people actually bathe? The honest answer from the records is a shrug, but a more interesting shrug than you might expect. There’s no systematic evidence for how […]

Candlemas, Lent, and the Rules of Fasting Candlemas and Lent together kicked off the most visually dramatic and dietetically demanding stretch of the whole medieval Church year — genuine hardship layered on top of genuine spectacle, and the details of both survive in surprisingly specific detail. Candlemas, on 2 February, marked the Virgin Mary’s ritual […]

The Castle Word That Became a Prison Word The word “dungeon” has a much less grim medieval origin than its modern meaning suggests, and the gap between the two tells you something real about how castles actually functioned as prisons — which is to say, mostly, they didn’t. “Donjon” originally referred to the large, secure, […]

When Trouble Came to the Cloister Even the most carefully enclosed monastery couldn’t always keep genuine trouble outside its own walls — and a handful of surviving incidents show real violence occasionally breaking directly into the supposedly sacred space of the cloister itself. At Chertsey Abbey in the fourteenth century, a thief snuck into the […]

Anatomy of a Medieval Town: Walls to Workshops From bath houses to bakeries, medieval towns packed a genuinely impressive range of building types into their walls — and several of them come with details odd enough to be worth stealing for fiction wholesale. Take the bridges. Urban bridges were rarely simple river crossings; many, like […]

How Many People Lived in Medieval England? England’s medieval population didn’t climb steadily upward the way a modern reader might assume — it went through a dramatic boom-and-bust cycle so severe that the country didn’t recover its 1300 population level again until 1750, a full 450 years later. The rough trajectory: about 2.5 million people […]

Women at Work: Blacksmiths and Bell-Founders Employers in medieval England were generally happy to hire women, for one blunt, unflattering reason: female labour was consistently cheaper than male labour for the same work, across essentially every trade open to them. Women couldn’t become priests, lawyers, or officially practise as physicians, but they turned out to […]