Category archives: Medieval

Monastic Vows of Chastity A monk’s vow of chastity was reinforced not just by rules and supervision, but by a genuinely rich body of cautionary stories and imagery — some of it surprisingly vivid, all of it designed to hammer home the same basic message to impressionable young novices. At Worcester Cathedral Priory, cloister glazing […]

Was 1553 Really the End of the Middle Ages? Was 1553 really “the end of the Middle Ages” in England? The honest, evidence-based answer is: not entirely, and not all at once — the transition was messier, slower and more contested than the tidy textbook date suggests. By the mid-16th century, genuine markers of change […]

Femmes Soles: Women Who Ran Their Own Businesses Most medieval Englishwomen who worked were legally “covered” by their husbands — meaning any contracts, debts, or legal responsibility from their trade technically belonged to him, not her. But a distinct category of women, the femmes soles, stood entirely outside that arrangement, running their own businesses under […]

Forests, Poachers, and the King’s Deer Every good medieval story needs a forest full of secrets, and it turns out the real medieval forest was already doing quite a lot of narrative heavy lifting on its own — mostly involving furious arguments about deer. England’s royal forests weren’t simply woodland; they included pastures, fields, and […]

Tournaments: Sport, Status, and Sudden Death Tournaments are one of those things everyone assumes they understand from films — knights, lances, “hurrah” — and almost none of that popular picture survives contact with the actual sources. Early tournaments, which became popular around 1170, were barely distinguishable from actual warfare: sharpened weapons, no “foul” strokes, no […]

Trespassing Your Way to a Better Living Beyond gathering firewood and gleaning grain, medieval villagers had a whole further toolkit of low-level, calculated rule-breaking that court records preserve in wonderful, petty detail — because the fines involved were consistently cheap enough to make the risk worth taking. Some tricks were almost comically direct: deliberately letting […]

Staging a Medieval Wedding Feast (or Funeral) Staging a proper medieval feast — whether a wedding, a funeral, or simply a grand annual dinner — meant coordinating a genuinely enormous supporting cast, and the detailed notes one elderly Parisian husband left for his very young bride give an almost step-by-step blueprint for exactly how it […]

Reading for Pleasure: Caxton’s Medieval Bestsellers By the late 15th century, a genuinely new leisure activity was quietly reshaping medieval England: reading for pleasure, made possible by William Caxton’s introduction of the printing press to the country in the 1470s. Caxton’s own choices as a publisher give a good sense of what a literate 15th-century […]

Why Nobody Loved Their House We like to imagine medieval peasants living out their days in the same cosy cottage their grandfather built, patched and loved for a hundred years. The archaeology says otherwise, and it’s a genuinely startling correction to make. Most peasant houses were built to last about one generation — roughly twenty […]

The Man of the House Who Loved to Cook It wasn’t remotely beneath a medieval man’s dignity to take a genuine, hands-on interest in what was cooked in his own household — quite the opposite, in fact, since food touched directly on both a family’s public standing and a husband’s own private comfort, and some […]