Category archives: Medieval

Rector, Vicar, or Chaplain? Sorting Out Medieval Clergy Titles “Rector,” “vicar,” and “chaplain” get used almost interchangeably in a lot of casual medieval fiction, which would have genuinely confused anyone actually living under the system, since the three titles marked real, meaningful differences in income, security, and status. A rector held the full “benefice” of […]

Master and Servant in the Medieval Kitchen The relationship between a medieval master or mistress and their household servants ran on a genuinely familiar mix of hierarchy, hard bargaining, and — more often than popular stereotype allows — real personal warmth, and the surviving correspondence between actual employers and staff captures both sides with disarming […]

The Twelve Days of Christmas, Medieval Style The medieval Twelve Days of Christmas, running from 25 December to 6 January (Epiphany), was a genuinely continuous stretch of celebration rather than the modern song’s countdown of escalating gifts — though the underlying spirit of extravagant, slightly exhausting festivity translates surprisingly well across the centuries. Christmas Day […]

Plows, Crop Rotation, and the Medieval Harvest Farming in medieval England was less a triumphant pastoral idyll and more a decades-long game of “how do we keep everyone alive until next year,” and the numbers explain why. Fields were worked under either a two-field system (half cultivated, half left fallow each year) or a three-field […]

Medieval Money 101: Livre, Sou, and Dernier Nothing kills a bit of medieval fiction faster than a character casually paying “fifty pounds” for a loaf of bread, so let’s sort out how money actually worked — and, importantly, why the answer changes depending on which side of the Channel you’re standing. England ran on pounds, […]

The Village Church and Its Secrets The village church gets cast, in most fiction, as a place people visit on Sundays and funerals and otherwise ignore. The reality was considerably livelier — and, frankly, a bit more useful. Every parish church needed at least one relic before it could even be consecrated, so somewhere in […]

Castle Design Through the Centuries Ask someone to draw a “medieval castle” and you’ll almost certainly get the same picture: tall stone towers, crenellations, maybe a drawbridge. What you won’t get is any sense that castle design actually evolved quite dramatically over four centuries, largely in response to who was trying to knock them down. […]

Inside a 13th-Century Manor House Let’s do a proper walkthrough of a 13th-century manor, using one particularly well-documented example — a bishop’s estate whose account rolls happened to survive in unusual detail. A manor wasn’t just “a big house.” It was a whole functioning settlement: one or more villages, a fortified dwelling for the landholder, […]

Getting, Keeping, and Losing a Fief Inheriting a fief sounds simple enough: wait for your father to die, collect the deeds, done. In practice, medieval landholding was less “here are the keys” and more “here is a small war waiting to happen.” The overwhelmingly normal way to get a fief was to inherit it or […]

What Is a Fief, Really? If you’ve ever pictured medieval England as a tidy pyramid — king at the top, dukes below him, then earls, then knights, then peasants, all standing in a neat org chart — I’m afraid we need to talk. Medieval people never drew that pyramid. We did. Centuries later. With hindsight […]