Monthly archives: July 2026

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 […]

You broke the Pre-Order Record! Just a brief update as I wanted to thank everyone who pre-ordered the latest book. We absolutely smashed it by launch day on the 14th with 290 pre-orders. That was a new record for the Draychester Chronicles series. Also a big thanks to anyone who left an Amazon review. Leaving […]