Monthly archives: August 2026

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 […]

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 […]