Monthly archives: August 2026

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 […]

Orphans, Stepparents, and Village Guardianship Given how routinely disease and accident could remove one or both parents, medieval English villages needed a working system for orphaned children — and they had one, even though it looked nothing like formal adoption, which simply didn’t exist as a legal concept. When a child inherited land but was […]

The Wild Man of Orford Castle In around 1165, fishermen off the coast of Suffolk reportedly caught something genuinely strange in their nets — a wild, hairy, naked man, unable or unwilling to speak, who was held prisoner at Orford Castle for months before eventually escaping back into the sea. The chronicler Ralph of Coggeshall […]

Managing Prostitution in Medieval Towns Medieval English towns handled prostitution with a genuinely uneasy compromise — officially condemned as sin, practically tolerated as an unavoidable fact of urban life, and managed through deliberate physical segregation rather than any serious attempt at outright suppression. Officially sanctioned “stews” (brothels) operated in specific licensed locations — Sandwich in […]

Medieval Legal Attitudes Toward Women The formal 1180 legal definition of a married woman — “every married woman is a sort of infant” — tells you almost everything about medieval English law’s baseline attitude toward women, and the practical consequences were genuinely far-reaching. On marriage, a woman’s property automatically passed to her husband’s control for […]