Monthly archives: August 2026

City Money: Public Debt and Urban Taxes Medieval town finances would look, on paper, weirdly familiar to a modern city council — building maintenance, public safety, the eternal headache of the budget — right up until you notice the bit about bonds sold to fund a daughter’s wedding. Italian city-states formalised citizen lending into a […]

A Merchant Family’s Lavish Medieval Funeral A medieval funeral was a genuinely fast-moving, torchlit affair, and the surviving accounts of one London merchant family’s mourning rituals show just how much money and social display could ride on getting the send-off right. With no cold storage, burial followed death within a day or two wherever possible. […]

Words That Meant Something Else Entirely Nothing marks you out as an outsider faster than getting the words wrong, and medieval English had a habit of using words to mean the near-opposite of what they mean today. Calling a woman “nice” was no compliment at all — it meant fussy, and described a wife who […]

Sieges, Chevauchée, and Life on Campaign Sieges in fiction tend to mean one dramatic battering-ram moment. Real medieval sieges were slower, grimmer, and considerably more about logistics than heroics. A siege typically opened with an offer of surrender terms and assorted threats rather than an immediate assault — if no terms were offered at all, […]

Board Games, Football and Medieval Pets Leisure in medieval England ranged from the genuinely gentle to the outright dangerous, and the surviving records of board games, football and pet-keeping give a real, textured sense of how ordinary people actually spent their time off — when they got any. Board games were more varied than the […]

The Cistercians: White Monks Who Wanted to Start Over The Cistercians, medieval Europe’s great monastic reform movement, began in 1098 as a genuinely deliberate act of protest — a group of French monks who simply walked away from a prosperous Benedictine abbey because they thought it had grown too comfortable, and ended up transforming the […]

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 […]