Monthly archives: September 2026

How English Lost (and Regained) Its Status The English language almost completely lost its status as a prestigious and powerful language after the year 1066. The process of returning to the position of a language fit for governance and intellectual exchange took about two centuries and is reflected in the current version of the language […]

How Many People Actually Went to Medieval Church? How many people actually turned up to a medieval English parish church on an ordinary Sunday? It’s a genuinely hard question to answer with real precision, but the surviving fragments of evidence — confession fees, communion headcounts, offering-day totals — provide a surprisingly vivid, if patchy, sense […]

What They Wore and What They Ate What people wore and ate is where medieval fiction most often gets it wrong: they all look like they’ve just come off the Renaissance fair’s main street, and everyone eats with a knife, fork, and spoon. Let’s fix both mistakes. Clothing was, first and foremost, a class marker: […]

Why Villeinage Declined Villeinage – the bondage of serfs to the land and their lord – is not easily extinguished. It is convenient to imagine that its passing was instantaneous and terminated abruptly with the ravages of the Black Death. In reality, villeinage was steadily undermined well before 1348 and persisted for another 150 years. […]

Bread, Milk and Cheese on a Peasant’s Table Bread, milk and cheese formed the genuine backbone of a peasant’s diet, and each came with its own set of small, practical problems that a resourceful cook had to solve, day in and day out, with almost no margin for waste. Grain had to be ground into […]

The Real Robin Hood(s) Robin Hood, as most people picture him, is a largely 19th- and 20th-century invention layered onto a much older, considerably stranger medieval legend — and the earliest genuine evidence points not to one heroic outlaw at all, but to dozens of real criminals who simply adopted his name as their own. […]

Medieval Paris: A Case Study Paris is the single best worked example of a “subject town” — genuinely split in its governance between the crown, the bishop, and the university, each pulling in a slightly different direction, and it’s worth a dedicated look on its own merits. The city sat on the Seine roughly 280 […]

Life Inside a Medieval Nunnery Medieval nunneries ran on broadly the same daily rhythm of communal prayer, reading and work as male monasteries — but they were, in several important and genuinely revealing respects, a fundamentally different institution, shaped as much by their exclusion from the priesthood as by any difference in spiritual ambition. There […]

Rogation Week: Beating the Bounds With a Dragon on a Pole Rogation Week, the week before Ascension Day, sent the whole parish physically outside the church walls for three consecutive days of penitential walking — genuinely long processions accompanied, at their grandest, by carved dragon effigies, banners, and relic caskets, deliberately timed to bless the […]

Buying a New Outfit in Medieval England Getting a new outfit made in medieval England was a genuinely slow, multi-stage process, and it involved rather more separate tradespeople than simply popping to a single shop. Early in the 14th century, clothes were at their most expensive because England exported almost all its raw wool rather […]