Monthly archives: September 2026

Death, Burial, and the Business of Dying Well Death in a medieval English parish followed a genuinely careful, deeply symbolic sequence of ritual — from the moment of burial itself right through to a full year of subsequent memorial services — reflecting a society that treated dying “well,” in the correct religious sense, as almost […]

Maud Heath and the Medieval Market Economy A sixty-foot column on a Wiltshire hilltop, topped with the sculpted figure of a small, determined woman clutching a shopping bag, commemorates a genuinely modest but lasting act of medieval infrastructure — and it began with nothing more than a widow’s weekly walk to sell eggs and butter. […]

Enclosure and ‘Organic Barbed Wire’ The enclosure of common land — hedging fields that had once been shared, open resources into private, exclusive pasture — was one of the most socially disruptive economic trends of the final decades of medieval England, and it earned itself a genuinely striking nickname among contemporaries: “organic barbed wire.” The […]

Improvised Medieval Cooking Fires Fixed kitchen hearths weren’t always practical, and the surviving pictorial record shows medieval households and travellers alike coming up with genuinely inventive portable heating solutions wherever a hot meal or a bit of warmth was needed away from the main fire. One French manuscript shows a solitary winter diner enjoying his […]

Medieval London’s Sewage Problem Medieval London had a sewage problem so severe it occasionally killed people outright — and the surviving records of exactly how Londoners tried (and often failed) to manage their own waste are simultaneously grim and darkly funny. In 1355, the Fleet Prison ditch — designed to run ten feet wide — […]

War Comes to the City Gates Towns rarely fought their own wars directly — they mostly funded, supplied, and occasionally suffered them, preferring to pay someone else to do the actual fighting whenever they possibly could. Merchants, even ones who could easily afford a full knight’s equipment, generally lacked the training to lead an actual […]

Feast Days and Public Spectacle Medieval town life ran on a genuinely dense calendar of feasts, processions, and public spectacle, and it’s worth remembering that religion and entertainment weren’t remotely separate categories the way they often are today. Bruges held thirteen processions a year; Venice, sixteen. Corpus Christi, authorised by papal bull in 1264, involved […]

Canons Regular and England’s Only Homegrown Order Not every medieval religious community fit neatly into the four great monastic orders — a whole separate category, the Canons Regular, blurred the line between cloistered monk and working parish priest, and England even produced its own entirely homegrown version of the concept. Canons Regular were priests who […]

The Medieval Bath (Such As It Was) One of the most persistent questions about medieval life is also one of the hardest to answer with any confidence: did people actually bathe? The honest answer from the records is a shrug, but a more interesting shrug than you might expect. There’s no systematic evidence for how […]