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 — was found so completely choked with the output of eleven latrines and twelve sewers that water had simply stopped flowing through it altogether. Some enterprising residents, faced with a full cesspool, resorted to piping their household waste directly into an unsuspecting neighbour’s cellar (two men were fined for exactly this in 1347). The most memorably grim case involves a Londoner known to history only as Roger the Raker, whose own backyard cesspit eventually filled to capacity, rotted through the floorboards of his privy above it, and drowned him in his own accumulated waste when he stepped onto the rotten boards.

None of this reflects official indifference, either — London’s authorities were genuinely trying to cope. The city built the Great Conduit by 1285 to supply clean water (its stone fountain house has since been excavated beneath modern Cheapside), employed street cleaners and dedicated “night-soil” collectors, and set up the Assize of Nuisances specifically to settle neighbour disputes over sewage and pollution. Even Edward III personally complained to the authorities about the stench rising off the Thames, warning it would bring disaster if left unaddressed. But the underlying problem — dense population, no coordinated sewage removal, drinking water drawn from the very same rivers used to dispose of waste — was simply beyond what medieval technology and administration could solve. It would take the better part of five more centuries, and a great deal more death, before anyone genuinely fixed it.

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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 military force, and preferred simply hiring mercenaries instead. Italian condottieri (mercenary captains) commanded genuinely eye-watering salaries — one earned 60,000 ducats a year in peacetime and 80,000 in war from Milan in 1467 alone, a sum that covered his soldiers and officers as well. Urban militias, when towns did raise their own forces, leaned toward crossbows and early handguns over longbows, precisely because they required far less training to use effectively — a sensible trade-off for part-time citizen-soldiers defending their own walls rather than professional archers on campaign.

A siege, ultimately, came down to a fairly grim calculation: whose food or health held out first. Even a town that chose to surrender rather than fight to the last could expect a degree of looting, pillaging, and assault regardless — the opposing commander’s promise to restrain his troops was, at best, a best-effort guarantee rather than an actual protection.

It’s worth remembering, when writing a besieged town in fiction, that the real drama very often wasn’t the storming of the walls at all — it was the desperate arithmetic of supplies, disease, and morale happening quietly behind them, long before any battering ram got involved.

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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 carrying a consecrated host through the streets in a strict procession running from least to most wealthy participant, ending with the clergy and the mayor — York’s accompanying cycle of religious plays became one of the great civic productions of the period, though the celebration could just as easily spark rivalry: guild members rioted during Chester’s 1399 Corpus Christi festivities.

Then there’s the Fête des Fous — the Feast of Fools, held on the eve of Lent — where groups of unmarried men in each neighbourhood elected a mock “king” to lead them through a night of thoroughly sanctioned drunken revelry. Paris took this to its logical extreme: butchers paraded their best fattened ox through the city streets, with a butcher’s own young child, dressed in finery and carrying a sword and sceptre, riding on its back as king or queen of the day, before formally presenting the ox to the mayor on the steps of the city hall to officially kick off Carnival.

The Church tried, repeatedly and mostly unsuccessfully, to rein in the Feast of Fools’ worst excesses — Innocent III attempted a ban in Polish churches in 1207, and the University of Paris had a go in 1400, with limited apparent success either time. It’s a lovely reminder that “medieval piety” and “medieval party” were very often the exact same event, just viewed from different angles.

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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 lived communally, like monks, while also carrying out genuine pastoral duties in the outside world — following a considerably less prescriptive rulebook, based on short letters by the fifth-century Bishop of Hippo, than the detailed daily instructions of St Benedict’s Regula. The Augustinians, arriving in England around 1106, grew into the largest such group, eventually running over two hundred houses including fifteen nunneries — the present-day cathedrals of Bristol, Oxford, Portsmouth and Southwark all began life as Augustinian foundations. A related, French-founded offshoot, the Arrouaisian Canons, adopted white habits in deliberate imitation of the Cistercians they admired, while the Trinitarian Canons pursued a genuinely distinctive charitable mission: raising ransom money specifically to free Christians kidnapped by pirates.

England’s own unique contribution was the Gilbertine order, founded by St Gilbert at Sempringham in Lincolnshire specifically to house canons and nuns together in “double” monasteries — a model the French Cistercians themselves declined to formally admit into their own order when Gilbert originally offered to hand his houses over to them. After Gilbert’s death in 1189, only two further nunneries were founded under his order’s rule, and the remaining new foundations shifted to canons alone — a genuinely rare case of an entirely English-invented monastic model that never quite achieved the wider international reach of its continental counterparts.

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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 often ordinary villagers washed their whole bodies, but there’s plenty of evidence that they did, at least sometimes, and mostly in the warmer months. A batch of coroners’ inquests records thirty-five people whose bathing ended in drowning — mostly in rivers, ponds, and streams during summer weather, which at least confirms that outdoor bathing was a real and unremarkable activity rather than a rarity worth remarking on for its own sake. One young harvest worker cooled off in a stream after a hot day’s labour, danced about to dry himself, and slipped back in. Shepherd boys stripped off to bathe while minding their flocks. In winter, warmed water in a basin or tub served the same purpose indoors.

What shows up far more consistently in the records is routine hand-washing before and after eating — people washing at a well or trough as an ordinary part of a meal, not a special occasion. Whatever the full-body bathing schedule actually was, keeping one’s hands clean at the table mattered enough to appear again and again in the incidental background of these cases.

The honest conclusion is that medieval peasants were neither the grimy caricatures of popular imagination nor secretly fastidious by modern standards — they washed when it was practical, sensible, and the weather cooperated, which is probably true of most people in most eras before hot running water existed.

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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 purification forty days after Christ’s birth, and required every parishioner, adults and children alike, to bring a candle to church for blessing — a Beverley guild dedicated to Mary went further still, with members dressing up as Mary, Joseph, Simeon, and angels to walk in torchlit procession through the streets to church. Roughly three weeks later, Ash Wednesday opened the forty days of Lent proper, marked by ashes painted onto every forehead in the shape of a cross while the priest intoned, “Remember, man, that you are ash, and to ash you shall return” — followed, at least in liturgical theory, by a formal ceremony expelling any serious public penitents from the church entirely until their readmission on Maundy Thursday, three days before Easter.

Lent’s dietary rules were genuinely comprehensive: no meat, no “white meats” (eggs, milk, butter, cheese), fish and shellfish the only permitted animal protein for the full forty days, with pregnant women, nursing mothers, children, manual labourers, the sick, the elderly, and travelling pilgrims all specifically excused from the fast entirely. A large hanging curtain, the “Lenten veil,” was strung across the chancel to physically block the high altar from view for most of the season — drawn back only on Saturday evenings so Sunday’s congregation could still see the consecration, then rehung again before Monday’s services resumed. And on the Wednesday before Easter, as the Passion story reached the words “the veil of the Temple was rent in the middle,” the Lenten veil was deliberately allowed to fall from its own hanging rail at exactly that moment — a genuinely well-timed piece of medieval liturgical stagecraft, landing the physical prop and the spoken text together in a single dramatic beat.

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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, vaulted cellar chambers underneath a castle’s central stone tower, or keep. These weren’t cells — they were storerooms, prized for how naturally secure and defensible their position was, and they typically held the food supplies a castle needed to survive a siege. Only much later did “donjon” narrow down into “dungeon” and pick up its current meaning of an underground prison cell.

That later meaning reflects a genuine historical shift rather than a simple word drift. Convicted criminals in the Middle Ages were mostly punished with fines, corporal punishment, or execution — imprisonment as an ongoing punishment in itself was uncommon, so castles held accused people only briefly while awaiting trial. The prisoners castles actually did house for extended periods were usually captured nobles being held for ransom, and they were treated as honoured, if unwilling, guests, lodged in quarters appropriate to their rank rather than shackled in a cell. The genuinely dark association between castles and torture chambers mostly traces to a few specific institutions used by the Inquisition starting in the thirteenth century, and it wasn’t until after the Middle Ages ended — once gunpowder artillery had made castles militarily obsolete — that European rulers began repurposing their thick stone walls on a large scale to keep people in rather than out.

For a story that wants a castle prison scene, the ransomed-noble-in-a-comfortable-suite version is the more historically accurate one — the grim oubliette comes largely from a later era.

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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 infirmary and was caught in the act by one of the sick monks — who also happened to be an ordained priest. Rather than simply raise the alarm, the priest climbed straight out of his own sickbed, seized a sword, and struck the intruder, who later died of his wounds; a subsequent investigation cleared the priest of any wrongdoing once it was decided the fatal blow had probably actually come from abbey servants who’d also joined the fight rather than from the priest himself. It’s a genuinely startling image — a bedridden monk turning swordsman mid-recovery — and a useful reminder that monastic enclosure was a legal and spiritual boundary, not a genuinely impenetrable physical one.

Natural disaster proved a far more constant threat than any individual criminal, though. Flooding and famine struck monasteries regularly across the medieval period, and from the fourteenth century onward, plague epidemics became a genuinely recurring institutional fear rather than a one-off catastrophe. At Meaux Abbey, the abbot and twenty-two of his monks all died within a few weeks of each other in August 1349, as the Black Death swept northward through England — a stark illustration that no amount of careful enclosure, discipline, or spiritual devotion could actually offer a monastic community any real protection once serious disease reached its gates.

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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 London Bridge (built 1176–1209, twenty arches, buildings three to six storeys high) and Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, had shops and homes built directly onto them. London’s Bridge Masters collected rent from the 140 buildings on the bridge itself and eventually came to own considerable land beyond it — one served an astonishing 23 consecutive years in the post. Cathedrals, meanwhile, were a genuine arms race: Laon reached 79 feet in 1194, Notre Dame hit 108 feet by 1163, Chartres beat that at 121 feet the very same year, and Amiens eventually topped out at 426 feet long. Beauvais tried to go even higher and paid for it — part of its vault collapsed in 1284, and the whole project limped on, interrupted by the Hundred Years War, for over three centuries.

Bath houses split firmly by class: proper bath houses were frequented mainly by nobility, higher clergy, and wealthy townspeople, while everyone else made do with “stews” — cheaper wooden tubs that, delicately put, often came with a prostitute’s services included. Many closed in the 14th century amid scandal.

And then there are mills: a town needed roughly one grain-mill wheel for every 600 to 1,200 inhabitants, and the church typically owned between half and three-quarters of a town’s mills outright — which tells you rather a lot about who was quietly making money off everyone else’s daily bread.

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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 in 1086 (Domesday Book), climbing to somewhere between 5.5 and 6.5 million by 1300 — genuinely comparable to England’s population in 1750 — before catastrophic harvests, livestock disease and, finally, the Black Death crashed the figure straight back down to roughly 2.5 million by 1377. It kept falling into the 15th century, possibly bottoming out around 2 million by 1450, and didn’t decisively climb past its 1377 level again until after 1520. Life expectancy followed an almost identical rollercoaster: Essex peasants in the 1390s could expect to live to about 54 on average, a genuinely respectable figure for the pre-modern world, but by the 1490s that had fallen back to 48, as repeated waves of infectious disease after 1348 took their steady toll.

The scale of this collapse is genuinely hard to overstate. England’s population growth essentially hit a hard ceiling around the 1300/1750 mark, and only the twin arrival of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions after 1750 finally broke through it — strong evidence that pre-industrial farming techniques and transport, however sophisticated they’d become by medieval standards, simply couldn’t sustain a larger population than that on a long-term basis. Four and a half centuries is a genuinely sobering amount of time for a society to spend clawing its way back to where it had already once stood.

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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 have a genuine presence in trades that might surprise a modern reader. Two separate London widows are documented taking over and successfully running their late husbands’ bell-foundries in the 15th century, one of them continuing the business for years — bells cast in that foundry’s workshop, bearing its maker’s mark, reportedly still survive in church towers across southern England today. Blacksmithing shows up too: one woman is recorded being paid to keep the royal forge at the Tower of London running and to sharpen the royal stonemasons’ tools while her husband was dead and her son away on campaign with the king. Another woman inherited and continued running her father’s architecture and stonemasonry business after his death from plague, keeping his (more famous) surname for professional reasons even after her own marriage, and was later commissioned to build an extravagant £100 royal tomb.

Because English surnames sometimes derived directly from occupation, and many trades had distinct feminine forms, an entire hidden vocabulary of women’s work survives purely in old tax and court records: throwster (female silk weaver), webster (female textile weaver), brewster (female brewer), baxter (female baker), lister or dyster (female dyer), and dozens more, some — like “fillister” — genuinely defeating modern historians’ attempts to pin down exactly what the job involved. Hucksters and tapsters, interestingly, became common enough occupations for women that the feminine form of the word eventually got applied to men doing the same job too, a rare instance of gendered vocabulary running in the opposite direction from usual.

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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 depicted a famous episode from the early life of St Wulfstan, the last Anglo-Saxon bishop, who reportedly threw himself into a bramble bush to physically quell his lust when a young woman threatened to make “a shipwreck of his chastity.” A surviving stained-glass panel from a German Cistercian abbey shows St Bernard of Clairvaux, in bed, shouting “Fures, fures!” (“Thieves, thieves!”) after a promiscuous innkeeper’s wife tried to seduce him. Meat was banned from the ordinary refectory partly on the theory that it stirred up physical desire, and homosexuality was treated as a genuinely serious offence, with senior monks specifically deputed to patrol the dormitory and latrines at night to prevent misconduct.

Despite all this institutional anxiety, the actual surviving disciplinary record suggests real transgressions were considerably rarer than the sheer volume of cautionary art and literature might imply: across the entire religious houses of Yorkshire between 1347 and 1540, only fifteen recorded cases of sexual impropriety survive. It’s a genuinely useful corrective to any lurid modern assumption about rampant medieval monastic misbehaviour — the fear and the imagery built up around chastity were clearly disproportionate to how often it was actually, demonstrably broken.

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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 were unmistakable: population climbing steadily again after two centuries of stagnation, the monastic system entirely dissolved, the Catholic ritual year dismantled in barely six years under Edward VI, and currency debasement so severe that Henry VIII earned the nickname “Old Copper-nose” once the thin silver wash on his coin portraits wore through to reveal the cheap metal beneath. Yet plenty of genuinely medieval structures persisted stubbornly alongside all this change. As late as 1525, roughly 60 per cent of English households were still effectively self-employed — almost exactly the same proportion as in 1300 — and it would take a great deal longer still before anything resembling a modern wage-earning economy became the norm rather than the exception.

Genuinely new departures were emerging too, tentative but real: the first recorded Africans in England since the Roman period (a trumpeter named John Blanc, paid by Henry VII in 1507, became the first black Londoner ever portrayed in art, at the 1511 Westminster Tournament); the first documented Roma communities, arriving from around 1505 and almost immediately targeted by discriminatory laws; and English ships beginning tentative exploratory voyages toward North America, a modest but genuine precursor of the much larger colonial project to come. Rather than a single clean break, what the evidence actually shows is a genuinely gradual, uneven, overlapping transition — deeply medieval structures persisting stubbornly alongside recognisably new ones, for decades on either side of whatever specific year a historian ultimately chooses to draw the line.

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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 their own legal responsibility, sometimes with spectacular results.

One of the best-documented examples is a wealthy London businesswoman who inherited both her father’s mercantile connections and, later, her husband’s trading interests, running an embroidery-supply business that employed out-workers rather than doing the stitching herself. Her commissions reached genuinely royal heights: a single embroidered bishop’s cope, commissioned by the king and gifted by the queen to the Pope in Rome, took a year to make and cost £100 — an eye-watering sum for the period. She also successfully fought a customs dispute after a shipload of her imported pepper and exotic spices was seized at Dover, using a royal writ that had already pardoned her outstanding customs duties against a separate debt the crown owed her, and won.

Official civic appointments for women were vanishingly rare, but not entirely unheard of. When the man responsible for collecting tolls on London Bridge — a genuinely complex job, since charges varied by cargo, owner, and carrier — died in 1433, his widow simply took over the role, apparently intended only as a temporary stopgap. She proved so efficient and trustworthy that she remained in the post for twenty years, collecting the city’s bridge revenues the entire time. It didn’t, unfortunately, open the door for other women to follow her into similar civic roles — but for two decades, London’s bridge finances ran entirely through one woman’s hands, by simple demonstrated competence rather than any change in the rules.

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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 even whole villages, all governed by their own dedicated laws and courts, entirely separate from the ordinary manorial system. Hunting or harming “venison” (the umbrella term for the big game animals — fallow deer, red deer, roe deer, and wild boar) without royal permission was strictly forbidden, and so, for good measure, was harming the trees and undergrowth that fed and sheltered them. You could get in trouble for disturbing a deer’s lunch.

The bureaucracy built around protecting these animals was genuinely elaborate: chief justices of the forest, itinerant justices who toured on an “eyre,” local wardens, and foresters-of-fee who tracked down poachers and criminals living rough in the woods. Offences were split between the verderers’ court (which handled minor matters and could fine up to four pence) and the far more serious eyre of the itinerant justices, which handled anything involving venison — and which, until 1217, could sentence poachers to death or maiming. After 1217 the going rate dropped to mere imprisonment or a fine, which is either progress or simply a sign that the crown had run out of patience for executing quite so many peasants over a deer.

If you’re plotting a story with a poacher hero, the stakes were entirely real, and so was the vast, resentful bureaucracy standing between him and dinner.

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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 forbidden tactics, and groups of knights quite happily ganging up to waylay a single opponent. The only rules that existed were about honouring refuges where a knight could rest and rearm, and capturing an opponent for ransom rather than simply killing him. Fatal accidents happened anyway — in 1095, Count Henri III of Louvain invited his own vassal Jocelyn of Vorst to joust against him, Jocelyn reluctantly agreed, and the resulting blow to the chest killed the Count outright. Awkward for everyone involved.

Over the following centuries, tournaments professionalised. Mêlée combats involving twenty to two hundred and fifty contestants gradually gave way to the individual joust; armour and weapons for the tournament field began to diverge sharply from what was actually useful in real combat, becoming heavier and more specialised; and by the 15th century, tournament armour had become so expensive that some wealthy knights had to have “loaner” armour made up for their guests. The English crown eventually tried hard to regulate the whole business — Edward I limited each competitor to three armed esquires in 1292, after decades of tournaments repeatedly collapsing into actual riots (the Boston fair of 1288 famously turned into one that burned down part of the marketplace).

Financially, it was a genuine gamble: winners could claim an opponent’s horse and armour, or a ransom, while an ageing knight who could no longer win found himself sliding, quite literally, into poverty. One surviving fabliau describes a knight who lived entirely off ransom money and fell into destitution the moment he got too old to keep winning — the medieval equivalent of a sportsman who never planned for retirement.

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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 animals through a gap in a hedge to graze on the lord’s crops, or driving livestock onto a field before the gleaning was officially finished. Others were quieter land grabs. One villager fenced off a piece of common meadow with a ditch and railings so his neighbours in two nearby settlements lost their traditional grazing rights there entirely, and was simply ordered to remove it once caught — no lasting punishment for the years of free use he’d already gotten. At one Surrey manor, twenty-one different men were found keeping cattle, pigs, and in some cases up to two hundred sheep on the lord’s own pasture without permission, for fines running to only a couple of pence each.

The pattern holds up remarkably consistently across the records: when a fine amounts to a few pence and the benefit gained is worth considerably more, rational peasants took the gamble, got caught some of the time, paid up cheerfully, and kept doing it. It wasn’t reckless lawbreaking so much as a shrewd cost-benefit calculation repeated across an entire village, year after year — exactly the kind of quietly self-interested, resourceful behaviour that made “grasping peasant” such a persistent stereotype in medieval literature, even as the same literature praised neighbourliness and charity in the next breath.

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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 was done.

Known to English readers today simply as “the Goodman of Paris,” he explained that a host with the right money and connections could hire virtually anything needed for a big event — even the venue itself, renting a grander house than his own from some absent nobleman for the occasion. A cook could be engaged complete with his own crew, responsible in turn for hiring the porters, water-carriers, and even security to keep out gate-crashers. A separate, trusted household officer went shopping alongside the cook specifically to prevent the two of them colluding to pad the bills — a genuine, recognised risk the Goodman warns about repeatedly, citing real cases of dishonest servants who inflated prices and pocketed the difference. Decorations, sauces, and sweets could all be ordered ready-made from specialists: candied orange peel and rose sugar from the spicer, garlands from a professional chaplet-maker, even cheese wafers bought in ready-baked rather than made at home.

One small, thrifty detail rounds out the picture nicely: leftover candle stubs from the feast were carefully collected and returned to the wax chandler afterward, who melted them down into fresh candles and knocked a little off the price of the next order in exchange — proof that even the most lavishly staged medieval feast still kept half an eye on the household accounts the morning after.

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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 audience actually wanted to read. In 1481 he published a beast-fable collection about a cunning fox, intended as a moral lesson about avoiding life’s “daily deceptions” but reading, in practice, as pure comic entertainment — a medieval ancestor of the kind of trickster-versus-pursuer cartoon slapstick that would still be making audiences laugh five centuries later. For readers after something more sweeping, Caxton also printed a landmark collection of King Arthur legends, compiled by an English knight and drawing together familiar figures — Arthur, Guinevere, Merlin, Lancelot — alongside less universally remembered ones like Tristram, Isolde, and Sir Bedevere, written in English despite its French title.

For a slightly racier taste, an English translation (by Geoffrey Chaucer himself, no less) of a 13th-century French “handbook for lovers” — an allegorical dream-narrative wrapped around a genuinely bawdy core — had already been circulating in manuscript form for a century by the time printing arrived, and remained popular enough to survive in several lavishly illuminated copies. Taken together, these bestsellers make a rather charming point: for all the religious duty and gruelling manual labour that structured most of medieval daily life, by the century’s end there was a real and recognisable reading public chasing exactly the same things modern readers still chase — trickster comedy, sprawling legendary adventure, and a decent romance.

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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 years — before they were simply abandoned and a new one put up. Not on the same spot, either, and not even facing the same direction: excavated village sites show houses rotated by ninety degrees, moved to a different corner of the plot, sometimes flipped entirely, generation after generation. The old structure, rather than being lovingly preserved, usually just became a shed for the animals or the plough.

Part of this was pure practicality. Timber-framed, wattle-and-daub houses with thatched roofs and no foundations simply didn’t last. Once damp got into the mud walls they began to dissolve, and a family inheriting a decayed house often had two years, by manorial custom, to knock it down and start again. But there’s a more interesting explanation lurking underneath the practical one: sons inheriting the tenancy don’t seem to have minded starting fresh. There’s no sign in the records of grief over losing the house one grew up in, no clause in wills protecting the ancestral walls.

What people were fiercely attached to was the land itself — the strips in the open field, the croft, the family name attached to a particular holding for generations. Home, in other words, wasn’t a building. It was wherever the hearth happened to be pitched that decade. A useful thing to remember next time a story leans on a character’s misty-eyed devotion to the house their father built: the house probably wasn’t there anymore, and nobody much cared.

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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 of our best surviving evidence for medieval cooking comes precisely from men who cared enormously about getting it right.

Francesco Datini, a wealthy Italian merchant, left behind genuinely detailed instructions for exactly the dinner he expected on arriving home: “A good broth with fat cheese of one kind or another to eat therein… eggs, fish… and many good figs and peaches and nuts… and look to it that the table be well laid and the room well cleaned.” He was fussy about ingredients too, once instructing a servant buying veal to specifically ask for “fine veal for that gentleman from Prato” to ensure good service, and there’s even a hint in his letters that he occasionally cooked a little himself. The Goodman of Paris showed an identical hands-on streak in the guide he compiled for his young wife, right down to warning her how to spot watered-down milk: “Say to the woman who shall sell it to you that she give it not to you if she have put water therein… it will turn.”

Men also had a practical reason for this interest that women of the household often lacked: they were the ones most likely to travel, and so the ones expected to bring back genuine treats from further afield. A young wool merchant regularly returning from business trips to Calais brought his mother preserved ginger and saffron on one occasion, and six sugar loaves and a dozen pounds of currants for a colleague on another — proof that even hard-headed businessmen kept half an eye on the family shopping list while away.

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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 too young to hold it, the manorial court typically assigned a guardian the use of that land specifically in exchange for housing, feeding, and raising the child until they came of age. These arrangements were often quite deliberately self-interested and forward-planning: a common structure had the guardian using the orphan’s land for a fixed number of years, at the end of which the orphaned heir — frequently now old enough to marry — would wed one of the guardian’s own children, neatly merging the two households’ interests and land. One case shows a man granted guardianship of three orphaned girls’ land for six years, on explicit condition that the eldest marry a specific young man once the term was up.

Stepparents were common too, given how often widowed parents remarried, and the records show the full emotional range you’d expect: some genuinely affectionate wills treat stepchildren identically to a testator’s own children, splitting bequests evenly between them, while other cases turn genuinely violent, including at least one recorded incident where a mother’s own children by her first marriage killed her second husband after he pushed her to sell off property that would otherwise have gone to them.

There was no formal legal category equivalent to modern adoption, but there was clearly no shortage of practical, community-enforced mechanisms for making sure an orphaned child with land didn’t simply fall through the cracks — even if the guardian’s motives weren’t always purely charitable.

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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 wrote it up roughly forty years later, and the way he tells it says almost as much about medieval attitudes as the “merman” himself.

According to Ralph’s account, the man ate whatever food he was given (squeezing raw meat between his hands to drain out the juice first), retreated to bed at sunset without fail, showed no reaction whatsoever inside a church, and — when guards grew curious about what language he might speak — was tortured, including being hung up by his feet, in an effort to make him talk. He never did. Eventually allowed into the sea under heavy guard with three lines of nets strung around him, he simply dived under them repeatedly before finally escaping for good. Ralph himself couldn’t decide what he’d actually been: “a mortal man, or some fish pretending human shape, or an evil spirit hiding in the body of a drowned man” — and then, almost as an afterthought, notes that “so many wonderful things of this kind are told by many to whom they happened,” as though this was simply one report among many similarly strange stories reaching him.

What’s most striking, reading it now, isn’t really the mystery of who or what the man was — it’s how completely unremarkable Ralph finds the torture itself, recorded without a flicker of moral comment, purely as an interesting detail in an already strange tale. It’s a small but genuinely useful reminder that medieval chroniclers weren’t neutral, dispassionate journalists by modern standards, however much their surviving accounts can read that way at first glance.

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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 Kent, Cock Lane near Smithfield in London, and above all Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames, where the trade sat under the direct legal authority of the Bishop of Winchester, who collected rent from the brothel-keepers on his land. This gave rise to the enduring nickname “Winchester geese” for the prostitutes themselves. Local ordinances tried to keep the trade at least nominally orderly: brothel-keepers had to be male, women were required to stay with a client the whole night to avoid being accused of illicit “night-walking,” and unlicensed operators working outside the designated zone faced the pillory. Street names still echoing this history — variants on “Grope Lane” turn up in Bristol, London, Oxford, Southampton and York, invariably clustered near markets and shops.

The tolerance had real limits, though, and those limits tightened sharply through the 15th century. Behaviour that had gone largely unremarked before 1400 came under increasingly harsh official scrutiny: Coventry’s 1492 ordinances targeted barmaids and alewives suspected of doubling as prostitutes, and Gloucester’s 1500 regulations ordered both prostitutes and their clients placed on public display in the marketplace. This wasn’t really about prostitution suddenly becoming more common — it reflected a wider shift in how urban authorities thought about moral regulation, with local secular courts increasingly taking over responsibility for policing sexual behaviour that earlier generations would simply have left to the Church courts entirely.

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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 as long as he lived. Canon law permitted a husband to beat his wife if he judged her “lazy or disobedient” — not, in fairness, an unlimited licence, since manor court records show neighbours did sometimes intervene when violence seemed excessive, but a real and legally sanctioned power all the same. A wife’s infidelity was judged far more harshly than a husband’s (for the straightforward biological reason that pregnancy made a woman’s infidelity visible in a way a man’s rarely was), and words like “womanish” and “effeminate” functioned as genuine insults against men — Edward II’s perceived effeminacy was actually cited as a contributing factor in the plot that eventually overthrew and killed him in 1327.

Women were formally barred from university, from holding responsible government or legal roles, and — under a 1215 legal reform — even from bringing most criminal accusations to court in their own name, except for a narrow set of cases: their husband’s murder (but only if he died in her arms), the loss of an unborn child, and rape. Manor court records also preserve a wonderfully petty running theme of women fined for “scolding and quarrelling” — one 1449 Yorkshire case shows two women repeatedly fined for arguing with the same third woman, who was in turn fined for arguing back with both of them, a small but vivid snapshot of ordinary village friction being formally logged and monetised by the manorial court system.

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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 genuine public-debt instrument called the monte, which issued shares in the community’s debt paying a fixed rate of interest — Venice’s monte Vecchio paid a steady 5% in 1270 and, by 1313, owed investors over a million ducats. A close relative, the monte delle doti (dowry fund), let families deposit a lump sum in anticipation of a much larger payout at their daughter’s marriage — Florence created the first one in 1424, with interest rates running as high as 21% over a seven-and-a-half-year term, a startlingly modern-looking savings product wrapped around a thoroughly medieval purpose.

Taxes, meanwhile, fell unevenly and everyone involved seemed to know it. English poll taxes graduated sharply by class — 4 pence per head in 1377, but by 1379 the rate ran from 4 pence at the bottom right up to 6 pounds 13 shillings for bishops — and by 1380–81 had flattened again into a blunt, resented mean of about 1 shilling per person over fifteen. The burden landed hardest on small shopkeepers, artisans, and modest landholders, who owned just enough easily-valued property to be taxed but lacked the wealth or connections to wriggle out of it — a genuinely direct line runs from this specific tax policy to the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt.

Public debt and grievance-driven tax revolt: not, it turns out, purely modern inventions.

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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. The body was washed by the household’s women, anointed and blessed by a priest, wrapped in a shroud, and — before roughly 1300 — carried to the graveyard on an open bier rather than in a coffin, in a torchlit, men-only procession after dark. Because news travelled slowly and distant relatives often couldn’t reach the funeral in time, a “month-mind” memorial feast was held four weeks later specifically to let them catch up and pay their respects properly.

A prominent family of London wool merchants left detailed accounts of exactly this kind of staged mourning through the 1480s. For the month-mind feast after the family patriarch’s death, they hired a cook and two spit-boys for a shilling, but splashed out on a professional butler as well, purely to impress the assembled guests. A full year later, at the “year-mind” feast marking the anniversary and formally ending the mourning period, the same cook was rehired at a considerably higher fee — evidently worth it, since the family brought him back again for the next family funeral, this time employing a friend purely to source wild fowl, meats, and spices from named London tradesmen and to hire sixteen full sets of pewter dishes for the occasion.

By London custom, once a husband’s debts and funeral costs were settled, his remaining estate split cleanly into thirds: one to the Church and charity, one to his widow, and one shared among the children — a formula that, in more than one recorded case, left an enterprising widow remarkably well provided for.

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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 nagged and found fault with everything. Calling a child “naughty” was far worse than it sounds now: the word meant “nothing, not even human,” and was reserved for murderers and rapists, not disobedient toddlers. A clever child, confusingly, was “silly” — meaning sweet and innocent. Praising a friend’s cooking or poetry as “amazing” wasn’t flattering either; it meant bewildering and confusing, as if lost in a maze, while “astounding” implied something had literally hit you hard enough on the head to see stars.

Beyond vocabulary, accent and language marked you out just as sharply. Ordinary English sounded almost foreign by modern standards; churchmen, lawyers, and scholars conducted their business in Latin; and royalty and nobility spoke a form of French well into the 14th century, a fading but still-prestigious mark of good breeding. Strangers, foreigners (from a different county), and aliens (from a different country) were automatically the first suspects whenever anything went wrong locally — missing sheep, a dried-up stream, any unexplained misfortune. During the 1381 Revolt of the Commons, Flemish immigrants living in London became a particular target for mob violence, in part because they’d originally been invited over specifically for their weaving skills; it was said that anyone unable to pronounce “bread and cheese” correctly must be Flemish, and was fair game for the crowd on that basis alone.

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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, the attacker could simply pillage and slaughter at will, which gave both sides a strong incentive to negotiate first. A defender might promise to surrender if no relieving force arrived within a set period, commonly one to three months, buying time for a rescue while avoiding the worst consequences of a forced storming. If talks broke down, the attacker moved on to filling ditches, battering walls, and building siege engines, while the defenders responded with their own engines, boiling oil and water, and small raiding parties slipping out through side gates.

Disease, rather than combat, was often the real killer on both sides — in one 1415 siege, dysentery reportedly killed more people than the actual fighting, not helped by the fact that neither side generally had enough cooks to stop starving, exhausted troops from eating half-cooked meat and spoiled bread.

Then there’s the chevauchée — the deliberately unglamorous alternative to a siege, a raid of “fire and sword” designed to pacify a region by simply destroying its crops and buildings rather than capturing anything at all. It’s brutally cost-effective: the raiding army essentially supplies itself from whatever it plunders along the way, no expensive siege engines required. A landholder caught in its path had grim options — retreat to a castle and watch the surrounding fields burn, or try to bribe the raiders to go and ruin someone else’s harvest instead, a “truce” that rarely lasted long before the raiders came back for a second payment.

Real medieval warfare, in short, was mostly about mud, patience, and starving people out — not a single glorious charge.

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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 usual chess-and-draughts assumption suggests: Nine Men’s Morris boards, using holes rather than lines, survive carved into cathedral cloister seats at Canterbury, Gloucester, Norwich and Salisbury, and even into a church pillar in Chester — quite literally graffiti left by bored medieval clergy. Chess itself reached England from Spain by around the 12th century, evolving gradually into something close to the modern game by about 1475. Football, by contrast, was closer to organised chaos than sport in any modern sense: a Gloucester Cathedral carving from the early 14th century appears to show players using hands as well as feet, injuries (including a visibly broken arm in the same image) were common enough to be unremarkable, and London banned the game outright in 1314 with essentially no effect on actual play — a 1333 County Durham manor court record shows officials struggling for months just to get residents to name the players still defying an earlier ban.

Pet-keeping, meanwhile, was a genuinely widespread and cross-class habit: dogs, cats, red squirrels, rabbits and tame songbirds were common, with genuinely exotic choices for the wealthy — Edward I’s queen, Eleanor, kept a pair of parrots, and a 13th-century Bishop of Durham was noted for personally feeding his two pet monkeys peeled almonds. One 14th-century priest complained that many of his fellow clergy clearly cared more for their pets than for the actual souls in their care — a grumble that, however unfair to any individual priest, does at least confirm that plenty of medieval clergymen were keeping pets in the first place.

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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 entire shape of Western monasticism within a single lifetime.

The breakaway group settled at Cîteaux, near Dijon, and after a charismatic later leader, St Bernard, founded a daughter house at Clairvaux, a formal set of shared guidelines bound every new Cistercian abbey to identical practices — complete with an annual inspection (“visitation”) from the founding abbey and an annual gathering of every Cistercian abbot at Cîteaux itself, the “general chapter.” Unlike the Benedictines’ black habits, Cistercians wore undyed white wool, a deliberate emphasis on poverty that led one contemporary to compare a gathering of them to “a flock of sea-gulls.” Early Cistercian churches were correspondingly austere — coloured glass, carpets and wall paintings were initially banned outright as wasteful indulgence — a stark contrast to the richly decorated Benedictine and Cluniac interiors of the same period.

The order’s growth was genuinely explosive: from its first English house at Waverley in 1128 (with a Welsh foundation at Tintern following in 1131), Cistercian abbeys spread rapidly to Rievaulx and Fountains in Yorkshire and beyond, absorbing an entire smaller reforming order (the Savignacs) along the way in 1147. By the later Middle Ages, though, the original sharp differences with the Benedictines — including disagreements over decorative art — had genuinely softened, with plenty of later Cistercian churches embracing exactly the kind of ornamentation their founders had originally rejected.

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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 a parish outright — every scrap of its land, tithes, and revenue, with no one standing between him and the money. A vicar existed specifically because wealthy institutional patrons — bishops, monasteries, cathedrals, later university colleges — were legally permitted to make themselves rector of a parish and simply pocket its most valuable asset (the “great tithes” of grain) while installing a resident deputy, the vicar, to actually do the pastoral work on a fixed, bishop-assessed stipend. Counterintuitively, this didn’t automatically make vicars poorer than rectors — plenty of rectories were themselves thin and unappealing precisely because a benefice needed real income to be worth splitting between an absent patron and a resident deputy in the first place.

Below both sat the chaplain: hired and fired at will, with no security of tenure, no formal confirmation from the bishop, and generally the lowest pay and status in the entire clerical hierarchy. Chaplains covered the gaps the system left behind — running chapels-of-ease, standing in for an absent rector or vicar, or serving the countless privately funded chantries and guilds that wanted a daily mass said for the souls of their founders. A single Dorset deanery survey from 1535 shows exactly how wide the income gap actually ran: two vicars scraping by on the bare minimum £8 a year, most incumbents comfortably on £10 to £20, the wealthiest rector pulling in over £41 — while an ordinary chaplain, in the same period, might be legally capped at barely £4 to £6. Same collar, wildly different bank balance.

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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 honesty.

One book of practical household advice warns bluntly that hired helpers are “commonly tiresome, rough and prone to answer back… and ready to break into insults and reproaches if you do not pay them what they ask when the work is done” — advice on managing awkward staff that would sound entirely unremarkable in any modern management handbook. Genuine domestic flashpoints survive too: Margaret Paston complained in a 1459 letter that the family’s newly hired steward flatly refused to keep the daily household accounts the way the Pastons always had, insisting on his own weekly method instead and seeing no reason to change. Yet warmth ran alongside the friction just as clearly. One Italian merchant, deeply fond of guinea-fowl and convinced of their health benefits, sent six of the birds to a sick servant with the brisk, affectionate instruction: “Look to it that you eat them, for you could eat naught better, or more wholesome, and I will go on purveying them for you.”

The Goodman of Paris captured the expected balance neatly in his advice to his young wife: hire and manage the servants firmly, but “if one of your servants fall ill… take thought for him full lovingly and kindly.” Distance and authority were expected, certainly — but so, evidently, was a genuine sense of mutual obligation running in both directions.

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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 itself opened with Mass and the reciting of Christ’s genealogy by candlelight, followed by feasting that formally ended the four-week Advent fast — a beginning rather than a climax, since the celebrations properly built from there. Subsequent days carried their own dedicated meanings: St Stephen (26 December), St John the Evangelist (27th), Holy Innocents’ Day (28th, commemorating the children killed by Herod), and New Year’s Day, reframed by the Church as the Feast of Christ’s Circumcision specifically to distance it from older midwinter customs — Archbishop Wulfstan was condemning “heathen rites” associated with the date as early as 1008. Villeins were excused from working the lord’s land throughout the Twelve Days, and lords traditionally provided a feast for their tenants, though on plenty of manors this was more a genuine bring-and-share affair, with villeins expected to contribute food themselves.

Holy Innocents’ Day developed one of the period’s most charming customs: the election of a “Boy Bishop,” a choirboy given the honour (and, at cathedrals like Winchester and York, the actual duty) of leading Mass for the day — first recorded at Salisbury in 1222, with a small ceremonial mitre purchased for the role by 1225. Households and royal courts also chose a “Lord of Misrule” (sometimes a “Bean King,” selected by whoever found a hidden bean baked into a cake) to preside over a day of deliberate role-reversal and licensed chaos — a tradition that lasted at the royal court right up until 1553, when the accession of the more austerely Catholic Mary Tudor quietly ended it, more for its association with the previous regime than for any real theological objection.

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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 rotation (a third wheat, a third barley or other crops, a third resting), with the fallow ground doing quiet, invisible work: grasses growing on it pulled nitrogen from the air back into the soil, ready for the next planting. Even the fallow field wasn’t idle, though — it got ploughed twice, once to turn under the previous crop’s residue and weeds, once again to aerate it. Nobody was getting a year off in medieval agriculture, least of all the soil.

The choice of plough mattered more than you’d think. Wheeled ploughs worked nicely in light soil but clogged in heavy clay; foot ploughs did the reverse; hook ploughs were the tool of choice for stiff ground or uneven terrain, since the smaller ploughshare shrugged off roots and stones more easily. Farmers also switched ploughs by season — foot ploughs for damper winter soil, wheeled ploughs once summer dried things out.

And the payoff for all this careful management? Before improvements kicked in, a typical yield was just four to five bushels harvested for every bushel of seed sown — compare that to twenty-times yields in the modern Netherlands, and you start to appreciate exactly how thin the margin between “adequate harvest” and “famine” really was. One bad summer, one flood, one outbreak of livestock disease, and the whole careful system tipped straight into crisis. It’s not melodrama when a medieval novel treats a poor harvest as a genuine catastrophe — it’s just arithmetic.

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Medieval Money 101: Livre, Sou, and Dernier

Nothing kills a bit of medieval fiction faster than a character casually paying “fifty pounds” for a loaf of bread, so let’s sort out how money actually worked — and, importantly, why the answer changes depending on which side of the Channel you’re standing.

England ran on pounds, shillings, and pence — twelve pence to a shilling, twenty shillings to a pound — the same basic structure that survived, remarkably, right up until decimalisation in 1971. Cross into northern France, though, and the same three-tier structure reappears under different names: the livre, the sou, and the denier, with twelve denier to a sou and twenty sou to a livre. The pound itself often wasn’t a physical coin at all, in either country; it was more of an accounting notation, a tidy way of keeping the books rather than something you could actually drop in a well and wish upon. In practice, the actual coins jangling in anyone’s purse varied hugely in value depending on their metal content and how much silver had been quietly shaved off the edges by the last three people who handled them.

Things got messier still during the Hundred Years War, when England and France both experienced a wave of coinage debasement — essentially, governments quietly making coins with less actual silver in them to stretch their money further, a medieval version of printing more banknotes. The English penny had managed to hold its silver content steady (92.5%, weighing about 1/240 of a pound) from 1279 all the way to 1344 — genuinely impressive fiscal discipline for the period — before being reduced in stages: a fifth less by 1351, another sixth by 1412, another fifth by 1464. France’s own coinage went through comparable rounds of debasement over the same period, driven by much the same wartime pressure on the treasury.

The practical upshot for anyone writing medieval fiction: a coin in 1250 was not worth the same as the same coin in 1400, prices genuinely did creep up as currencies were quietly debased, and any character handling money — English or French — would have been half-consciously assessing whether the coin in front of them was full weight or a clipped disappointment. It’s the medieval equivalent of checking your change twice.

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The Village Church and Its Secrets

The village church gets cast, in most fiction, as a place people visit on Sundays and funerals and otherwise ignore. The reality was considerably livelier — and, frankly, a bit more useful.

Every parish church needed at least one relic before it could even be consecrated, so somewhere in that unassuming stone building was a saint’s bone, a scrap of cloth, or — if the parish was feeling ambitious — a “mysterious statue of the Virgin” that had supposedly washed ashore or been found while ploughing. Inside, a small chest held the good stuff: a gold or silver chalice, a paten, an alms basin, cruets, candlesticks, and altar linens, most of which the priest brought out only when actually needed and otherwise kept locked away, because medieval villages had thieves too.

But the church wasn’t just a treasury with a spire. It was the closest thing a village had to a community centre. It hosted markets, served as an occasional courtroom, held weddings and dower exchanges at its door or porch, and was the venue of choice for dancing, wrestling, banquets, and religious plays. Merchants sometimes set up booths inside it and slept there overnight to guard their goods — which tells you a lot about medieval property crime, and rather less about medieval reverence for sacred space.

There’s a dark footnote too: unwanted newborns were sometimes left on the church porch or in the graveyard, in the hope that someone — anyone — might take them in.

So: less “quiet Sunday obligation,” more “village hall, courthouse, market, and social club, with occasional actual church services.” The multi-use community space, thirteen centuries early.

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Castle Design Through the Centuries

Ask someone to draw a “medieval castle” and you’ll almost certainly get the same picture: tall stone towers, crenellations, maybe a drawbridge. What you won’t get is any sense that castle design actually evolved quite dramatically over four centuries, largely in response to who was trying to knock them down.

It starts with the motte-and-bailey, the 11th-century classic: an artificial hill (the motte) built from stone, earth, and rubble, topped with a wooden or stone tower, the whole thing ringed by a wooden fence, hedges, and ditches. They were quick to build — a 30-foot motte could be raised by 50 men in 40 days — which made them the flat-pack furniture of medieval fortification: fast, functional, not especially glamorous.

The shell keep, arriving in the late 11th century, looked like a stone doughnut from above: outer walls with storerooms and living quarters built into them, wrapped around a central courtyard. Some got a second ring of walls, towers, gatehouses, and a portcullis for good measure.

Then came the circular keep in the 12th century, and this is where the Crusades start showing up in the architecture. Crusaders came home with ideas borrowed from fortresses in the Holy Land — large round stone towers with thick walls, supplemented by rectangular halls, kitchens, chapels, and craft buildings, plus a proper two-to-three-storey gatehouse behind a ditch and drawbridge. They also brought back “archer’s loops”: narrow slits, wider on the inside than the outside, designed to let a defender shoot out while giving an attacker almost nothing to aim at.

So the next time a fantasy castle in a book or film has archer’s loops on a motte-and-bailey mound, know that somewhere, a medieval architect is quietly judging the anachronism.

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Inside a 13th-Century Manor House

Let’s do a proper walkthrough of a 13th-century manor, using one particularly well-documented example — a bishop’s estate whose account rolls happened to survive in unusual detail.

A manor wasn’t just “a big house.” It was a whole functioning settlement: one or more villages, a fortified dwelling for the landholder, a church or chapel, mills, ovens, fields, forest, and at least one water source (ideally running water, for reasons that will become obvious to anyone who’s read about medieval sanitation). This particular manor’s set-up started as a classic motte-and-bailey, with a stone keep containing a barracks, well, armoury, and stores, all protected by a ditch and a bridge that could be pulled up in a hurry.

By the 13th century it had grown an outer stone wall, three turrets, a square tower, a round tower, and two gates — a proper upgrade from “wooden fort on a hill.” Inside, the main hall measured a genuinely impressive 66 by 43 feet, lit at night by wax candles in iron holders, its walls hung with tapestries for formal dinners (and, rather less glamorously, used to hang hog carcasses from when the bishop wasn’t in residence — waste not, want not).

The bailey, meanwhile, was the working end of the operation: a cluster of wooden buildings including a bakery, brew house, dairy, dovecot, dyer’s house, kennels, mews, stable, and smithy. Two granges held hay and grain — one could store sixty meadows’ worth of hay, conveniently enough for a single royal visit, should the king ever drop by unannounced (he wouldn’t, but you’d want to be ready).

It’s a useful corrective to the “castle equals fairy-tale palace” image: a working manor was closer to a self-sufficient village with excellent security than a stately home.

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Getting, Keeping, and Losing a Fief

Inheriting a fief sounds simple enough: wait for your father to die, collect the deeds, done. In practice, medieval landholding was less “here are the keys” and more “here is a small war waiting to happen.”

The overwhelmingly normal way to get a fief was to inherit it or marry into it — widows and children of a landholder were often given rights to support themselves from the estate. Getting land as an outright gift was rare, and when it did happen it tended to come with faintly absurd conditions: a rose, a few pounds of pepper, a sparrow hawk, or an egg, handed over annually as a symbolic “rent.” Somewhere out there, a medieval bailiff spent his career collecting eggs from a minor knight and calling it estate management.

You could also land a fief by being appointed to an office that came with attached land — a castellan or bailiff managing property for the crown or a bishop — or, in the classic underhand method, by backing the winning side in a war. The Norman Conquest of 1066 is essentially this tactic executed at continental scale.

Losing a fief was rather more varied. There were three respectable routes: military defeat, dying without heirs, or forfeiture for disloyalty or heresy. Dying without heirs turned out to be surprisingly hard to achieve, since “heir” stretched to children, siblings, parents, aunts, uncles, and cousins — reversion to the landholder for lack of anyone at all mostly happened during genuine catastrophes like the Black Plague. Fiefs on contested borders also had a habit of simply being captured and occupied by the nearest hostile army, with the original landholder restored if and when someone won it back.

For a novelist, this is gold: every fief is one bad harvest, one lost battle, or one childless marriage away from changing hands entirely.

What Is a Fief, Really?

If you’ve ever pictured medieval England as a tidy pyramid — king at the top, dukes below him, then earls, then knights, then peasants, all standing in a neat org chart — I’m afraid we need to talk. Medieval people never drew that pyramid. We did. Centuries later. With hindsight and a flair for oversimplification.

The word “fief” itself was a bit of a mess. Medieval writers used it to mean almost any kind of property, and nobody was writing cheerful pamphlets about “the feudal system” — that term wasn’t even coined until 1614, safely after the Middle Ages had finished happening. A proper, settled definition of a fief (land held by someone above peasant status, with obligations owed to a bigger landholder up the chain) only really solidified around the 12th century, and even then it varied wildly by region.

Fiefs probably grew out of the Carolingian “benefice” — a grant of land from the crown or the church to someone for life, in exchange for military service rather than rent. When the Carolingian empire fell apart in the late 9th century, a lot of these benefices quietly merged with the office-holder’s own family land, and custom gradually allowed big fiefs to be passed down by inheritance rather than granted afresh by royal favour each time.

Here’s the bit that surprises people: plenty of medieval landholders didn’t think of themselves as sitting on a rung of anyone’s ladder at all. They thought of their land as, well, theirs. Their duties to a liege lord were treated as personal and social obligations — a matter of honour and friendship — not a strict legal quid pro quo for the property. It’s less “corporate hierarchy” and more “extremely serious mutual favour system with swords.”

So next time someone describes the feudal system as a rigid pyramid, feel free to gently point out that the people living in it never got the memo.

You broke the Pre-Order Record!

Just a brief update as I wanted to thank everyone who pre-ordered the latest book. We absolutely smashed it by launch day on the 14th with 290 pre-orders. That was a new record for the Draychester Chronicles series. Also a big thanks to anyone who left an Amazon review. Leaving a review helps enormously with Amazon’s ranking algorithms and means the series gets promoted to even more fans of medieval crime fiction.

Follow the Bishop’s reluctant officials, Will, Bernard and Osbert as they tackle their most dangerous investigation yet. Can they hope to survive Oxhaven’s lawless streets? If you haven’t already, order Death of the Scholar now.

Death Of The Executioner – Book 6 Of The Draychester Chronicles is Available on Amazon.

 So dear readers, with your fantastic help we hit 190 pre-orders just before launch day on the 24th. When it passed 100 I was amazed, at 190 I was jumping up and down with excitement.. for this small niche in the historical fiction genre it was mind-blowing. I am so grateful for all of you who took the time and effort to pre-order Death Of The Executioner, it has meant the book was immediately catapulted up the Amazon book rankings on launch day. Hopefully that will give the entire Draychester Chronicles series more visibility to new readers over future months.

The paperback and hardback versions were also released on the 24th Feb if you wanted the book in a different medium.

Death of the Merchant – Now Available from Amazon.

Its the 5th of October and my latest book in the Draychester Chronicle series, Death of The Merchant is now available on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback and Hardback editions. Once again we follow the Bishop Of Draychester’s officials, Will Bernard and Osbert as they tackle another dastardly series of murders in medieval London…

Book Five of the Draychester Chronicles is Almost Here! Death Of The Merchant.

I’m thrilled to announce that my latest medieval crime mystery, “Death of the Merchant,” will be released in just a few days! After months of writing, editing, and polishing, I can finally share this dark medieval tale with you all…

In the shadowy streets of medieval London, where the Thames carries secrets as surely as it carries commerce, a grisly discovery is about to shake the foundations of the city:

In the grim heart of medieval London, some secrets are best left buried in the Thames mud. But when a German merchant is found chained to a river post, his back carved with arcane symbols, those secrets begin to surface…

Once again we follow Bishop Gifford’s trusted officials – Will, Bernard, and Osbert – as they navigate a treacherous landscape where truth is as rare as genuine charity. When the city’s Sheriff hastily declares the merchant’s death an accident, our protagonists know something far more sinister is afoot.

Their investigation will lead them from the imposing Hanseatic Steelyard to the dangerous back-alleys of Southwark, forcing them to question everyone and everything they thought they knew about London.
Available from Amazon shortly, on Kindle, Paperback and Hardback.

It’s Finally Here: Death of The Wakeman – Book 4 of the Draychester Chronicles Released!

Its been a long wait (almost 3 years) but book 4 “Death of the Wakeman” in my Draychester Chronicles series has been released and is now available in eBook, Paperback and Hardback from Amazon.

Autumn mists cloak the northern town of Ditton in late 14th century England, where local legend speaks of a beast that haunts the lonely countryside paths after dark…The town’s Wakeman and a local woman are foud dead, their bodies savagely torn in a backstreet slaughter. The frightened townsfolk of Ditton are quick to blame the Shuck—a monstrous black hound of legend with eyes that glow like hellfire.

Bishop Gifford’s trusted officials, Bernard, Will, and Osbert, are dispatched north to investigate the brutal killings. In a town where fact and folklore intertwine and everyone has something to hide, they must untangle truth from superstition. Are these deaths truly the work of a legendary beast made flesh, or is someone using an ancient tale to conceal murder?

Step Back in Time: Exploring Medieval English Towns

Many of my historical thrillers take place in and around the fictional medieval English city of Draychester. Ever wonder what it was like to live in England hundreds of years ago? Picture yourself strolling down narrow, cobblestone streets, the air filled with the shouts of merchants and the tolling of church bells. Welcome to the world of medieval English towns – bustling hubs of commerce, culture, and daily life that shaped the nation we know today.

Let’s take a whirlwind tour through some of England’s most fascinating medieval towns. Trust me, whether you’re a history buff or just looking for some travel inspiration, you’re in for a treat!

London: Where It All Began
No surprise here – London was the big kahuna even back in the Middle Ages. Imagine the Thames teeming with ships from across Europe, streets packed with traders hawking everything from spices to fine cloth. Despite its size, medieval London had a surprisingly cozy feel, with tight-knit guilds and local parishes creating a sense of community.

York: A Northern Powerhouse
Head north and you’ll hit York, a city that’s been turning heads since Roman times. In the medieval period, York was the place to be, thanks to its prime location and religious clout. The massive York Minster cathedral dominated the skyline (and still does!), while merchants kept the city’s economic engine humming. Walk the old city walls today and you’ll feel like you’ve stepped right into a history book.

Winchester: Before London Was Cool
Before London stole the spotlight, Winchester was England’s seat of power. The Winchester Cathedral is a jaw-dropper, one of Europe’s largest. But it wasn’t all prayer and politics – the town was famous for its rowdy fairs and thriving cloth trade. Stroll through Winchester today and you’ll swear you can hear the echoes of medieval life.

Norwich: Wool You Look at That!
Norwich, in medieval times, it was England’s second-largest city, all thanks to the magical properties of… wool. Seriously, wool was big business, and Norwich was at the heart of it all. The Norwich Cathedral is a Gothic masterpiece, but it was the hardworking merchants and guilds that really put this city on the map.

Canterbury: The OG Pilgrimage Destination
Thanks to Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” we all know Canterbury was the medieval hotspot for pilgrims. They flocked to the shrine of Thomas Becket, turning the town into a medieval tourist trap (in the best way possible). But Canterbury wasn’t just about prayer – it was a buzzing market town where you could find anything your medieval heart desired.

Oxford: Where Brains Met Brawn
Oxford University kicked off in the 12th century, transforming this sleepy town into a hotbed of learning and debate. But don’t think it was all quiet libraries and dusty books. Medieval Oxford students were known for their wild antics, often clashing with the locals in epic “town vs. gown” showdowns.

Bristol: Setting Sail for Adventure
Perched on the River Avon, Bristol was the place to be if you had an itch for adventure. Ships set sail for Ireland and beyond, loaded with wool, wine, and who knows what else. The town was crawling with merchants, sailors, and craftsmen, all looking to make their fortune. Much of medieval Bristol is still standing, so you can channel your inner sea dog as you explore.

Coventry: Weaving a Rich Tapestry
Coventry was medieval England’s textile central, churning out some of the finest cloth around. But it wasn’t all peaceful weaving – Coventry played a big role in the Wars of the Roses, England’s very own “Game of Thrones.” Check out St. Mary’s Guildhall to get a taste of Coventry’s medieval glory days.

Exeter: Guarding the Southwest
Tucked away in the southwest, Exeter was a military and religious powerhouse. Its cathedral is an architectural stunner, and the town was crucial for keeping those pesky western uprisings in check. Take a walk along Exeter’s medieval walls and let your imagination run wild.

Chester: Where Roman Meets Medieval
Chester is like a historical layer cake – Roman foundations topped with medieval charm. Its location near Wales made it a key military outpost, and those impressive walls are still standing today. Chester was also a thriving market town, and you can still see the medieval influence in its famous “Rows” – covered walkways lined with shops.

Why These Towns Still Matter
These medieval English towns aren’t just relics of the past – they’re living, breathing links to our history. Each one has its own unique story, filled with drama, innovation, and the everyday lives of people not so different from us.

Visiting these towns is like stepping into a time machine. You can walk the same streets as medieval merchants, pilgrims, and scholars. It’s a chance to connect with England’s rich past in a way no textbook can match.

So, which town catches your fancy? Whether you’re drawn to London’s bustling energy, York’s ancient walls, or Oxford’s scholarly atmosphere, there’s a medieval adventure waiting for you. Go on, take a step back in time – you might be surprised at how much you have in common with those medieval folk!

Naughty Medieval Nuns. Wicked women or historical medieval trailblazers?

Naughty Medieval Nuns. Dive into the intriguing world of Medieval history as we uncover the fascinating stories and secrets of naughty medieval nuns. Were these women truly wicked, or were they trailblazers challenging the norms of their time?

Gongfarmers. The dirtiest job in history? Dealing with medieval sh*t!

Gongfarmers. Step back in time and discover the unsung heroes of Medieval history: the gongfarmers. These brave individuals had one of the dirtiest jobs in history, dealing with medieval waste and ensuring the sanitation of bustling medieval towns.

Medieval Alehouses, Taverns & Inns. Social Hubs or Dens of Iniquity?

Step back in time to explore the fascinating world of Medieval alehouses, taverns, and inns—the vibrant social hubs of the Middle Ages. Were these establishments merely places for merriment and community gatherings, or did they also serve as dens of iniquity where illicit activities thrived?

March Update…

The New Omnibus Edition – Draychester Chronicles 1-3 & the prequel all in one  place for the first time.

March, and spring time is not far away here in northern England. It’s been a long winter in many ways and like most of us I am looking forward to better days ahead. Still, there’s some time yet to sit by the fire and read about times past, or, in my case, write about them.

Over the last few weeks I have made great progress on the fourth book in my new Draychester Chronicles series. Will, Bernard and Osbert, in the “Death of the Wakeman”, are once again heading north from Draychester to investigate more medieval, murder, mystery and skulduggery in late 14th century England. I am looking at a release date probably towards the end of spring if things go to plan.

Although book four is a fair few weeks away I do have news of a new omnibus edition which contains not only books one through three but also the prequel book as well! So if you want to jump right in, all 800+ kindle pages of medieval murder are available right now…(it’s also available as a paperback… when you’ve read it you can reuse it as a door stop, it’s that thick…)

Touch wood or Knock on wood? God bless you?

The effigy of a crusader knight, carved in wood around 1280, can be found in Southwark Cathedral, London. He has a shiny nose for a reason…

Another hangover from our distant past, at least in Britain, “knocking on wood” or “touch wood” (the usual phrase and action for speakers of English) is the action of literally touching, tapping, or knocking on wood, or at least stating that you are doing or intending to do so.
It’s invoked in order to avoid “tempting fate” after making some favourable prediction or boast, or a declaration concerning your own death or another unfavourable situation.

So the story goes, medieval knights being sent into battle would visit the wooden effigy of a knight in Southwark Cathedral and touch its nose for luck. The Knight’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales begins in Southwark for this reason. The effigy can still be seen in the cathedral to this day.

The origins of the superstition is much older. It derives from the pagan belief that malevolent spirits inhabited wood, and that if you expressed a hope for the future you should touch, or knock on, wood to prevent the spirits from hearing and presumably preventing your hopes from coming true.

Somebody sneezes and you say “bless you”. A familiar event but the practice is believed to have originated in the middle ages. The thought was that the act of sneezing gave Satan the opportunity to enter the body. The person who sneezed needed God’s help to expel the devil, hence “God bless you”. There was also a belief that you could “sneeze out” your soul which was countered by the “God bless you” or covering the face to hold the soul in.

And Then There Were Three

Preparations for the release of the third book in my Draychester Chronicles series have taken longer than first planned even though we are still in strict lockdown here in England. I’m pleased to say Death of the Anchorite is now available. Will, Bernard and Osbert are once again on a mission to track down a killer in late 14th century England. As usual I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

The Dilemma of Advanced Reader Copies (ARCs)

Just reading my reviews on the various Amazon country sites tonight. I always approach it with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. I do honesty read them all, good or bad. Getting someone to leave even a rating is hard, and most people don’t ever leave a review. I understand, I don’t often leave reviews on the books I read either. It takes effort, and once I finish a book, I am generally off to the next shiny thing on my reading list. If you do leave a rating or review, I applaud you for taking the time, I really do.

Before publication of a book, I sometimes ask for people to review an advanced reader copy (ARC). Now an ARC is sort of a “nearly finished version” of the book before the final edit. There might be spelling errors, a few passages that might not make the final cut and other things that will get tweaked. It’s not the finished product but it’s close. If you ever get an ARC for review that’s what you need to bear in mind.

You might not know this, but you can review a book on Amazon that you haven’t actually purchased through the site. Reviews obviously help readers to decide on whether a particular book is for them or not. So, as an author, if you can get a few reviews immediately the book is published it can help with kicking in the algorithms behind the mighty Amazon selling machine. The idea is that you send out a few ARCs, people get to read the book a few weeks before publication, and then as soon as its on sale they can post a review on Amazon if they like. They don’t need to buy the book on Amazon.

Anyway, I just read one review that I know was generated via an ARC. I thought, “yikes lady”, I appreciate you leaving a review, but I soon realised what the review was based on. Not my actual book but partly on the free prequel novel to the series and partly on the ARC. The reviewer pulled me up on spelling and grammar. I’m sure she did see some problems as she was reviewing the pre-publication copy before the final edit! That’s an ARC for you. Also, she quoted parts of the storyline that aren’t actually in the book she was reviewing at all. They were in the prequel book which I presume she read before the actual ARC of the novel. Now don’t get me wrong, the fact she took the time to leave a review was fantastic. However, the actual review makes me wonder if I should continue giving out ARCs or not. It’s the first time I have done so via the storyorigins site and it’s been very hit and miss. Anyway, you live and learn…

P.S Don’t get me started on the differing spelling of the same words in US and British English. I unashamedly write using British English spelling. Why wouldn’t I? I live in England, it doesn’t make the spelling wrong…😊

Losing A Joust (every day since 1390!)

The Jousting Knights, Wells Cathedral Clock

A very happy new year to you all. As I sit here typing away I can hear the steady tick of my clock counting off the hours and minutes of the new year.

My dad was a carpenter / joiner and when he retired in the late 1980s he decided to make the cases for a series of grandfather clocks. Over the next few years, he made several clocks for various members of the family, including me.

The oak Dad used for the cases had come from my grandmother’s wardrobe! She lived to be 96 and I am sure she had inherited it, perhaps from her own parents, so it was probably Victorian.

Anyway, my vague memories of the famous wardrobe are of a hideous thing the size of a small tank. (They had to literally remove the window of my Grandmother’s bedroom to get it out. How it had got in there in the first place was a mystery). Hideous though it undoubtedly was, it had been made with some fabulous pieces of oak.

All of which brings me, in a round about way, to medieval clocks… Time in the modern world is a very different concept than it was to our medieval ancestors. That’s not to say time wasn’t important to them, particularly in the medieval town and city, the day could be closely regulated. The canonical hours would be sounded out by the church bells and things like a curfew bell that signalled the end of the working day were common.

During the 14th century, when my books are set, things slowly started to change regarding telling the time. Before mechanical clocks, the hours of daylight could be divided up with some measure of accuracy but during the night-time, particularly during the winter it would be very difficult to estimate how long you had until dawn.

It’s generally accepted that the first mechanical clocks, powered by water, originated in China probably in the 11th century. Weight-driven clocks were beginning to be developed in the first half of the 14th century.

Early clocks were nothing like their later descendants. They did not have hands or a clock face. As many were installed in church buildings they perhaps gave an indication that a bell was to be rung or later actually rang the bell itself. The clock would often be housed in a tower and encased in a metal frame. In England, during the early 14th century, there is some evidence for primitive clocks existing at the cathedrals / abbey in Lincoln, Norwich and Saint Albans although they may have had more to do with astronomical prediction than telling the time. By the 1350s mechanical clocks had been installed in the palaces of Edward III. However actual accurate time keeping by these devices was not a priority, clocks could lose or gain many minutes over a single day.

At this period there was not even an agreement of what precise length an hour should be. Most people accepted that in the winter there would be twelve short hours of daylight, and in the summer twelve long hours of daylight. It was only gradually that the length of an hour came to be more or less agreed upon and regulated for the whole 24 hour period. As mechanical clocks became more widespread, they certainly helped to make this a more acceptable way of dividing up the day.

Wells is a cathedral city in the southwest of England. It’s a place full of history spanning hundreds of years. The magnificent cathedral has a clock dating from the 14th century. (It also happens to be one of my favourite cathedrals, my fictional city of Draychester bears an uncanny resemblance to Wells…)

The original clock mechanism at Wells is dated between 1386 and 1392 and may be based on a slightly earlier clock that still exists at Salisbury Cathedral. The Well’s clock is an astronomical clock, as well as showing the time on a 24-hour dial, it reflects the motion of the sun and the moon.

The original dial (the oldest surviving clock face in the world) is located inside the cathedral with a later dial driven from the same mechanism located on the outside of the building.

I’ve stood and looked up at these dials with wonder. It’s like looking into the face of history. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up just thinking about all the other people over the ages who have stood in this spot and done the same.

Inside the catherdral, driven by the mechanism of the clock, is a figure called Jack Blandifers. He sits up and above the clock face and to the right. Every quarter hour he hits a bell with a hammer held in his right hand and two bells hung beneath him with his heels.

For videos of the clock, Jack Blandifers and the Jousting Knights see the links below:-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NjpuBiuMvFg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyKhYvBy-AA

A Medieval Christmas

The church, which dominated so many aspects of medieval life, ensured that Christmas was a true religious holiday and a highlight of the calendar. It was the longest holiday of the year, twelve days, lasting from the night of Christmas Eve, the 24th of December, to the Twelfth Day, Epiphany, on the 6th of January. Mid-winter saw a lull in agricultural tasks and meant that everyone got the chance to enjoy some of the merriment and festivities.

Then as now, it was a season that involved decorating the home with garlands and wreaths. William Fitzstephen (a cleric and administrator in the service of Thomas Becket) writing in the 12th century recorded,

“Every man’s house, as also their parish churches, was decked with holly, ivy, bay and whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be green.”

The local parish church would be the focal point of the celebrations with Nativity plays and other festive traditions observed.

Feasting was of course a major part of the celebration. The humbler members of the community might treat themselves to a rare delicacy of some meat, cheese and eggs. On the menu for the local clergy and lord of the manor might be such things as Larks, ducks, salmon, even wild boar. At the other end of the spectrum was the royal court…

On Christmas day 1213, King John, spending the festive period at Windsor Castle, held a feast. The sheer quantities and logistics concerning the organisation of the feast boggle the mind. In charge was Reginald de Cornhill, a long-time administrator under King John.

We can only imagine the stress poor Reginald must have been under. With only around a week’s grace, he suddenly found himself with the task of finding,

“20 tuns of good and new ordinary wine, both French and Gascon, and 4 tuns (2 of red, 2 of white) for the king’s table. 200 pigs’ heads with all the pickled pork, 1,000 hens, 50 pounds of pepper, 2 pounds of saffron, 100 pounds of good fresh almonds and 15,000 herrings, as well as spices for making sauces, two dozen towels and 1,000 ells of linen for making tablecloths”.

Other officials were tasked with finding even more provisions, including another 200 pigs’ heads, 15,000 hens and 10,000 salted eels. They also needed to lay their hands on all the pitchers, cups and dishes they could find.

You might have thought, given the severe financial pressures John found himself under during his rule, that this sort of extravagance might have attracted some criticism! However, from a medieval perspective, displays of royal generosity were expected, indeed they a were a key part of medieval politics and in fact the chroniclers of the time approved whole heartedly with his largess. He was only doing what was expected of a medieval king.

The Gongfermor – Dealing with Medieval Sh*t!

(Trying a medieval “garderobe” for size at Lamphey Bishop’s Palace, purely for purposes of research you understand!)

Towards the end of the 14th Century, London with a population of around 30,000 defecating souls, had only 16 public latrines, known as “houses of easement”. However, many private latrines (privies) existed, and the local authorities had even started to regulate their placement and construction. Cess pits started to be placed in the back yard of houses or even under their cellar floors. The more sophisticated arrangements carried excrement from upper floors by means of a wooden chute, sometimes flushed by rainwater.

Just as today, the space where you did the business was often given a “polite” name. Some common ones being the ‘privy chamber’, and the ‘garderobe’. The more imaginative ones include the ‘draught’, ‘gong’, ‘siege-house’, ‘neccessarium’, and the ‘Golden Tower’.

As most cesspits were not watertight, liquid waste would drain away leaving the solids behind. Every two years or so, this solid waste would have to be removed. As you can imagine, the smell and fumes could become a problem. It wasn’t unknown for clothes to be hung nearby as the acrid vapours would kill any mites in them!

King Henry III, (who was King of England between 1216 and 1272) in a letter to one of his castle constables complained about a privy at the tower of London that smelled so bad he wanted it rebuilt before his next visit,
“Since the privy chamber…in London is situated in an undue and improper place, wherefore it smells badly, we command you on the faith and love by which you are bounden to us that you in no wise omit to cause another privy chamber to be made…in such more fitting and proper place that you may select there, even though it should cost a hundred pounds, so that it may be made before the feast of the Translation of Saint Edward, before we come thither.”

A “gongfermor” or “gong farmer” was the term used at this period to describe someone who’s job was to dig out and remove the waste. (“Gong” is derived from the Old English gang, which means “to go”). The solid waste collected had to be taken outside the city walls or town boundary and was known as nightsoil. After being dug out, the nightsoil was removed in large barrels or pipes, which were loaded onto a horse-drawn cart. The job of the gongfermor was certainly unpleasant (day in, day out, up to the knees or waist in excrement) and could be dangerous but it was also well paid.

Pick up some free reads…

I often link up with other authors to cross promote our books to a wider list of readers. We currently have a promotion underway for the next month or so where you can pick up a ton of free reads from new and established authors. If you’d like to explore whats on offer click here.

Death Of The Official – The Paperback Cover…

The last couple of weeks I have been preparing the formatted files and graphics of the latest book release for upload to the Amazon kindle store.

This time I’ve decided to do a simultaneous paperback release as well. As an independent author I pretty much do everything from the writing through to preparing the artwork. I could outsource most of this (apart from the writing of course!) but I’m a bit of a control freak and I like learning new skills as well.

I’ve really struggled with the paperback cover. Amazon has exacting criteria in terms of positioning all the cover graphics (so when its printed it actually looks correct and the text doesn’t get chopped off in the printing process). Anyway, the job is finally done now and I think it looks ok (see image above)

As I type this, I’m waiting for the proof copies of the paperback to come back from Amazon KDP.

Now to be honest, paperback sales are a fraction of eBook sales on Amazon but I think it’s nice to actually have a physical product as well. Some people will always prefer a real book over an eBook so why not cater for everybody if I can.

A mortal blow to the back – a medieval skeleton

Watching TV the other day, I came across the “Bone Detectives”.  It’s a program on Channel 4 here in the UK. The premise is “a team of scientists piece together the lives behind unearthed bones to find out their stories. Once a skeleton has been recorded, the bones immediately begin to reveal their mysteries, opening up a secret history of Britain.”

The series so far has been interesting (it’s well worth a watch) but this episode even more so as they were examining some skeletons found during excavations at Norton Priory. This is the remains of an abbey complex dating from the 12th to 16th centuries, which is only some twenty-five miles from where I sit typing this in northwest England.  Now this part of the northwest is fairly industrial, where I live most of the towns really grew to prominence only in the Victorian period. The northwest went from being somewhat of a backwater in previous centuries to the heart of the industrial revolution. Heavy industry and medieval remains rarely go together, but Britain’s a place where you never have to travel far to find some hidden gem. My wife and I had a day trip out to Norton about six or seven years ago. The location of the ruins and museum is well hidden. The route takes you through a modern industrial estate and I was convinced we’d taken a wrong turn, even with the sat-nav guiding us.

The priory was an Augustinian foundation from the 12th century and was raised to the status of an abbey in 1391. As part of the dissolution of the monasteries, the abbey was closed in 1536. Excavation begin in 1971 and was to become the largest carried out on any monastic site in Europe during modern times. You can read more about Norton Priory here.

One skeleton discovered during the excavation shows signs of murder, with what appears to have been a sword blow to the back whilst the unfortunate victim was perhaps kneeling in prayer. It’s fairly likely the skeleton is that of Sir Geoffrey Dutton, a crusader knight. As you can image it was the ideal place to do some on-site research for story plots!

You will see Norton (or something based on it) in a future book in the Draychester Chronicles series, watch this space 🙂 The museum has been rebuilt and expanded since we were last there, and it’s high on our “to do again” list. If you get the chance, pay it a visit.

Medieval Alehouses, Taverns, and Inns

In the late 14th century, when my books are set, alehouses and taverns would provide food and drink and inns would also provide accommodation for travellers. They make an excellent setting for the plot of a medieval novel. These were places where people met to socialise and talk. Particularly in towns, this made them cultural and political hot beds. Uprisings and mobs often had their origins in such places.

In England, inns were found mainly in towns and cities. They quickly became prominent landmarks and were usually located in a central position such as the town square, or in places where roads met. Geoffrey Chaucer of course immortalised these Inns in the Canterbury Tales, his Tabard Inn being a real hostelry in Southwark (the Abbot of Hyde originally built it so he and his good brothers had a place to stay when on business in London). But it wasn’t just pilgrims travelling to and from religious shrines who might need accommodation, there were a wide range of other travellers on the move, including merchants and court officials and monks travelling between religious houses. Inns could also be used for other purposes. “Ye Olde Trip to Jerusalem” in Nottingham, allegedly dating from 1189, was said to have acted as a recruitment centre for volunteers to accompany King Richard to the Holy Land on crusade. By the 1400s many larger inns would have private function rooms. These could be hired by the local town guilds or for private events. Many inns also provided locked rooms and strong boxes for storage of valuables.

Taverns and alehouses could be found in the biggest towns to the smallest villages. In places like London taverns were often owned by brewers and vintners as an outlet for their wares, in effect having a monopoly on what alcohol was served.

In the countryside the alehouse was one of the main places of recreation for the villager. An alehouse might not be in a permanent location, villagers would drink at the house of any neighbour who had recently brewed a batch of ale. Like their modern counterparts, villagers would pass the evening drinking. Inevitably this could lead to accidents, quarrels, and all too common acts of violence. The coroner’s records of the period are full of alcohol-related accidents, mishaps, injuries, and murders. Then as now, drinking to excess could lead to more than just a hangover… again all material for scenes in my novels.

Before Henry VIII split with the Catholic church, many taverns and inns had religious names. So we have, “The Anchor” (a reference to the Christian faith), “The Cross Keys” (the emblem of Saint Peter), “The Mitre” (a bishops headgear) and “The Ship” (the Noah’s Ark). Then we have names that have a connection with the crusades like “The Saracen’s Head” and “The Lamb and Flag” where the flag represented the crusaders and the lamb Jesus. Taverns names after saints, “The Christopher”, after the patron saint of travellers, and “The St. Julian”, who was the patron saint of hospitality.

There were more straightforward names, “The Ball”, “The Basket”, “The Bell”, “The Cross”, “The Cup”, “The Garland”, “The Green Gate”, “The Hammer”, “The Lattice”, “The Rose”. “The Swan” seems to have been very popular, there were six Swan’s in London alone in the 1420s. Other London taverns in the same period were named for birds as well, including “The Crane” and “The Cock”.

Bolton lies about six miles from where I type this. It’s a place I know well, I used to work in the centre of the town and occasionally went for a drink in what also claims to be one of Britain’s oldest pubs, “The Man and Scythe” or as its modern sign styles it, “Ye Olde Man and Scythe”. The earliest recorded mention of its name is in a medieval market charter of 1251. The present building dates from the 1630s and has been extensively rebuilt since then. The only part of the original medieval structure is probably the vaulted cellar. The pub is reputedly haunted, and the cellar appears to be one centre of the activity. (The few times I sat in the pub’s “front parlour” I can’t say I noticed any spirits except of the kind you can drink). The name of the pub derives from the crest of the Pilkingtons, who were a powerful family during the period with various branches scattered across the northwest of England.

Evolution of Medieval Inns and Taverns

So as you’ve seen, medieval inns and taverns have a fascinating history, evolving from humble beginnings into more structured establishments. Initially, these services were often an extension of someone’s home. Imagine a cosy front room where the host would serve drinks, creating a year-round house party-like atmosphere for locals and travellers alike.

From Homes to Social Hubs

Early Days:

• In small villages, inns might have been no more than a room in a house where elders opened their doors to weary travellers. These spaces were intimate and family-run.
• Entrepreneurs would often set up a simple operation by freeing up a room, placing a few benches, and selling beverages to their guests.

Gradual Expansion:

• As trade routes became more established, the need for reliable rest stops increased. This led to a rise in dedicated inns and taverns.
• These establishments became social hubs, providing not just lodging but food, drinks, and a place to exchange news and stories.

Infrastructure and Regulations

Standardization:

• Over time, the demand for better services led to more structured facilities. Inns began to appear with specific amenities like stables for horses and private rooms for guests.
• Governmental bodies started implementing regulations to maintain standards, ensuring that these inns provided safe and sanitary conditions for travellers.

Role in Society

Cultural Significance:

• Taverns and inns became central to community life. They were places where local events were celebrated, deals were struck, and gossip spread.
• These establishments also often served as forums for political discussion and planning, playing crucial roles in various social movements.

Modern Day Impact

Although today’s hotels and bars are far more sophisticated, the essence of the medieval inn or tavern remains. The desire for a welcoming atmosphere, good company, and a refreshing drink is timeless.

My favourite writers of medieval fiction – No2 – Paul Doherty – the Hugh Corbett Series

I first came across Paul Doherty’s books via his Hugh Corbett series, set during the 13th-century reign of Edward I of England. There are now twenty-one books in the series as of 2020’s “Hymn to Murder”. I have loved this series since the first book was published back in the late 1980s. Doherty has written something like 100+ published works under a variety of pen names alongside his real name. The sheer volume and quality of his literary output is quite amazing. The other series of his I’m familiar with is the “Sorrowful Mysteries of Brother Athelstan”, set during the 14th-century reign of Richard II of England. Again a great read. The series will be on book twenty as of December 2020. I highly recommend both series, Doherty is an absolute master of the historical mystery genre.

Medieval Swearing, “God’s Bones!”

There are trends and fashions in swearing. Things that were outrageous and blasphemous in one age might raise nothing but a curious stare in the 21st century.

It’s difficult today to understand why swearing by parts of God’s body would be offensive, but it was a popular way of swearing up to the end of the 15th century. People would swear by “God’s Nails” or “God’s Bones”, “God’s Teeth”, even “God’s Balls!”

It a tough concept to get your head around, but I’ll try to explain it as best I understand it myself. So, to the medieval mind swearing an oath was a deadly serious affair. If you swore a sincere oath you were asking (even forcing) God in heaven to look down and guarantee what you said was in fact true. In an age where religion was an integral part of daily life, if you swore a false oath you were in effect making God out to be a liar!  In addition, to swear by parts of God’s body you were literally thought to be affecting those parts of his body up in heaven. These words and phrases have a power that is mostly lost on us today, but you would use them when you trapped your finger in a door, insulted someone, even expressed joy and amazement.

On the other hand, some words and phrases which were part of everyday speech in the medieval ages would today, in polite company at least, raise eyebrows. Describing bodily functions wasn’t a big deal, and it was normal practice for something like a street name to reflect the street’s function or the economic activity taking place within it. Which explains streets in many medieval towns called Gropecuntlane, Oxford and London to name just two. You can image what went on there. The local stream might well be called the Shitebrook for similar reasons….

I confess I find this sort of stuff fascinating. It might not be your cup of tea, but if you are interested, there’s a brilliant book about the history of swearing, “Holy Sh*t” by Melissa Mohr. It’s available on amazon.

My favourite writers of medieval fiction – No1 – Ellis Peters – The Cadfael Chronicles

I’ve always been a fan of historical fiction, although over the years I’ve also read a lot of science fiction. Still, I always seem to return to books set in the past, particularly the medieval period. It seems a lifetime ago (and I suppose it really is now) when I first came across The Cadfael Chronicles (a series of historical murder mysteries written by Edith Pargeter under the pen name “Ellis Peters”). The first book, A Morbid Taste for Bones,  was published in the late 70s and I would guess I began reading the series in my early teens (I was a strange kid!). They feature the Benedictine monk Cadfael (of Shrewsbury Abbey) who aids the local forces of law and order in solving murders. The books were made into a very popular TV series here in the UK shown during the mid-90’s, it was also shown in the US.

Partgeter died in 1995, but I think we can credit her with being one of the authors who first really popularised what became the historical mystery genre. The books are beautifully written and might be a bit tame for some readers (I’ve seen them recently tucked under the Cosy Mystery sub-genre) but I for one always enjoyed the gentle unfolding of each story. There are twenty-one books in the series, so something to get your teeth into and highly recommended.

The English Medieval Penny

The most widespread coin in use in medieval England was the penny. Twelve silver pennies made a shilling and there were twenty shillings to the pound. For transactions worth less than a penny it could be divided by physically clipping the coin into halves and quarters. Hence, half pennies and quarter pennies (known as farthings). Although official half pennies and farthings existed, they don’t ever seem to have been issued in the quantities needed to stop them being anything but rarities. The clipped coins therefore being the norm for anything less than a whole penny.

In accounting the Silver mark was used, although no actual mark coins existed. One mark was equal to 13 shillings and 4 pennies, which was two-thirds of one pound.

Wages and buying power in medieval England are notoriously difficult to estimate from a modern vantage point. There are so many unknowable factors at play that everything you can find on the subject can only ever be an estimate of what things cost on a daily basis.

I’ve assumed some typical daily earnings for the lower ranks of society for the time period my books are set in (1390’s – 1420’s) which I think are fairly accurate. A labourer, manservant, maidservant or swineherd might earn between one and three pennies a day. More skilled craftsmen like masons, carpenters, thatchers and weavers might earn between three and six pennies a day. A chantry priests might earn four pennies a day and an esquire or constable in the army perhaps thirteen pennies a day.

Cheap wine was about three pennies a gallon, the good stuff perhaps eight pennies a gallon. Ale, the staple drink of everyone, was three quarters of a penny for a weak gallon of ale and one and half pennies for a gallon of a better brew. Two dozen eggs could be had for a penny and you could buy two chickens for three pennies.

Medieval English Ale

In medieval England virtually everyone would have drunk ale on a daily basis. That’s not to imply that the whole population was constantly inebriated. The fact is medieval ale was a very different drink to any modern-day beer or ale. The basic ingredients were water and malted grain fermented with yeast (beer as oppose to ale also included hops as an ingredient). Ale was both used for hydration and nutrition and was very much an essential part of the English diet. This was a time when most people rarely drank water or milk. Although the wealthier could also afford to drink wine, ale was the overwhelming liquid refreshment of choice for much of the population. Then as now people could drink to get merry, to get drunk even, but it was also a much more mundane, day to day experience. Both children and adults drank ale, it was consumed throughout the day.

The basic ale making process consisted of the malted grain being crushed, boiling or very hot water would be added, and the mixture allowed to work. The liquid would then be drained off, cooled and fermented.

Although a relatively simple process it was also time consuming. In medieval England this type of ale would be served fresh which means it had very recently stopped fermenting or it was still in the process of fermenting. Ale did not keep well, being fast to sour and lasting at most only a few days.

The amount of ale that was brewed and consumed appears enormous to modern day eyes. For a household of five perhaps up to one and quarter gallons would be required per day.

During the fourteenth century most of the ale brewing in England was carried out by women in a domestic setting. Most households had the capability to brew ale for their own use and sometimes to sell to others. For many households it could be a valuable source of extra income even if they only sold to others a few times a year. When a fresh brew was available for others to buy a sign would be hung outside, often a broom.

The Medieval Revenant

During the middle ages a belief in souls returning from the dead was very common. A revenant was an animated corpse believed to have been revived from the dead to haunt the living. At various times the term revenant has often been used interchangeably with vampire. Numerous contemporary writers of the period recount stories relating to these undead souls.

Perhaps the most well know is William of Newburgh (or Newbury) (lived 1136 – 1198 in England). He recorded that such stories were common “were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome!” This didn’t however stop him later recounting such stories with some ghoulish satisfaction.

He continues, “It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony.”

It seems William was a believer at least as far as he didn’t discount out of hand the stories he came across. To the medieval mind it seems it was a perfectly possible scenario to have the recently departed wandering around the countryside terrifying the living.

One story involves a man who becomes jealous of his wife. Trying to catch her up to no good he hides in the bedroom rafters. Unfortunately, he manages to fall from his hiding place, seriously injuring himself in the process and dies a few days later. This is where things take a sinister turn.

“By the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.”

The monster then goes on a rampage and kills several of the townsfolk before they take action to counter the horror.

“Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames.”

A tale which surely wouldn’t disgrace a modern horror film.

In the 12th Century the chronicler Walter Map records a similar tale of a “wicked man” of Herefordshire who comes back from the dead. He takes great pleasure in wondering the streets of his village during the night-time calling out the names of those who will die of a sickness. Naturally his fellow villagers are less than impressed. They enlist the help of the bishop of Hereford who authorises them to dig up the body and cut of its head with a spade. He sprinkles it with holy water and re-inters it in the hopes it will desist its nightly rambles.

Medieval Anchorites

In the third of the William Blackburne series of medieval adventures a spate of killings involving anchorites takes place. Many people confuse the terms anchorite and hermit. Although anchorites can be thought of as religious hermits there were some subtle differences. Most were required to take vows that tied them to one place. Many opted for permanent enclosure in cells attached to churches. Looking from a modern perspective it’s difficult to comprehend the attractions of being walled up for life in a small cell! Anchorites became widespread during the 13th and 14th centuries and in England it was not at all unusual for the local village church to have an anchorite cell built against one wall. The majority of anchorites, at least during the later middle ages, appear to have been female.

On becoming an anchorite, they were subject to a religious rite similar to that of a funeral. They became in effect dead to the world and often considered living saints. The typical size of the enclosure (cell) was 3.7 to 4.6 m (12 to 15 ft) square. Usually there were some small windows, one facing the outside for light, the others opening to the interior of the church. The anchorite could hear mass and receive communion via a shuttered window know as a squint. They could also provide counsel and spiritual advice through this window to visitors. Many anchorites gained a great reputation for wisdom over the years of their enclosure. One of the other interior openings would allow food and other items to be passed in and waste removed (A chamber pot being provided for bodily waste!)

Not every anchorite was confined to a cell. Some did have access to the church itself although their vows would probably exclude them from leaving the main building. The vows were for life and those who broke them and escaped or attempted to escape would be returned by force.To break their vows would also be to damn their soul to hell.

Perhaps the most famous English anchorite of the middle ages was Julian (or Juliana) of Norwich, also known as Dame Julian or Mother Julian. She wrote the earliest surviving book in the English language to be written by a woman, Revelations of Divine Love

Medieval Shipping – The Cog

In my book “Death of the Vintner” the three bishop’s officials of the story arrive at the small harbour town of Tenby in the west of Wales by sea. The ship they travel in was known as a Cog. This type of ship first appeared in the 10^th century and was in use across Northern Europe from the 12^th century onward. The vessels had a single mast with a square-rigged sail. They were clinker built, usually of oak and ranged in size roughly from fifteen to twenty-five meters in length with a beam between five and eight meters. Some of the largest cogs could easily carry 200 tons.

The cog developed into a sturdy seagoing trader, that was capable of crossing even the most dangerous passages. For defence against Pirates fore and stern castles would be added. The stern castle allowed more cargo space below by keeping the crew and the tiller up out of the way. The cog had reached its full potential by the 14^th century and other forms of ship design started to be explored but the cog continued in widespread use for several centuries in one form or another.

The Population of the English Medieval City

In 1377 of the thirty most populous cities and towns in England only three had a population of more than ten thousand people. These were London with forty thousand, York (see picture above) with twelve thousand and Bristol with ten and a half thousand. The others ranged in size from Coventry at eight thousand down to Nottingham and Winchester with two thousand four hundred each.

The whole of the county totalled around two and a half million people. Only a hundred or so years before the population had been almost double this but the Black Death had decimated numbers. Compared to the great cities of continental Europe only London was of similar size. Only twelve percent of the population lived in a town of some kind. This is profoundly different than modern England where some eighty percent live in a town or city.

This isn’t to say that England’s medieval towns and cities were quiet places, far from it.
During the daytime the population of these places could almost double with people from the surrounding rural areas coming to sell their wares and others coming to buy. The inns added to the shifting population, there were travellers of all sorts making use of the accommodation they offered. The towns were vibrant and noisy places.

Medieval Violence

The middle ages in England were a pretty violent place viewed from a modern perspective. Even today statistically most crime is carried out by males on males under the age of 25.  A study of coroners rolls from the 1340’s suggests a homicide rate of 120 per 100,000 of the population in Oxford. That’s incredibly high when compared to around 1 in 100,000 today. Some of the worst cities for crime in the modern world only score around 111 per 100,000.

Medieval England was predominately a young society. The average age of death was around 35, that’s skewed of course by the childhood mortality rate which was most probably as high as 25% for those under 5 years. However, the young could and did hold significant roles in authority at ages that would raise modern eyebrows.

Access to the law particularly for those in the lower levels of society could be limited. Seeking revenge because the courts were non-existent, weak of simply untrustworthy was common. It seems some disputes could be more readily settled by doing violence to each other. And willingness to fight was often deemed an appropriate way of dealing with any sort of slight. Alcohol fuelled fights as today were very common. It must be remembered that people daily drank what would be considered today excessive quantities of ale. Even though rather weak by modern standards ale was preferred over the polluted water supplies of the medieval town.

As perpetrators, victims or simply witnesses, people from the lowest to the highest ranks of medieval society experienced violence as an ever-present part of daily life.

Medieval Seals

I’ve had a few questions about the medieval seal depicted on my upcoming book, “Death of The Official”. The image on the left depicts the impression made by William Blackburne’s seal matrix. William is an official of the bishop of Draychester and the Latin inscription reflects this.

The status of the seals owner was often reflected in the actual size of the seal. In medieval religious hierarchy no one would be allowed to own a seal as grand as one issued by their own superiors! The cheaper seal matrices would be made of lead whilst wealthier owners would own a seal matrix made from bronze. The bronze seal matrices were harder wearing and therefore lasted longer. Lead is a fairly soft metal and seal matrices made of this material often broke.

In the middle ages the majority of seals were circular in design but ovals, triangles, shield-shapes and other patterns are not unknown. Generally, the design would comprise some sort of graphic emblem often incorporating a heraldic device. Surrounding this would be a text (known as the legend). Often this would just consist of something like “The seal of the [Name of Owner]”. At this time the seals of women and priests and other members of the clergy would be given a pointed oval shape (a vesical). The emblem would be a standing figure of the owner or in the case of clerical seals that of a saint. The medieval towns-person would sometimes use a seal with images relating to their trade but a variety of different emblems could be used.

Medieval Bridge Chapels and Bridge Hermits

In one of my upcoming books “The Death of the Official” Sir Roger Mudstone has an unfortunate encounter with a hermit collecting a toll on a bridge crossing a river. In the late medieval period it was fairly common for bridges to have all manor of buildings built on them. Perhaps one of the most common were chantry chapels. These were where prayers could be said for the souls of the founders and benefactors of the bridge. Donations were often collected for the upkeep of the structure. Bridge maintenance could be an expensive and ongoing task. However, to the medieval mind bridges with chapels could be thought of as less likely to collapse as the dedication of the chapel, often to a local saint or perhaps Saint Mary herself would offer some protection to the rest of the structure.

They were also a place for travellers and pilgrims to pray for a safe journey and attend mass. To the medieval pilgrim the bridge played a key role in a journey where the alternatives were dangerous ford and ferry crossings.

There are few medieval chapels associated with bridges that survive in England. Two important examples can be found in the West Riding of Yorkshire at Wakefield (see picture above) and at Rotherham. There are other significant chapels at Rochester and at Bradford Upon Avon.  In the aftermath of the Protestant Reformation many chapels were destroyed or fell into disuse and were eventually demolished. Some that did survive found new purpose as storage, offices and even gaols or shelters for livestock.

Most chapels would have a resident priest who said Mass for the travellers and pilgrims. He would often also live in the chapel. As travel could be dangerous in the medieval period the priest would often also be expected to say prayers for those injured, robbed or killed on the roads.
Another common presence at medieval bridges would be a hermit who would assist in the maintenance of the bridge and sometimes collect tolls. Occasionally hermits would be specifically granted alms for use in building small bridges.

Medieval Sanctuary

In my upcoming book, “The Death of the Vintner”, two brothers sought for the murder of their father seek sanctuary in the cathedral at Saint Davids in West Wales. This was a crime that would likely result in execution. The alternative sought by many who committed capital crimes was to seek the protection of sanctuary in a Christian Church.

The right to sanctuary has its origins in ancient Greek and Roman times and survived in at least some form into the 17^th Century. The belief system that gods were inviolable led to a tradition that their holy places were untouchable and thus a place where fugitives could escape the authorities. There was a price to pay for this shelter in terms of atonement and penance for the crimes committed. Medieval sanctuary had its foundations in these ancient beliefs.

By the late medieval period an almost standardised sanctuary process had emerged in England. On committing a crime, the sanctuary seeker would often flee to a nearby church. Church sanctuaries were regulated by common law. On entering the church he’d inform whoever was responsible that he intended to claim sanctuary. The fugitive then needed to confess their sins, surrender any weapons, and permit supervision by the church or abbey organization which had jurisdiction. A period of forty days sanctuary would then be granted. As long as they stayed within defined boundaries usually within the church building itself but sometimes over a wider area they could not be removed. It was illegal for the victim’s friends or relatives or the secular authorities to remove them and there were heavy penalties for those that tied.

The forty days was to allow the suspect to make a choice. Either stand trial according to law or confess their guilt and agree to abjure the realm. Which meant swearing an oath to effectively go into exile. The person taking the oath swore to leave the country directly and promptly, never to return to the kingdom unless by permission of the sovereign.

If the suspect decided to abjure the realm the coroner for that area, an official of the crown, would eventually be called. The suspect would confess their guilt to the crime usually in some form of public ceremony and the corner would then choose a port from where the fugitive would have to leave the kingdom from. Any possessions would be forfeit to the church and any land they owned to the crown. At least they would avoid execution but this was no soft option. They had to set out barefooted and bareheaded carrying a wooden cross-staff to indicate they were under the protection of the church.

At this point in theory they would take the main highway to the nearest port and leave safely. For any fugitive there were some unpalatable truths around what usually happened in practice. They could start out on their trek and once away from sight, jettison the cross and simply try and disappear and start a new life. The victim’s friends and relatives would have no illusions about the process and could simply follow them and administer vigilante justice at some point along the way. In theory the fugitive had only to leave the main highway and it would be perfectly legal for them to do this. It also seems that in some cases coroners would deliberately pick a port at the other end of the country. This would make it extremely difficult to fulfil the terms of the fugitive’s oath to adjure the realm.

There was always the chance of escape from sanctuary before the forty days were up, or simply the choice of sitting in the church past the time limit. However, many fugitives would be starved of food and water by the church authorities if they decided to simply sit and wait.

All churches had the power to grant sanctuary within the building, however there were some places where the bounds of the sanctuary area were much wider. These places had a specific royal charter to extend sanctuary to a wide zone around the church. Some of these areas extended to nearly a mile and a half from the church or abbey and the boundaries were marked by sanctuary crosses of stone. In England the churches with these areas included, York Minster and Westminster Abbey, the cathedrals at Wells and Winchester, Ripon, Norwich and Durham, Hexham Abbey, Battle Abbey and Beverley Minster (pictured above).