There’s an odd illogicality to this story – the medieval stones are only 114 years old?? Interesting though that such a large scale bakery would exist in a village – you would imagine most villagers would bake their own. I wonder what was going on? The full story is at Culture 24 Here’s an excerpt: [...]

I blogged about the fantastic Pase Domesday project yesterday, which is an online reference tool to access data about people and places from the Domesday Book. What I should have mentioned as well is what seems to not be available from Pase Domesday, which is all the detail of what customs and fees are owed [...]

We seem to have a Norman theme today! You can now search the Domesday Book online thanks to the PASE Domesday project run by King’s College, London and the University of Cambridge. Here’s a sample output for the town where I grew up (click on the image to see it in detail): You can also [...]

I have been working through some ideas of how to portray hell in my novel Hell has its Demons. If you read the synopsis of the story you’ll have noticed that it ends with a journey by some of the main characters into hell itself. As the story is set in the middle ages there is [...]

Just shows you how long the media can take to pick certain things up – I’ve actually known about this Medieval Soldier website for months now! Here’s the link to the story on the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8160081.stm

This is the first in an occasional series of posts looking at commonly believed ‘myths’ about Medieval times. For instance many people, including some writers of popular history, often picture the medieval peasant as living in fairly primitive housing – perhaps basic wattle and daub or wooden structures. However, evidence from archaeology shows that is [...]

This audio slideshow sort of backs up what I was saying in a previous post about Medieval medicine – but the quacks weren’t seen as quacks at the time and of course this medical ignorance lasted into the 2oth century.

… before the rise of infantry armies in the 14c. I was reading an article by Clifford Rogers on revolutions in Medieval warfare, and I found a few statistics here quite illuminating. This was part of my research for the Agincourt gamebook, but this musing might come in useful perhaps at a later date.  The [...]