The last few weeks have been spent editing my historical fantasy novel set in the Middle Ages: Hell has its Demons. At present I am half way through reading the first draft. I am not making too many edits at the moment, unless I spot a glaring typo. This is my first time editing a [...]

Daphne who runs Tanzanite’s Castle Full of Books has kindly allowed me to write a guest post for her blog about Chivalry: A Jake Savage Adventure. In the post I ramble on about how I came to write Chivalry, the background for the story and some of the important themes: Arthurian romance, the terrible generalship [...]

Why were Wednesday, Friday and Saturday considered fast days in the Middle Ages? Although Ian Mortimer states that Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays were fast days in his The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, it seems that this was not necessarily the case. Melitta Weiss Adamson in  Food in Medieval Times states that Christians copied Jewish practice [...]

Fast Days in the Middle Ages Meat was forbidden by Church law on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays and also during Lent, when the consumption of eggs was also forbidden. (Friday is commonly known to be a day on which fish was eaten, but Wednesday and Saturday are a bit more obscure. Find out a bit [...]

In the Medieval History and Literature section of this site I’ve recently posted the full modern English translation by Jessie L. Weston of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight – a rather fine poem, and a good translation. Here’s an excerpt from the first section of the translation: After the siege and the assault of [...]

Also available as an eBook Introduction The tales included in this little book of translations are derived mainly from the “Lays” of Marie de France. I do not profess them to be a complete collection of her stories in verse. The ascription varies. Poems which were included in her work but yesterday are withdrawn to-day, [...]

Part of my story Hell has its Demons is set in the fictional Abbey of St. Brett’s. Therefore I’ve had to research monastic life a fair bit. I have just added a page to this site on Abbey officials. I hope you medieval history fans find it useful!   Incoming search terms:histroy and and mark [...]

Because of the great amount of time taken up by prayer and readings, certain monks were allocated specialist tasks that allowed them relief from all the offices, and made sure that the work, necessary to keep the community running, was done. Here’s a list of the common offices and their functions. This would of course [...]

Who gives the Middle Ages a bad name? They were bad, but without them history wouldn’t have been so interesting. Again like my article on the Top 5 Medieval People, this list is completely arbitrary. The villains of the medieval age are in my opinion: Innocent IV - the implacable enemy of Frederick II. Innocent’s political [...]

Some of the top stories and most interesting blog posts on Medieval History and Medieval Historical Fiction in the past week or so: Medieval Bookworm reviews Bernard Cornwell’s Death of Kings Medievalists.net discusses evidence for Scottish Medieval Football – although is this any real surprise? Football was around for a long time in the Middle [...]