culture
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I have an odd question. Well, odd in that it concerns medieval minstrels/musicians and what they are called according to the instrument they played. For instance, those who played trumpets were (still are) called trumpeters and those who played fiddles were fiddlers and pipes are played by pipers, all of which seem recognisable enough to…
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It’s always rewarding to find a site that is helpful with medieval research. By this I mean everyday research, not the highly specialised work of historians. This site was stumbled upon because I needed to find out how sturgeon would have been served in the medieval period. Yes, it had been a royal fish…
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This extract is from https://gardenandhappy.com/medlar/ “….Great writers such as Shakespeare and Chaucer used medlars to convey the loss of womanly virtue. In The Honest Whore, Thomas Dekker wrote: “Women are like medlars, no sooner ripe but rotten”. Hmm, that bit about “no sooner ripe but rotten” is more likely to apply to the male of the species. As soon…
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If you go to this link you’ll find a fascinating, zoomable map of Europe in 1444. You really can zoom right in, and my only regret is that more towns, etc. aren’t indicated. Well, a lot are listed by initials on the left, but it’s not the same as being able to read them once…
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Well, I have always regarded those awful pointed shoes of the 14th to 16th centuries as a rather daft fashion fad, and to be avoided if you had to go up stairs because you’d have to accomplish the ascent sideways, like a crab. But it seems this footwear was much more than that! In fact…
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You can take your pick of our medieval monarchs at this site ! Although I’m sure Henry Tiddler wouldn’t appreciate being included as Medieval. He was Renaissance, indeed, he started that whole shebang – ask any Tudorite!
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Treasure buried in fields and discovered centuries later are always in the news these days. These are usually coins, of course, but also jewellery, including posy rings. A posy ring was found in Wales very recently so I was interested to then read about the true meaning of such rings in A Crisis of Truth…
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15th C fashion could be quite dramatic…and sometimes, to our modern eyes, a bit ridiculous. Nothing more so than the infamous Poulaine shoes, with their excessively long pointed toes that looked as if they were dangerous to walk in (the nearest we had to them in modern times were the Winklepicker shoes worn by Teddy…
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The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 is well-known, and it is often thought that the decline of serfdom, or villeinage, began at about this time. The truth is more complex. Like most English traditions, villeinage took a long time to pass and outlived its usefulness by many decades. Indeed Queen Elizabeth I still owned serfs –…
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I have often wondered about the medieval Mass. What happened? What would it have been like to be there? What was said/sung/chanted? Well, I have now found a link to a You Tube film that shows a recreation of a Mass of Sunday, 4th October 1450 – the 18th Sunday after Pentecost. The film itself…
The New Murrey and Blue blog 