Lots of royal children

 If you don't have birth control, you may have lots of children. This shouldn't be a big surprise. Medieval people had various concoctions/devices/rituals that purported to reduce fertility, but none of them worked real well.  On the other hand, a lot of people didn't have children when they wanted them. Women who work extremely hard and are undernourished are less likely to get pregnant.  And there was always the sad fact that half of all children (roughly) died before their first birthday, so having babies didn't necessarily mean having adult children.

Let's look at a few examples of well-documented royal women to see how many children they could have, starting with Eleanor of Aquitaine (d. 1204).  (And note that these women had the best nutrition and medical care their time could offer.)

 

Eleanor was wife of two kings, Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, and mother of two more kings, Richard I and John of England, as well as two queens (by marriage), Joan of Sicily and Eleanor of Castile.  But these four children were less than half of her total brood.  She gave birth to ten children, all but one of whom grew to maturity.  Her first, a daughter (she had two daughters and no sons with Louis VII) was born when Eleanor was twenty-one.  Her youngest, John, the future king, was born when she was forty-two.  Although all but the one son who died in early childhood grew up and married, she outlived all but two of her children.

(It seems like a good time to reiterate that medieval people would have been just as devastated by the loss of a child as we would be. One historian suggested that medieval people wouldn't have loved their offspring, but he clearly had no clue what he was talking about.) 

Let us turn now to Blanche of Castile (d. 1252), Eleanor of Aquitaine's granddaughter (Blanche's mother, also named Eleanor, had married the king of Castile).  Blanche, the wife of King Louis VIII of France (grandson of Louis VII), had twelve children.  She had the first when she was seventeen, having been married when only twelve (and presumably still too young to become pregnant).  She was thirty-six when she had her final child, being pregnant with him when her husband died.

Of these twelve children, the first four all died very young. The fifth, however, flourished, the future Louis IX. The other seven all lived  at least into their teens, with one exception, a boy who. died at age one. (Three others of these final seven died before their mother, so she outlived all but four of her twelve offspring.)

Margaret of Provence (d. 1295), wife of Louis IX, had eleven children, nearly as many as her mother-in-law. Margaret was daughter of the count of Provence, who had married all four of his daughters to kings.  Margaret married Louis when she was thirteen (he was twenty), but they did not start having children for another six years, probably because she was still very young. But once they started they didn't stop.

They had their first child, a girl who died as a toddler, when Margaret was nineteen, and their last when she was thirty-nine.  Of these eleven children, all but two lived at least into their teens, the first-born girl and a boy who died not long after birth.  One of Margaret's sons,  named John Tristan, was born in Egypt, where Louis and Margaret were (unsuccessfully) trying to wrest Jerusalem back from the Muslims through a great Crusade.  Perhaps ironically, when Louis tried Crusading again twenty years later, John Tristan accompanied his father and, like Louis, died on the campaign.  Margaret (who wisely did not attempt a second trip to Egypt) lived for another twenty-five years and outlived all but three of her children.

In spite of having large broods, these women all outlived their husbands as well as the majority of their children.  Eleanor of Aquitaine lived to be 80 and rode down to Spain in her 70s to pick out her granddaughter Blanche of Castile as a suitable bride for the French king. Blanche herself lived to be 64. Margaret of Provence lived to be 74. These queens were tough. They all started having children in their late teens/early twenties and packed them in at a rough average of one every two years, until they were somewhere around forty.  Although they cannot be typical of medieval women in general, frequent childbirth over a twenty-year period may well have been the norm for many.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval rulers, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback. 

 

Saint Louis

 No, I'm not talking about the city in Missouri. I'm talking about the saint named Louis, after whom the city of Saint Louis was named.

Unlike some of the early martyr-saints (even Christopher has been dropped by the Catholic church -- no! not Christopher!), Saint Louis was totally real. He is usually better known as Louis IX, king of France (1226-1270).  He was part of the Capetian dynasty, descended from the tenth-century King Hugh Capet. Louis's grandfather, King Philip II "Augustus" (1180-1223), had essentially unified what we now think of France for the first time since the days of Charlemagne, and he drove the English out of most of the French territory (primarily Normandy) they had held since 1066, so young Louis was able to rule over a fairly peaceful kingdom.

We know quite a bit about Louis from the biography written about him by his friend, Jean de Joinville.  Not surprisingly, Louis always looks good in this account, but other sources tend to confirm the impression of a pious and conscientious king. 

He became king when he was only twelve, because his father, Louis VIII, died young, from dysentery, after only three years as king.  Young Louis IX was promptly crowned after his father's death in 1226, but for the next eight or nine years his mother, Blanche of Castile, ruled France as regent. When he was twenty (1234), Louis married Margaret of Provence, which marked the official end of his mother's regency. However, there are indications that Blanche was jealous of her son paying so much attention to his new wife and tried to keep them apart—ultimately unsuccessfully.

(One may note that Blanche had twelve children, and Louis was the first one to survive childhood.  An older sister and two older brothers (twins) had died in infancy. An older brother had been designated as heir to the throne but had died at the age of nine.   Perhaps we should not be surprised that Blanche wanted to cling to the first son who was perfectly healthy.)

(Louis and Margaret did not start having children until they had been married for six years, but they went on to have eleven. Of these two died in infancy, but the rest lived at least until their teen years and mostly well into adulthood.) 

Louis, Blanche, and Margaret were all highly religious people, and Louis genuinely tried to live as a Christian monarch.  He fully embraced chivalric ideals of gentleness toward the weak, generosity to the poor, and kindness to each other.  Knights at his court had to agree to fight fairly and not kill each other, not even a little bit, just because they felt insulted.  Louis outlawed trial by ordeal in his kingdom (which the organized church was also trying to end) and insisted that anyone, even of humble status, should have access to royal justice.  He also founded churches and was responsible for building the Sainte-Chapelle in Paris, a gorgeous Gothic church built to house the Crown of Thorns (it's still there and has amazing stained glass; I recommend a visit).

He also sought to make sure that his younger brothers (more of those born after him lived at least until their teens than those born before him) and all his sons were well provided for.  At a time when aristocratic brothers were often at each others' throats over the inheritance, he made sure that everyone in his family was well provided for.

This was known as the apanage system, where a royal son or brother would receive an important county or duchy as his own, within the kingdom.  Most notably, he gave his youngest brother Charles the county of Anjou as an apanage, one of the territories Philip II had taken from the English crown.  Charles went on to become king of Sicily, but that's a different story.

But Louis's most notable activity was going on Crusade, not once but twice.  Although the numbering of Crusades gets a little vague in the thirteenth century, his are usually called the Seventh and the Eighth.  The Muslims had retaken Jerusalem and most of the Holy Land in the 1180s, and Europeans repeatedly launched efforts, all unsuccessful, to get it back.

Even by disastrous-crusade standards, Louis's efforts turned out really badly.  It was not due to a lack of planning.  For the Seventh (1249), the plan was to establish a base camp in Egypt from which to attack Jerusalem, rather than heading right there.

It didn't even vaguely work. Louis was immediately captured, along with much of his army, and was only freed after France paid a large ransom.  But this didn't make him lose faith in Crusading! Twenty years later, when he was in his mid-50s (and hence getting up there by medieval standards), he set out on Crusade again. This time they had the brilliant idea of setting up a base camp in Tunisia to attack Egypt from there, and then once they'd conquered Egypt....

You can tell what's coming.  But it was even worse than that. Louis almost immediately fell ill and died in 1270, and his army attempted nothing more.   (Louis's son John Tristan also died.) They boiled up Louis's bones so they could take the bones back to France, to be interred at the abbey of St.-Denis, where his father was already buried.

The monks of St.-Denis knew a saint-in-waiting when they saw one, and they had his relics right there! By this time one had to be formerly declared a saint by the pope, and in 1294 Louis's grandson, Philip IV, who was in a tense standoff with the pope, got the pope to declare Louis officially a saint.  Louis is not the only king to become a saint, but the list of king-saints is extremely short.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval rulers, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback. 

 

 

Relic Collections

 As I have discussed previously, relics were an important part of medieval Christianity. The bones of a saint, or at least things associated with a saint (like a piece of clothing), created a tie between humans and a long-dead saint (though of course just being dead didn't keep a saint from being alive).

The first saints to have their relics gathered and put into altars in the West were martyrs. From the fourth century on, a lot of saints from the eastern half of the old Roman Empire had their relics dispersed to the West, where they were credited with working miracles. In subsequent centuries, more and more local or regional saints had their bones discovered and brought into town as relics. Most of these local saints had supposedly been martyred back in the second or third century and then been forgotten, until a vision took a pious Christian to their forgotten grave. So-called confessor saints, who had not had to die for their faith but who lived very holy lives (complete with miracles), soon joined the group.

Monasteries and other churches soon started collecting relics.  As well as having the relics of martyrs from their own region or of their own early bishops, they started collecting the bones of other saints.  A good place to get them was Rome, where the catacombs, the old quarries dug for the stone that built imperial Rome, were full of bones (the pagan Romans had wanted to put the dead somewhere far enough away that they were unlikely to come for them in the night).  Christian martyrs were reputed to make up a large proportion of the bones.

Churches could also swap with other churches.  Give another church a finger bone of one of your saints, get a foot bone or a piece of skull in return, and gain the attention of one more saint.  A reliquary could be made to house the body part appropriately.

 One could also steal relics if the saint was fed up with not receiving proper attention where she or he was now. Fed-up saints would appear in a vision, urging their removal from a less-than-ideal church, and protect the thieves as they triumphantly carried the relics home.

A church would usually have one principal saint (usually a local saint from late antiquity for a traditional monastery,  Saint Peter if one needed a good all-purpose saint, Saint Stephen quite frequently for a cathedral if not another local saint, the Virgin Mary for a Cistercian monastery).  But by the ninth or tenth century and certainly in later centuries, a church would have a whole collection of relics and would be happy to list them all.  If they didn't have a big enough bone for its own reliquary, a little scrap of linen would be pinned around it, with an identifying tag, and all these small relics could be kept in a box.

In the late Middle Ages, many fewer new saints were recognized, but the old ones could continue to be divided.  Some wealthy people, even one French king, had their own collections of (small) relics, which they could wear pinned to their clothing.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval Christianity, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback. 

 

Varieties of modern fantasy

 Fantasy has become a well developed genre, with lots of sub-genres, from romantic ("romantasy") to grim-and-dark to "cozy" to humorous.  Today I want to talk about several recent excellent fantasy books as examples of the variety the field has embraced.

Okay, at the simplest, fantasy is a story with magic, usually (not always) set in an imagined past, often vaguely medieval.  JRR Tolkien essentially invented the modern genre with The Lord of the Rings, and in the 1950s critics didn't know what to make of it, although they liked it a lot.  "Super science fiction."  "Fairy tales for grownups."

Tolkien-style fantasy has dominated for 75 years. It has a fairly well developed world in which the story takes place, generally with wizards, magical creatures like hobbits or elves or dragons, often a map.  The material culture is pre-modern, swords instead of guns, horses instead of cars, hand-made instead of factory-made goods, wood fires instead of electric and gas.  George RR Martin has this kind of setting for his on-going series beginning with A Game of Thrones.  My main fantasy series, "The Royal Wizard of Yurt," falls more or less into this category (though I highly doubt anyone would compare Yurt to Martin's Westeros.)

One can vary this with fairy-tale fantasy, sort of the same but vaguer on setting, often including such New World items as chocolate and potatoes in a semi-European setting (even Tolkien included potatoes and tobacco), generally more lighthearted (certainly more so than Martin), and frequently involving princesses.  Some authors retell classic tales like "Beauty and the Beast" or "Snow White" this way.

Alternately one can have a medieval setting that is pretty close to the real Middle Ages, although with magic. My husband and I did this with our Count Scar.

  

 

One can also set fantasy in something like the modern world.  The book The Everlasting, by Alix Harrow, starts off in something sort of like modern England but then ranges back over the centuries to the Bronze Age or before, with efforts to remake history in pursuit of justice.  It's been getting a lot of attention for its unexpected plot twists and strong characters.

This book just came out last year, as did Snake Eater by T. Kingfisher.  This one is set in something close to the American Southwest, and it is very evocative of the creatures and myths of the desert and the native Americans.  Its magic isn't time-travel but the idea of desert gods attached to native creatures (a roadrunner is crucial, definitely not the cartoon version).  Again, excellent characters.

A third recent book I've very much enjoyed (though it's nothing like my own fantasy) is The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune. This one is a few years older. It's set in something like modern Britain, except that a lot of children are born as magical creatures, and there's a highly questionable bureaucracy that is supposed to supervise them. Humor, very realistic children, and a touch of gay romance, lots to enjoy.

You will notice that fantasy is very rarely a quest to overcome the Dark Lord these days. Ever since Diana Wynne Jones published Dark Lord of Derkholme, a hilarious adventure where people from our world pay to take quests through the "portal" to a fantastic land and "slay the dark lord," we haven't seen it much.  But there are lots and lots of alternate plot lines. Fantasy, when done right, raises real human concerns in a setting like and unlike ours. And I haven't even talked about sex-with-magical-creatures.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026  

Cows

We take cattle for granted.  Beef accounts for a quarter of the meat eaten in the world.  Our milk and dairy products are primarily from cows (half-and-half for our coffee, much of our cheese, butter, sour cream, and ice cream).  Most of our leather comes from cows.  We wouldn't know what do without them, even though most of us have few personal interactions with them.

Did medieval people have cows? Of course. But they were raised and treated differently than cows today, and there were no cows in the Americas before Christopher Columbus brought some on his second voyage (1493).

Cows are descended from the aurochs, a wild bovine that finished going extinct in the seventeenth century but had been very rare for centuries before then.  The aurochs might be considered Eurasia's answer to the bison. It could reach six feet tall at the shoulder and had wicked horns.  But the aurochs was domesticated into the cow around 10,000 years ago, probably roughly simultaneously in the Middle East (specifically what is now Turkey) and in South Asia (specifically what is now Pakistan). It became smaller, more mild-tempered, and stupider.

The generic term "cows" can either mean cattle of either sex (used this way in the term "cowboy") or else female cattle in particular.  The feminine is the term used for the species as a whole. (Fun fact:  The same is true of geese.)

Cattle change a landscape.  They trample through the mud and eat all the grass.  In the medieval Mediterranean region they were relatively uncommon, because sheep and goats did better in a dry landscape and could eat plants cows wouldn't touch.  The Romans had mocked the Germanic peoples for preferring cows to goats when they showed up along the margins of the Roman Empire.  But then they mocked the Germans for liking butter and for not speaking Latin.

 Medieval cows were smaller than our cows today, which really can be enormous, as you'll know if you've had any personal interactions. Medieval cows were usually brown, not the black-and-white we often assume.  Dairy cows did not produce milk year-round (or almost year-round) as they do now, which meant farmers were not slaves to their cows, who now require twice-daily milking.

Today most beef cattle are free-range for much of their lives, wandering around eating grass without much human supervisions, then rounded up, taken to livestock yards for fattening up (mostly on grain and corn), and slaughtered.  Dairy cattle are kept in good sized herds, from twenty cows up to a couple of hundred.  Medieval cows were mostly kept one-at-a-time, in close contact with their humans, as I have discussed earlier.

Medieval cattle were also very useful as draft animals. Oxen were used to pull carts and plows much more than horses, which are more flighty and more expensive to keep. (An ox is a male castrated as a calf, so it grows up with a bull's muscles but not a bull's aggression.)  The ox transformed life in the Americas, giving the natives an animal that could be used to pull heavy loads, which they had never had before (for small loads, North American natives had used dogs, South Americans the llama—you can see this has serious limits).

 

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval social history and how it still affects us today, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback. 

 

Count Scar

 "Count Scar" is back in print!

 

Okay, let's back up a bit.  Have you ever tried to write something jointly with someone else? My husband and I did. The book was "Count Scar" (and we followed it up with a sequel, "Heretic Wind."). How you ask did we do it without straining our marriage?

Actually it worked well.  We each wrote one of the book's two main characters, alternating viewpoints. We had to consult of course on what was going to happen next, and had to go back sometimes to make sure the continuity worked, but overall each person's chapter belonged to that person (including sometimes setting up a surprise twist at chapter's end for the other person to deal with).

The two characters are Galoran, a scarred soldier who unexpectedly inherits a county and a castle when a distant cousin dies under mysterious circumstances, and Melchior, a priest trained in the highly dangerous magical arts, who has dark family secrets to hide.  It's set in an alternate version of southern France at the beginning of the thirteenth century, in the era of the Albigensian Crusade.  The two characters don't entirely understand or trust each other, but they have to work together when it becomes clear that heretics, far from being defeated in the Crusade, are planning an assault on the castle in the opening salvo of a magical attack that could destroy everyone.

In spite of the magic, the book is fairly close to being set in an accurate version of the real Middle Ages.  Interestingly, "Count Scar" (and its sequel) and the three retellings of medieval tales which I've published all take place in something I'd recognize as the real social world of the Middle Ages.  (The medieval tales-retold are "Ashes of Heaven," "The Sign of the Rose," and "The Knight of the Short Nose."). None are historical fiction because none of the characters are real figures, but the settings are about as real as I can get.

"Count Scar" was originally published in mass-market paperback some thirty years ago and has long been out of print, though it's been available as an ebook on all major ebook platforms and as part of a print omnibus along with the sequel.  But we decided to bring it out again as a free-standing paperback, new cover but same content, for everyone who likes holding a book in their hands but is tired of  dog-eared pages falling out of an old paperback.  And also for those who've never read it but would enjoy it!

Here's the listing on Amazon.  It is also available to be ordered through any bookstore, or will be shortly.  Happy reading!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

Forest Primeval

 Europe and North America don't have a lot of old growth forest anymore, for the simple reason that humans have cut it down.  It is said that at the time of the American Revolution, a squirrel could travel from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic without once getting down from the trees.  That squirrel would be in trouble now.

In Ohio, when the settlers arrived one of their first acts was to start cutting down the forests. Oaks hundreds of years old were chopped down and burned in big bonfires, not even saved for building materials or household cooking and heating, because the amount of wood appeared unlimited (spoiler alert, it wasn't).  It was said the bonfire flames could be seen for miles.

There are a few patches of primeval forest left in North America, but the biggest stretch is the boreal forest at the northern edge of Canada, now suffering from wildfires.  Western Europe has very little real forest, outside of some in northern Sweden and Norway, which is why it was considered miraculous when enough big oaks were found (mostly in eastern Europe) to rebuild the roof beams in Notre Dame the way they had been built in the twelfth century.

The early Middle Ages had had some fairly major forests, due in part to the reforestation of what had been cropland under the late Roman Empire, during the major population decline of the sixth and seventh centuries. "Second growth" forest can become "old growth" forest, given a few centuries undisturbed.  Forests were considered scary places, the land of bandits and wolves.  But as Europe's population grew, so did land clearance.

Already in the first half of the twelfth century, Abbot Suger of St.-Denis considered it miraculous when he found enough big timbers for his own church rebuilding in his immediate region (not having to send off to eastern Europe, as was the case with Notre Dame nine centuries later).

The Europeans in medieval times were a bit more cautious about clearing forests than were their descendants in. eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ohio.  In spite of the forest advances of the early Middle Ages, there were still a lot more people needing open land for their crops and their flocks than there were in North America before the arrival of white people.  Trees were too valuable just to burn in bonfires.

Trees were used for building and for firewood in the home, and it was recognized that wild animals (like deer and rabbits) and some wild foods (like mushrooms or wild fruits and nuts) needed forested land if they were going to produce human food without human labor.  From the late twelfth century on, there were a constant stream of negotiated agreements about who could and couldn't cut down trees or carry fallen wood away.  Forests needed to be managed.  (Though not raked.)

England and Iceland especially were deforested during the Middle Ages.  In both places there was a lot of raising of sheep, who will eat almost any plant down to the ground, making it hard for woodlands to spread.  Especially since both of these are on islands, the ocean itself slowed down the spread of seeds.  Interestingly, there are probably more trees in western Europe (including England) now than there were in the late Middle Ages.  Modern agricultural methods (and fertilizer) have reduced the amount of open land per person required to raise food, and heating and building are primarily done with materials other than wood.

© C. Dale Brittain 2026

For more on medieval social history and how it still affects us today, see my new ebook, Still Medieval After All These Years, available from Amazon and other major ebook platforms. Also available in paperback.