Still Medieval After All These YearsAs

As I announced back in March, I've been working on a new book, and now it's out!  It's called "Still Medieval After All These Years," and it started life with this blog.

 The book's purpose is to discuss some aspects of medieval society I never got to in my first so-called blog book, "Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages."

 

Specifically, I have much more to same about peasants, their status and opportunities, and about food and beverage.  (Did you know lasagna is probably a Norman dish? Introduced by them into Italy? No tomato sauce, though.). Then I go on to discuss how medieval buildings were built, how medieval people kept healthy, and a lot on the medieval church and religion.

But the newest aspect is a focus on how much modern society owes to the Middle Ages, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.  Even though we've decided we are "modern," the medieval keeps tempting us, including (strangely enough) notions that somehow life was better then and that we should be able to use the Middle Ages as a model for a racially and religiously pure society.  (Um, that's not going to work.) 

(I also talk about medieval-themed fantasy fiction. That aspect is fine.)

Anyway, the book is now available on Amazon, both as an ebook and a paperback.  Here's the paperback link.  It's also on Barnes & Noble as an ebook and will shortly be available on all major ebook platforms, and it can be ordered through any bookstore. 

The ebook has color pictures if you read on a computer or tablet, black and white on a Kindle or as a paperback.  They're all my photos, so you get in effect a travelogue as well as social history. Hope you enjoy!

© C. Dale Brittain 2026 

500 Posts

So this is a milestone.  This marks the 500th post on my blog, "Life in the Middle Ages."

I started the blog back in 2014, over eight years ago, because I knew there was a lot of interest in medieval social history but not necessarily a lot of places to actually learn about it.  Sure, there were little "fun fact" things that might mention something from the Middle Ages, such as, "Medieval kings often received visitors while in the bathtub," complete with a drawing of someone lying in a clawfoot tub, wearing a crown, greeting someone dressed like the Vatican's Swiss guard.  (Ultimate source for this highly unlikely image is a comment by a contemporary biographer of Charlemagne, saying the king invited his courtiers to join him in the hot spring baths of Aachen, which would have been more like a small swimming pool.)  But I wanted to provide a look at how medieval people lived their lives, in an informal but scholarly accurate way.

The blog has been a success.  It routinely gets hundreds of hits a day.  I think some home-school curricula include links to it.  My post on "medieval farm animals" is especially popular, being viewed multiple times a day.  I try to post new material fairly regularly, but there's a whole lot out there already, everything from what medieval marriage was like, to latrines, to war horses, to medieval diet, to the origins of universities, to the history of the Bible, and so much more.  Scroll through, and I'm sure you'll find something interesting.

Along the way I also discuss, at least in passing, some of the things that modern western society takes for granted, like electricity and clean running water (and chocolate), to draw a contrast between our lives and those of our ancestors.  On the other hand, a constant effort has been not to draw too sharp a contrast between us and medieval people.  They really are like us in everything besides the material objects that surround us.  Looking down at people of the past as somehow defective because they didn't have cell phones doesn't help anything.

I also blog intermittently about my own fiction.  I write fantasy, set in a semi-medieval world.  It helps that in knowing a lot of real medieval history I can add texture and detail to the background.  And when I'm anachronistic, I'm doing it on purpose.

So if you've just stumbled across my blog, or if you've been following it for a long time, I hope you continue to find it enjoyable.  And are there topics I've never covered that you'd like to know about?  If so, let me know in the comments section, or email me (link in my profile).

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For much of the material from the first half dozen years of the blog, organized into handy chapters, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback, on Amazon and other on-line retailers, or for sale from your local bookstore.

Positively Medieval

For those of you who have been following this blog, it's now a book!  I've taken the best bits of the blog and organized them into a social history of the Middle Ages, everything from medieval farm animals, to marriage and divorce, to brothels, to the medieval diet, to life as a medieval teenager.

The book is called "Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages."  It's a big one, something like 400 pages.  It's available as an ebook on Amazon, Nook, Kobo, and iTunes;  a paperback version is also for sale on Amazon and is coming soon to a store near you.

Here's the link to the book on the US Amazon site.

 And here's the Preface, to give you a taste:

***

What was life like in the Middle Ages?  It’s a fascinating historical period, where to the modern reader everything can seem larger than life, more dramatic, much more interesting than a modern life centered on driving to work, paying the bills, picking up something at the grocery store, and urging the kids to do their homework.  Between The Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones, almost everyone has become interested in the Middle Ages.

But it was more than a time of sword fights and capes and dramatic contests for the crown.  It was also the period when much of what we think of as “modern” was first established, from universities to the legal profession to sword-and-sorcery stories to parish churches to Europe’s political and linguistic boundaries.

Four years ago I started a blog to inform those interested of aspects of medieval life.  I wanted to counter common misconceptions, such as that medieval people were all brutal and superstitious, or that everyone lived under “feudalism,” or that medieval women had no rights, or that everyone was middle-aged.  I also wanted to give a little more context than those who arrived at my blog after a Google search probably expected—no simple answers here to questions like, “How many silver coins make a gold coin?” or “What was a queen’s illegitimate child called?”  (I actually don’t have handy answers to either of those.)

In this book I’ve pulled together a lot of the ideas from the blog with the hope that both those who have been reading it and those who have not will discover some of the fascination that has kept me involved with medieval history my entire adult life.  There is a little political history, the “kings and battles” kind of history that they may have tried to make you memorize at some point.  But most of it is social history, how people lived and tried to get along.

The book is arranged topically.  Under broad headings, you will find out about medieval society in general, how people lived their lives, as well as more specific information about everything from farming to the church.  Because every chapter cannot possibly cover a thousand-year span, I tend to focus primarily on the high Middle Ages, the period from the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, although you will also find plenty here on both the early and late Middle Ages.  This isn’t a textbook—it doesn’t have to be read in any particular order, and there won’t be a quiz on Monday.  So plunge in, and I hope you enjoy it!

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

One Thousand Years Ago

The Middle Ages can seem very far away.  Let's set the way-back machine for 1017 and see what's different.

For starters, you wouldn't be reading this on a screen but on parchment.  Plus you wouldn't be reading it in English, a language that only slowly emerged out of a fusion between Anglo-Saxon and Old French, as I have discussed elsewhere.  And then you probably wouldn't be able to read at all, since most people in the eleventh century were illiterate (including most of our ancestors, in spite of our best efforts to claim descent from kings and knights and princesses).

If you're in the US, you're in a building that certainly didn't exist in 1017 and, most likely, not even before World War II.  (I take this back if you live in a pueblo.)  You have electricity, modern plumbing, and most likely a furnace or heater that can keep you warm without an open fire.  Almost certainly today you ate some processed food, like cereal or chips or store cookies or anything made with flour or sugar, or consumed coffee or tea or chocolate or potatoes or tomatoes or anything made with corn, all foods unknown in the Middle Ages.

You would neither own a gun nor worry about gun violence in the early eleventh century, for the excellent reason that there were no guns.  Gunpowder only appeared in Europe in the fourteenth century (China had had it earlier but used it for fireworks, not killing people, at least intentionally), and for several centuries it just used for cannons, not handguns.  (Medieval people did of course worry about violence, but it was more the up-close-and-personal kind.)

You rely for entertainment on things reaching you from outside--radio, TV, streaming broadcasts.  You travel by bicycle or car or bus or train or plane, not by horsepower or on foot.  You communicate with your friends by telephone or Facebook or email or texts.  You took a nice bath or shower in the recent past.  Your clothing was probably made by someone you've never met, most likely in a different country.  Now imagine not having any of this.

And yet in many ways there are strong similarities between life a thousand years ago and now.  The dominant religion was Christian, in spite of minority populations of Jews and Muslims and atheists, as is the case in the modern US and western Europe (not so many Hindus, however).  Muslims, in the abstract, were considered scary by people who didn't know any, as now the thought of "Islamic terrorism" lurking among refugees can now send shivers of fear.

Towns then, as now, were the centers of trade, commerce, and opportunity (or at least the hope for opportunity).  Northern Europe's cities were just starting to grow in 1017, but Italy already had cities, and cities had mayors and elected city councils.  Almost all of modern Europe's cities are in the same place as medieval cities, usually with the same names.  Modern Dijon, for example, was Divionensis in medieval Latin, probably pronounced something like "Divion" or "Dijon" by people who lived there.

Speaking of Dijon, the above is one of the carvings in the crypt of St.-Bénigne of Dijon.  It was brand new in 1017, and you can still go see it.

Europe's countries were taking shape in the eleventh century.  England and France were more or less where they still are.  Both Spain and Italy were divided into smaller states, but in both cases their peninsulas had a certain cohesion (complicated in Spain because the southern half was ruled by Muslims).  Germany thought of itself as a country, though it sort of wandered off to the east.

Most people paid rent for their housing to landlords.  Much of the rent was paid in labor or produce rather than coin, but they still had coins for some things.  In their houses, they did the same things we do, eat, sleep, store their possessions, relax after work.

People lived in families a thousand years ago, a mother and father, who were supposed to be married to each other, trying their best to raise the children and teach them what they needed to succeed.  Although there were not yet any public schools or universities, there were plenty of places to get an education, either in a monastery or cathedral school, although only a few could take advantage of these.  Parents loved their children and got exasperated by their teenagers, just like today.  And they worried about and took care of older relatives.

(Note, I seem to have pulled together in this post a lot of earlier ideas.  If you haven't been following my blog all along, click on the links to learn more from earlier posts.)


© C. Dale Brittain 2017

Anniversary

Happy anniversary to my "Life in the Middle Ages" blog!  It's one year ago today since I started it.

So far I've covered a wide range of topics, some on everyday life, such as what people did and didn't eat in medieval times; some on religious history, such as why medievalists avoid calling people "superstitious" just because we in the twenty-first century don't agree with them; and some on political history, such as the Holy Roman Empire.  Posts on medieval women have proven especially popular.

I've also talked some about my books, fantasy set in an alternate version of the Middle Ages, where there was working magic, and where the Middle Ages had persisted without the invention of gunpowder, the Protestant Reformation, the French Revolution, or the Industrial Revolution.

("The Starlight Raven" and other books are available as ebooks on Amazon and other e-tailers.)

Recently I seem to have been discovered by gamers, who want some ideas for role-playing games set in their own version of the Middle Ages, and by students googling for answers to take-home exams.  (I'm fine with the first, not so sure about the second--if you just copy and paste my text, kiddos, the teacher will recognize that you weren't the ones who wrote it.)  I'm probably a big disappointment to re-enactors, because I don't describe exactly how to sew a medieval-style tunic or give recipes for garlic stew (which was actually a big favorite--better than a plate full of under-salted lentils).

As a professor, I get a lot of people signing up for medieval history courses because they've enjoyed "Lord of the Rings" or "Game of Thrones."  I'm not alone--medievalists across the country experience the same thing.  Real medieval history is usually a shock if one comes in expecting lots of sword fights, but fortunately it's extremely interesting in its own right.  And that's what fantasy is for, a half-way house between hard-core medieval history and imagined adventures with knights and castles.

If there are specific topics you'd like to see covered in this blog, let me know!

© C. Dale Brittain 2015

What would you like to see?

So far I've had about fifty posts about medieval life (including a few on my novels).  So I ask you, the readers of this blog, what would you like to see next?

I've had posts on sex, on childhood, on castles, on Christianity, and so much more.  I of course could keep going indefinitely, but if there are specific topics you're hoping I would cover, either add a "comment" at the end of this post or get hold of me through my website (www.Daimbert.com).

So far, I've barely touched on saints or medieval theology, have just given passing attention to agriculture, have a whole lot more I could say about monasticism, and have just hinted at criteria for kingship.  And that just scratches the surface!  So if you want to see something addressed sooner rather than later, let me know!

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

Medieval Peasants

Life for a peasant in the Middle Ages was, not surprisingly, more difficult than life for an aristocrat.  A student once asked a colleague of mine, "Why would anyone choose to be a peasant?  Was it a bad high school counselor?"

Um, no.  You would be born a peasant.  Although most of us can imagine ourselves as medieval knights and ladies, in fact, let's face it, our ancestors were peasants, along with a good 90% of the population.

Basically a peasant was a country person, someone who farmed.  Although in the modern US only about 3% of the population lives on a working farm, in the Middle Ages, before modern hybrid seed and fertilizers, a farmer would raise barely more food than needed to feed his family, meaning that almost everyone was out working the soil.  As any modern farmer will tell you, it's very hard work, and you're subject to random, uncontrollable events like storms, drought, and insect invasions.  Famine sat at the shoulder of every medieval peasant (as is still the case in much of the Third World).

A peasant might be completely free, owning his or her own land.  Or a peasant might be personally free yet rent land from a landlord (probably the most common situation).  Or he might be a serf.  A serf was not a slave, as agricultural slavery had disappeared in the sixth century with the breakdown of the Roman Empire (click here for more on the end of imperial Rome), but he or she was considered "bound in the body" to a "lord of the body."  This meant a serf could not give testimony in court or become a priest, as he or she was not considered to have the ability to make free-will oaths.  On the other hand, not being a slave, a serf could not be bought or sold and was not subject to arbitrary commands.

In practice there were a great many varied statuses for peasants, including many varieties of serfdom, depending on location and whether one was a descendant of slaves or a descendant of someone who had commended himself to a lord of the body in return for protection and support.  In a village, every family probably had a slightly different status and owed different rents to different people.  All of this was kept track of orally, which meant that slippage was always possible.

Anyone who rented land owed rents, of course, whether a free peasant or a serf:  usually some combination of money rents, rents in kind (a certain number of chickens or bushels of wheat a year), and days a week in which the peasant was obligated to work on the landlord's fields, raising food for the landlord.  These rents were (theoretically) fixed, not a percentage of the crop.  Serfs as a group generally (though not necessarily) had higher rents, and in addition they owed servile dues, generally a few pennies a year, more symbolic than anything--but humiliating if, as in many places, the serf was required to approach his lord on his knees, pennies on his head.

Although a serf might have both a landlord and a lord of the body, and one would think this would make life very difficult, in practice it could be an advantage, as a serf could use one against the other.  Serfdom ended in France and Italy in the early twelfth century, although it lingered longer in Germany and Britain.  Russia acquired serfs for the first time after the end of Europe's Middle Ages.

Peasant houses were very simple, at most a few rooms, generally built right up against the cowshed (this can be an advantage in the winter--cows keep you warm).  Their diet was also very simple, mostly bread and whatever vegetables might be available.  Meat was an extremely unusual luxury.  (Click here for more on the medieval diet.)

(Click here for more on medieval peasant farming, and read my post here on the word 'feudalism' before you use it to refer to medieval peasants.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For medieval peasants and so much more, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Medieval Death

Part of life in the Middle Ages is death in the Middle Ages.  Modern society essentially deals with death through denial.  "As long as I eat healthy and exercise, nothing bad will happen to me."  Most people die in the hospital, accompanied by last ditch efforts to give them a few more moments of life.

Humans haven't figured out yet what to do about death.  The medieval response, not being able to deny it as we do, was heart-breaking:  they embraced death.

This did not mean they wanted to die, because they didn't.  But they insisted, loudly and repeatedly, that death was good.  You could go to heaven, be reborn in an improved version of your own body, and be very happy.  The saints were dead, but that didn't keep them from being an active part of people's lives.

Alternately, of course, you could go to Hell.  Just as most modern Christians don't worry very much about Hell, most medieval people didn't either, unless they realized they had committed some major sin or were actually dying.  Priests tried to remind them, and the frequency and enthusiasm with which they were reminded suggests few were paying attention.

The requiem mass included the "Dies irae," a poem about God's wrath and begging for mercy.  It's a terrific poem, with a strong melody, composed by an unknown author, incorporated shamelessly into more recent Requiems such as Mozart's and Verdi's.

Dies irae, dies illa,
Favet saeclum in favilla,
Sicut David et Sibilla.

That's the first verse.  It basically can't be translated into English.  In translation it goes, "Day of wrath, on that day, Heaven and earth shall pass away, as David and the Sybil say."  See what I mean?  (The Sybil was a Greek prophetess who, a couple of centuries AD, was supposed to have predicted all the events of the New Testament.)

But in practice medieval Christianity asserted that the dead were not in Hell but were their friends.  This was very different from pagan Rome, which feared the dead and made sure to bury them outside the city walls, so they couldn't sneak in at night.  Above is an image of a sarcophagus, a stone coffin from the early Middle Ages.  Hand-carved from a single piece of stone, a sarcophagus probably cost as much as we'd pay for a Buick.  And it was not just the elite who wanted such a coffin.  Medieval churches were surrounded by them and often built literally over dozens of sarcophagi in their crypts.

Click here for more on medieval Christianity.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

Medieval Diet - What They Ate

In an earlier post, I discussed what medieval people did not eat, primarily because it was not available (for example, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, all New World foods).  Here I will discuss what they ate instead.

The medieval diet, like the diet of ancient Greece and Rome, got most of its calories from bread.  Christians pray, "Give us this day our daily bread," with "bread" a metaphor for all needed things, but when the Lord's Prayer was composed in the first century, bread meant bread.

Bread could be made from different sorts of grain, but wheat bread was preferred.  Medieval wheat (like most modern wheat) was winter-wheat, planted in late fall and harvested in the summer.  Barley, which was more common around the Mediterranean than was wheat, was planted in the spring and harvested in the fall.  Barley was also used to make beer.  Medieval people would not recognize today's "lite" beers.  Beer was supposed to have a lot of calories.  The bread was what we would call whole-wheat, with the wheatgerm in, and the beer was thick and crunchy, almost like runny oatmeal.

Confusing to Americans, the British often call wheat "corn."  This is because the word "corn" just means grain in general, although in the US it is used almost exclusively for maize.  Maize (American corn) was not found in the Middle Ages, so all references in British sources to medieval "corn" mean wheat.

Other foods in small amounts accompanied the bread.  Dried peas, beans, and lentils were a regular part of the meal.  So were root vegetables, parsnips and turnips (carrots were only domesticated centuries later).  You will notice that none of these foods need refrigeration.  You will also notice that they are all remarkably bland, which is why spices were highly valued and highly expensive.  So was salt.

Those parts of Europe that will support grapes produced wine.  Wine was also necessary for the liturgy and had to be imported into places (like Scotland and Ireland) where grapes will not grow.  For the peasantry, beer rather than wine provided most of the alcohol (it was all fairly low proof).

Milk, when they could get it, was mostly made into cheese.  (Unlike modern cows, medieval cows only gave milk for a short time when they had just calved.)  Eggs, when they could find the nests the free-range chickens had hidden, added protein.  Nuts, berries, and mushrooms were gathered in the woods in season.  In spring and summer lettuce and cabbage and other leafy vegetables rounded out the diet.

This vegetarian (if not vegan) diet was the normal diet for most of the population, most of the year, and also for monks, who deliberately ate a peasant diet in a search for purification and simplicity.  A vegetarian diet is now promoted as healthful.  But note that these "healthy" people were worn out by their 50s.

But then there were special foods.  When a hen got too old to lay eggs, she could become dinner.  So could the worn-out ox or cow.  Aristocrats hunted for deer—and tried to restrict peasant poaching, because they wanted the deer for themselves.  Aristocrats also went hawking for geese, ducks, and other wild birds.  Peasants did not have trained hawks, but they sometimes spread a sticky substance on twigs to try to catch song birds—who we would not think had enough meat on them to be worth eating.

Fish were an important addition to the monastic diet, eaten on feast days because monks never (or almost never) ate red meat.  Streams like the one pictured above produced trout.

But the most common source of meat was pork.  Pigs were only semi-domesticated and ran wild much of the year.  Around November, after they had gotten fat on acorns ("mast"), they were rounded up and slaughtered.  Everyone ate as much fresh pork as they could hold for a day or two, then the rest was smoked and salted to last the winter.  Modern ham would seem very insipid to a medieval person used to a ham that had to be soaked for a day or so before cooking, to get out all the extra salt.

Feasts (for the wealthy) were symbolically a denial that the diet was bland and limited.  A good feast included a great many different dishes, fowl, red meat, fish, vegetables cooked in different ways, puddings, nuts, and so on.  A feast started in early afternoon and went on as long as anyone could still eat.

Click here for more on medieval ideas of mealtimes.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval Teeth

Medieval people did not get cavities at nearly the rate that do modern people in the West.  On the other hand, their teeth were worn down a lot.

Cavities, as your dentist will tell you, are directly linked to sugar and sugary foods.  The medieval diet (on which see more here) had very little sugar.  They had honey, but it was not used very much.  After all, honey means bees, so you either have to find wild honey in the woods (and avoid getting stung) or keep bees, which is a lot of work and takes away from time spent raising grain.

Without soft drinks, without sugary snacks, without frosted flakes, even without the currants that started attacking teeth in the early modern period, a person in the Middle Ages would get very few cavities, as archaeology has shown.  They would not have the perfectly aligned, pure white teeth of modern orthodontia, but they were pretty good for people without toothbrushes or fluoride toothpaste.  (One could and did clean one's teeth with a twig.)

And yet many teeth were worn down by medieval bread.  Starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries,  most grain was ground by big millstones, powered either by wind or water.  These replaced the old hand mills, something closer to a mortar and pestle.

It would take one person essentially all day, doing nothing else, to grind enough grain into flour in a hand mill to make enough bread for a family for one day.  Back in Roman times, a slave or two would do the grinding.  With wind mills and water mills, however, unknown to the Romans, one could grind a 50-pound bag of wheat into a 50-pound bag of flour in fifteen minutes.  Not surprisingly, this technology spread very rapidly and was adopted nearly everywhere.

But mills grind grain by rotating two big millstones against each other, with the grain in between, and what emerges is both flour and stone dust.  The stone dust would be baked into bread along with the flour.  Stone dust passes through the digestive tract without any problem, but it first wears down the teeth, not a lot with each bite, but the effect builds up over time.

Archaeologists can tell when a particular community adopted mills and millstones by looking for wear on skeletons' teeth.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014
For more on medieval hygiene and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval Diet - What They Did Not Eat

The medieval diet, unlike the modern American diet, did not have meat as the central event.  Aristocrats ate a lot more meat than did the peasants, but for everybody bread was the single most important item in the diet.

Here I will point out a few things that they did not eat, mostly because these foods were not found in Europe in the Middle Ages.  In a future post I will discuss what they ate instead.

There was no corn in medieval Europe.  We tend to think of corn as corn on the cob, or a major ingredient in corn tortillas and corn bread.  But in fact corn is a significant part of the American diet.  Look on almost any box or can, and you'll see corn starch or corn syrup.  And of course we use a lot of corn to fatten up cattle before slaughter.

There were also no tomatoes.  Like corn, tomatoes are a New World plant.  In fact, they were originally introduced into Europe as an ornamental plant that grew attractive red fruits believed to be poisonous.  It was a century or two before someone was brave enough (hungry enough?) to eat a tomato, find it tasty, and not die.

Hard as it may be to imagine, medieval Italy had pasta and pizza without tomato sauce.  You also couldn't put ketchup on your French fries.

Part of the reason of course is that there were no French fries!  Potatoes, like tomatoes, are a New World plant.  We tend to think of potatoes as having something to do with Ireland, because of the potato famine in the nineteenth century, but that is because the Irish had been replacing wheat fields with potato fields, because potatoes grow much better in Ireland's cool, damp climate than does wheat--at least until it gets the blight.

The potato, like the tomato, has prospered in modern Europe as in the US, because it also grows well in lots of places besides Ireland.  (See more here on potatoes and tomatoes.)  Russia grows a lot of potatoes--and indeed uses them to make vodka.

Medieval Europeans however did not have hard liquor.  This is not because they were Mormons!  Rather, distilling was not invented until the very end of the Middle Ages.  The major alcoholic drinks were beer and wine.  Without modern bottling (also a later invention), neither will keep very well, and last year's wine had pretty much turned to vinegar by the time of the grape harvest in the fall.

Tea and coffee were also unknown in medieval Europe, even though these are not New World products.  Both reached Europe for the first time in the early modern period, tea coming from China and India, coffee from the Arabs.  Without coffee and tea, no orange juice, and no corn flakes, medieval people might start the day with a hearty mug of beer.

Finally, there was no chocolate.  Yes, I know, it's hard to imagine.  Chocolate comes from South America.  I have seen it suggested that the reason the ancient Greeks invented tragedy is because they did not have chocolate….

© C. Dale Brittain 2014

For more on medieval food and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Life in the Middle Ages - Welcome

Welcome to the C. Dale Brittain blog, "Life in the Middle Ages."

Between "Lord of the Rings" and "Game of Thrones," there's a whole lot of interest in what life in the Middle Ages was really like.  As both a professor of medieval history and a fantasy writer myself, I've been studying medieval times for over 40 years.

In this blog, I'll be posting fun bits of information about the period--some funny, some sad, some downright weird.  I'll also be putting up some pictures of medieval architecture and the like, almost all of them mine.  There is an amazing amount of misinformation about the Middle Ages out there (no, not everyone was middle-aged!), so I'll be correcting some of that too.

First tidbit of information:  The Ox.

An ox was a crucial medieval animal.  An ox is just a bull who was castrated as a calf, so he (it?) grew up with a bull's powerful muscles but none of a bull's testosterone-fueled fury.  Strong and placid, able to subsist on grass rather than needing expensive grain (because of the multiple stomachs all cattle have, good for getting the last ounce of nutrition out of something), an ox made a great draft animal.  Carts and plows were normally drawn by oxen.

And when an ox got old and died, its skin was used for leather (ox hide is thick and tough), and its meat could be boiled up and eaten (though also thick and tough).

(Click here for more on medieval farm animals.)

© C. Dale Brittain 2014