The Common Cold

One often hears some version of, "If they can send a man to the moon, why can't they cure the common cold?"  Well, for starters there are probably 200 or so different versions of "the" common cold, so you'd need 200 cures.  They are all viruses, which scientists put into several groups, including the Rhinoviruses (the most common), and Coronaviruses, also known as Covid.

Symptoms vary but all include sniffling and aching and maybe running a fever.  One's body does build up immunity, so by the time a person has been around for a while they don't catch nearly as many colds, as they've already had and recovered from a large proportion of them.  Children, as every daycare knows, catch lots of colds, because their immune system is still developing and is meeting colds for the first time.  Influenza is another viral disease, again with a number of different strains, potentially more deadly than a cold and usually not involving sniffles, though it can make a person feel terrible otherwise.

In spite of the name, you won't "catch cold" by going outdoors without a sweater.  But the  cells in your nose that fight off foreign invaders (like viruses) may be less effective when they're chilly, making colds spread more readily, especially when people are mostly indoors during the winter months, breathing each others' air.

(Don't try to treat viral diseases with antibiotics.  Antibiotics are effective against living creatures like bacteria, which viruses are not, and overuse of antibiotics helps antibiotic-resistant bacteria to develop.  This health tip brought to you courtesy of this blog.)

Wait, you say, didn't you just mention Covid a couple paragraphs back?  What's with that?  Yes indeed, I did, because Covid-19 is a Coronovirus, related to though a lot more serious than the "common cold" versions.  It's called "19" because it was first identified in 2019.  (The number has nothing to do with the number of pounds you gained in 2020, staying home, getting no exercise, but filling your time baking sourdough bread and cinnamon rolls.)

But what, you say, does this have to do with the Middle Ages?  You're about to find out.

Some version of "the common cold" has been around for a long time, the sniffles being described by physicians in ancient Egypt.  But there is emerging evidence that one of the Coronovirus versions of the cold first appeared in humans in the thirteenth century.  Like many viruses (including Covid-19), it probably developed first in animals and then made the jump to humans.

It was a killer.  A lot of people got very sick and died.  It was not nearly as bad as the Black Death in the fourteenth century, but it was bad.  Without modern vaccines, people had to rely on their own immune systems and on friends and family keeping them warm and fed.  This is when it became a great act of charity to endow a hospital, to care for the sick and the indigent.

This disease was probably comparable in effect to modern Covid-19, and like Covid-19 it mutated readily, each iteration being somewhat less deadly but somewhat more infectious.  It seems most likely that this medieval form of Covid, now just starting to be studied seriously by historians of medicine, is still with us.  We know we still have a version of Covid that killed a lot of people in Russia in the 1890s, before becoming less deadly.  So it seems Covid-19 is going to be with us permanently, in some form.

By the way, there are a number of "just so stories" about medieval people, some of which involve colds and are clearly untrue.  No medieval priest taught that your soul would escape as you sneezed or coughed, or that the devil would zip into the vacancy your soul left behind.  So stories that people said "Bless you" to encourage your soul to stay put, or that they coughed into a handkerchief to keep the soul from escaping, are just untrue.  People have doubtless said some version of "Bless you" or "Gesundheit" (meaning Good Health) as long as people have sneezed, because sniffles are an illness you hope the person recovers from.  And they coughed into handkerchiefs because, even without knowing about viruses, no one likes a sick person spraying on them.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval health and disease and other aspects of medieval history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

The sixth century

 As I have discussed before, the term "fall of the Roman Empire" is a misnomer.  No one thought the Roman Empire had fallen until close to a thousand years after it had supposedly done so.  There were still Roman emperors (in Constantinople and, in the west after 800, in Germany), Roman cities, Roman religion (Christianity), Roman language, Roman roads, Roman monuments, and so on.

The seat of Empire had shifted from Rome to Constantinople (in Byzantium) in the fourth century, under the emperor Constantine (guess how Constantinople got its name), so in many ways you could say the Empire did not fall until 1453, with the fall of Constantinople to the Turks.  (It was at this point that the church of Hagia Sophia, seen below, became a mosque.)  From the fourth century to the late fifth, there were sometimes two emperors, one in Constantinople and one in Rome, until the last separate western one was assassinated at the orders of the Byzantine one.

And yet a whole lot indubitably changed during the "long" sixth century, from the late fifth century to the early seventh century.  This is one of the least well documented periods of the history of western Europe in the last two millennia, which is why British scholars have sometimes called it the Dark Ages.  But this term has unfortunate negative undertones (you mean the sun never came up?) which is why the term Late Antiquity is now mostly used instead for the fifth through seventh centuries.  (For one thing, the term recognizes that the Empire of antiquity was still around.)

The "long" sixth century is bracketed by the disappearance of separate Roman emperors in the West after the 470s or so, although there continued of course to be Byzantine Roman emperors who sometimes visited the West, like Justinian, and by the rise and spread of Islam in the first half of the seventh century, which radically changed the culture of the Mediterranean, which had been known as a "Roman lake."

The sixth century was also an awful time in many ways, marked by the first outbreak of the Black Death, and by several very cold years of disastrous harvests, probably caused by a volcanic eruption.  The pandemic and breakdown of trade and communication meant that cities, which had been central to Roman civilization, radically shrank.  After all, people could recognize that infection was a lot higher in a crowded city even without knowing about bacteria, and a city can't survive if the countryside isn't producing enough surplus food to sell to city-dwellers.

The cities persisted, however, as religious and governmental centers, even if with much smaller populations.  In some old Roman cities, like Nîmes, people retreated inside the amphitheater, treating its outer walls like the new city walls.  The city of Rome itself shrank into a new, smaller area with its own walls, leaving the area between the old and new walls, that had once had a large population, dotted with orchards, villas, and monasteries.

Constantinople had the same problems as the West with disease and famine, and orders stopped coming from Byzantium.  But a lot of the governmental structures stayed in place.  As provincial governors stopped ruling cities, bishops took over the role.  New kingdoms, such as those of the Franks in what is now France and the Visigoths in what is now Spain, became established, using Roman laws and Roman taxation systems as they replaced Roman regional administrators.  They dropped their original Germanic languages like hot potatoes in favor of Latin.  Urban populations continued to be literate, writing on papyrus, with city archives recording important events in people's lives.

The Franks, Visigoths, and many other so-called Germanic people were once described as invaders, destroying Roman civilization, but in fact they had been neighbors to the Empire for several centuries, traded with them, and were often recruited into the Roman armies.  The only part of the Empire where Germanic people could be said to have radically changed the culture was what was now England, with the arrival of the Angles and Saxons.

Elsewhere the new arrivals clearly wanted to be Roman, adopting the culture as well as the language.  A lot of the new arrivals kept their traditional names, however.  Yet the same family might include a Theoderic, who served the king as a regional lord (a count), and an Anthony, who entered the church.  The first was a "Germanic" name, the second a "Roman" name, indicating sons destined for different functions.

In the cities, people went to church, scribes kept records, and merchants sold goods, some of which continued to come from some distance away in spite of all the trade disruptions.  Kings and counts went to war with each other and collected booty.  In the countryside, people farmed, tended vines, and raised their animals.  One crucial sixth-century development was the end of agricultural slavery, as the legions were no longer bringing home huge numbers of people to be worked to death, then replaced.  Peasants became serfs instead of slaves, legally unfree but with their own families, houses, and plots of land.  People of whatever status recognized the need to work together in dangerous times.

A good book about the movement of so-called Germanic peoples into the Roman Empire, refuting the notion that they somehow destroyed it, is by Walter Goffart, Barbarian Tides (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on Rome and the Middle Ages, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Peasants in the Winter

 Winter was a tough period for medieval peasants.  For one thing, they would have had a difficult time keeping warm.  We probably do not appreciate our furnaces enough—turn up the thermostat, and heat appears!  Medieval people of all sorts, not just peasants but the rich and powerful, would have killed for a furnace (well, maybe not literally).

They had firepits, but peasants would not have had fireplaces, a thirteenth-century invention.  A fireplace, while not filling the room with smoke the way a firepit can, also sends a lot of its heat up the chimney, so it's inefficient, and if fuel is hard to get or expensive you don't want to be inefficient.  Building a fireplace was also a skill that most peasants didn't have, and they wouldn't have had the money to hire a mason.  So fancy medieval fireplaces might be found in castles (as seen below), but not peasant houses.

 

The best way to stay warm was to stay in bed, snuggled up against other people.  Fortunately there was very little work to be done in the winter, other than taking care of the animals, so there was plenty of time to stay in bed.

 Animals in fact could be advantageous to have.  They wouldn't actually live with the humans, but a medieval farm house would generally have the barn or stables attached, or perhaps on a lower floor with the humans living above.  Some of their body heat would thus help keep the structure from becoming too frigid.

But a farm would still have been a brutal place in the winter (and remember, probably 90% of the medieval population lived on a farm).  The water that both humans and animals needed might well have frozen.  The courtyard and the dung heap, where both human and animal waste was deposited, would have been a muddy mess, or a frozen muddy mess, scarcely better.  Worst of all, the food might be running out.  Everybody tried to stash away plenty for winter, but there was no doubt that it could be a close run between when the root vegetables, stored grain, and smoked meat gave out and when the first dandelion greens appeared.

Appreciate your furnace and the grocery store.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval peasants, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

The Starlight Raven

 A lot of readers like series.  They get to know and like the characters, they enjoy the world in which the characters function, and they are eager to see what happens next.  This is why some authors keep a series going for dozens of books (mysteries are especially wont to do this), and why both TV shows and movies keep bringing out the same people to have new adventures.

I like a good series myself!  And I write them.  When I first wrote and published A Bad Spell in Yurt, I assumed it was a stand-alone.  At first I resisted suggestions that it become a series.  I'd seen too many series in which the problem solved in the first book turns out not to have been solved after all in the second book, thus undercutting what had been the first book's happy ending, or the same problems being presented repeatedly and unoriginally (as in the classic, Defeat the Dark Lord in book 1, defeat the Purple Lord in book 2, and in book 3, look, there's the Plaid Lord), or the author becoming so fond of his characters that he won't let anything exciting or dangerous happen to them.  But my husband persuaded me that my characters could mature and grow and face entirely different challenges, so "Yurt" ended up being a series, with 6 novels (and 3 shorter novellas).

But the series wrapped up well in the sixth novel, all the long-term plot lines resolved, our hero in a very different place than he had been at the beginning.  I didn't want to continue the series with lame adventures.

So instead I went with "Yurt, the Next Generation."  This series focuses on the hero's daughter, offspring of a witch and a wizard with the skills of both.  The Starlight Raven, the title of the first book about Antonia, has become a series in itself, with three books published and a fourth on the way.  It will probably be five or maybe six books in all.

These are quite different, I've found, than the original Yurt series, even if set in the same world.  A teenage girl (Antonia) is quite different from a perhaps overly-confident young adult male (her father when his series begins).  She has to worry about sex discrimination and unwanted attention from the opposite sex, things which never bothered him in the slightest.  I've added the dimension that witchcraft, female magic, is quite different from male wizardry, and Antonia has to try to find her way in both, while still being a girl.  Although the wizards' school gets mentioned a lot in the original Yurt series, Antonia's stories are actually set there, at least in part.  I've also done a lot more with inter-generational issues.

The result of introducing real teen-girl issues into fantasy is that a lot of people think of "The Starlight Raven" series as darker and for more mature audiences than the original Yurt, even though Antonia begins the series at age 14, whereas her father began his own series in his late 20s and has been killed at least once, although she's never been killed a bit.

 

Anyway, I hope that both "Yurt" fans and people who just enjoy teen fantasy will like "The Starlight Raven."  A sample is given below to whet your appetite.  Here's the link to the book on Amazon.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Of course I knew my mother was a witch.
She never needed a match to light the fire.  She knew immediately if someone new had come to town, even if she had spent the entire day at home, sewing.  Sometimes in the evening, after she had finished tailoring a new ballgown for the mayor’s daughter or embroidering a new altar-cloth for the church, women would knock quietly on our door, giving quick glances up and down the cobbled street, and Mother would tell them if they were going to have a baby boy or a girl.
But I had no intention of living an uneventful life as a small-town witch.  I was going to study to be a real wizard.
That would be easy, I thought.  My father was head of the wizards’ school in the great City, a much more interesting place than our little town of Caelrhon.  He’d said himself that I could come and study there when I became fourteen, the first girl the wizards’ school had ever admitted.  Already I knew how to turn someone into a frog, something even my mother couldn’t do.
But on my fourteenth birthday it all became much less easy.

It started two weeks earlier.  A gentle hand on my shoulder interrupted my dreams.  “Antonia, wake up.”
“It’s too early to get up for school,” I mumbled into the pillow.
The hand remained on my shoulder.  “It’s not a school day.”
Then I remembered.  “We’re going to the City!”
I was out of bed with a bound, and then, with another bound, right back under the covers.  The air from my casement window was cold.  “It’s not even morning yet!”
Mother flicked a flame into life on my candlestick.  She was already dressed, her brown braids neatly wrapped around her head.  I loved her hair, smooth where mine was always tangled, darker than mine but showing golden highlights in the glow of the candle.
“I want to go there and be home again before it gets late,” she said firmly.  “After all, tomorrow is a school day.  In fact I hear,” she added with a smile, tugging the quilt off me, “that at the wizards’ school they give the new students only one warning.  Then, if they aren’t on time for the first early-morning class, they set the dragons on them.”
I swung my legs out of bed and kept them out.  “Sometimes I think everyone’s seen dragons except for me.  Father even killed one once when he was young, even though he won’t talk about it.  And there was the time we arrived in the City just too late to see a whole flock of them.”
“I’ve never seen a dragon either,” said Mother.  She had the brush and was working the snarls out of my hair.  “I think it would be more terrifying than exciting.  And I’m not at all sure they come in ‘flocks.’”
I let her work on my braids, thinking that once I was a wizard I would go visit dragons myself, rather than waiting for them to come to me.  A herd of dragons?  A pack?  A clutch?  I was fairly certain it wouldn’t be a gaggle.
“Besides,” I said after a minute, “I know they don’t punish students for sleeping late.  Father told me that when he was a student at the wizards’ school, he hardly ever made any of his morning classes.”
There was a chuckle behind me.  “Antonia, your father is an admirable man in many ways, and he’s made himself an excellent wizard over the years, but I would not recommend using him as your model when you become a wizardry student.”
I shrugged and laughed myself.  Having my hair braided was very pleasant.  I glanced toward my window, still nearly dark, and was hit by a sudden memory.  “I had the strangest dream,” I said slowly.  “It was about a bat.  He tapped at my window and squeaked this really high squeak, but when I sat up he flew off.  And for some reason I wasn’t frightened at all.”
“Of course not,” Mother muttered through hairpins.  “Bats won’t hurt you.  I’m glad you knew that, even in a dream.”
“And the strangest thing of all,” I went on, “was that he had a little cylinder tied to his leg—you know, like the carrier pigeons wear.”
“Who would send messages by a bat?” said Mother abruptly.  The last pin went sharply into my hair.  “Really, Antonia, you’re old enough to know that nobody finds someone else’s dreams very interesting.  Get dressed and come downstairs.”
She slammed my door behind her, leaving me wondering why she could possibly be so irritated by a dream.
No time to worry about it.  I splashed cold water on my face from the washbasin, pulled on a school dress, and laced up my boots.  In front of the mirror I smoothed out the hairs disarranged in getting dressed.  I grinned at my reflection and blew out the candle.  I was the daughter of a witch and a wizard, almost fourteen years old, and I didn’t think there was anything I couldn’t do.
When I clattered down the stairs into the kitchen, Mother was frying bacon and smiling again.
But then I saw it, lying on the table amid dressmaking scraps:  a tiny piece of parchment, half unrolled.  It looked like the kind of message usually brought by a carrier pigeon.

© C. Dale Brittain 2015, 2022

Medieval Slavery

 The ancient Mediterranean region had been a society of slavery.  Slaves then were usually people who had been captured in battle, or the children/descendants of such people.  Slavery is distinguished from other sorts of subservience by the fact that slaves are treated as having no will of their own.  They cannot say No to any command, no matter how arbitrary or foolish, and they can be bought and sold like animals.  Ancient slavery did not have the racial component of later slavery in the Americas, because slaves might be the captured citizens of a different city located only a few dozen miles away, who had (until captured) shared language, religion, and culture with their captors.

The Roman Empire was built on slavery.  Rather than just raiding their neighbors, they captured hundreds of people from all over their vast territory.  Successful generals would have big parades, with captured slaves in chains walking along with the carts piled high with loot.  Some slaves were well treated, but there was no penalty for maltreating one's slaves, and even well treated slaves had nothing that we would call rights.  Runaway slaves would be captured and brought back.  In the city of Rome itself, slaves probably outnumbered the free people, and the Senate periodically worried that the slaves would figure this out and revolt (which they sometimes did anyway).

Mediterranean-region slaves might be given responsibility as school teachers, or those who ran shops, or those who ran a household, even as the equivalent of policemen in ancient Athens.  Certainly not every family had slaves, but all well-to-do ones did.  The gladiators who fought for the entertainment of the Roman masses were slaves.  The Romans used slaves for agriculture, working them very hard, even to death on big plantations.  Many Roman citizens in the countryside worked their own fields, and indeed it was from such yeomen farmers that the Roman legions were recruited, but with a lot of the young men off fighting, slaves made up the difference.

All of this changed in late antiquity.  Once the Roman legions stopped winning and bringing home new captured slaves, an economy built on the labor of slaves considered disposable become unsustainable.  With the breakdown of many of the structures of the Empire, due in part to changing climate, disease, and the rise of Islam, slaves could just run away.  In addition, freeing one's slaves became considered a Christian duty once the Empire became Christian, and it was clear that one was not supposed to enslave someone already a Christian.

Agricultural slavery was replaced during the sixth and seventh centuries by serfdom, as I have discussed earlier.  Serfs were not really free (and the term servus was the same Latin word used for slaves), but serfs could not be bought and sold or treated horribly without repercussions.  Most importantly, serfs had their own houses and own families and own plots of lands on which they raised their own food, rather than just being worked in gangs until they dropped, to be replaced by new slaves.

Household slavery continued until the eighth or ninth century in some cases, and one would never have wanted to be a serf, but for much of the Middle Ages slavery was not found in the West.  Slavs (in the Balkans and further east), who were not yet Christian, might be captured and sold as slaves (Slav is the root of the word slave), and Muslims and Christians might sometimes have engaged in the slave trade with each other around the Mediterranean, but this was rare.

But slavery returned at the end of the Middle Ages.  Both legal scholars at the universities and town councils in Renaissance Italy studied Roman law, where there was a great deal said about slavery.  North of the Mediterranean, there were attempts to reimpose serfdom, which had been dying out since the twelfth century. as I have discussed earlier.  In Italy, which considered itself the heir to Rome, slavery was once again considered appropriate.

And then Europeans started exploring the rest of the world in the late fifteenth century, discovering all sorts of people, especially in Africa and the Americas, who seemed very strange by their standards, thus perhaps to be treated as a lesser race, and who were not Christians.  With Roman law as their guide, people of the early modern period re-embraced slavery.

Today, one hopes, almost everyone would agree that slavery, treating humans like animals, is wrong.  But it has only been gone in the West (including North America) for about 150 years, and its legacy deplorably still lingers.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval peasants, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

Stonehenge

Stonehenge is not medieval.  It was built somewhere around 2500 BC.  But medieval people of course knew it was there, it's hard to miss a circle of huge standing stones, and they had their own theories about it.

 Modern archaeologists of course have had plenty of theories as well.  The current thinking is that it was built during a (relatively) short period at the end of the Stone Age (the Neolithic) which also saw most of the other great stone circles and standing stones erected across Britain, Ireland, and Brittany.  During a period that may have been as short as a century, Neolithic men across the region dragged huge stones many miles and heaved them up into position without machines, horses, or even the wheel.  (One assumes Neolithic women were wondering when the guys would do something useful, like raise some food.)  (Am I sexist in assuming the women had something better to do than create huge erections? of course not.)

And it certainly is a remarkable achievement.  Stonehenge's big stones weigh several tons each. The bluestones, those making a smaller circle in the center of the monument, came from Wales, 175 miles away.  (Stonehenge is unique in this; all the other stone circles in Britain just were built from local stone.)  There is even a site near the original Welsh quarry that has pits spaced the same as the stones at Stonehenge, but with no stones in them (maybe a test run?)  There is also some evidence that the cremated human remains found at Stonehenge are from people who had been living in Wales, perhaps those who had accompanied the bluestones to their final destination.

The biggest Stonehenge stones were all quarried locally, but they still would have needed to be dragged several miles.  And think about trying to heave the lintel stones up on top of the standing stones.  It's no wonder that Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing King Arthur stories in the twelfth century, said that Merlin had magically erected Stonehenge, having brought the stones from Ireland (some millennia-old legend of bluestones coming from Wales?).

In modern popular belief, Stonehenge is often attributed to the Druids and the Celtic peoples, and self-styled pagans like to hold special ceremonies there at the summer and winter solstice (the longest and shortest days of the year).  Stonehenge is indeed lined up with the sunrise of the summer solstice and the sunset of the winter solstice, but we know nothing of what this may have meant for the builders' religion.  We know a little about the Druids, but they came along some 2000 years later, making it pointless to assume similarities.

Whatever it meant to the people who built it, Stonehenge has generated lots of meanings in the last thousand years.  It has been taken as King Arthur's "real" round table, as proof that giants used to exist, as a sign of alien visitors from outer space, and of course as an excuse to wear green and do "pagan" dances.  The chronicler William of Huntington, writing in England in the 1130s, was probably more honest than most when he said he had no idea when or why it was built.  He still named it a "wonder of England."

The megalith builders (as they are called) did not only erect stone structures.  They also built huge circles of wood, sometimes made of very old, very tall oaks that would have weighed even more than the stones.  Archaeologists have found the remains of such "wood henges," though they are not visible now as the stone circles are; millennia ago, however, they would have stood as impressive monuments for centuries.

Although we can only guess at what the megalith builders were trying to do, it is interesting to note that they had agriculture, and thus a (fairly) reliable source of food, not needing to wander around hunting and gathering.  Some 4000 years after Stonehenge was built, the Inca emperors in what is now Peru had great stone structures built to honor their gods (and themselves), again using stone-age technology (this was not long before Columbus) and having well-established agriculture.  (They concentrated on walls, rather than standing stones, and smoothed the stones so that they would fit together so tightly you couldn't even slide a piece of paper between them.)

There is a good article on the current scientific understanding of Stonehenge's construction in the August 2022 National Geographic.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022

For more on medieval society, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

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.