Popular depictions of castle moats in film and television usually involve hungry crocodiles , flesh-eating piranhas or dangerous sharks. While most of these depictions are fanciful, one medieval...
Ermine de Reims was a relatively inconsequential peasant woman who moved to the town of Reims, in northeastern France, from rural Vermandois with her elderly husband in 1384. She was a pious woman,...
It is hard to imagine that the gruesome topic of bodysnatching and the ghastly, gory and gorgeous world of relics would be a main focus of religious veneration throughout the Middle Ages. Through...
In the Middle Ages, animals were put on trial just like human beings. A wide range of crimes could be committed by these animals including murder, being an accomplice in bestiality , and damage of...
People in Europe in the Middle Ages boosted libidinal sexual intimacy through the use of medieval aphrodisiacs, some of which are truly bizarre. Dr. Eleanor Janega, a medieval historian based in...
It has long been assumed by historians that medieval English royals consumed a heavily meat-based diet. But a new bioarchaeological study proposes that, before the arrival of the Vikings, Anglo-Saxon...
Out on his daily constitutional, a dog in Poland unexpectedly struck gold, or rather, silver. The dog was being taken for a walk by his owner near the city of Wałbrzych in southwestern Poland when he...
One of the largest ports in the Baltic Sea, Estonia’s Tallinn Port is also one of the oldest in northern Europe, famous as trade center between Rurik Novgorod and Viking Scandinavia. Yesterday, a 700...
When Barry and Lola Haughian purchased an historic old castle on the outskirts of Galway in west Ireland in 2017, they had no idea that one day they would be opening the castle doors to people...
For many years in an obscure back corridor of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem there was a large stone slab leaning against a wall. The eight-feet-by-five-feet (2.5 meter...
On the 16th of September 1560, in the small rural French town of Artigat, a man named Arnaud du Tilh was put to death by hanging for a most unusual crime: for over three years, he had assumed an...
The world’s most expensive spice by weight, saffron, has been valued and coveted by many ancient civilizations for a multitude of purposes, and debates over its origins still continue. Worth its...
If you find the term ‘bollock dagger’ too crude, you could rightfully call this weapon a ‘kidney dagger.’ But that’s how the Victorians attempted to mask the true nature of this horrendous invention...
Nine ancient Scots were buried in a mass grave in eastern Scotland some 1,400 years ago. However, a new study in the Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences journal shows they were born in...
European Nordic seafaring pirates and raiders, known as the Vikings, would come to Greenland to settle around 950 AD, but mysteriously the Greenland Vikings vanished with the onset of the Little Ice...
In 2020 the Regional Directorate of Cultural Affairs (DRAC) in France’s northernmost region, Hauts-de-France, requested that the country’s National Monuments Center (CMN) begin renovation of an...
Game pieces from the gaming and gambling history of Norway have been discovered in medieval Oslo. So bad did gambling addiction become that the king had to change national gaming laws. An excavation...
When nations go to war, the most tragic aspect is the disruption and annihilation of civilian lives. International media has been reporting the robust resistance put up by Ukrainian citizens in many...
Nothing recalls the medieval era in Europe better than the image of a gallant knight in shining armor mounted on a fully barded—or armored—steed. But how effective was such mail horse armor in...
Black Death is said to have killed over half of Europe’s population. However, a new pollen study suggests many parts of Europe were not affected by the bacterial onslaught. Black Death was a bubonic...
Marthe Brossier was a celebrity in France in the 1590s. She was a woman possessed by demons and her family took “the act” on tour. They went from town-to-town showing off the Satanic entity that...
A team of Norwegian scientists have been tracking the evolution of diseases in medieval bodies. Not only have they added to the understanding of how diseases become pandemics, but they’ve revealed...
An archaeological dig prior to the demolition of the Old Berwick Hospital site, built in 1874 in the town of Berwick in Northumberland, continues to unveil interesting discoveries about the town’s...
Located in Berlin-Mitte in the German capital, Stralauer Straße has a storied history which is now known to stretch back to the medieval founding of Berlin in the year 1237. Excavations in January...
