A burial practice among elite medieval Europeans was to be interred on their beds, a rite which archaeologists call “a bed burial.” An English researcher has now completed an analysis of 72 bed...
The daily life of a medieval peasant in England and elsewhere was extremely difficult, long, and busy. They faced endless days of manual labor working on farmland starting as early as three in the...
The Middle Ages had its fair share of terrible jobs, from cesspit cleaners to rat catchers and even royal bottom-wipers , but few were as soul-destroying as the job of a sin-eater, who carried the...
An English couple in Australia are selling a home. But this is not your typical suburban semi-detached house, it’s a full-blown English-style medieval castle , complete with a moat… the last thing...
The jus primae noctis , droit du seigneur , or “right of the first night,” is an alleged medieval custom which permitted lords to engage in sexual intercourse with the brides of their male subjects...
One surprising quirk about life in medieval times is that people could, and did, take animals and insects to court and try them as if they were humans. While there is scant verifiable evidence on the...
The medieval jester has become an iconoclastic figure in society, regularly appearing in the TV shows, films, and video-games of the modern era. The classic jester, replete with flamboyant colorful...
The use of private duels as a way of settling questions of honor spread through Europe from Italy in the end of the 15th century, though the institutional practice was much older. These encounters...
In November 2013 archaeologists from the University of Durham in northern England found two mass graves near Durham Cathedral. At first the archaeologists thought the bodies belonged to the Cathedral...
In early medieval art and literature fluffy white rabbits, bunnies, and hares were typically motifs of innocence, venerability, and purity. However, more in sync with these animals’ rate of...
In 2020 construction workers in the Netherlands made a gruesome discovery. While working in the city of Vianen they came across an enigmatic mass burial. Were the 82 skeletons victims of war, a...
Every country in the world has its own rich folklore , every city and village has its own legends about fantastic creatures and supernatural beings told by grandparents to parents to children,...
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...