Medieval England

|

8 books

This list features a selection of books that provide both a good introduction and a much deeper understanding of life in Medieval England, particularly in the Thirteenth Century. All of these proved very useful in researching my own trilogy of novels set in the Barons’ War of 1264-66.

Read more... Read less...

The English Castle, 1066-1650

John Goodall, 2011

Castles are surely the most iconic structures of the medieval landscape. John Goodall is an acknowledged expert on them, and this massive and beautifully illustrated book provides both a historical panorama of their development in England, from the earliest fortified stockades to the lavish palaces and grim gun-forts of a later age, alongside a detailed survey of castle construction, architecture and operation, and the experience of living within them.

Going to Church in Medieval England

Nicholas Orme, 2021

The medieval world was saturated with religion, and with Christianity in particular, which informed just about every aspect of life. However, until recently there has been little accessible study of just what the practical experience of medieval Christianity actually involved – when and where did people go to church, and what did they do there? How did their beliefs, and the religious calendar they followed, colour their everyday life? Nicholas Orme’s book meets that lack, and is a vital accompaniment to any understanding of life in the era.

Life in a Medieval Village

Frances Gies, Joseph Gies, 2010

Frances and Joseph Gies have written a series of short books about medieval life – they also cover castles and towns – but this one really stands out for its depth and clarity. The book focuses on a single village – Elton in Cambridgeshire - largely in the later Thirteenth Century and goes into great detail on manorial administration and law, agriculture, families and the life of the people of the land. Besides being a very solid study in its own right, it acts as an excellent jumping-off point for further reading.

For Honour and Fame

Chivalry in England, 1066-1500

Nigel Saul, 2012

Chivalry is a much-misunderstood concept today, but for the aristocracy of the middle ages it was very real and much prized as a guide to honorable behaviour and admirable virtue. Nigel Saul traces its development from a practical warrior ethos on the battlefields and tournament grounds of the Eleventh and Twelfth Century, through to its final flowering in the courtly etiquette of the Tudor era and looks at the ways it was used – and misused – to try and govern the actions of a volatile and often violent warrior class.

Medieval Outlaws

Twelve Tales in Modern English Translation

Thomas H. Ohlgren, 2005

While knights, castles and clergymen formed one side of the popular medieval scene, the ordinary people of England were often far more enthralled by tales of outlaws and banditry. Robin Hood was the most famous, then as now, but Ohlgren’s book collects a diverse and very colourful band of rogues, whose adventures range from the grittily realistic to the outright fantastical. His translations are vivid and readable, and often very dramatic, and show that the people of the past enjoyed a tale of action and adventure just as much as we do today.

The Light Ages: The Surprising Story of Medieval Science

The old idea of the medieval era as the ‘dark ages’ has been getting pretty regular debunking lately; some of these attempts perhaps stray into exaggeration at times and pitch their claims for medieval scientific and cultural innovation a bit too high. Seb Falk’s book is rooted very firmly in the real world; he follows the career of a late-Fourteenth-century monk, John of Westwyk, whose ideas and experiments, while totally in keeping with his own time, point the way towards the developments of a later age. Following John from one monastery to the next, and even on a brief ‘crusade’ to the Low Countries, it’s essentially an intellectual history, but packed with fascinating little details of the understanding of the age, building a close-focus examination of a single life on the cusp of great change.

Tournament

David Crouch, 2006

We tend today to associate the medieval tournament with jousting, but back in the Twelfth-Thirteenth Century, it was based around the mock battle called the melee and provided both the main form of training for the mounted warrior, and the most dazzling form of popular sport of the era. Knights made and lost fortunes in the melee and often lost their lives as well. David Crouch’s book is a gift for a novelist writing about this world: he not only provides a full narrative account of the tournament scene but also a selection of original texts in translation.

The Great Household in Late Medieval England

C. M. Woolgar, Christopher Michael Woolgar, 1999

There are a number of very good books about life in the great households of the medieval English aristocracy and gentry, often focusing on a single individual. Woolgar’s book is one of the most accessible, I think, and although his focus is on the Fourteenth-Fifteenth Centuries, a lot of what he describes – the organisation of the household and retinue, the logistics of moving from one manor or castle to another, the provision of food and drink, what everyone wore and ate and where and how they slept – is fully applicable to earlier centuries as well.