Daily Medieval

Controlling the Workforce After the Black Death (1348-49 in England), the workforce was radically reduced. In a culture where 90%+ of the ...

The Transformation of Matter Of Lanfranc's (c.1005-1089) many accomplishments, perhaps the most far-reaching was his writing on the su...

Friar Clynn looks beyond the present Friar Clynn was a Franciscan living in Kilkenny in western Ireland at the time of the Bubonic Plague....

Scholar and Teacher, Priest and Politician There are two reasons why I want to mention Lanfranc today. One is because today is the 923rd a...

Concerning Nursery Rhymes Ring around the rosie A pocket full of posies Ashes, Ashes We all fall down! "Everybody knows"* t...

The ultimate character witness Throughout several centuries and many countries, establishing your innocence or trustworthiness in a court ...

Hype aside, what do we know? The Middle Ages called what was happening "The Great Pestilence." The "Black Death" was...

Richard II (1367-1400) had all of the elegance and none of the political savvy or military skill required of a king of England in the 14th...

A timeline for the Bubonic Plague (An incomplete list of) Breakouts of the Bubonic Plague: 540 C.E. -- Breaks out in Egypt and reaches C...

Does the Earth rotate? Born in  the 1320s, Nicholas (or Nicolas) Oresme likely came from humble beginnings; we assume this because he att...

The men before Galileo In the first half of the 1300s, a handful of scholars at Oxford University, most of whom were at Merton College, a...

The Collapse of the 1340s Florence was the headquarters for some powerful families in the Middle Ages who used their wealth and business a...

from a sketch by Matthew Paris  In 1232, King Henry III of England established the Domus Conversorum , the "House of Converts...

Town vs. Gown The St. Scholastica Day Riot This phrase is commonly used to refer to conflicts between members of a university and the com...