Daily Medieval

When King Edward I of England was a teenager , he chose to side with his father's critics. His father, Henry III, refused to speak to hi...

Edward Caernarvon (princes were named for the location of their birth) was born 25 April 1284 to Edward I and Eleanor, Countess of Ponthieu....

The Royal Touch was not just for scrofula , nor was it just a simple touch. Epilepsy was another disease that would bring folk to the king ...

Scrofula, characterized by swellings on the neck, is caused when someone inhales air contaminated with mycobacterium. The bacteria infect th...

...are the hands of a healer." This line from The Lord of the Rings  sounds fantastical, but as a first-rate historian and medievalist,...

Lord Edward returned from the Ninth Crusade to a country that had not had a king in residence for a couple years. His father, Henry III, ha...

In 1271, Edward, Duke of Gascony, went on a continuation of the Eighth Crusade that is sometimes called the Ninth Crusade and sometimes Lord...

The future King Edward I (pictured here with his wife Eleanor and showing his reported blepharoptosis , drooping left eye) did not always su...

When Alfonso X of Castile looked northward over the Pyrenees and cast his eye on Gascony, Henry III of England decided he needed to do somet...

When Henry III's eldest son was born on 18 June 1239, he gave him an unusual name. Edward was an Anglo-Saxon name, in a court that spoke...

North of the Pyrenees in what we now think of as southwestern France is an area the Romans called Aquitania from the Latin aqua , "wate...

Although we associate the feudal system in the European Middle Ages with a way in which knights and soldiers were provided for the king'...

The feudal system could include military duties in exchange for tenancy on the land; forty days was a typical obligation. This might be simp...

Simply put, possession of land equalled power. The laws of primogeniture and ultimogeniture existed to keep estates together. There were pla...

Recent posts discussed practices of inheritance such as primogeniture and ultimogeniture . There was also, evolving from the feudal system,...

We are accustomed to linking inheritance with a preference for the eldest, even without strict primogeniture involved. In New York State in...

Primogeniture is actually a "generic" term for different systems of inheritance. The desire by human beings to create a system tha...

The Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (sometimes called the Frankish Kingdom of Jerusalem) was a Western European creation established after the Fi...

The Hohenstaufen family came from unknown origins to be Holy Roman Emperors from 1138 to 1254 (with a break of four years between 1208 and 1...

There are a number of families in the 21st century who have become wealthy through commerce and use that wealth to exert their influence on ...

After the Ostrogoths took Rome in 476 under Odoacer , the Senate continued managing affairs; after all, the "barbarians" didn'...

When Pope Innocent II (shown here on the left, hanging out with St. Laurence) finally was able to be  pope—after the rival antipope Anacletu...

When Pope Honorius II died in 1130, two popes were elected by rival factions, first Innocent II by a small contingent of cardinals, and then...

Like many well-known theologians/priests in the Middle Ages, Bernard of Clairvaux was born to a wealthy family. This was in Burgundy in 1090...

The Immaculate Conception is the Roman Catholic dogma that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was free from original sin from the moment of her conc...

The picture is misleading, I'm afraid, because the subject of today's post died a natural death, but it is certain that there were p...

Ramon Llull's system of philosophy was officially condemned by an Inquisitor General of the Roman Catholic Church, Nicholas Eymerich, a ...