Daily Medieval

When Deusdedit was Archbishop of Canterbury (from 655 to 664), he had in his household a Saxon priest named Wighard. The date of Deusdedit...

If, of the members of the Benedictine Confederation, the Camaldolese Congregation was founded in 980, and the Vallombrosians in 1036, how ca...

Nennius, the lowly minister and servant of the servants of God, by the grace of God, disciple of St. Elbotus, to all the followers of truth ...

When the Romans in the 1st century CE reneged on their deal with King Prasutagus of the Iceni tribe, seizing property, beating his widow, an...

The Venerable Bede tells a story of Pope Gregory I in the Roman slave market, seeing some fair-haired and light-skinned slaves from Britain ...

Becoming a monk was not always a choice. Sometimes it was the default choice for someone with no skills that he could turn into a career, or...

Start typing the word "venerable" into a search engine on the Internet and one of the options offered will be "venerable Bede...

A synod, from Greek σύνοδος (sinoðos, "assembly") is a council of Christian authorities, usually to decide issues of doctrine or a...

The previous post discussed some aspects of Celtic Christianity found in the British Isles that differed from the "mainstream" ...

It is the first of April, and while you might expect something about pulling pranks and acting the fool, instead we are going to talk about...

Statues of the two Ewalds, in the church at Cologne. Although the Saxons were not converted to Christianity until Charlemagne did it by...

First page of the Textus Roffensis. The water damage is from the early 1700s. The Textus de Ecclesia Roffensi per Ernulphum episcopum  ...

The various Anglo-Saxon kingdoms Poor Æthelbert! All the attention this blog gives him is in regard to wergild . He deserves attention f...

"Grammar" comes from the Greek gramma , meaning "letter of the alphabet" or "thing written." Their word gramma...

When we think of the history of schools, we imagine an unbroken line of buildings and teachers and groups of pupils sitting on chairs or b...

The cleric and writer called the Venerable Bede has cropped up many times here; his learning is known to us by his translation of parts of ...

Were the Norse Norns/Fates the "Mothers"? Among the notable works of the Venerable Bede (c.673-735) is De temporum ratione (T...

Notker Balbulus (the Stammerer) Yesterday's post on cheese included an anecdote about Charlemagne, attributed to Notker the Stammer...

John Wycliffe (c.1320-1384) was politically active and a reformer whose brilliance as a theologian was originally admired widely. Eventuall...