Welcome to the Medieval Period!
The what?!?
Medieval literally means Middle Age. It comes from two Latin words:
medium, meaning the middle
aevum, meaning age
Put them together and jiggle them about a bit so they are easier to say (because mediumaevum would be a bit of a mouthful!), and you get Medieval!
But what is the Middle Age in the middle of?
Well, in Britain it is between the end of the Roman period and start of the Tudor period.
Can you find those on the timeline below? You can also grab the images and try to put them in the right slots.
The Medieval Sandwich
Talking of sandwiches (mmm, sandwiches…), you can think of the medieval period like a big, historical sandwich. But with less cheese.
The medieval period is made up of three smaller periods of time:
The Early Medieval period starts when the Romans left Britain in 410AD. This is when the Anglo Saxons and Vikings were settling here, and it used to be known as the Dark Ages.
The High Medieval period starts in 1066 when the Norman (French) King William the Conqueror beat the last Anglo Saxon King, Harold Godwinson, at the Battle of Hastings. When you think about knights and castles and princesses and Robin Hood and jousting and dragons (ok maybe not the dragons), you’re thiznking about the High Medieval period.
The Late Medieval period starts in around 1300, and it’s the least fun part: there’s climate change and famines and wars and a terrible plague called the Black Death that kills one third of the population of Europe!
When you learn about the medieval period in school, you usually learn about the high and late medieval periods – the cheese and tomato in our sandwich. You’ll learn about the early medieval period (Anglo Saxons and Vikings) separately.
Medieval life
During the medieval period, EVERYTHING changed in Britain:
- The food
- The clothing
- People’s names
- The English language
- Laws and the way people were ruled over
- Buildings
- Medicine
- Art
- And even the size and shape of the country!
The best way to find out about medieval times is to pretend you’re really there. So let’s get started!
Medieval Clothing
First, let’s get you looking like a medieval person.
Just like today, people came in all shapes and sizes; some were rich, more were poor, and most people didn’t own anything at all! How you dress as a medieval person will depend on how wealthy you are. And of course fashions changed quite a lot over the 300 years. Someone from 1066 would look very different to someone from 1485. Or at least they would if they were rich (poor people just had to make do with basic clothes that didn’t change all that much).
Here’s some ideas of how you could dress up as a medieval person, but you can also do your own research:
Clothes from around 1066
Dress like you’re off to the Battle of Hastings.
High Medieval Clothes
Dress like you’re off to the joust!
Late Medieval Clothes
Dress like you don’t care about the Plague!
Make a shield and helmet
One thing you won’t be able to avoid in the middle ages is war. If you’re not off crusading in the Holy Lands you’ll probably be fighting the Saxons (who are not very happy about being ruled by Normans), or the Welsh, or the Scots, or most likely the French.
Yes, the Normans who took over England in 1066 were also French, but don’t let that get in the way of a good battle!
There’s also a civil war in the 1100s called The Anarchy, where everyone in England fights over whether they should let a woman be Queen. It almost destroys the country.
Then there’s the Hundred Years War against the French that actually lasts 116 years;
The Peasant’s Revolt where thousands of people march to London to complain about high taxes and end up burning half of the city down (oops!);
The English wars with Wales, Scotland and Ireland because England wants to rule everybody;
And the Wars of the Roses which has absolutely nothing to do with actual flowers.
So with all this war going on, you’re going to need to make sure you’re well protected. Click the pictures below to download instructions on how to make your own helmet, and design a fancy coat of arms for your shield.
Make a Great Helm
Design a Coat of Arms
Every day life in Medieval England
Enough about war; what was life like for the ordinary people in Medieval times?
Well, as you’d imagine, it was often pretty rough.
For most of the medieval period, people lived under the feudal system. In case you’ve not heard of that, here’s a quick explanation:
Heroes and Villeins
As you saw above, ordinary people were usually called peasants, serfs or villeins. Villein didn’t mean a bad person, just a poor peasant. It didn’t come to mean a bad person until much later on in history!
So let’s see what sort of things villeins would have used in their daily life. Here are some every day objects; can you work out what they were for?
Food and Drink
Remember that medieval sandwich? Sorry to tell you that you couldn’t really have a sandwich in medieval times. Sandwiches hadn’t been invented yet!
Of course you could eat lots of other things, and bread was most definitely one of them.
Here are some medieval recipes that you can make, to turn your classroom into a medieval feasting hall!
Pottage
Pottage was the staple food of the medieval period. It is a porridge, but not like the porridge you might have for breakfast. It was likely full of onions, leeks, beans and maybe some dried fish or heavily salted meat, and it was eaten pretty much every day by peasants.
Can you imagine having the same food for every meal? It might sound boring, but in medieval times food could be hard to come by. Bad weather could make crops fail, and there were no fridges or freezers so food would go bad easily. Food was preserved by smoking it over a fire, drying it out, fermenting it (turning the sugars to alcohol), or pickling it in brine, (salt-water).
Yum.
Pokerounce
When you’ve had enough pottage, why not try some Pokerounce? No, you don’t have to catch ’em all, Pokerounce is actually a sweet honey bread. Although sugar was available in medieval times, it was very expensive as it had to be brought all the way from the Middle East. Only rich people could afford sugar, so if you wanted something sweet, you had to go and find a wild bees’ nest and fight for it! People did keep bees for their honey but most of that would be sent to the Lord to be made into mead or “sack” – a kind of honey wine. Poor peasants wouldn’t get a look in, so get out into those woods and find a bees’ nest!
Wassail
You’re going to want something to wash down that feast, so make some Wassail. Wassail is a drink made from cider and spices, and is usually served hot. Don’t worry, our recipe doesn’t have any alcohol in it so you won’t get drunk! The spices used would be very expensive in medieval times, so you’ll have to try to sneak some from the Lord’s manor house. Make sure you don’t get caught stealing or you might end up getting flogged (beaten with a whip), or losing an ear or a hand, so that drink had better be worth it!
Medieval Houses
All this feasting is all very well, but where are you going to hold your feast? If you’re better off than the average peasant, you might live in a big house. There are still lots of medieval houses in Britain today, so let’s see what they look like so that you can recognise them next time you are out and about.
Medieval Medicine: Kill or Cure
Hopefully that food hasn’t given you a dodgy tummy, otherwise you’ll have to see a doctor.
Medicine at the start of medieval times was very different to how it was at the end! Little more than herbalism and luck kept you alive at the Battle of Hastings, but by the time of the Tudors, people were starting to do things a little more scientifically.
That’s not to say that it was anything like modern medicine, but the beginnings were there. Meet two “doctors”, one from the Early Medieval and one from the beginning of the Tudor age, and see which one you’d prefer to go to if you were feeling a bit sick!
The Battle of Bosworth
Hopefully you’ve enjoyed your time in the medieval period, but like the era itself, we must come to an end.
The medieval age came to an end when the last Plantagenet King, Richard III, met Henry Tudor at the Battle of Bosworth Field.
Let Master Thomas show you the kinds of weapons that were in use during that battle, when Richard III gave battle in vain, and Henry Tudor became King.