I first came across the phrase “Peasants’ Revolt travel route” in a rather dry local guide from the 1980s, which made it sound like a sort of medieval coach tour…
If you grew up on the sort of history that treats the Knights Templar as a minor footnote before zipping off to the Black Death, the phrase “Templar sites in…
Medieval village life in England is usually described as if it were a diagram from a GCSE textbook: a neat row of peasant strips fanning out from a compact village,…
I came late to early medieval England. At school, 1066 was treated like the franchise reboot: everything before it a muddle of “Angles and Saxons and maybe some Vikings”. It…
When people ask me about “post-Roman Britain travel”, they usually mean mosaics, legions and Hadrian’s Wall tea rooms. What they rarely mean is the bit afterwards – the two or…
I first got hooked on Viking life in Britain standing on a very ordinary-looking street in York. I was at the JORVIK Viking Centre, doing the thing you’re meant to…
Until my late twenties, Hadrian’s Wall lived in my head as a single line: one emperor, one big decision, a neat stone barrier keeping “Romans” on one side and “barbarians”…
My relationship with London Black Death history started, oddly enough, with a badly drawn rat. I was about ten. A primary school project, one of those sugar-paper posters with titles…
My relationship with the Domesday Book started with a bored teenage me in a draughty county record office, flicking through a modern English translation and thinking, “So this is it?…
When people ask me for “Domesday Book villages to visit”, I usually disappoint them by saying something very un-touristy: the most Domesday-ish places in England often feel oddly ordinary. No…
