The Daily Telegraph has an interesting article concerning a twelfth century poem that has just been translated into modern English. The poem itself is piece of propaganda composed by English intellectuals of the time to whip up anti-French feeling. Seems we English have not got on with the French for some time; the poem characterises the French as lazy, arrogant cowards. The stanza I particularly like is:

People remind them often enough about
This source of shame, but they may as well not have bothered;
For they take neither offence or account,
As they know no shame.

Naturally, I love French culture and the French people, even if sometimes they can be a bit… well… French.

I’m reading an excellent history book at the moment: The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England. It is quite an unusual take on the history book genre in that it aims to explain what life was like for all the social strata of people living in the fourteenth century and how we, as modern people, would respond to life during that period. It covers everything from food to recreational activities, from the structure of towns to the effects of the great plague. It provides a lot of detail on aspects of life that most history books just would not contain. An example of this is the section on medieval humour, and I shall reproduce a medieval joke here:

Two merchants are having a chat and one of them says, “I’ve been married four times now, and each time my wife has hung herself from the oak tree in my garden.”

The second merchant replies, “Can I have a cutting from this noble tree?”

So you can tell medieval humour was not terribly sophisticated. The book is filled with fascinating details like this, and reading it gives a real sense of how the people and life was so different back then. Another example is the staggering misogyny in medieval England, no modern English woman would allow themselves to be treated as the distinctly inferior people that women were in the fourteenth century.

If you enjoy history and want a compelling and engaging book to read I can highly recommend this.