A MEDIEVAL YEAR IN ENGLAND

In crafting my stories, I try to shape the plots and characters to the realities of life in England in the 1400s, rather than casually (one may even say, of some authors, carelessly) re-shaping medieval times and minds to suit my whim.  Toward the goal of understanding medieval life as deeply as may be, I started -- a long while ago, when my research and I were much younger -- putting together a guide, from many sources, to what I suppose can be called A Medieval Year in England.

It was never meant to be more than a gathering of details for my own use about the yearly returning patterns of medieval English life -- the seasonal work on the land, the holidays and holy days, the hunting seasons, the folklore that were part of people’s everyday lives.  I say I “started putting together” because to this day, every once in a while, some new tidbit of information is added to the file, despite my occasional spasms of attempting to declare “Enough!”.  It seems that research, like death and taxes, is forever.  But at some point I set some of what I had gathered into a series of very short articles for an SCA newsletter.  Lately, they surfaced out of my welter of papers (I had, of course, filed them right where I be able to find them again; this was, as all too usually, a mistake) and because so much of what is in them is, like weather, woven into the texture of my stories, I thought you might enjoy reading them, month by month, through a modern year.