HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: The official website for BBC History Magazine
date: 2025-11-05T09:01:03.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think
items: Michael Wood on lessons on good government from medieval Siena
items: Medieval warhorses: 5 moments horsepower changed the course of history
items: Live locally, live sustainably, live medieval
items: What was life like in a medieval town? A historical A-Z
items: Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life
items: What are the Easter treats known as Biddenden cakes, and who were the Biddenden Maids?
items: How pigs caused a stink in medieval England
items: Medieval towns: everything you wanted to know
items: Medieval influencers: 4 women who brought change to the Middle Ages

Marvellous medieval medicine: why their curious cures were better than you think
type: item
date: 2025-11-05T09:00:32.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Medieval life
description: What did medieval physicians prescribe for stomach ache? And could weasels’ testicles really help you conceive? James Freeman delves into the sources to find eight curious cures from the Middle Ages
encoded: My urine has turned black! What does your wee say about your health? Well, plenty – but perhaps not in quite the way medieval physicians understood it. Before the in-depth study of anatomy and physiology, establishing the causes of symptoms relied on theories that today seem primitive or foolish. However, they were often based on long-established ideas about the body and its function. Medieval treatises on uroscopy – the study of urine – identified up to 20 colours, each indicating certain diseases. Many texts on this subject were accompanied by drawings of glass flasks filled with liquid coloured with an appropriate pigment. These might be arranged in a circular shape with descriptive labels, helping readers to memorise the key diagnostic details. Perhaps unsurprisingly, black was the worst possible colour, and was generally agreed to indicate imminent death. Why was urine so significant? Because of prohibitions against opening the body (which extended to postmortem dissections), medieval doctors were reliant on external indicators. This included variations in a patient’s pulse but also the colour, texture, layers, smell and even taste of their urine. The doctor’s role was to understand a patient’s nature: specifically, the four fluids or ‘humours’ inside the human body. In the treatise De Natura Hominis (‘On the Nature of Man’), by the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (c460–c375 BC) or his pupil Polybus, it was determined that there were four such humours: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Disease was caused by imbalances in these humours, or when they became ‘corrupted’ or concentrated in a part of the body. Read more | It felt like the end of the world, but this medieval ‘apocalypse’ left a legacy no one saw coming This theory was developed further by Galen of Pergamon (c129–c216), who likened digestion to the cooking process: food was converted into life-giving liquid, the humours were generated by the vital organs, and waste products – including ur…

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Michael Wood on lessons on good government from medieval Siena
type: item
date: 2025-08-21T08:00:14.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Medieval life
description: "When justice is sovereign, the wicked are stripped of all power", writes Michael Wood
encoded: Siena is one of the great historic cities – a living vision of the medieval world found now in very few places. Here is the architecture and street plan of a medieval city-state, the oldest bank in the world, and one of the oldest universities. Siena was even the first place to ban the car, in 1966! In its centre, the great square called the Campo hosts the famous Palio horse race twice a year. It’s a place to relish the continuance of the past into the present. In the Middle Ages, Siena was run by the Nine, who rotated every two months as a bulwark against tyranny. They met in the council hall in the Palazzo Pubblico (Public Palace) on the Campo. On the first floor is a room adorned with some of the most extraordinary paintings in western art. Three fresco panels, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338, offer a vibrant vision of life in town and country on the eve of the Black Death. This huge work, known as The Allegory of Good and Bad Government, covers three walls. In the dim light, the eyes need a moment to take in the scale and the colour – the deep, luminous ultramarine skies created with a paint made from ground lapis lazuli. It’s the last great creation of the school of painting in Siena that came to an abrupt end when the plague struck Italy in 1348, killing half the city’s population – including Lorenzetti and his elder brother, Pietro. These extraordinary frescoes came to mind while visiting the National Gallery’s fabulous Siena exhibition this summer. The focus there was on four painters: Duccio, Simone Martini and the Lorenzettis. It encapsulated an exquisite, idiosyncratic moment, with none of the advances of Renaissance art: perspective, anatomy, realism. Instead, as the cultural historian Erin Maglaque eloquently remarks, we saw “silk, gold, and suspended emotion – an embrace of mystery that feels archaic and alien”. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life Florence lies close by, but the Sienese were seduced by the sole…

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Medieval warhorses: 5 moments horsepower changed the course of history
type: item
date: 2025-08-20T08:00:44.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Medieval kings and queens
subject: Medieval life
description: From William the Conqueror’s battle-winning cavalry to Richard III’s fatal final charge, Oliver H Creighton and Robert Liddiard explore five moments when horsepower changed the course of medieval history
encoded: 1. 1066 and all that Horses were involved in King Harold’s defeat at Hastings – but also in the demise of his Norman conqueror It’s one of the most famous of all medieval images. Harold II stands upon the battlefield at Hastings, desperately grasping at an arrow lodged in his eye. This incident – depicted in the Bayeux Tapestry – is credited with ending the English king’s life and extinguishing centuries of Anglo-Saxon rule. Yet look to the right of Harold and you’ll find an image that arguably goes even further in explaining his defeat: it depicts a sword-wielding warrior mounted upon a horse. The Norman conquest of England in 1066 was an era-defining event – and its centrepiece was the battle of Hastings. That clash is graphically represented on the Bayeux Tapestry, most memorably in the image of mounted Norman knights charging the line of Anglo-Saxon warriors on foot. It’s a powerful rendition of horses making history – and for William, Duke of Normandy, those animals proved critical in securing his victory. William began the day of the pivotal action, 14 October, by ordering reconnaissance missions, receiving intelligence from returning mounted scouts on the whereabouts of Harold’s forces. When the two armies later closed in to do battle, the Bayeux Tapestry shows us, the duke mounted his warhorse and exhorted his knights to “prepare themselves manfully and wisely” as they cantered towards the forthcoming engagement. During the nine-hour struggle, William was in the thick of the fighting – and two, or possibly three, of his horses were killed beneath him. The crucial part of the battle came when a rumour spread among the Normans that their commander had been killed. The duke hurriedly rode among his now-fleeing troops, his helmet raised to prove that he was alive, so preventing a rout. At this key moment it was the mobility provided by his mount that allowed William to be in the right place at the right time, averting disaster (for him). Despite the oft-repeated…

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Live locally, live sustainably, live medieval
type: item
date: 2025-07-23T09:30:46.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Medieval life
description: If you want to live a sustainable life today, you need to think local. For that, you can channel the experience of the Middle Ages, as Dr Ian Mortimer suggests
encoded: When I have a spare moment, I dabble in making hazel hurdle fence panels. It’s gloriously therapeutic. You get yourself a fat bundle of six-foot-long straight hazel rods, ram a few of them vertically into the ground at regular intervals and then cajole the rest of your rods through them on the horizontal, weaving them in and out of the uprights. The trick is to bend the rods robustly so that you can feel the fibres creaking and twisting through your palms, but you can’t be so hard on the wood that it cracks and snaps. It’s bad if that happens. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2025/07/Hurdles-panels-f647815.jpeg" width="1006" height="774" alt="A fence made of light brown hazel rods, weaved together. In the background, there is a wall covered in ivy and a wooden structure with fairy lights on it" title="“My shabby efforts at making hazel hurdle panels,” explains Dr David Musgrove. “Note the amateur broken ends of the rods.”" /> I am a rank amateur at this, and the results of my labours are woefully rustic, but I like the process of getting there. If you’re doing it properly, you’re supposed to split the hazel rods in half, but I’ve yet to conquer that art. To see it done masterfully, there are loads of informative videos of competent, serious chaps in forests teasing the wood into beautiful hurdle panels. People have been making hazel hurdle panels for millennia. In the Somerset Levels, archaeologists have excavated them in situ where they were laid down in the Neolithic period as trackways to help people get across the boggy ground. They survive, amazingly, because peat grew up over them and protected them. The trickiest bit of making a hazel hurdle is procuring the rods. You have to coppice trees (ie cut them down to the base) in order to encourage the hazel to shoot up in straight stems. If you’re managing a woodland, you would crop the coppiced hazel on a regular rotation every five to seven years. It’s a very sustainable buildi…

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What was life like in a medieval town? A historical A-Z
type: item
date: 2025-05-16T10:09:01.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Medieval life
description: What was life like in a medieval town? Were the streets really filled with filth? How did people make a living, and where could they grab a bite to eat? Speaking on the HistoryExtra Podcast, Professor Carole Rawcliffe takes us through an A to Z of urban life in Britain in the Middle Ages. Words by James Osborne
encoded: A… is for Architecture According to Professor Carole Rawcliffe, speaking on the HistoryExtra podcast, would-be travellers in medieval England, Scotland and Wales approaching a large town would likely first notice the distinctive walls and gates. These were more than just practical defences, going as far as symbolising civic identity. “Walls and gates often appear on the town seals,” Professor Rawcliffe explains. Dunfermline and Norwich, for example, proudly displayed their gates alongside royal lions. B… is for Bathhouses Bathhouses were not as common in England as they were in Europe. While in Germany, bathhouses were considered charitable institutions, in England, the best-known examples were the Southwark ‘stews’. These were not just public baths but also doubled as brothels, a connection that led to their temporary closure in 1506 during a major outbreak of syphilis. “Henry VII closes them down […] but they open up again by popular demand soon after,” explains Rawcliffe. C… is for Cleanliness The idea that medieval towns were drowning in filth is an inaccurate one. The reality – according to Professor Rawcliffe ­– was that “most towns put a great emphasis on the cleanliness of their streets and their clean water supply”. Read more | A brief history of human filth: how did people try to keep clean in the past? Laws were strict. Bristol, for example, imposed a fine of three shillings and fourpence (a week’s wages for a journeyman) for anyone caught emptying chamber pots onto the street. In Cambridge, market spaces were required to be cleaned twice a day from 1379 onwards. Towns also hired ‘rakers’ to clear dung, introduced refuse collection, and regulated butchery to prevent animal waste from contaminating public areas. D… is for Disease Towns were vulnerable to epidemic disease, particularly the Black Death, which killed vast swathes of the urban population in the 14th century. The belief at the time was that plague spread through ‘bad air’ (miasma), leading to s…

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Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life
type: item
date: 2025-05-10T08:00:06.000Z
creator: Michael Wood
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Global cities
subject: Medieval life
description: "Globalism is ironing out the fabulous texture and diversity of the old world", writes historian Michael Wood
encoded: Coming from industrial Manchester in the cold, rainy north of England, I have loved the Mediterranean all my life. The wondrous diversity of landscapes, cultures and histories, and the peoples around its shores – all are an inexhaustible delight. Recently, I’ve gone back to an old favourite book, A Mediterranean Society by Shelomo Dov Goitein. Published from 1967, it’s never included in those ‘great historians’ debates, but it is a masterpiece. A portrait of medieval merchant communities in the eastern Mediterranean, its canvas is huge, stretching across Europe to India, and from Morocco to Crimea. It centres on one of the world’s most amazing historical archives: the Cairo Geniza (‘storeroom’ in Hebrew) of the Ben Ezra synagogue in Fustat, Old Cairo – a stone’s throw from the Nile. A windowless box of a room on the second floor, reachable only via a rickety wooden ladder, by the 19th century it was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of documents. A photo from 1898 shows some of them: heaped, crumbling, wrapped in cloth, crammed in wooden tea chests. These were the business documents – and so much else – of medieval Jewish merchant communities, and are especially rich for the period 950–1250. There were 400,000 of them – the largest and most diverse collection of medieval manuscripts anywhere in the world. Read more | Michael Wood on the rise of a new world order The Geniza was one of hundreds that once existed in the hyper-literate society of the medieval Levant. They survived because Jewish tradition dictated that Hebrew script was sacred and should not be thrown away but stored or buried reverently in a cemetery. Removed from Egypt in 1897, this incredible treasure trove is now divided between many libraries, with the majority of the documents in Cambridge. After the Second World War, Goitein – already a great scholar in the languages of the Near East – decided to dedicate the rest of his life’s work to the archive. The result was his portrait of the Geniza in f…

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What are the Easter treats known as Biddenden cakes, and who were the Biddenden Maids?
type: item
date: 2025-04-10T11:00:45.000Z
subject: Medieval
subject: Period
subject: Medieval life
description: What are Biddenden cakes? Every Easter Monday, a Kent village celebrates the story of the Biddenden Maids, medieval sisters who were reputedly joined at the hip and shoulder. Who were the sisters, and why did they become a symbol represented on these Easter biscuits?
encoded: Every Easter Monday, in the village of Biddenden in Kent, a charity doles out tea, cheese and loaves of bread to local pensioners, and distributes hard-baked biscuits, known as Biddenden cakes, to villagers and visitors alike. Stamped on each cake is a representation of the ‘Biddenden maids’, conjoined twins from the 12th century who supposedly left money in their wills to found the charity. Joined at hip and shoulder, the twins, usually named as Eliza and Mary Chulkhurst, are said to have lived to their thirties and died within six hours of one another in 1134. There is little evidence, though, that the Chulkhursts actually existed and the earliest account of what is probably a legend was only published in 1770. Jan Bondeson, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University, takes up the tale to trace what can be known about the Biddenden legend… Who were the Biddenden Maids? According to tradition, the Biddenden Maids, Mary and Eliza Chulkhurst, were born to fairly wealthy parents in the year 1100. Their bodies were joined at the hips and shoulders. They were naturally very close friends, although one source states that they sometimes disagreed in minor matters, and had “frequent quarrels, which sometimes terminated in blows”. In 1134, Mary was suddenly taken ill and died. It was proposed that Eliza should be separated from her sister’s corpse by means of a surgical operation, but she refused with the words, “As we came together we will also go together”, and herself died six hours later. In their joint will, the two Biddenden Maids left 20 acres of land to the churchwardens; the rent from these Bread and Cheese Lands was to provide an annual dole to the deserving poor. When Biddenden Church was visited by the Archdeacon of Canterbury on Easter Day 1605, the custom that “on that day our parson giveth unto the parishioners bread, cheese, cakes and divers barrels of beer, brought in there and drawn” was not observed, because it was usually accompanied by “much disorder by re…

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How pigs caused a stink in medieval England
type: item
date: 2025-01-13T07:30:22.000Z
creator: Spencer Mizen
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Medieval life
description: Dolly Jørgensen explores medieval England's love-hate relationship with the urban pig
encoded: They attacked children. They exhumed dead bodies. They were even thought to be in league with the devil. And yet, despite this long list of misdemeanours, pigs were an indispensable part of urban life in the Middle Ages. Speaking to Spencer Mizen, Dolly Jørgensen reveals why medieval city-dwellers were so dependent on swine – and explains what city authorities did to prevent rogue pigs from running riot. Dolly Jørgensen is the author of The Medieval Pig (Boydell Press, 2024) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones

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Medieval towns: everything you wanted to know
type: item
date: 2025-01-05T07:30:49.000Z
creator: Dr David Musgrove
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Everything you wanted to know about history (podcast series)
subject: Medieval life
description: Were medieval towns filthy? How often did fires break out? And where could you get a slap-up meal? Carole Rawcliffe answers listener questions on urban life in the Middle Ages
encoded: What was it like to live in a British town or city in the Middle Ages? Were they filthy hotbeds of crime and violence? How often did fires break out? And where could you get a good slap-up meal if you were hungry? In this 'everything you wanted to know' episode, historian Professor Carole Rawcliffe speaks to David Musgrove to answer listener questions about medieval urban life – from filth and fire, to fast food, foreigners and fighting on the streets.

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Medieval influencers: 4 women who brought change to the Middle Ages
type: item
date: 2024-12-12T09:00:43.000Z
creator: Dr Hetta Howes
subject: Medieval
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Historical people
subject: Medieval life
description: Medieval women rarely wielded political or economic power – yet, a little like the most persuasive doyennes of social media today, their words could shape minds and lives far beyond their own circles. Hetta Howes introduces four female literary and spiritual trailblazers
encoded: Christine de Pizan: the trailblazer who used her literary brilliance to wage a war on misogyny Christine de Pizan (1364–c1430) was the definition of a hustler. One of the most prolific writers of the Middle Ages, with a career spanning almost four decades, her poems and books are still enjoyed today. Christine grew up in luxury. Her father, astrologer to King Charles V of France, moved the family from Venice to France when she was just a little girl. She had a happy childhood and was pleased with the husband her father chose for her, Etienne du Castel, whom she married when she was just 15. But disaster struck when Etienne died of the plague a decade later. Finding herself the sole provider for her children, Christine refused to remarry but instead picked up a quill. In doing so, she became the first known woman in European history to make a living as a writer. Read more | The gender pain gap: perceptions of women's health through history Christine was not only a talented author but an astute businesswoman. She became expert in book production, and leveraged her networks to ensure that her writing ended up in the hands of the highest echelons of French society. She started her career writing love poetry, but switched gears when she began to attract the attention of a wealthier audience. She wrote political treatises for princes and other nobility, including a manual on how to be the perfect knight. She strategised, often choosing to write in French, a language “more common throughout the world than any other”, so that her books didn’t become “useless and forgotten”. She was even commissioned to write a biography of the late Charles V. With her readership secured, Christine set out to effect change. In her political works, she called for an end to the in-fighting then plaguing the French nobility. She devoted a poem to Joan of Arc, confident that the peasant girl would lead the French to victory against the English in the Hundred Years’ War. Most famously, she wrote …

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