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• 26 Aug, 2026 Breaking the Beer Rules in 1289

  Breaking the Assize of Beer

  Twelve people. One court session. And all of them had broken the rules.

  In 1289, something was going wrong with the beer in Bledlow.

  The ale-tasters had been keeping an eye on things...

  And they had names.

  Twelve of them.

  Richard Hull.

  Agnes Holemere.

  Gregory Miller.

  Joan Moor.

  Maud Pholip.

  William Kavening.

  John of Grateley.

  John Fellow.

  Hugh Wiking.

  Hugh Churchyard.

  John Newmere.

  And John Brown.

  All twelve were presented at the manor court for breaking the assize of beer.

  

  And the punishment?

  A fine.

  Richard Hull paid 6d.

  Agnes Holemere, 3d.

  Gregory Miller got the full 12d.

  Joan Moor and Maud Pholip paid 3d each.

  Most of the others were fined 6d.

  Hugh Churchyard also got 12d.

  And that was that.

  No great scandal.

  No dramatic confrontation.

  Just twelve people caught breaking the rules about beer, all appearing in the same court sitting and all being fined for it.

  Which is perhaps the most interesting part.

  Because this wasn't some extraordinary event that brought the whole village to a standstill.

  It was routine court business.

  The ale-tasters found people breaking the assize.

  They reported them.

  The court fined them.

  And everyone presumably got on with making, selling and drinking the stuff.

  The record doesn't tell us exactly what each person had done to break the assize. It simply gives us the names, the offence and the fines.

  But twelve names in one sitting tells us something rather nicely.

  Medieval people were apparently breaking the beer rules often enough for the village to have officials whose job was to catch them.

  And in 1289, getting caught meant paying your few pennies and carrying on.

  Beer was serious business.

  Apparently, so was getting it slightly wrong.

  Source: F. W. Maitland, Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seignorial Courts, p. 33. Manor Court of the Abbey of Bec, Bledlow, Buckinghamshire, court held on St Luke's Day, 18 October 1289.

  Image: An alewife in a brewhouse, The Smithfield Decretals, Royal MS 10 E IV, f.114v, c.1300–1340. British Library. Public domain.

• 23 Aug, 2026 He beat up a priest, then called the cops on himself

  Henry Assaulted a Priest.

  Then He Raised the Alarm — on Himself.

  

  In 1294, in Brightwaltham, Berkshire, a man called Henry Smith struck Sir Robert the chaplain and drew blood.

  Then he did something nobody expected.

  He didn't run. He didn't hide.

  He raised the hue and cry.

  That's the medieval emergency alarm — the one where you shout, your neighbours shout back, and the whole village drops what it's doing to chase whoever's responsible.

  Henry raised it himself. On himself.

  The court says he did it “to conceal his fault.”

  It didn't work.

  Henry was left at the mercy of the court. Three men — John Atgreen, Richard Young and Thomas Smith — were named as his pledges.

  Nice try, Henry. Nice try.

  Source

  F. W. Maitland (ed.), Select Pleas in Manorial and Other Seignorial Courts, Selden Society, Vol. I, 1889, p. 167.

• 08 Aug, 2026 The Story of Dubious Deeds & Village Feuds

  I'm delighted to be joining Robert Birming's AuguStory challenge, where bloggers are sharing the stories behind their blogs, how they got started, and where blogging has taken them.

  And the funny thing is, Dubious Deeds & Village Feuds wasn't really the blog I set out to create.

  I'm just very good at falling down rabbit holes.

  It Usually Starts With a Rabbit Hole

  I've always loved history, particularly the bits that make you stop and think, wait... they actually did that?

  I love visiting castles — the more ruined, the better. Standing among broken walls, I find myself wondering who lived there, what they did all day, what they ate, what they argued about, and what the place looked like when it was full of people rather than tourists.

  For a long time, I thought the best way into those questions was through medieval manuscripts.

  I spent ridiculous amounts of time looking through them. Not just the famous paintings of kings and saints, but the little scenes tucked into the margins and pages.

  A man having a tooth pulled.

  A baker at work.

  Someone being chased through the streets.

  A woman defending a castle with a sword.

  A swarm of ants marching towards a field.

  And suddenly there's a story.

  But eventually I found myself looking somewhere else.

  Medieval court rolls.

  And that was it.

  

  The Bits Between the Big Stories

  The more I looked, the less interested I became in kings and battles.

  I wanted to know about everyone else.

  The farmers. The bakers. The villagers. The women running households. The people who appear in the historical record for doing something completely ordinary — or something spectacularly stupid.

  More recently, I've fallen down another particularly dangerous rabbit hole: medieval manor court rolls.

  I can now happily spend an evening reading seven-hundred-year-old records about wandering pigs, blocked ditches, unpaid debts and neighbours arguing over fences.

  And somehow, those tiny disputes feel incredibly alive.

  Someone owned that field.

  Someone else's cow got into it.

  Someone was furious.

  Someone went to court.

  Seven hundred years later, we're still reading about it.

  That's the part of medieval history I love most.

  Not the grand story. The little one.

  And Then There Was Middle Woe

  Eventually I started wondering what would happen if I stopped simply writing about medieval people and invented some of my own.

  That became Middle Woe — a fictional medieval village inspired by the real world I've been disappearing into.

  There are parish notices. Court disputes. Village gossip. Bureaucracy. And, inevitably, people taking completely ordinary problems far too seriously.

  It's fictional, but almost everything in it has roots in something I've found in the historical record.

  Finding My Place to Write It

  I've blogged on just about every platform imaginable over the years — WordPress, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr, Substack and probably several others I've forgotten.

  I've bought domain names that seemed like excellent ideas at the time and abandoned projects when my attention wandered somewhere else.

  Then I found Bear Blog.

  And something clicked.

  It's simple. I can write. I can play with the HTML and CSS. I can change things when I have an idea rather than spending half my life trying to make a theme behave.

  More importantly, it feels like my little corner of the internet.

  So What's Next?

  I don't really know.

  And, for once, I'm quite happy about that.

  Because I don't have a carefully planned five-year content strategy.

  I have a growing collection of medieval court cases, far too many open browser tabs and a long list of things that have made me say, surely that's not true?

  And that's probably enough.

  Because there's always a strange little record.

  Another forgotten person.

  Another story waiting somewhere in the margins.

  All I have to do is find it.

• 06 Aug, 2026 His Solution to a Neighbour Dispute? Throw Rocks at the House.

  He threw stones at his neighbour's door.

  In the middle of the night.

  Then his neighbour raised the hue and cry.

  It's 1249, in Ogbourne, Wiltshire.

  A man identified in the court record as Robert Carter's son went to the house of Peter Burgess after dark.

  And started throwing stones at his door.

  Peter responded by raising the hue — the medieval public alarm that called on neighbours to come and help pursue an offender.

  The court record tells us:

  “It was presented that Robert Carter's son by night invaded the house of Peter Burgess and in felony threw stones at his door so that the said Peter raised the hue. Therefore let the said Robert be committed to prison. Afterwards he made fine with 2s.”

  Robert was ordered to be committed to prison.

  Then he made a fine of two shillings.

  And that's where the record leaves us.

  But why was he throwing stones?

  We have absolutely no idea.

  The court doesn't tell us what had happened between Robert and Peter beforehand.

  We don't know whether there had been an argument.

  We don't know whether Robert had been drinking.

  We don't know whether Peter had done something to annoy him.

  We don't even know whether the stones actually hit the house, although the record certainly makes it clear that Peter thought the incident serious enough to raise the hue.

  All we have is the aftermath.

  Robert went to Peter's house at night.

  He threw stones at the door.

  Peter raised the alarm.

  Robert ended up before the court.

  And two shillings later, presumably, everyone went home.

  And that is the brilliant thing about court records.

  They don't give us a neat story with a beginning, middle and satisfying explanation.

  Sometimes they give us a tiny glimpse of something that happened to two people nearly 800 years ago.

  We know what Robert did.

  We know what Peter did.

  We know what the court decided.

  But the argument that started it all has disappeared.

  Which leaves us with one extremely important unanswered question:

  Peter, what did you do?

  Sources

  • Manor Court of the Abbey of Bec, Ogbourne (Wiltshire), Whitsun Week 1249. Translated manor court roll recording the prosecution of Robert Carter's son for attacking the house of Peter Burgess and the raising of the hue.
• 06 Aug, 2026 Someone Told the Bishop Her Cat Was Stealing Their Cows' Milk

  Someone Told the Bishop Her Cat Was Stealing Their Cows' Milk.

  It's the sort of complaint that makes you wonder what on earth was happening in medieval Herefordshire.

  But someone actually reported it.

  During an episcopal visitation in the Diocese of Hereford, an accusation was recorded against a woman who was said to keep an animal in the shape of a cat which sucked milk from her neighbours' cows.

  Yes.

  Someone told the bishop about a milk-stealing cat.

  And, nearly 800 years later, the allegation is still sitting in the records.

  But was there actually a cat?

  We don't know.

  And this is where the record gets particularly interesting.

  What survives is an accusation.

  Someone reported the matter to the bishop's officials, and the allegation was recorded during the visitation.

  That doesn't tell us whether the animal actually existed.

  It doesn't tell us whether the woman admitted to anything.

  It doesn't tell us whether the cows were actually losing milk.

  And it certainly doesn't tell us whether the neighbours were right about what they thought was causing it.

  All we have is the accusation.

  And someone thought it was worth reporting.

  That's the bit I keep coming back to.

  Medieval episcopal visitations weren't just opportunities for bishops to inspect churches. Their officials collected information about the behaviour of clergy and local communities, and people could bring complaints and accusations to their attention.

  Most of those complaints were considerably less entertaining.

  Adultery.

  Violence.

  Disputes.

  Clergy behaving badly.

  Churches in need of repair.

  And then, somewhere among all of that:

  There's a woman whose cat is drinking our cows' milk.

  What was actually going on?

  We don't know.

  Perhaps there was an entirely ordinary explanation.

  Perhaps someone really did believe the animal was responsible for the missing milk.

  Perhaps there was a dispute between neighbours that had somehow found its way into the bishop's paperwork.

  The record doesn't give us enough information to know.

  And that's important.

  This is an accusation, not proof that a magical milk-stealing cat actually existed.

  But it is proof of something else.

  Someone, somewhere in medieval Herefordshire, thought this was serious enough to tell the bishop.

  And the bishop's officials thought it worth writing down.

  Which means that nearly eight centuries later, we can still sit here asking exactly the same question:

  What the hell was going on with that cat?

  Source

  Records of episcopal visitations in the Diocese of Hereford, including the visitation records of Richard Swinfield, Bishop of Hereford, in the late thirteenth century.