About The Alewife, Unfiltered

I bloody love the Middle Ages. And I keep finding fascinating shit in them.

I've loved history for as long as I can remember.

As a child, my parents took me to old castles, and I loved them because they were old and ruined. It wasn't until I got older that I really thought about what that meant.

People had lived there.

They'd worked, argued, fallen in love, fallen out, gone to court, complained about their neighbours and generally made a spectacular mess of things.

That's the bit that interests me.

Not just the kings and battles and famous people.

The people.

The ones who appear for a few lines in a court roll and then disappear again. The neighbours having a dispute. The bloke who has somehow ended up in court over something completely ridiculous. The person making a complaint that is technically so terrible that the court can't even deal with it.

Like Roger Eyre, who accused Elias of taking four oxen.

Elias didn't have to prove he hadn't taken them.

He just pointed out that Roger hadn't said what year it happened, what the oxen were worth, or where he'd taken them.

The court agreed.

And then Elias sued Roger.

And his mother got involved.

This is the stuff I keep finding.

The more you look, the stranger it gets.

Medieval records are full of these tiny glimpses into ordinary lives.

Sometimes they're funny.

Sometimes they're bizarre.

Sometimes they're wonderfully petty.

And sometimes you read one and think:

What the fuck was going on here?

That's when I want to tell you about it.

The Alewife is where I bring those stories back.

Real people. Real records. Real medieval weirdness.

I'll give you enough history to understand what's going on, but I'm not here to turn you into a medieval historian.

You can just read the story.

Have a nose around.

Get lost for five minutes.

Find out that people in 1258 were apparently capable of having exactly the sort of neighbourly disputes we still have now — only with more oxen.

No homework. No self-improvement. No productivity required.

Just some very old people doing some very interesting things.