The Castle Library

A guide to medieval terms and phrases that are still in use today

The topic I have been asked to cover is modern phrases that originated in the medieval period. I have extensive experience of this. I was very much a part of the medieval period. I have views on all of them, mostly unfavourable, which is consistent with my views on most things.

A quick overview explaining the Crusades - what they were, why they happened and what did they achieve?

This blog explores how far medieval knights were able to travel. They travelled a lot further than you may think!

The 5 best medieval films that you can watch on VHS or DVD - Excalibur, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Braveheart and A Knight's Tale.

The strange medieval symbol hiding in plain sight throughout Britains churches - The Green Man.

Why is it the smallest hero who always defeats giants?

According to the National Literacy Trust, (NLT) just 1 in 3 children and young people aged 8 to 18 said they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2025. That is the lowest level recorded since the NLT began tracking reading enjoyment twenty years ago. Even more striking: reading enjoyment among children has fallen by 36% since 2005. Read that again for a moment.

When I launched The Good Knight blog, I had a plan. The plan was this: write honestly about the journey to get five picture books published. Share what it's like to write something you believe in and then spend months trying to persuade people in offices to agree with you. Talk about the mission, getting more dads reading at bedtime, the 42% statistic, the ten minutes that makes a difference. Build Jack's world in public. Be vulnerable. Be real. It was a good plan. Then I wro

Back to the roots of the unicorn, which date back at least as far as 400 BCE, when the Greek historian Ctesias first documented a unicorn-like animal in his writings on the region of India. Ctesias was a physician who served in the court of the Persian king Artaxerxes II. A very reliable source...

The good news is that Europe, as it turns out, is absolutely full of them. Infact, there are tens of thousands of castles in Europe, with estimates often ranging between 100,000 and over a million depending on whether ruins, fortified manor houses, and small, private, or partially destroyed structures are included.

Did Genghis Khan really change the climate? And could medieval knights have stopped his Mongol horde?

Let's make this very, very clear, the the nursery rhymes you sang as a child and are now singing to your children off by heart are considerably older and considerably darker than they sound. Here are my top 5...

Here is where it gets genuinely surprising. Most knights were not fighting most of the time. War happened, but it wasn't constant - not even the 100 Year War! Which meant knights needed something to do in the considerable gaps between battles.

When I started writing this blog, I was fairly confident the answer was going to be simple. Perhaps there had been an unfortunate period of giant snail activity across medieval Europe. Perhaps medieval snails were just built different. And perhaps we are very, very, very, very lucky with how they have evolved. Similar to the T-Rex and the chicken.

By Princess Charlotte (Medieval Warfare Expert) Here is a family dispute that makes every argument about who gets to play with a certain toy first, or who gets to sit in the front seat. For thirty years, on and off, with occasional ceasefire, two branches of the same royal family fought each other for the throne of England. Nine major battles. Thousand upon thousand dead. Nobles executed on both sides. A king imprisoned. Princes murdered. Enough betrayal and unexpected revers

1066 was a rather big year for castles in England. Before this date there were four, maybe five, castles found in the whole country. By 1100, just thirty-four years later, there were over five hundred!

I have lived within reasonable distance of Colchester for most of my adult life, I even studied at the University of Essex between 2000-2004. For those unfamiliar with Colchester it is the oldest recorded town in Britain, a former Roman capital, a medieval fortress city, a place with two thousand years of documented history sitting quietly underneath a modern high street. It has a castle that William the Conqueror built on the foundations of a Roman temple. It has walls that

My daughter asked me this question a few weeks ago. She is a very smart five year old, she takes her dragon research extremely seriously and was seemingly preparing a full report to her younger brother based on my answer. She was looking at me with the particular expression she reserves for questions she already thinks there's going to be a very silly answer. It was time to not disappoint her! So, I considered my options. I could have mentioned Basildon on a Friday night. I h

By Chris Livemore It is January 878 AD. The greatest Viking warlord in England launches a surprise midwinter attack on the Saxon king’s base at Chippenham. The king, caught off guard, his army scattered, flees into the freezing Somerset marshes absolutely defeated. He is hiding in a swamp. He has lost almost everything. And he is the reason England exists as it does today. His name is Alfred. But you may know his as Alfred the Great - the only English monarch ever to receive