The Story of Life in the Middle Ages
I'm delighted to be joining Robert Birming's AuguStory challenge, where bloggers are sharing the story behind their blogs, how they got started, and where blogging has taken them.
I realised my story wasn't really about blogging at all. It was about slowly finding the thing I actually wanted to write about.
I Didn't Expect Medieval History to Become My Main Creative Project
Like many people, I didn't start with the blog I have today.
When my husband was deployed, I needed something to fill the long evenings, so I turned to crafting. That eventually became a blog about military spouse life. Looking back, though, I've always been the sort of person who starts one project, then another, then another. Before long I'd have a dozen ideas all competing for my attention.
One thing that never changed was my love of history.
I've always loved visiting castles—the more ruined, the better. Standing among broken walls, I find myself wondering who lived there, what their daily lives were like, and what the place would have looked like when it was full of people rather than tourists.
That curiosity slowly grew into Life in the Middle Ages.
What makes this blog a little different is that it often starts with a picture rather than a topic. I spend hours searching through medieval manuscripts, looking at illustrations painted hundreds of years ago. One image might show a dentist pulling a tooth, another a baker at work, or musicians playing strange instruments I'd never heard of. Each one becomes the starting point for a story about everyday medieval life.
More recently, I've also fallen down the rabbit hole of medieval manor court rolls. I can happily spend an evening reading seven-hundred-year-old records about wandering pigs, blocked ditches and neighbours arguing over fences. Some of the cases are so wonderfully bizarre that it's hard to believe they really happened—but they did. Those forgotten records are full of stories waiting to be told.
I suppose that's what I've realised I enjoy most: telling stories.
That love of storytelling even led me to create Middle Woe, a fictional medieval village inspired by real history, where bureaucracy is taken far too seriously and parish notices are every bit as entertaining as the court records that inspired them.
Finding My Home on Bear Blog
Over the years I've blogged on just about every platform imaginable—WordPress.org, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr, Substack and probably a few others I've forgotten. I've bought domain names that seemed perfect at the time, only to let them go when my interests moved on.
Then I found Bear Blog.
I was surprised by how refreshing it felt. Instead of spending hours wrestling with plugins and themes, I could simply write. Learning HTML and CSS has also been unexpectedly enjoyable. My site isn't built from a template; it's something I've gradually shaped myself, one change at a time. Every tweak teaches me something new, and I love seeing it slowly become the site I imagined.
Looking Ahead
I don't know exactly where Life in the Middle Ages will take me next.
What I do know is that, for the first time in a long while, I'm no longer wondering what I should write about. Every manuscript, every court roll and every strange historical record seems to contain another story waiting to be discovered.
And I can't wait to tell it.