Quotes About Medieval

Alfred responded to the invasion by summoning an army

At the end of his career, when William attempted to assess the scale of this transformation by launching a great survey, his subjects compared it to the Last Judgement of God. Thanks to the Domesday Book, we know more about eleventh-century England than any other medieval society anywhere in the world. Accurate

the story of Offa's rise to power is frustratingly obscure.

Two were works of Gregory the Great,

Here our best guide is once again the Venerable Bede,

it forced Æthelred to do what Byrhtnoth had refused to countenance, and pay the vikings to cease their plundering.

According to another contemporary author, writing in the 970s, the king ordered that thieves and robbers were to be punished by having their eyes put out, their ears ripped off, their nostrils carved open and their hands and feet removed, before being scalped and left in the open fields at night to be eaten by wild beasts and birds.

Indeed, according to William of Malmesbury, one of them staged something of a counter-demonstration by dropping his trousers and farting loudly in the king's general direction.

The works of other eighth-century chroniclers are pitifully thin compared to those written by Bede,

Ealdred of Bamburgh, had dutifully attended several assemblies down to his death in 933.

Several of these plots involved gaining control of the young duke. William's father had taken the precaution of naming several guardians for his son, but one by one they were assassinated. Count

in 934, the king set out to discipline Constantine by invading his territory.

a vicious warrior with whom Wilfrid collaborated around the same time.

Æthelberht had a Christian queen and a renovated Roman city as his capital.

Egbert, alas, never got to make his planned pilgrimage, and died later in the same year.

warfare was primarily an aristocratic pursuit.

As Bede explains in his book The Reckoning of Time,

their ealdormen and their thegns, who in turn called upon the services of their own followings of well-equipped warriors.

in English.

Cluny was created with the intention that it should be free from lay control, and was answerable only to the pope.

enough land to support their family, an amount that they called a hide.

he travelled through the lands of Charles the Bald,

Æthelwulf decided to marry Charles' daughter, Judith

Æthelwulf was about fifty years old, Judith only twelve