Samuel Peterson’s Reviews > Life in a Medieval Castle > Status Update

"'Her hair was golden with love-locks; her eyes blue and laughing; her face most dainty to see, with lips vermeil than ever was rose or cherry in the time of summer heat; her teeth white and small; her breasts so firm that they showed beneath her vesture like two rounded nuts; so frail was she about the girdle that your hands could have spanned her,..." This was from a 13th century romance? It could've fooled me!

"In some castles rainwater from gutters above or from a cistern or diverted kitchen drainage flushed the shaft." I would hope so! The smell would've been terrible! I love that there's a reference from Henry III to send word ahead to a residence make sure that their privies were cleaned out before he arrived.

"A latrine was corbeled...with a long shaft reaching nearly to the ground. This...arrangement sometimes proved disastrous in siege, as at Château Gaillard, Richard the Lionhearted's castle on the Seine, where attackers obtained access by climbing up the latrine shaft." Lol, I want to find an Instagram skit of this now. It sounds perfect.

"When the lord traveled, the tub accompanied him, along with a bathman who prepared the baths." Lol. Reminds me of my DnD game where my "frog prince" type character needed to take constant baths or else he dried up. It was necessary for the group to bring along some container to fill with water so he could take baths. Now it actually had some basis in history!

They had peepholes back then? Lol

In historical movies and shows, at least the ones that I've seen, they like to depict castle interiors to be bare, walled, and grey. In reality, the vast majority of lords with castles were just as interested in interior decorating as we are today!

"In the bailey near the kitchen the castle garden was usually planted, with fruit trees and vines at one end, and plots for herbs and flowers — roses, lilies, heliotropes, violets, poppies, daffodils, iris, gladioli. There might also be a fishpond, stocked with trout and pike."
Well, that does sound like Redwall.

"The ancestor to the fireplace was the central open hearth, used in ground-level halls in Saxon times and often on into later centuries." You actually see in an example of this in Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in Edoras where Eowyn is sleeping.

Sealing an oath of fealty with a kiss is certainly not depicted anymore! Lol

"The sheriffdom, or shrievalty, was even more a focus of conflict as the fractious barons strove to occupy themselves or place it in friendly local hands. By the thirteenth century the office had become one of the most embattled prizes of the baronial-royal conflict..." thus why a lot of the depictions of the Sheriff of Nottingham tends to put him as an extension of Prince John or an independent baron against Robin.