Medieval Life: Inside the Real Middle Ages

You have heard the Middle Ages called dark, filthy and short-lived, and something about that never quite added up. You want to know what a real day actually felt like — what people ate, what the air smelled like, what made them laugh in court and cry in church.

This is medieval history rebuilt from the records that survived: manor rolls, coroners' inquests, household accounts and market court cases. You spend a peasant's year in the fields, stand on a cathedral mason's scaffold, sit in the alewife's brewhouse and the midwife's birthing room, walk the pilgrim road and enter a plague village. Along the way the myths quietly fall apart — the chastity belts, the people who never bathed, the notion that everyone was dead by thirty.

By the end the Middle Ages stops being a dim backdrop and becomes a place you could find your way around. Press play, and step into a world that suddenly feels inhabited.