Five books that will help you understand medieval Britain

A guide for writers of fantasy and historical fiction

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Andrew LiVecchi is an author of epic fantasy inspired by a lifelong obsession with ancient and medieval history, mythology, and classic literature. His novella, Son of the Thunder Goddess, is available for purchase at Amazon.

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About a year ago, I talked about why I think writers of fantasy and historical fiction should read primary sources to understand the period from which they are taking inspiration. In this post, I’m going to provide some examples of what kinds of sources writers should be reading.

There are any number of specific periods and places that we could focus on (and I hope to cover more of these in future posts), but, for now, I’d like to explore a period that is near and dear to me: The British Isles in the High and Late Middle Ages (roughly 1066-1485).

So, without further ado, here are five primary sources that will help you better understand medieval Britain.

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5. Chronicles by Jean Froissart

What it is:

Froissart is probably the most well-known historian of the Late Middle Ages and the chief chronicler of the Hundred Years’ War, fought primarily between the kingdoms of England and France from 1337-1453.

His Chronicles covers the majority of the fourteenth-century, beginning with the English King Edward II’s unhappy demise in 1327 until the author’s own death in 1400.

It is an incredibly long work, detailing the political and diplomatic maneuvers of the French and English royal courts, as well as the military campaigns and battle tactics that made up the Hundred Years’ War

Why you should read it:

While Froissart was not himself a soldier, he had direct access to men who did participate in the military campaigns he discusses. This means that when he writes about a famous event such as the Battle of Crecy in 1346, he is drawing on the firsthand accounts of those who were actually there.

Froissart’s Chronicles is unparalleled as a source for understanding medieval warfare in the fourteenth century. Read it for a realistic portrayal of knighthood, chivalry, warfare, and politics. While the genre of romance (which we’ll get to in a moment) tells us how knights are supposed to behave, Froissart gives us glimpses into the realities of warfare, revealing the stark brutality of medieval campaigns in which peasants, townsfolk, and even monks and nuns, routinely faced pillage, rape, and wholesale slaughter at the hands of knights who were supposed to be protectors of the common people.

Recommended selections:

I recommend starting with Froissart’s descriptions of the following key historical events:

• Battle of Crecy (1346)

• Battle of Poitiers (1356)

• Sack of Limoges (1370)

• The Castilian Civil War (1366-1369)

• The Peasants’ Revolt in England (1381)

• The trial by combat between Jean de Carrouges and Jacques Le Gris (1386) — Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel is about this event.

• The tournament at Smithfield (1390)

4. Journey Through Wales and Description of Wales by Gerald of Wales

What it is:

Technically, these are two separate works, though they are often printed together, as is the case with the Penguin Edition. Gerald of Wales was a priest and historian of Norman descent who spent much of his time in Wales during the ongoing Norman conquest of that country. Journey Through Wales, written in Latin, is his travelogue of a journey he took accompanying the Archbishop of Canterbury on a tour to drum up support for the Third Crusade. Description of Wales was written shortly after this journey and provides a much deeper dive into the customs and history of the Welsh.

Why you should read it:

No study of medieval Britain is complete without looking at the non-English players like Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Wales, specifically, provided a steady source of conflict for England’s kings. Beginning in the eleventh century and extending well through the fifteenth, the Normans waged war on their Welsh neighbours, conquering and reconquering throughout the centuries that comprise the High and Late Middle Ages. It is in Wales that you will find the Normans’ most imposing castles, built to awe the native Welsh and dissuade them from rebellion.

In these two books, Gerald provides a fascinating glimpse of Wales from the perspective of a Norman colonizer. He attempts an anthropology of the Welsh people, whom he considers to be essentially barbarians, though not without their own virtues. Gerald offers a mix of charming little bits of medieval bestiary (e.g. poisonous toads and weasels), an eyewitness travelogue, and stories of the kind of guerilla warfare common in Wales, where unarmoured Welsh archers used their knowledge of the terrain and their powerful longbows to take down armies of heavily armoured Norman men-at-arms.

Gerald of Wales covers an earlier period of history than Froissart. He also offers a different perspective; while Froissart is almost exclusively concerned with the goings-on of the nobility, Gerald presents a more balanced mix, giving us stories about both knights and peasants.

Recommended selections:

These books are short enough, that I would recommend reading them in their entirety. And if twelfth-century Norman conquests are of interest to you, check out Gerald’s analogous treatment of Ireland in Topography of Ireland and Conquest of Ireland.

3. Pearl, author unknown

What it is:

Pearl is a Middle English poem from the fourteenth century, part of the same manuscript as the famous Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the not-so-famous Patience and Cleanness. The poem contains just over 1200 lines and is written in the Northwest Midlands dialect, rather than Chaucer’s London dialect, so the language is considerably more difficult for us modern Anglophones to understand without consulting a translation. The poem employs rhyme while also being highly alliterative, which creates an interesting bridge between Old English (which favoured alliteration) and Early Modern English (which favoured rhyme).

Pearl is a dream vision, a popular medieval genre in which the poem’s main character/narrator, usually in the midst of some personal crisis, falls asleep and experiences a dream vision that offers him consolation and guidance. At the end, he awakens with newfound wisdom and a sense of purpose. Dante’s Divine Comedy is probably the most famous example of this medieval genre.

Pearl begins with a grieving father mourning the loss of his “pearl,” a young daughter who has died tragically young. He falls asleep and dreams of an otherworldly land, divided by a stream. On the other side of the stream, in a heavenly paradise, is his “pearl maiden,” who appears to him, not as the child he knew, but as a radiant, heavenly woman. Over the course of the poem, the pearl maiden guides the father through his grief, consoling him with Christian doctrine. She reveals to him, that rather than being lost, she is now in a state of bliss, living with Christ in the New Jerusalem. By the end of the poem, the narrator is overjoyed and attempts to cross the stream to join her. But as he enters the stream, the dream vision fades and he wakes up with newfound understanding.

Why you should read it:

It’s difficult to overstate just how significant a role Christianity played in the Middle Ages. You cannot study medieval literature, history, art, or music without being struck by how pervasive and all-encompassing this influence was. In fact, you will find a Christian worldview reflected, at least implicitly, in all five of the texts included on this list.

A large portion of the writing from the Middle Ages was dedicated to an explicit examination of and reflection on Christian doctrine. There is a range of genres in this category — saints’ lives, sermons, religious instruction, Biblical retellings, mystical devotion, and more.

Pearl is much more accessible than the vast majority of these texts. For while the poem is explicitly religious, it presents its subject matter through the dramatic narrative of a parent grieving the death of a young child. By reading Pearl, we gain insight into so much of what was important to medieval people, and see firsthand how they understood such topics as life and death, grief and consolation, salvation and heaven, and our relationship to the divine.

Recommended selections:

At around 1200 lines, Pearl is short enough that I recommend reading the whole thing.

2. Le Morte Darthur by Sir Thomas Malory

What it is:

Le Morte Darthur by Sir Thomas Malory is a work of medieval romance written in the late fifteenth century. The manuscript version was completed in 1476 and William Caxton’s print edition was published in 1485, the year that saw the end of the Wars of the Roses with the Battle of Bosworth Field and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty under Henry VII.

In Le Morte Darthur, Malory traces the whole of the Arthurian legend, beginning with Arthur’s birth, proceeding through the ordeal of the sword in the stone and his coronation in Camelot, the founding of the Round Table, his marriage to Guinevere, the adventures of Arthur’s knights, and the eventual tragic collapse of Camelot.

As typical of medieval authors, Malory rarely created entirely new stories. Rather, he drew from a wealth of previously existing material from English, French, and Welsh sources. This means that Le Morte Darthur reads less like a novel and more, at times, like an anthology of loosely-connected stories. While there is an overarching narrative of Arthur’s rise and fall, many of the books within the Morte present largely self-contained episodes that reflect Malory’s process of knitting together so many different sources.

Why you should read it:

Le Morte Darthur is the definitive work of medieval Arthurian literature. Other major texts, such as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are focused on a particular hero (e.g. Gawain) or narrative (e.g. the quest for the Holy Grail) and do not present the full mythical history of Arthur. Only in Malory do we find all the elements that have come to be considered iconic. In the Morte, you have Merlin, the sword in the stone, the Lady of the Lake, Excalibur, Lancelot and Guinevere, the Round Table, the Quest for the Holy Grail, the civil war between Arthur and Mordred, and every other essential Arthurian motif.

Malory is also the major source for more modern adaptations of the Arthurian legend, including Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, T. H. White’s The Once and Future King, and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Mists of Avalon. Le Morte Darthur is largely considered to be the “original” or definitive presentation of King Arthur, even though there is a great deal of Arthurian material that preceded it.

Unlike Froissart or Chaucer, Malory does not present an accurate picture of medieval life. I don’t recommend studying the Morte for a realistic depiction of how knights conducted themselves or of what medieval battles were really like. Instead, you should come to Malory to understand an idealized version of the Middle Ages. Malory presents knighthood, chivalry, and courtly love as they should be. He sets his stories in a mythical past that was simultaneously both aspirational and unattainable to his fifteenth-century audience. Malory’s own life was marked by unknightly behaviour, including murder and rape, and he wrote this book while imprisoned for those crimes. The Morte gives us a glimpse into the fantasy world of medieval romance, a place of heroes and villains, knights and ogres, ladies and witches, of huge epic battles and divine miracles.

Recommended selections:

The following book divisions are based on Caxton’s 1485 version, rather than the earlier manuscript version. Many modern editions (such as Penguin) use Caxton’s format.

• Books I-IV — Arthur’s birth, the sword in the stone, Excalibur, and marriage to Guinevere.

• Book VII — The Tale of Sir Gareth

• Books XIII–XVII — The quest for the Holy Grail

• Books XX-XXI — The fall of Camelot

1. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

What it is:

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories from the late fourteenth century (1387-1400) written in Middle English. This means you can read it in the original without too much training (unlike Beowulf) but it is much more challenging than Shakespeare’s work (written in Early Modern English).

The book is told using a frame narrative. A group of pilgrims are traveling from London to Saint Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury, and, along the way, they pass the time by telling each other stories. After the “General Prologue,” which introduces each of the pilgrims, the rest of the book consists of these stories, told by characters such as the Knight and the Miller. While Chaucer never completed The Canterbury Tales, the work, as it stands, consists of twenty-four tales.

Why you should read it:

No other work of English literature gives us as clear a picture of the richness and variety of medieval life as The Canterbury Tales. With its setting of a medieval pilgrimage, The Canterbury Tales functions as a fourteenth-century slice of life. Medieval pilgrimages drew people from all walks of life, and we see this diversity represented in Chaucer’s characters — men and women, knights and peasants, clergymen and laymen. In this book, we get to see (even if filtered through the eyes of an upper class writer like Chaucer) a full spectrum of life in fourteenth-century England.

Also, because this is a work of estate satire, nearly every character serves as a stereotype, a stand in for their class or occupation as a whole. This gives us a pretty good idea of what the common attitude at the time was to knights, pardoners, friars, etc.

Chaucer satirizes everyone, including the nobility, peasants, and members of the church. We get the Knight, who on first glance seems to be a paragon of chivalry, but is actually a bloodthirsty mercenary fighting for hire and whose son the Squire practices “chevauchee,” the brutal pillaging of peasants which was common practice during the Hundred Years’ War.

We get the Monk who enjoys fine dining, hunting, rich clothes, and other practices which contradict the rules for monastic life, and which leave him no time for studying scripture. Then there’s the Friar, who takes bribes and refuses to visit the sick, and the Pardoner who scams people by selling fake relics and pardons for sin.

Then there are the stories themselves, which span the full range of medieval genres. There’s romance, fabliaux (raunchy comedy), theological treatise, beast fable, fairy tale, and much more. Reading these tales, or even just a representative selection, will give you familiarity with the kinds of stories medieval people themselves told and enjoyed listening to. Because it consists of so many genres, The Canterbury Tales offers a much broader perspective than any of the other books on this list.

Recommended selections

• “General Prologue”

• “The Miller’s Prologue and Tale”

• “The Pardoner’s Prologue and Tale”

• “Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale”

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By reading just these five books, you’ll acquire a solid understanding of medieval Britain and acquire familiarity with the attitudes, voices, and values of this period.

This is useful for anyone who wants to learn more about the Middle Ages in Britain, but especially for any writers whose settings are directly inspired by this period. As I said in that original post:

The more you familiarize yourself with the language and literature of the culture you are using as inspiration, the better you’ll be able to imbue everything from your characterization to your dialogue to your prose with historically informed believability.

Thanks for reading,

Andrew LiVecchi

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If you enjoyed this post, please consider checking out my epic fantasy novella, Son of the Thunder Goddess. It builds on a lifelong love of mythology and literature and engages with a lot of the themes I wrestle with in my Substack posts.