Writing Medieval Servants
in Historical Fiction

Additional thoughts...

/ / / /


By EelKat Wendy C Allen

Writing Medieval Servants: Their jobs and their place in historical fiction.

Part 2

It is now August 2017.

The original article "Medieval Servants" was written October 14, 2013

The original draft was 10,000 words long, but many parts of it were removed and the published article you know is only 7,000 words long.

Here now are the additional 3,000 words that had been removed...

NSFW Warning!

NOTE: The goal of this page is not to provide you with in-depth details of medieval servants, but rather to point out various disturbing facts about everyday medieval life that historical fiction authors willfully choose to ignore for the sake of writing a warm, fluffy, happy story.

Many of the facts about medieval life presented here are purposely jarring, disturbing, have high squick factors, and are meant to open your eyes to the harshness every day people lived with, in the hopes that writers will stop sugar coating medieval life in their novels, and make some sort of attempt to actually research the period they are writing about, before they write it.

Things that happen today in the 2000's - like bathing daily, white bread or just bread without bugs in it, drinking clean water, and women being thought of as Humans - did not exist in the medieval world.

Because this page details actual things that occurred in every day medieval life, much of the content of this page is Not Safe For Work.

Reader discretion is advised.

Part 2 of My Answer:
To this question
On the topic of writing Medieval Servants:
Their jobs and their place in historical fiction.

Here is the side note, deleted from the original article, but now added here to the Part 2 of it...

In Medieval fantasy you see people attending church services every Sunday. In real Medieval times church services were held once every other month (6 times a year) not weekly. Each family would have had a mall altar or shrine in their homes, where they would pray 5 times a day as they had been taught to do by Catholic monks and nuns. Most villages would have had a monastery or convent either in town or on the outskirts.

People needing religious advice would go there for answers, during the week. People who had sinned would go to the monks and request to be forgiving, than they would pay the sum required to be forgiven for the sin in question. If you told a lie, you may only have to pay a few coins to buy your forgiveness, if you killed your neighbor, you may have to pay by giving your land to the church.

Also in Medieval times most people did not count days or know the concept of weeks/months/years in the same way we do. Most folks just lived one day to the next and when winter ended and planting season arrived they announced that a new year had begun, whether 6 months had passed or 2 years had passed since the last time they planted crops. That was their concept of a year.

They knew to go the church because a town crier would come through and announce that the bishop/ priest/ pope was in town all the way from Italy and it was time to be inspected (going to church was like getting your car inspected, only if you failed to pass the Christianity test you were executed at best, or made the personal indebted and daily tortured slave of the bishop /priest/ pope at worst.)

Bishops/ priests/ popes were the most feared people of the land - more feared than tax collectors, and kings were terrified of them as well, because church leaders were vast land mongers and if they decided they wanted your land, than you would not pass your Christianity inspection no matter how saintly you were. The religious leaders of Medieval times were among the most corrupt, violent, bloodthirsty, murderous men to ever walk the face of the earth at any time period: these men made Hitler look like a saint, that’s how bad they were.

It is important to note that in Medieval times the Catholic leaders: popes, bishops, priests, monks, nuns, etc, were not the celibate unmarried folks we know today. Most were married and had families, polygamy was not an uncommon practice in Medieval times and the wealthier a man was the more wives he could afford to buy. The Catholic church did not forbid leaders from marrying until into the 1600s, well after the Medieval period had ended.

Remember that wives were bought, not married in Medieval times, and a wife was nothing more than a house servant who slept with the master, and there are many books from Medieval times written for men on how to take care of their livestock, and these books contains lists of livestock which include: horses, dogs, cows, wives, pigs, and daughters.

Men could go to the local blacksmith and along with getting his horse shoes, he could also have his wife fitted with a chastity belt (cast iron panties) to prevent other men from using her and a bridle (some of which resembled bird cages bolted to her neck and forehead) which prevented her from talking.  Leather makers sold collars and leashes, which wives were lead around by whenever they went out in public. This would have included queens and princesses as well, who most likely to have been kidnapped from enemy kings, and paraded  through the streets as trophies, than publicly raped by the king, so that the entire town was a witness to the “marriage”.

Note that the word marriage meant: the act of stealing a woman’s virginity, or the act of claiming ownership by raping her. This was always done publically, both to shame the female into never allowing another man in her bed, and to show other men, this one’s mine I’ll kill you if you touch her. Medieval people did not have the “sex is a sin to be done in secret” mindset that would develop in Victorian times.

In Medieval times: Women were property, marriage was rape, age of consent was 10, incest was common practice, religious leaders got first choice of daughters, fathers got second choice, brothers got third choice, the man with the highest bid got to buy her if no priest or man in the family wanted her, and sex was public.

You got to remember, marrying outside of family was condemned by the Church in Medieval times. Men were expected to marry their daughters. If a man had 4 wives it was because his first wife had given birth to 3 daughters and no sons. If he had a son, then one of the daughters would have gone to the son.

Medieval Europe was VERY clannish and VERY concerned with not "tainting the bloodline". No one mixed races. No one married outside their family in order to ensure purity of blood. If they were marrying outside of family, it was done for political reasons, to unit two regions into one, to end a war, or to pay off a debt. This incest norm became less common in later Medieval years, but still continued right into the Renaissance, and would not be fully shunned until the Victorian era.

Remember: white Europeans were EXCESSIVELY paranoid about getting dirty Semite blood or dirty Canaanite blood or dirty pagan witch blood, mixed in with their pure white Aryan blood. The Templar Knights were glorified for their mass murders of all non-whites, and their white robes, red crosses, and pointy hoods, can still be seen worn by the Templar today. (Raise your hand if you knew the Templar Knights, still existed, still killed all none whites in the name of Christian purity and are now known as The Loyal White Knights of The Ku Klux Klan, the Final Division of The Templar Knights of God? Next time you do a Google search for images of a Templar Knight Uniform, do a side by side Google search of the Klu Klux Klan uniform. Look at a Templar Knight flag side by side a Loyal White Knight flag. You might want to rethink glorifying the Templar Knights when you realize exactly who they are and what they do.)

Remember if your princess really is a princess in a Medieval castle, she'll be expected to start giving birth to daddy king's babies soon as she reach's 10 years old, in order to ensure the purity of their royal white blood and make sure no "evil" non white blood gets into the family tree, and any knights marching around her castle will be white power colour murdering fanatic wearing white robes and brandishing a white flag with a red KKK Templar Knight cross on it.

It was a sin to marry (rape) a nun, thus most girls elected to become nuns as soon as they got their periods.  

It is very important to keep these facts in mind when writing historically accurate Medieval fiction and it is especially important to keep the horrors of being a female front and center when choosing to write your Medieval main character as female.








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