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As professional swordsmanship teacher, there is a simple question that I'm often asked: why the sword? The meaning of the question is more or less asking how a long-bladed weapon came to exist in so many different forms to become so widespread and valued by fighting men throughout history? It's not an easy question to answer in brief. It's a matter that involves many inter-connected elements of warfare, close combat tactics, metallurgy, physics,...

Food in the Middle Ages was not very dissimilar to what we have today, though there was a distinct difference in food of the rich and the poor, especially during harvest or extreme circumstances like famine.What of medieval utensils then? It is quite ironic that notwithstanding evolution and modern-day sophistication, we still love to eat with our fingers. Our ancestors were high-level practitioners of that art. They had no choice. The fork came...

Leather armour may not have been as popular in life as it appears in entertainment. It won't prevent a sword going right through or an axe from dealing a fatal blow, but it will muffle most swipes or slashes and can cushion the wearer from projectiles fired from a distance. Leather had many positive factors going for it such as being relatively cheap to make, more mobile than a plate, more durable than cloth, and troops could provide it themselve...