A Few Words From the 14th Century
Alongside every Merrie England strip, paid subscribers receive a short piece about the medieval world behind it.
Not a history lecture. Nothing with footnotes. Just the curious, the funny, and the occasionally baffling details of life in 14th century England — the kind of thing that makes you realise that people seven hundred years ago were dealing with essentially the same problems we are, with considerably worse plumbing.
Each piece takes about ninety seconds to read. Here is a taste.
When Did the Year Actually Start?
If you’d asked a medieval English person what year it was on the 1st of January 1350, they’d have told you it was still 1349. England celebrated New Year on the 25th of March — Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation — and kept doing so until 1752, when Parliament finally moved it to January 1st. The adjustment required removing eleven days from the calendar entirely. There were riots. The English have always taken a dim view of being told what to do with their calendar.
This matters for April because it means the month sat right at the hinge of the medieval year — the old year ending, the new one beginning, Lent finishing, Easter arriving. A busy and slightly disorienting time to be alive, particularly if you’d been fasting since February.
A new piece accompanies every Merrie England strip — available to paid subscribers on Substack. Each one comes with a recommendation for further reading if you’d like to go deeper.
The medieval world is stranger, funnier, and more human than most people suspect. That’s rather the point of Merrie England — and rather the point of this.