Fenny Castle.

31/10/2026

Chilly yet?

27/10/2026

With the budget imminent we thought we’d look back a bit…..

A silver hammered penny was the main coin most people used in medieval England. One of them bought a useful amount of everyday food and goods.
From the time of Offa of Mercia in the 8th century right through the later Middle Ages, the silver penny was the coin ordinary people actually handled. Shillings and pounds existed as ways of counting larger amounts (12 pence to a shilling, 240 pence to a pound), but they were not physical coins. The pennies themselves were thin, hand-struck pieces of high-purity silver, usually weighing around 1.3–1.5 grams.
They were valuable enough that people often cut them into halves or quarters when smaller change was needed. Many people in the countryside still used labour services or barter as well as cash.
What one penny typically bought:
• Two pounds of cheese, two dozen eggs, or a couple of chickens
• Roughly a gallon of ale (the everyday drink)
• Several loaves of bread (a farthing, or quarter-penny, often bought one loaf)
• A goose cost about 4–6 pence, a sheep around 17 pence, a pig about 24 pence, and a cow 70–100 pence or more
A basic pillow might cost a penny, while a simple linen shirt was more like a shilling (12 pence).
For context, an unskilled labourer usually earned about 1½ to 3 pence a day in the 13th and 14th centuries. So one penny was a meaningful part of a day’s wages — enough for several loaves or a decent amount of ale and cheese, but not enough for livestock or bigger items.
In today’s money (in England):
Comparing prices is tricky because the economy has changed so much. In terms of everyday consumer prices, a medieval penny from around 1300 is roughly equivalent to £4–£5 today. Relative to wages, it was worth considerably more — often in the region of £80 or higher — because food took up a much larger share of people’s income back then.
In short, a silver hammered penny was proper everyday money that covered basic staples for a person or household. It stretched further in real life than its small silver content might suggest.

21/10/2026

William of Normandy didn't just conquer England in 1066. He made speaking English a mark of the defeated. Within a generation, every law was French, every charter Norman, every royal proclamation foreign to the people it ruled. English became the language of peasants — and it stayed that way for three hundred years.

The transformation was swift and total. Before Hastings, English had been the language of kings. Edward the Confessor issued charters in it. Anglo-Saxon scribes kept records in it. The law courts of Wessex and Mercia heard cases argued in the tongue of Alfred the Great. But when Harold fell on that October field and William claimed the crown that Christmas Day, the very words England spoke began to change.

The Norman elite spoke French. Every baron William granted land to, every bishop he appointed, every sheriff who now collected taxes in English shires — they conducted their business in the language of Normandy. If you wanted justice in a royal court, you pleaded in French. If you held land and needed the deed recognised, it was written in French or Latin, never English. If you served in the household of any lord worth naming, you learned French or you swept floors.

The Church switched too. Latin remained the language of prayer and scripture, but the bishops and abbots who ran England's great monasteries now spoke French among themselves. English monks found themselves taking instruction from Norman superiors who couldn't understand their native tongue. The chronicles that had been kept in English for generations began appearing in Latin and French instead.

For the English themselves, the effect was humiliation encoded in every conversation. Your own language became a confession of defeat. To speak English marked you as conquered, landless, powerless. The new Norman lords didn't bother learning it — why would they? Their king didn't speak it. Their courts didn't hear it. Their children wouldn't need it.

And yet English survived. It survived because the vast majority of people in England still spoke it every day. Farmers and craftsmen, villeins and freeholders, the men and women who worked the land and built the cathedrals and fed the towns — they had no choice but to keep speaking the only language they knew. English became the tongue of the kitchen and the field, the alehouse and the village church. It lived on in places power didn't reach.

But it changed. Norman French words crept in wherever English speakers had to deal with Norman authority. "Court" and "judge" and "justice" — all French. "Prison" and "crime" and "verdict" — French again. The language of power colonised the language of the conquered, one borrowed word at a time.

For three centuries, this remained England's reality. Kings who couldn't speak English ruled a nation that mostly spoke nothing else. Richard the Lionheart spent less than six months of his reign in England and likely never learned the language. It wasn't until the Hundred Years' War turned English identity against France that the nobility began switching back. By the time Chaucer wrote in English in the 1380s, it was a language transformed — shot through with French and Latin, barely recognisable to the subjects of Edward the Confessor.

William's conquest didn't just replace a king. It broke the continuity of English culture at the level of words themselves. The language that had produced Beowulf and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle became, for generations, the language of the powerless. And when it returned to the halls of authority, it returned irrevocably changed — a hybrid thing, carrying the marks of its defeat.

Read the full story over at Britain Untold — and follow us for more of the moments that made Britain what it is.

🎨 Images are AI-assisted illustrations created to depict historical events.

14/10/2026

960 years ago William (my direct ancestor) arrived in these shores - and yes I’ve tried to claim Somerset and/or Wiltshire,…unsuccessfully 😁🤣
Anyway, here something related and a bit interesting:

13/10/2026

What’s in a name…..

Tethiscine is the earliest recorded pre-Saxon name for the settlement that became the city of Wells in Somerset, England.
While Theodorodunum was a much later pseudo-Latin creation, Tethiscine appears in ancient chronicles and is deep-rooted in the ecclesiastical folklore of early Britain.

The Legend of the Lost Bishopric

The name is most famous for its appearance in the 12th- and 13th-century chronicles of the Canon of Wells and the Glastonbury Chronicle. According to these texts:
• Around the year 704 AD, King Ine of Wessex oversaw the relocation of an ancient, legendary British bishopric.
• The seat was supposedly moved from Kongresbury (Congresbury) to a small villa or settlement noted in the original Latin texts as:"ad villam quae tunc Tethiscine, nunc vero Welles nominatur"
(“to the village which was then called Tethiscine, but is now named Wells”).

Etymology and Variations

Historical geographers point out that almost all ancient names for Wells reference its abundant natural water springs. The word Tethiscine is tied to early variants such as Tudingtone, Tyderton, and Tidington. Local records also associate the name with the area just east of the Bishop’s Palace gardens, historically referenced in land deeds as "Tidesput" or "Tithesput furlang".
While modern historians view the story of the 600-year-old Congresbury bishopric moving to Tethiscine as an inventive medieval fabrication designed to give Wells Cathedral a grander, older pedigree than its rival in Bath, the name remains highly significant to early Somerset geography

27/09/2026

Great company at Fenny Castle.
👏👏Claws of Fenrir

20/09/2026

Personally I still thing the origins of the original walls on the castle were Roman, later modified by the Norman’s (Perhaps under Walter of Douai - he of bryj of Walter/Bridgwater fame https://share.google/HgWs0mvVZ2XTA3jTb)

18/09/2026

Pancake day?

23/06/2026

- The Manor of King Alfred - Like the castle; forgotten history.

Beneath Glascon three Rivers which there meete, doe make a meere, and issuing forth at one litle mouth, runne all in one channell West-ward, to Uzelila Frith,
,* first by Gedney or (as others will have it) Godney more, which
(they say) signifieth, Gods Iland, and was granted to loseph of Arimathea: then, by Weadlmoore, a Mannour of King Aelfreds, which by his last Will and Testament, hee gave as a legacie to his sonne Edward, and so by that moory or fenny-country Crentmaesh, that runneth out verie farre, which the Monkes of Glastenburie interpreted to bee the Countrey of Fen Frogges, like as the litle Towne Brentknoll there, which signifieth, Frog-
hill. [ D]
*From thence Eastward, Mendippe hils extend themselves in length and bredth; Leland calleth them Minerarios, that is, the Minerall hills; and rightly (as I suppose) seling they be in old writings named Muneduppe: for, rich they are in lead mines, and good to feed cattell. Among these hils there is a cave or denne farre within the ground:" wherein are to be seene certaine pits and rivelets, the place they call Ochielhole, whereof the Inhabitants feine no fewer tales, nor devise lesse dotages, than the Italians did of their Sibyls Cave in the mountaine Apenninus. The name (no doubt) grew of Ogo, a British word, that betokeneth, a Den: even of the like den, the Isle Euboea,
* was by such another name sometime called Ocha. Not far hence, in the raigne of
K. Henrie the Eighth, was turned up with the plough, a table of lead [E] somewhat long, which lay long at Lambith in the Duke of Norfolkes house, erected sometime for a trophee in token of victorie, with this inscription:
TI. CLAUDIUS CAESAR. AUG. P.M. TRIB. P. VIIII. IMP. XVI. DE BRITAN.