Now here's a surprise. These days we expect our heroines to take the lead at times, or at least not to sit about being passive drips - the days of the woman shrieking helplessly while the man did all the work are long gone. Even in Georgian and Tudor times, some women defied these conventions, but medieval? Medieval? Did medieval women take control and power their way to the men they loved? In such a brutal, violent time, did they dare? Well, Marjorie Carrick did. She k

I live in an old house. It’s 500 years old, it leans all over the place, and it still has the original Tudor bread oven working. It’s a timber frame building, most of the timbers coming from Tudor ships broken up at the Chatham dockyard. So the house is 500 years old, but the timbers are older. These aren’t the only older things in the house. When it was being built, according to legend, a medieval manor house in the village was being pulled down. As was common back then, bui