There are few eras in human history that have inspired the level of stories, rumors, fables, ornamentation, jewelry, and/or nostalgia as the Middle Ages. From the legend of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table to contemporary epics like Game of Thrones, or even fun, heroic journeys like A Knight’s Tale, the crowds have always thrilled to tales of noble kings, clever queens, simple peasants, knightly jousts, and fire-breathing dragons, to the point where numerous people dress up in bright colors for Renaissance Fairs. Year after year these medieval myths are regarded more and more as fact. The "Dark Ages" were a unique time in history, for sure. However, while the Medieval era definitely was a lot darker, dirtier, and more dangerous place than what you find in 21st century life, it also wasn’t quite the cesspool of scum that people often make it out to be. Learn the truth about the Middle Ages, and don’t forget to SHARE these fun facts with your friends!

If you hopped in a time machine and dropped into the Middle Ages, your first concern would probably  be personal hygiene. After all, wasn’t everybody seriously dirty back then? Actually, no. Bathing was a big part of the culture, and just like in ancient Rome, it was a common practice for people to gather around in bathhouses after a long day’s work, catching up on gossip as they washed. In fact, when you visited someone’s house, it was completely normal for them to offer to bathe with you. That’s how clean these guys were!

Iron Maidens are, admittedly, horrifying. They look like something out of a Hellraiser movie, and it says a lot about Medieval folk that these things were real. Except, well… they weren’t. These spiky torture devices were “invented” as a hoax, and it wasn’t until the 1800s where someone named Matthew Peacock got around to making a real one. Don’t worry, though, even this one wasn’t used for real: he just wanted to make some money off selling it to a museum.

If you’ve ever watched a single movie or TV show about the Medieval period, there is guaranteed to be at least one scene of someone kicking butt with a flail – I.E., the stick with the spiky ball chained to it. However, it turns out that this use of flails is every bit as fantastical as dragons. Nobody used flails as a weapon in the Middle Ages, precisely because they were wildly ineffective and could easily harm the user. The few Medieval flails that do exist, in fact, have been revealed as forgeries.

Peasant life was hard, no doubt about that. Backbreaking labor was guaranteed. In certain regards, though, peasants had it better than you do today, at least in the area of vacation time. On average, peasants worked no more than 150 days a year, meaning they had over half the year off. Now, to be fair, none of this came with healthcare, benefits, today’s medical advancements, and/or the amenities of contemporary life, but remember this example the next time your boss tries to reject your time off request.

It’s nice to imagine that knights were all goodhearted, noble people who always did the right thing. In reality, though, they were often young, violent, and hotheaded, so there are numerous reports of them causing problems, burning down villages, and murdering peasants for no reason. One particularly nasty example being the incident of them cannibalizing people in 1098 in the Siege of Maarat. Obviously, it wouldn’t be fair to characterize all knights this way, as there were plenty of ones who didn’t do this, but the mileage really varied, and current portrayals certainly tend to be fairly whitewashed.

Listen, if you want to prove this one wrong, you try surviving on a water-free diet of booze for a few days, and see how you do. The myth that Medieval folks drank alcohol for hydration, due to unclean water, is a false impression that was formed by lazy historians who bizarrely assumed that because old texts didn’t mention water, people must’ve not drank it. A bit of a leap, no? In fact by the 13th century, London had constructed a “great conduit” of pipes to bring fresh water to the masses, so genuine hydration was definitely something people cared about.

When you think of a knight, you probably wonder how they were able to breathe in that ridiculously heavy suit of armor, much less joust or wage wars. However, the truth is that the armor a knight wore into battle actually weighed less than the gear you’d see on a firefighter today: keep in mind, a lot of the armors you’ve seen in museums were actually tournament armor, rather than fighting armor, which is why they are so ornately decorated and heavy. But no, these things weren’t meant for combat.

To be frank, you can probably find more Flat Earthers in your local pub today than if you went to a tavern in the Middle Ages. People have known that the world is a sphere for a long time, going all the way back to the ancient Greeks, and the average Medieval person would’ve seen no reason to disagree with these assessments. The notion that people believed in a flat Earth is a product of the Victorian era, when “enlightened” scholars purposely tried to paint the so-called "Dark Ages" as being a primitive, backward time that it truly wasn’t.

When people want to paint a picture of how barbaric Medieval times were, they often mention prima nocta – also known jus primae noctis, or droit du seigneur, or simply “the lord’s right” – which was allegedly a law that permitted lords to have sex with any woman at any time, even on that woman’s wedding night. Horrifying? Yes, but there’s not really any evidence to suggest that any such law or practice went down, much less being normalized. That said, there is still some debate about this amongst scholars. 

The image of frequent public executions in the Middle Ages isn’t a lie, per se, but a bit of an embellishment. It’s worth noting that it was in this era where juries first became a thing, and the death penalty wasn’t a sentence that people made lightly. Also, beheadings were not something done on a whim. They were in fact seen as a privileged way to die, reserved for nobleman, and usually done behind walls instead of in the public streets. Most public executions, as the movies accurately portray, were hangings.

One area where movies, books, and TV shows are way off the mark is in their depiction of Medieval Europe as being a place where 100 percent of the faces you see are pale, Anglo-Saxon ones. In reality, Europe was a great deal more diverse than you would think, and since today’s concept of “race” didn’t really exist at the time – the brutal institution of racial slavery had not been instituted – there wasn’t yet the same tension and discrimination caused by skin tone differences, though religious differences could certainly ignite major prejudices.

Back in the days before city water, in the thick of the "Dark Ages," what did the average Joe Peasant do with his toilet waste? If you asked most people, they’d tell you that he threw it right out on the street. This wasn’t the case, though. There were, actually, specific laws requiring that people had to keep the street area in front of their home clean and tidy, or risk fines. So instead, people would have to bring their chamber pots to the nearest river, or designated gutter, and dump them down. People in more rural areas, of course, could just dump it somewhere out back.

Lest you think that the desire for a full, eight-hour sleep has existed since the dawn of humankind, it turns out that most people in the Middle Ages followed a different pattern: namely, they slept twice in one night. They would tend to hit the hay at sundown, for a so-called “first sleep,” and then get up around 2 A.M. or so. Once awake, they would stay awake for an hour or so to do some reading, writing, art, or what have you, then go back to bed for a “second sleep.” Sounds productive! This practice remained popular until the Victorian era.

Robin Hood is an amazing character, and his message of combatting greed has truly stood the test of time. However, the lack of historical evidence for his existence as a real person means that his adventures were, most likely, just a work of fiction. 13th century documents do show that the words “Robehod” and “Rabunhod” were common nicknames for criminals, but this doesn’t prove that Robin himself was a real person, rather than a fable. That doesn’t mean he absolutely couldn’t have been real, of course, but the odds don’t look too good.

Popular culture would have you believe that Medieval peasants were ignoramuses who lives and died in the village of their birth, but the evidence shows that these people traveled a lot more than you’d think. No, they certainly weren’t jetting off to Asia, but consider the inns: back then, every village had a major inn at its center, because hundreds of travelers might be moving through at any time. Also, keep in mind that peasants had over half the year off from work, so they had plenty of time to travel, visit family, check out the sights in Rome, or what have you. So hey, if a peasant could travel every year, what’s your excuse?

Spices were expensive, so the most decadent feasts were only had by lords, royalty, and so on. However, while peasants mainly subsisted on “pottage” – a stew made by boiling whatever food was on hand at the time – the items they could put into the pottage were often quite tasty. Keep in mind, peasants had a wide assortment of herbs in their garden, including garlic, sage, and parsley. Meanwhile, by 1300, bakeries became a common sight in every English village, serving treats like honey doughnuts. Not so bad!

Monarchies were hardly democratic governments, for sure, and they were absolutely the dominant form of government in almost all European countries during the Middle Ages. However, minor forms of democracy often existed alongside said monarchies: it was during the Medieval era, for example, that England’s Parliament was formed. Iceland had its own representative assembly, as well, as did some parts of Italy. However, the role of these assemblies was always advisory in nature, since they couldn’t overstep the monarch’s rule.

When you think of Medieval-era health care practices, your first instinct is probably to hurl up your lunch. To be fair, those plague doctor masks were quite frightening. That said, while this was the “Dark Ages,” it isn’t quite fair to pretend that advancements in medicine simply stopped during that time. For example, the Middle Ages saw the invention of eyeglasses – bet you’re happy about that one! – not to mention the advancement of hospitals and pharmacies, as well as the first recorded incident of a mother and baby both surviving an emergency C-section.

If there’s one link that popular culture has created between the Middle Ages and the Old West – inaccurately, for the record – it’s the sense that both times and places were lawless, chaotic battlegrounds, where people did what they want, killed who they hated, and had no laws to restrict them. This ignores the fact that back in Medieval times, laws were just as stringent as they are today, in certain respects: tradesman had to have licenses to sell good, everybody got taxed, and minor actions could result in surprising fines. 

As the camera pans across the village, highlighting all the characters in your favorite Medieval-themed TV show, most of the peasants will tend to be portrayed wearing drab, brown clothing, ripped to pieces. In reality, though, clothing dyes were widespread, and even the average person wore bright colors. The poor folk mostly clad themselves in blue, since it was a cheaper color, while individuals with a few extra coins wore yellow and gray. Purple, however, was a color restricted only to monarchs, and it would be seen as offensive for a commoner to wear it.

Vikings were intense, but a lot of the myths about them today are far from the truth. Perhaps the most striking example is the fact that their horned helmets, now so ubiquitous with the very term “Viking,” were not something they wore. On top of that, the image of a Viking drinking from the skull of his enemy is equally fictional, inspired only by an old mistranslation of a Norse poem from the 1600s, which was actually referring to drinking alcohol from an animal’s horn (ala Tyrion Lannister in Game of Thrones).

As any giant battle scene in the Lord of the Rings trilogy will tell you, the true MVPs of any Medieval-style conflict were the archers, hitting faraway targets with perfectly aimed arrows. Now, real archers were definitely highly skilled individuals, but one thing that modern media often gets wrong is that archers often went barefoot – their heavy bows were easier to aim if they gripped into the ground with their toes – and they almost never kept quivers on their back, since it was easy to keep arrows around their belts.

If there’s one thing that movies like Army of Darkness have taught you, it’s that Medieval peasants were rude, filthy people with terrible dinner manners, and nobleman weren’t much better. However, despite what popular culture tells you, people didn’t tend to eat with their hands. Utensils were common – though if a meal involved knives, you were expected to bring your own – and table manners were demanded, though the precise manners you’d be expected to follow at an average dinner would seem foreign to you today.

You’ll often hear the tale that, back in the Middle Ages, the average life expectancy was 35. This is true. However, the way people use this fact demonstrates that they don’t understand the use of the term “average” here, in a mathematical sense: it’s not that people rarely lived to 35, but rather, the fact that vaccines hadn’t been invented, so an insane number of children died in their early years. This spree of child deaths brings the average down quite a bit, and in fact, once a Medieval adult made it to their 20s, they usually could be expected to live into their 70s.

Okay, sure. That whole Sword in the Stone thing was definitely a stretch, and Merlyn probably wasn’t a real wizard, but King Arthur was probably a real figure in British history, right? Well… probably not. In fact, historians often dispute Arthur’s veracity, since the oldest accounts of him are from a ninth century writer named Nennius, who was known to stretch the truth. At this point, many historians are inclined to just write off King Arthur altogether, with one archaeologist named John Nowell Linton Myres once summarizing that, in his words "No figure on the borderline of history and mythology has wasted more of the historian's time." Oof.

Some more modern scholars have looked back on medieval theology mockingly, often using the example of theologians of the time debating the concept of “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” as an example of the fruitless things they wasted their time on. However, there's no evidence that this was ever a heavily discussed theory in either a scholarly or philosophical sense.

According to numerous legends, men of nobility who were about to head off on a crusade who force their wives into wearing chastity belt devices to ensure the latter stayed faithful while the former was away. However, by all historical account this isn't true, and chastity belts didn't become well-known or widely used until the 19th century, when interest in so-called medieval torture devices was at an all-time high.

There are many people who consider Neuschwanstein Castle a stunning example of medieval architecture. The only problem? It's not medieval at all. Ludwig II of Bavaria began building the castle in 1869 - hundreds of years after the Middle Ages ended - and it's design is based on romantic ideals of the period that in actuality had very little to nothing in common with real medieval fortresses or castles.

There's long been a myth that Europeans during medieval times feared that tomatoes were poisonous, likely another way to express how "backwards" and misinformed they were. However, tomatoes weren't even in Europe during most of the period. The food was first brought over from South America in the 16th century, and became popular across the continent near immediately.

There's a longstanding believe that women had little to no rights in the Middle Ages, and were essentially expected to be subservient to their husbands. However, in actuality could buy and sell property, run a business, and had many legal rights enshrined. In fact, it wasn't until the early modern period that many of said rights were stripped away, before being regained over the decades.

While religion was a massively important part of both the personal and social lives of many in the Middle Ages, the idea that everyone blindly followed the church's teachings is misinformed. Everyone from peasants to religious scholars would debate issues of the church and its teachings. Beyond that, there were even some who weren't religious at all.

According to longhand medieval legend, the great Library of Alexandria was destroyed by invading "Arabs" in 640 AD, with Caliph Omar specifically ordering all the books in the library to be burned. However, this wasn't recorded anywhere in the historical record until 500 years after it allegedly happened, leading many modern scholars to believe that it's simply a fable and that the library had actually been destroyed long before the conquest.

While the fall of the Roman Empire did contribute to massive societal and social unrest, the idea that it brought about a "dark age" is a Western ethnocentric view. There were still many innovations following the "collapse" of the empire, and things were by no means equally terrible everywhere.

There's a medieval myth that there was a female pope, specifically that a Pope who went by Joan reigned for two years from 855 to 858. In reality, Leo IV served from from 847 to 855 and Benedict III reigned from 855 to 888 and the legend of Joan appears in no literature of the time, and didn't emerge until nearly 200 years later. In other words, there's most likely no truth to the story.

While this one may seem like a bit of semantics, given the importance of the Magna Carta - it's been referred to as "the greatest constitutional document of all times—the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot" - it's probably worth clarifying everything about it. Specifically, King John didn't sign the Magna Carta, he stamped it.

According to legend, there was mass panic in Europe as the year 1000 AD approached, with many trying to desperately repent as they believed that the second coming of Christ was about to herald the end of days. Only problem with that is there's no record of the panic until hundreds of years later. The likelihood is that if there were anyone who thought the world was ending it was likely a small group, similar to those who thought so in 2000 or 2012.

The story of Joan of Arc has gone through so many permutations over the centuries that it came sometimes be hard to delineate fact from fiction. For example, many have conflated Joan being burned at the stake with stories of witches being being burned at the stake to indicate that's why Joan suffered her faith. In truth, she was burned at the stake for heresy thanks to dressing like a man.

Ignoring the fact that there were Native Americans in the land for thousands of years, it's pretty well-known that Columbus did not "discover" America. The first European to "discover" the land was Bjarni Herjolfsson about 985 AD. 15 years later, Leif Ericsson led an expedition to the new land, though his Vikings failed to establish a permanent colony, leaving the door open for the other European powers.

Tradition has long said that he Blackheath area of London gained its name from the fact that victims of the Black Death from London were buried there. However, this can't be true as Blackheath was called Blackheath at the time of the Domesday Book circa 1086, nearly 300 years before the Black Death plague of 1348-49. So unless there's a time machine involved...

Some would argue that no one actually believes this one, but it's worth pointing out. No, Golf - which was invented in Scotland during the Middle Ages - does not stand for 'Gentlemen Only Ladies Forbidden’. The world gold actually derived from an old Dutch word ‘kolf’ which meant club. The Scots changed the word slightly to ‘golve’ or ‘Goff’ and in time it became golf.

Man have long believe that bows wielded by Englishmen were made of wood from yew trees, to the point that there's a ling-held myth that most churchyards in England had a yew tree specifically to create matters to create bows. There's almost certainly no truth to this, as contemporary records show that most bow-makers preferred to use yew wood from Southern or Eastern Europe.

Oxford details how this myth came to be:

"In recent years an explanation for the origin of the V-sign dating it from the Battle of Agincourt has appeared. This story maintains that British archers were so effective and so feared by their enemy that when the French captured an archer they chopped off the two fingers he needed to draw a bow-string. Bowmen who had not been thus disfigured took to holding up two fingers to taunt their cowardly foes. Needless to say, there is no shred of evidence to support this unlikely origin, but it is on its way to becoming entrenched in the popular mind and becoming folklore in itself."

As we've spoken about previously in this gallery, food there are a ton of myths about food in the medieval period. On of the longest lasting is that idea that spices were used to disguise the taste of tainted meat. However, the only people who could afford most spices were those with the means to also afford untainted eat. Simply, the spices were there for flavor.

On Friday October, 13th 1307, King Philip IV of France ordered every templar knight in France arrested. Today, many believe this is the origin of the superstition that the date in question is unlucky. While there may be some level of truth to that, the concept of Friday the 13th being unlucky didn't become part of the pop culture lexicon until the 1900s, some 600 years later.

For hundreds of years now there has been a rumor that the current Freemasons group is actually descended from the Knights Templar. However, according to History UK this is due to a miscommunication: "... Andrew Michael Ramsay, better known in masonic circles as Chevalier Ramsay, raised the idea that Freemasonry was connected to the knights of the Crusades in Discourse Pronounced at the Reception of Freemasons by Monsieur de Ramsay, Grand Orator of the Order. A myth within a myth says that he mentioned the Templars by name, hence the misconception that the two groups were somehow connected."

Despite the popular notion, 'Ring a Ring o' Roses' was not written about the black plague. In fact, that interpretation of the folk song/nursery rhyme didn't become widely known until the 1950s, and was influenced more by the post-World War II political and social climate than it was any actual historical data or record.

For hundreds of years, the spread of the plague was blamed on infected rats who spread infected fleas across the world on merchant trips. However, in recent years new research has come to light indicating that humans were acutely much more responsible for spreading the infecting than rats ever could be. “It would be unlikely to spread as fast as it did if it was transmitted by rats,” Nils Stenseth, a professor at the University of Oslo, told BBC News. “It would have to go through this extra loop of the rats, rather than being spread from person to person.”

Many believe that the phrase Black Plague came into use to describe the balanced flesh of the disease's victims. However, as History Collection describes, the name actually stemmed from a mistranslation:

"In 1350 the Flemish astrologer Simon de Covinus described the plague that ravaged his country. He wrote a poem which he entitled “mors atra.” The title could be translated two different ways either as “Black Death” or “Terrible Death.” The translators, for whatever reason, decided interpret the title as “Black Death” and from there the infamous plaque got the name for which it is best known. The name took on quickly and it would eventually be a way for historians to differentiate between the medieval plague of the 14th century and the Great Plague of 1665 which devastated England."

Many mistakenly believe that the Black Plague was a disease that mainly effected the poor. However, that's not accurate. As History Collection explains, "Chroniclers of the period report that many important knights, ladies and merchants fell victim to the black death. Records from the time also show that many wealthy and well-fed convents, friaries and monasteries were just as devastated by the plague as the rest of Europe. Many of these convents, friaries and monasteries lost more than half their population and some even disappeared altogether. The Black Death not only killed the wealthy but it gave peasants power they never had before. After the Black Death peasants who survived believed that they were blessed by God. This meant that they will not as willing to accept oppression and just accept their lot in life. They believed this blessing from God put them above Parliament and anything that the Parliament could do to them. In 1381 the peasants revolted in order to fight against rising taxes and the fear that power would once again shift back to Parliament."

Some historians have long contended that the 1666 Great Fire of London that devastated the city had the "silver lining"of ending the plague. However, according to the London Museum, that's not true. "The Great Fire only burnt about a quarter of the urban metropolis so it could not have purged the plague from the whole city. Though the outside walls of houses rebuilt after the fire had to be built from brick, there were no major improvements to hygiene and sanitation afterwards. Many of the areas that were worst affected by the plague, such as Whitechapel, Clerkenwell and Southwark, were not destroyed by the fire. The numbers of people dying from plague were already in decline from the winter of 1665 onwards. People continued to die from plague in London after the Great Fire was over. This myth seems to have grown up because the two catastrophes were so close together and because the Great Plague of 1665-66 was the last major outbreak of the disease in this country. We are still not sure why the plague did not return to our shores after it faded out in the 1670s but it wasn’t due to London’s 1666 fire."