Experience Medieval Archery

06/07/2026

How interesting. We sleep in a different world to our ancestors.

04/07/2026

An interesting linguistic history.

Before the plague, an English king's court spoke French. The clerks wrote in Latin. The peasants in the fields spoke English, and almost nobody who mattered listened to them.

Then 1348 arrived.

The Black Death tore through England without checking anyone's pedigree, taking bishops in their palaces, abbots at the altar, and Norman-French landlords in their manor houses alongside the laborers in their huts. By some estimates nearly half the population was gone within a few years. The French-speaking ruling class, already a thin layer over a vast English-speaking majority, was suddenly far thinner.

The survivors needed hands. Fields had to be plowed, sheep sheared, taxes collected, courts held. Lords who once issued orders in Norman French found themselves negotiating with English-speaking tenants who now had leverage they'd never had before. Wages rose. Bonds of serfdom frayed. And the language of the people doing the actual work started pushing upward.

The schools shifted first. John Cornwall, an Oxford grammar master, began teaching Latin through English instead of French around 1349, and other schoolmasters followed. A generation of boys grew up construing their lessons in their mother tongue.

In 1362, Parliament passed the Statute of Pleading, ordering that court cases be argued in English because French had become so unfamiliar that litigants couldn't follow their own trials. That same year, the Chancellor opened Parliament with a speech in English for the first time in nearly three centuries.

By the 1380s, Geoffrey Chaucer was writing the Canterbury Tales in the London dialect of English, treating it as a literary language worthy of the kings and clerks who had once dismissed it. John Wycliffe's followers were translating the Bible into English. Sermons, wills, and guild records began appearing in the vernacular.

The English that emerged was already changed. Centuries of French rule had layered thousands of French words into its vocabulary, beef and mutton and parliament and justice, while the underlying grammar remained stubbornly Germanic. The plague didn't create that hybrid. It just cleared the room enough for English to walk back to the head of the table wearing French clothes.

A disease rewrote the country's tongue. The Norman Conquest had taken three hundred years to bury English. It took the Black Death about thirty to dig it back up.

04/07/2026

The mute response of Ireland’s golfing community to the threat of a visit by this man – one of the most harmful figures on the planet – is antithetical to the footballing community’s refusal to countenance Israel playing on Irish soil.

The mute response of Ireland’s golfing community to the threat of his visit is in sharp contrast to the footballing community’s refusal to countenance Israel playing on Irish soil

02/07/2026

A great day out with the White Strand Club at Glenribbeen Archery School.

13/06/2026

Ireland 🇮🇪

13/06/2026

The World Cup has started - a shame anyone is attending. Even if allowed to.

13/06/2026

The Irish £10- Tower House.

08/06/2026

Ballymastocker Beach, Fanad, Co Donegal, Ireland.
Stretching for over 2km between Portsalon and the Knockalla Hills, it is famous for its golden sands, crystal-clear waters, and breathtaking views of the Inishowen Peninsula

08/06/2026

Today's Holiday - St. Médardus's Day
June 8.

St. MÉdardus, or MÉdard, who lived from about 470 to 560, was the bishop of Vermandois, Noyon, and Tournai in France. Because he was the patron saint of farmers and good weather, he has come to play a role in weather lore similar to that of the English St. Swithin. In Belgium he is known as the rain saint, and there is an old folk rhyme that says, "If it rains on St. Médard's Day, it will rain for 40 days."

07/06/2026

G'nite cruel world