Medieval History

I’m currently wading through The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History – Volume II has been reached, about 3/4 of the way through – which, like calling the Hundred Years’ War “a bit of a tiff,” is pure academic trolling. The main takeaway? Medieval Europe was one long punch-up in a muddy field, occasionally interrupted by plagues, popes, and the odd overcooked boar.

It's extremely hard to keep up with the constant, shifting tides of ownership. By the end of one page, a territory that was owned by one individual at the start of the page, has passed between 3 others - nothing stayed stable for longer than 5 minutes, which makes Vol II a rather turgid read. Every land-grabbing lunatic with a sword and a dubious family tree fancied himself a king. But let’s not romanticise it – these weren’t noble stewards of civilisation. They were homicidal kleptomaniacs in chainmail. What we now call "nobles" were just thugs with monograms. Born today, they’d be flogging crypto and appearing on GB News to denounce the Archbishop of Canterbury as “woke”.

And the names! Louis the Sluggard, Baldwin the Bulbous, John the Blind, Philip the Slightly Moist. All stomping about, lopping limbs off rivals, while peasants prayed the next overlord would be marginally less stabby than the last. It was less the “Age of Chivalry” and more a never-ending episode of Game of Thrones, just with worse personal hygiene and even less character development. It's hard to keep up with the shifting lands being handed to shifting Barons. The main reason was there was not uch concept as primogeniture and every landowner had to split his land between his mutually antagonistic sons.

All of them were related in some way or other and it was like the Mafia wars.

Eventually – miraculously – something shifted. People began noticing they had more in common with the bloke in the next village, who spoke the same dialect and hated the same taxes, than with some silk-wearing duke from Anjou who claimed their souls and livestock by divine right. Identity began to coalesce around language and culture, not just bloodlines and bonkers heraldry. Enter the nation-state: turbulent, bloody, often ridiculous – but a step up from being ruled by Henry the Quarrelsome, whose foreign policy involved biting people.

But of course, history always leaves behind a few awkward outliers.

Take Switzerland – a country so mountainous and inconvenient to invade that most powers simply gave up and went around it. Too rugged to conquer, too remote to centralise, too well-armed to ignore. Its cantons squabbled like a dysfunctional village fête committee, each with their own language, customs, and opinion on the correct way to melt cheese. But instead of collapsing into civil war or getting annexed by Habsburgs with ideas above their station, they just… carried on. Multilingual by geography, not ideology. A loose alliance of stubborn valleys who learned to get along because no one else wanted the job. A country accidentally preserved by its own inaccessibility.

Then there’s Britain – the sulky teenager of Europe, sat just offshore, arms crossed, muttering about sovereignty. Its island status spared it the worst of continental trampling (bar the odd Norman, Roman, or low-cost Ryanair invasion). Over time, this physical detachment fostered a mental one. While Europe tangled itself in imperial ribbons, Britain forged a fudge of nations: England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland… and Cornwall, quietly rehearsing secession in the corner over scones. Like Switzerland, it remained multilingual – not from tolerance, but from centuries of conquest, accommodation, and benign neglect.

It worked – or did – because the parts tolerated each other, vaguely united by free movement, shared institutions, and Antiques Roadshow. Strip that away, and you’re left with a group of flatmates who’ve realised they hate each other but are stuck on the same tenancy agreement.

So yes – most of Europe eventually staggered towards borders and identities that made some sort of sense. The great patchwork empires – Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans, Tsarist Russia – crumbled under the weight of bayonets, bureaucracy and bad blood. But Switzerland? The exception. Britain? The experiment.

Just don’t call either of them normal. They’ve read the rulebook – they’ve just scrawled their own addendum in Welsh, Romansh, and Glaswegian, and left a note in the margin saying no thanks, we’re full.