In recent years, history has become the focus of increasing popular interest, both in book form and on television. This dictionary is intended not for historiographers (who will not need it) but rather for the readers of history who are neither specialists nor academically trained.

There is an astonishing amount of material that is readily available today. Domesday Book can be bought in a modern translation, in one paperback volume, for less than the cost of a ticket to a football match – all two million words. There are paperback editions of texts of the period, in which the voice of the time can still be heard, while Bracton is easily accessible on the Internet. And there is, of course, the literature. From Geoffrey of Monmouth to Chaucer, to Thomas Malory – it is all available, sometimes in modern English, and there the imagination of the past can be seen and heard at work. The people are recognisable. Chaucer is subject to adaptations which attempt to make him ‘relevant’: but modernisation strips his characters of just what it is that makes them recognisably flesh-and-blood human beings: their voice and milieu. Malory’s Morte D’Arthur was being printed by Caxton in the same year as the Battle of Bosworth, 1485: a decisive exposition of the Arthurian legend which had persisted throughout this period appeared simultaneously with the battle which was the last of the era we call medieval.

The period can be made to look very good, even glamorous, with wellchosen pictures. Iconic knights in armour on gorgeously arrayed horses, the castles and tournaments, the brightly coloured clothing of the men and women of the nobility, so rich in comparison with ours, so unlike that of the little-seen peasantry – all provide evocative images. But all that they thought and believed was utterly different, even alien, to our ways of thought and belief. The Church and its place in the lives of those people, its power over actions and its intimate place in daily life and thought is just one such profound difference among many.

The medieval period is separated from us by language as much as time. This was a time of languages: English, French and Latin.