Free Republic

Cambridge scholars have finally cracked a 130-year-old medieval literary puzzle: the Song of Wade, a long-lost gem of English literature.Previously believed to be a monster-filled epic, new research reveals it was actually a chivalric romance -- a tale of knights, battles, and courtly intrigue.A few lines of text in an 800-year-old medieval sermon document stumped the literature scholars.The breakthrough came from correcting a long-standing misreading in a medieval sermon: the word "elves" was mistakenly transcribed by a scribe, and the correct word is "wolves.""Changing elves to wolves makes a massive difference. It shifts this legend away from monsters and giants...

Eric Barker, Barking Up The Wrong Tree September 9, 2014Roger Ekrich noticed many old books, including Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales", referenced two periods of sleep being the norm in their era. Via Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep: ...Ekirch somehow rediscovered a fact of life that was once as common as eating breakfast. Every night, people fell asleep not long after the sun went down and stayed that way until sometime after midnight. This was the first sleep that kept popping up in the old tales. Once a person woke up, he or she would stay that way...

Canterbury Cathedral, where Archbishop Thomas Becket was killed, is the city’s biggest tourist attraction with a million visitors every yearAfter nearly 1,000 years, murder in the cathedral is still luring visitors to Canterbury. It was in the Canterbury Cathedral in 1107 that Archbishop Thomas Becket was killed, viciously, by four knights who believed they were doing the bidding of King Henry 2. As a result, Becket became a martyr and the cathedral a place of pilgrimage to his shrine. The homicide was the subject of Murder in the Cathedral, a verse drama by T.S. Eliot, and was more famously immortalised...