Medieval History Quotes

There is a list of things I'm not allowed to discuss at the dinner table! I am extraordinarily passionate about the Black Death, which is not something most people are into.

Magna Carta has 63 clauses in abbreviated Latin. Two of them that are still on the statute book, numbers 39 and 40, could be said to have changed the way in which the free world has grown.

Joan of Arc was not elected.

We believe that the Greeks have been punished through [the Crusades] by the just judgement of God: these Greeks who have striven to rend the Seamless Robe of Jesus Christ ... Those who would not join Noah in his ark perished justly in the deluge; and these have justly suffered famine and hunger who would not receive as their shepherd the blessed Peter, Prince of the Apostles.

In the Middle Ages, I think the French kings murdered slightly fewer of their family members than the English kings, though I haven't actually counted the heads.

The Magna Carta was the first class-based charter, enforced on the monarchy by the rising class.

I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.

No medieval monarch in the whole of British history ever had such power as every modern British Prime Minister.

Cheerily to sea; the signs of war advance: No king of England, if not king of France

With the World War II era, there's so much written material to draw on. When you go back to the 14th century, you have to imagine more.

The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches.

… the faithless and most vile Lombard people … whose members have certainly brought forth the lepers.

I'm a bit of a history goon, and I love all that. Anything that's medieval-based up until, probably, the Tudor period and just after, I'm quite into.

Joan of Arc was born 600 years ago. Six centuries is a long time to continue to mark the birth of a girl who, according to her family and friends, knew little more than spinning and watching over her father's flocks.

I am a keen medievalist and like going around museums and ruins and finding out about the people and local culture. I'm not one for sitting by a pool or lying on a beach. I also like to sketch while I'm on holiday, if I have time.

I have a real passion for anything medieval, which is why I love the drama series 'Game Of Thrones.'

I started doing some more specific research on Wales in that period because I like the idea of being authentic to the territory, and with that came the knowledge that there was this great rebellion that was happening with the Marcher barons and conflict with the king. A lot of it wasn't documented by the English.

Casting me as King Arthur was quite bold of 'Spamalot's producers, although it has been historically proved Arthur was Asian, and that Sunday trading started with Asians in 11th-century Britain.

Here in Europe they had a Dark Age so extensive, radical and obliterative that everyone forgot how to speak Latin.

I discovered [Joan of Arc] toward the age of ten or twelve, when I went to France. I don't remember where I read about her, but I recall that she immediately took on a definite importance for me. I wanted to sacrifice my life for my country. It seems like foolishness and yet...what happens when we're children is engraved forever on our lives.

In the Middle Ages, cathendrals and convents burned like tinder; imagining a medieval story without a fire is like imagining a World War II movie in the Pacific without a fighter plane shot down in flames.

Russian history began in Kiev, not in Moscow.

Up until the War of the Roses there had been continual conflict in England.

I like Joan of Arc best of all my books; and it is the best; I know it perfectly well.

The head of a Pike, served at supper, is said to have caused the death from terror of Theodoric the Goth, who imagined the fish's features to be those of Symmachus, a man he had just killed. But for this story, we of today would have no idea what Symmachus looked like.