Suzannah Rowntree

(In fact what she is, is written with very little concession to the male gaze. She is forthright. She knows what she thinks and isn't going to compromise it for anything or anyone, and she has absolutely zero respect for anyone who hasn't earned it.)

The thing about this that makes me so happy is that she reminds me of another of my favourite female characters of all time.

Edmund Spenser's Britomart, the lady knight from The Faerie Queene - a 16th century epic poem written during Shakespeare's day.

The Faerie Queene is my favourite epic poem of all time, largely due to Britomart, whose author clearly adores her. Britomart isn't a delicate, ladylike heroine like the damsels in the rest of the poem (Una, for instance - as awesome as she is in her own way). Britomart is, on the contrary, a big, muscular woman who after seeing the face of her true love in Merlin's magic mirror, decides to put on armour and go out into the world to bludgeon bad guys and look for her beloved. (Along the way she rescues another damsel and they become besties and honestly they're a much more compelling relationship than the one she eventually has with her Destined Love).

But the thing about Britomart that makes me so happy is that Spenser chooses not to write her with the tropes he uses for his damsel characters. Instead, he writes her with all the tropes of a medieval knight - which means she has a keen sense of her own worth. If people fail to treat her with respect, she'll have no hesitation in banging heads together. Britomart is totally unapologetic. She knows what she wants and what she deserves, and she's not going to accept any substitute.

TROP Galadriel is almost exactly the same character, and I would argue that any lady knight worth the name needs to be written the same way - with medieval knightly tropes that just happen to be worn by a woman.

On the right: the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, depicted by a director in 2026 who thinks he's being super realistic by coating everyone in mud and leeching all colour from the world.

There was even a shot in the trailer from inside a GOTHIC CATHEDRAL and it had no colour. Like extraordinary dedication to making everything look like mud. FOR WHY.

The lack of colour tells me everything I need to know about this movie - i.e. that it's going to sacrifice historical accuracy in favour of making the entire period look filthy, joyless, brutal and stupid.

Sarcasm alert. Everything I've heard about this movie sounds like it was created specifically to annoy me, so I'm going to try to ignore it and just talk about my pet peeve, which is this pop culture myth that the medieval period was particularly filthy, brutal, misogynistic and lawless. 

Which is simply not the truth, and here's a true story from 1348 that shows the real Middle Ages.

We know this story because it's a very important moment in the development of common law - that is, the facts and the conclusion of the story were written down and became the basis for how similar cases would be decided long into the future. This 1348 judicial decision (citation: I de S et Uxor v W de S (1348) yb 22 edw iii f 99) is still read by law students today when studying the tort (or wrong) of assault. That's nearly seven hundred years of judges and lawyers looking back at a medieval judicial decision and saying, "Yes! That was a good and just decision!"

To set the stage, it's the 1300s - a century famous for the Black Death, the Hundred Years' War, the Peasants' Revolt, and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church that saw the papacy moved to the French town of Avignon as puppets of the French monarchcy. But that's not the only thing that happens in the 1300s. This century also sees the publication of Dante's Divine Comedy; the Clockwork Revolution in which intricately designed clocks tracked everything from the hours of the day (which were measured in variable lengths) to the phases of the moon and the Sun's path through the zodiac; the creation of gorgeous books of hours and tapestries; the career of Christine de Pizan, the first woman known to have made a living from her pen; the writing of Geoffrey Chaucer and the radical social and religious reforms proposed by John Wyclif and his followers.

About the middle of this century a man known to history as W de S came in the night to the house of I de S and M, his wife, looking to buy some wine. The door to the taven was closed, so W pounded on the door with a hatchet, which he had in his hand. At this, M, the tavern-keeper's wife, put her head out the window and told him to stop. W responded by throwing the hatchet at M, narrowly missing her.

The tavern-keeper and his wife, contrary to what pop culture will tell you, responded exactly the way a couple of pub owners might respond today: they took the offender to court and argued that W had made an assault on M. W argued, in response, that he had committed no crime because the hatchet had not in fact struck M.

You might now be thinking that of course W would have won the case, since no actual physical harm was done to the woman he'd attacked. But you would be wrong! The judge in the case declared that the assault itself was harmful, and that W was liable to pay compensation for the fright he had caused M. 

"Ever since then," states my old Torts textbook, "the tort of assault has extended protection to a person's right to be free of emotional disturbance brought about by intentional threats of physical violence."

Law did exist in the middle ages. Women, as well as men, could expect to be protected by the law from assault. And not only physical, but even emotional damages could be awarded for assault...all the way back in 1348.