What People Are Looking for in Medieval History



Leading searchers astray.

 This is always interesting, looking over what search terms people are using that lead them to a site. In the following instances, they all found themselves at Today In Medieval History... whether they learned what they wanted is anyone's guess, but we can speculate.

medieval nun england

Lots to choose from, of course. My guess is that the person was either looking for a story or novel they once read or perhaps want to know more about how nums lived them. What is your guess? I can’t tell you much about what they found. It was an image result on Bing with a link to an old archived set of posts. When I did the same search on Google I found much more germane results. Perhaps they just wanted to make a costume?

"today in medieval history"

There were several of these, and I hope I don’t flatter myself when I choose to believe they were all looking for my blog.

astronomer dies 2010

I am afraid all this person discovered at TiMH is astronomers died before 1600 also.

23 october 1066

Rather specific, as are some of the the following. In this case it looks like they learned that just one week before Harold Godwinson died at the Battle of Hastings.

1487 Ireland

I expect lots of things happened that year in Ireland, but one significant event was the arrest of Lambert Simbel, one of the pretenders who claimed to be a Prince in the Tower.

1407 – A truce between John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy and Louis of Valois, Duke of Orléans is a

I am just impressed that someone even knew about this. Even more impressive, there were two separate hits the same day from different people! What the rest of that sentence, “is a”, will forever remain a mystery.

politics middle ages 1251

Middle Ages and 1251? What they found on the blog was the birthdate of Marco Polo.. not a lot of political content in that natal event.

news in 30th december 1170

“This just in: Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas a Becket slain by unknown assailants during the celebration of mass. Four barons seen leaving the precincts on getaway steeds. News at 11.”

saladin today

What is this, a celebrity magazine or something?

September 1187

Perhaps they wanted a back issue of “Saladin Today” since this led two others to the retaking of Jerusalem.

This is just one of the many things you can find on a statistics tool like the one I use, Statcounter.com. For instance, the two people concerned about that truce about an hour and a quarter apart and using the same precise words were in Ashalnd and Columbus, Ohio. Our “Saladin Today” readers were in Brisbane, Australia, Derby, UK, and Rugby in the UK and the searches were conducted over two days the week before the anniversary of the event. At least one can follow the thought process there. Our nun seeker was at SUNY in New York, our possible Lambert Simnel fan in Hendersonville, Kentucky and it was someone in Tulsa, Oklahoma who was worried about politics in 1251.   Perhaps the filibuster is still going on.

Less encouraging is the information that most of these people clicked through and then skedaddled immediately, their stays totaling 0 seconds each! At least it was comforting that one of the people looking for “today in medieval history” muyat have really wanted the blog as the stats say “Multiple visits spread over more than one day”..

I actually came across a search I knew about. A woman who was trying to remember the Justin de Quincy mysteries titles I found on another blog’s stats, using logical search terms and finding and track-able through medieval-novels.com . So in this case it was no longer a mystery, I guess!