The Most Horrifying Sexual Practices in Medieval Castles | Sleepy History Story

Video Description

👉Support the next bedtime history with a coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/boringhistorybites🙏 Step into the torchlit corridors of medieval Europe as we trace the everyday choreography of love, power, and rumor inside castles. This 210-minute journey moves from salt-cellar etiquette and courtly codes to letter-locked secrets and the clamor of tournaments; from banns and confession in ecclesiastical courts to pillories, charivari, and the Assize of Bread and Ale; from still-room remedies, humoral medicine, and bells rung against storms to midwives, birthing girdles, and the politics of heirs. You’ll watch messages sealed in wax with stag and rosemary, listen to troubadours spin senhals into gossip, step behind screens and tapestries where architecture stages privacy, and sit with household books that choreograph feast nights, bath nights, and bed-curtained hospitality. Across borders, we visit Iberian and Levantine frontiers where truces, languages, and table customs meet—and we debunk stubborn legends, from chastity belts to droit du seigneur and “secret tunnels.” Grounded in real rooms and practices—salt cellars and signet rings, banns and beadled bells, tally sticks, charters, rushes and rosemary—this film follows castle life after dark and the people who steered it with wit, ritual, and steady hands. Join us as we explore: 0:00 Introduction: Above the Salt, Below the Salt (great-hall choreography, courtly love, and why glances matter) 12:00 Making and Unmaking Alliances (arranged marriages, dowries & dower, banns, dispensations, wardship) 29:30 The Rumor Web (pages, maids, messengers—routes through screens, galleries, and service stairs) 47:00 Songs as Social X-Rays (troubadours, senhals, albas & tensos; praise, satire, and portable news) 1:05:00 Spectacle & Scorekeeping (tournaments, favors, heralds, and how lances become arithmetic) 1:25:00 Rules of the House (courtesy books, chivalry manuals, orders & household ordinances, livery and lights) 1:45:00 Privacy by Design (tapestries, bed curtains, mural passages; letterlocking, wax seals, mottos) 2:05:00 Morals & Markets (confession, consistory courts, Assize of Bread and Ale, fines, stocks, and charivari) 2:25:00 Herbs, Bells & Bodies (still rooms, humoral medicine, barber-surgeons, midwives, birthing girdles) 2:45:00 Fear, Folklore & Control (bells against storms, Canon Episcopi, witch-panics and what courts actually did) 3:00:00 When Courts Stumble (royal scandals, faction, interdicts, and how distant politics enters the pantry) 3:15:00 Frontiers & Cross-Cultural Etiquette (Iberia & Outremer—truces, shared hospitals, mixed customs) 3:30:00 Myths We Can’t Quit & Farewell (chastity belts, droit du seigneur, iron maidens, “secret tunnels,” and the dawn that follows)