Jack Cardenas, 24, spent this week charging across east London pavement on a Lime hire bike, PVC pipe in hand, jousting another rider in a piece of community theatre staged in the same week as Frieze, the art fair he calls “expensive and inaccessible”. “So many members of the community came out,” he said afterwards. Two men on hire bikes, playing at knights, drew a crowd that a medieval tournament would have recognised instantly.
Cardenas and his fellow jousters are not alone. Across music, fashion, film and art, the middle ages are suddenly everywhere, and young people are reaching for its symbols with unexpected enthusiasm. At Frieze itself, the artist Corbin Shaw staged a show called Feast of Fools, an “anti-Frieze” event inspired by a medieval festival in which, as Shaw put it to GQ, “the peasant class could insult the rich”. In the video for his latest song, Party, the Australian pop star Troye Sivan postures as a medieval knight, and after victory in battle gallops off to join a hedonistic, homoerotic celebration inside a castle. One piece of choreography has Sivan being used like a battering ram.
The catwalks have followed. At Givenchy, Louis Vuitton and Max Mara, the look has run from wimples to chainmail, a trend that has been called “medievalcore”. In cinema, Andrew Garfield leads the rabble in The Uprising, Paul Greengrass’s retelling of the Peasants’ Revolt, while Sports Banger, the political collective known for punchy T-shirts, sells garments reading: “Peasants’ Revolt 1381. Let’s finish the job.”
The question hovering over all of this is why now. Simon Trafford, a senior lecturer in medieval history at the University of London Institute of Historical Research, argues that the medieval period never really leaves us; it is “always there”, he says, and the real question is which particular bit of it we decide to borrow from at any one time. Marion Turner, a professor of English literature and language at the University of Oxford, sees something lighter at work in much of what is happening. “Some of the way modern artists and fashion designers are using the medieval is focused on joy and playfulness,” she says. These creators, she adds, are not saying: “This is what I actually think the medieval world was like.”
Bridget Dalton, a semiotician and cultural analyst at Truth Consulting, puts it more bluntly: “It’s fun. It can be camp and it can be macho and it can be sexy as well.” Dalton has identified another strand emerging alongside medievalcore, which she calls “wenchcore”, offering what she describes as “a more acceptable voracious sexuality, the ribald, singing, dancing, drinking, doesn’t-need-to-be-perfect idea of womanhood and of masculinity … more of just whatever goes”. It could be read as a medieval-inflected answer to Brat. For Trafford, the appeal is that the middle ages “gives us a sort of fantasy other space”.
Meanwhile, there is more than playfulness here, and the stakes sharpen when the parallels turn political. Many buzzy contemporary ideas feel medieval-tinged: seasonality, an emphasis on nature, folklore and locality, refracted through technological, globalised times, with community as a focal point. There is an anti-authoritarian streak as well, running from Shaw’s art to The Uprising, in which a Ploughman carries his grievances to London in a bid to restore egalitarianism to 14th-century England. Garfield told the Washington Post recently that he saw the film as “prescient and kind of predictive” of the No Kings movement in the United States.
Turner draws what she calls an “interesting parallel” with the pandemic. After the plague swept across Europe, she notes, there was massive social change, prompted by population decline, wage rises and new social mobility. The Peasants’ Revolt, she says, “is absolutely that generation after the plague”. In the post-Covid UK, “people feel like they just don’t want to put up with what they used to put up with before the pandemic”. Another parallel she draws is between the advent of printing then and the arrival of the internet and AI now. AI, in her view, “is more extreme in its negative effects”, but there are parallels with “the squashing of individual creativity by big technology”.
For young people, the pull also runs through identity. Shaw, whose cult-favourite T-shirt reads “Eng ‘lish’”, told GQ: “I hate the ruling classes of England, but there’s a lot of reasons to be proud to be English, we have to take these symbols back.” While rightwing politics has often mined the middle ages for its own ends, Dalton sees something reparative in what youth culture is doing. “Watching youth culture embrace the medieval is a way to talk about Britain without flying a St George,” she says. “It’s a very interesting route to reparative ideas about what it means to be British.”
Trafford, for his part, cautions that the period is endlessly flexible: “You will always be able to cherrypick … the little bits that play to your cause.” Marine Le Pen may draw on Joan of Arc as “this massively militant Christian figure”, he says, while a leftwinger “can definitely find that more friendly, more conducive society”. In the middle ages, it seems, there is a medievalism for everyone. Whether the jousters of east London are reclaiming their history or just borrowing its costumes may depend on which bits they choose to keep.