A Grade II listed mansion in the heart of the Peak District is going to be converted back into a luxurious private residence after being used as a hotel for more than 40 years.
Medieval Millennials
When does a boy become a man? Medieval millennials were just as hard to define as those of today.
We have a tendency to associate youth culture with modernity, but medieval people were as anxious about youths as are today’s headline writers worrying about the rise of the ‘millennial’. As the poet John Lydgate (c.1370-c.1451) warned: ‘O lusty gallants in your adolescence, / . When you are stirred to wanton insolence, / Restrain yourselves.’ We might also assume that extending youth beyond the teenage years is a luxury of a modern society, where life expectancy stretches into the eighties. But even in the late Middle Ages, when life expectancy was considerably lower, youth was a flexible category that could expand well into the late twenties and even thirties. So what were the defining characteristics of ‘medieval millennials’ and when did they stop being youths and start being adults?