I've always enjoyed historical fiction, but recently my interest in the medieval period has become rather more serious — and possibly slightly obsessive.

Part of that is because history has become much more personal through The Yorkshire Knights. Riding in armour, learning mounted skills, thinking about heraldry, shields, weapons and theatrical jousting has a habit of making the medieval world feel rather less distant.

Add in a growing fascination with the Knights Templar, the Crusades and medieval warfare, and I've disappeared quite happily down an increasingly large historical rabbit hole.

Looking back, two series probably did more than anything else to lay the groundwork for that interest: Ken Follett's Kingsbridge novels and Bernard Cornwell's The Last Kingdom.

They approach history in completely different ways, but between them they make the medieval world feel remarkably real.

Ken Follett — Kingsbridge

The Kingsbridge books are probably best known for The Pillars of the Earth, centred around the construction of a great cathedral in medieval England.

That description makes it sound considerably less exciting than it actually is.

What Follett does brilliantly is use the cathedral as the centre of an entire community. Around it are craftsmen, monks, merchants, nobles, labourers and families, all with their own ambitions and problems.

You see how people lived, worked and survived.

Politics isn't something that happens somewhere far away between kings. It affects whether a town prospers, whether somebody can trade, who owns land and sometimes whether somebody lives at all.

And the cathedral itself becomes almost a character.

Building something on that scale without modern machinery, engineering software or even a particularly reliable supply chain suddenly becomes an extraordinary achievement.

The books make medieval life tangible.

Follett makes you interested in how people lived.

Bernard Cornwell — The Last Kingdom

Cornwell comes at medieval history from a rather different direction.

Usually carrying a sword.

The Last Kingdom follows Uhtred, born a Saxon but raised by Danes, through the wars between the Saxon kingdoms and Viking invaders that eventually lead towards the creation of England.

Uhtred is fictional, but Cornwell places him alongside real rulers and real events, most notably Alfred the Great and his descendants.

The result is history seen from ground level.

There are kings, politics and strategy, but there are also mud, fear, loyalty, betrayal and some wonderfully brutal shield walls.

Cornwell is particularly good at showing how complicated identity must have been.

Saxon or Dane?

Christian or pagan?

Loyal to a king, a lord, a family or yourself?

The answer is rarely as simple as a modern history book might suggest.

If Follett made me interested in how medieval people lived, Cornwell made me interested in how their world was made.

History With People In It

That's probably what I like most about both series.

Neither feels like a history lesson.

You can read that Alfred defeated the Vikings at Edington in 878, or that medieval cathedrals could take generations to build, and understand the facts perfectly well.

Historical fiction gives those facts people.

Suddenly there are craftsmen wondering whether a roof will stay up, soldiers standing in a shield wall waiting for somebody to try to kill them, families trying to survive political upheaval and rulers attempting to hold together kingdoms that barely exist.

And these days, some of that lands differently.

When you've spent time around horses in costume, practised with shields and weapons, or started learning how awkward and physical mounted skills actually are, the romantic version of the Middle Ages gets a bit of grit under it.

You become more aware of weight, balance, fear, weather, mud, equipment and the very practical business of staying on a horse while trying to do something dramatic with your hands.

That doesn't make historical fiction more accurate by magic.

It does make it feel more immediate.

Two Very Different Versions of the Medieval World

If I had to sum the two series up:

Follett gives you cathedrals, communities and generations.

Cornwell gives you swords, shield walls and the birth of England.

Both make the past feel less remote.

And both did something that the best historical fiction does exceptionally well: they made me want to know what really happened.

The Yorkshire Knights has probably accelerated that process considerably. What started as enjoying medieval fiction has turned into riding, armour, heraldry, jousting practice and an unhealthy amount of reading about crusading orders.

Years later, I'm considerably further down that medieval rabbit hole.

I don't appear to be climbing out any time soon.