The Story of Dubious Deeds & Village Feuds
I'm delighted to be joining Robert Birming's AuguStory challenge, where bloggers are sharing the stories behind their blogs, how they got started, and where blogging has taken them.
And the funny thing is, Dubious Deeds & Village Feuds wasn't really the blog I set out to create.
How it all began
I've always loved history, particularly the bits that make you stop and think, wait... they actually did that?
I love visiting castles โ the more ruined, the better. Standing among broken walls, I find myself wondering who lived there, what they did all day, what they ate, what they argued about, and what the place looked like when it was full of people rather than tourists.
The bits between the big stories
The more I looked, the less interested I became in kings and battles.
I became way more interested in old manorial rolls. Those local court case that cannot be true, yet they are.
I can now happily spend an evening reading seven-hundred-year-old records about wandering pigs, blocked ditches, unpaid debts and neighbours arguing over fences.
And somehow, those tiny disputes feel incredibly alive.
Someone owned that field.
Someone else's cow got into it.
Someone was furious.
Someone went to court.
Seven hundred years later, we're still reading about it.
That's the part of medieval history I love most.
Not the grand story. The little one.
Finding my place to write it
I've blogged on just about every platform imaginable over the years โ WordPress, Blogger, Medium, Tumblr, Substack and probably several others I've forgotten.
I've bought domain names that seemed like excellent ideas at the time and abandoned projects when my attention wandered somewhere else.
Then I found Bear Blog.
And something clicked.
It's simple. I can write. I can play with the HTML and CSS. I can change things when I have an idea rather than spending half my life trying to make a theme behave.
More importantly, it feels like my little corner of the internet.
So What's Next?
I don't really know.
And, for once, I'm quite happy about that.
Because I don't have a carefully planned five-year content strategy.
I have a growing collection of medieval court cases, far too many open browser tabs and a long list of things that have made me say, surely that's not true?
And that's probably enough.
Because there's always a strange little record.
Another forgotten person.
Another story waiting somewhere in the margins.
All I have to do is find it.