“Rent a flat above a shop, cut your hair and get a job…”

Via The Heroic Age comes word of a clever project: according to the Lincolnshire Echo, an archaeological group is adapting a medieval work for film. Interestingly, they’ve chosen not an epic, a romance, a ballad, or a saga; instead, they’re recreating scenes from the Luttrell Psalter, a 14th-century manuscript that depicts the people of Lincolnshire living and working through the changing of the seasons.

You can learn more about the Luttrell Psalter at the Web site of the British Library, which also offers an online, page-turnable version. Compare its illuminated pages with some rough footage of the Luttrell Psalter movie that’s already posted to YouTube. I’ve just spent four weeks teaching Arthurian romance, and I’m gearing up to teach an Icelandic saga, so for me these placid, rural scenes are a timely reminder that medieval hands were far less likely to be gripping a truncheon at a Winchester tourney and far more likely to be holding a shovel or milking a cow—the work that often goes unseen in “the kitchens of history.”