From the rain-slicked, mud-caked villages of Monty Python and the Holy Grail to the grim, soot-covered faces in Game of Thrones, pop culture has spent decades convincing us that the Middle Ages were a thousand-year stretch of bad smells and worse luck.

But if you actually hopped into a time machine set for 1200 CE, you’d find a world that was far more sophisticated—and quite a bit cleaner—than Hollywood suggests. Before you get swept up in the cinematic gloom of the next big historical drama, let’s peel back the layers of soot and look at six ways movies consistently get the Middle Ages wrong.

The “Eternal Layer of Grime” Myth

In many films, a medieval village is signaled by a few goats, a lot of rain, and peasants covered in so much mud they resemble human pottery. But beyond the cinematic sludge-and-soot aesthetic, the reality is that people in the Middle Ages actually valued hygiene; they just didn’t have indoor plumbing.

While modern showers were centuries away, the average person wasn’t uniformly filthy. Most people started their day with a basin of water and a cloth to wash their faces and hands, and many even brushed their teeth with twigs and herbs. In rural areas, peasants bathed in rivers or used wooden tubs, while in town, public bathhouses—often called “stews” that cleverly used excess heat from nearby bakeries to warm the water—were common social hubs until the arrival of the plague made people suspicious of standing water.

Even the poorest laborers understood the importance of cleanliness, laundering their linens with soapwort to deodorize and chamber lye to brighten whites. Ultimately, the soot-covered serf is largely a caricature created by later generations to make themselves feel more enlightened by comparison.

Witch Hunts Weren’t a Medieval Staple

If a movie features a frantic village priest screaming about a witch at the stake in the year 1100, the screenwriter is off by about four centuries. Thanks to the “Burning Times” trope in horror films, we often associate the Middle Ages with a constant, paranoid hunt for magic-users.

In truth, the most intense, large-scale witch trials occurred during the Early Modern period (roughly the 15th to 17th centuries). For much of the early Middle Ages, the Catholic Church’s official position was actually that witches didn’t exist. Believing that a neighbor had supernatural powers wasn’t just wrong: it was a total affront to God’s monopoly on the universe. If you thought a witch could make it rain, you weren’t just a sinner; you were massively misinformed about who held the remote control to reality.

Armor Was Neither Daily Wear Nor Paper Thin

Movies usually get armor wrong in two directions: knights either wear it to dinner like it’s a casual tracksuit, or they die the second a sword so much as grazes them. In reality, a full suit of plate was the pinnacle of medieval engineering: a deflective “steel skin” that made the wearer nearly invincible to standard sword swings.

You couldn’t just casually poke a blade through a breastplate any more than you could poke a finger through a brick wall. Defeating a knight required a “work smarter, not harder” approach: you either used a massive, specialized hammer to dent the suit or aimed for the tiny, inch-wide gaps in the joints—even when it came to chainmail armor.

Furthermore, because armor was incredibly expensive and required a literal pit crew (squires) to put on, knights didn’t lounge around the castle in it. They wore it for the “office”—which, in their case, was the battlefield—and took it off the second they could.

Sieges Were Grueling Endurance Tests, Not Sprints

On screen, the average siege is an action-packed affair: catapults fire flaming rocks, a ram hits the door, and the castle falls by sunset. Historically, if a siege ended in one day, someone had seriously messed up.

Real sieges were grueling marathons that could last months or even years. Because the invaders actually needed a functional fortress to occupy once the fighting stopped, knocking the walls down—a process that was both incredibly difficult and self-defeating—wasn’t always the best option. Instead of pulverizing their future real estate, medieval troops often opted for the sit and wait strategy: starving the defenders into submission. Most of the “action” involved digging tunnels to quietly collapse foundations or simply waiting for the people inside to run out of grain and beer.

The most decisive factor in a medieval siege wasn’t usually a hero with a sword, but rather a breakout of dysentery or a failed supply line. In fact, biological warfare was often more effective than a flaming arrow; attackers would sometimes catapult the severed heads of prisoners and animal carcasses over the walls to spread fear and disease, hoping the stench and the germs would do the work that their ladders couldn’t.

Medieval Fashion Went Beyond Brown and Burlap

If you believe Hollywood costume designers, the only colors available in the Middle Ages were mud-brown, forest green, and a particularly depressing shade of charcoal. Most characters look like they’re wearing oversized potato sacks cinched with a piece of twine, creating a world that looks like it was filmed in sepia.

In reality, medieval people were absolutely color-obsessed. While deep blues and bright reds were often reserved for the wealthy, even lower-class peasants used natural dyes from plants like woad (blue) and madder (red) to spice up their wardrobes. To a medieval person, a wardrobe of entirely unbleached, undyed linen and wool wouldn’t just signify lower status—it would look like you just hadn’t gotten your hands on DIY dyes yet.

Far from the monochromatic aesthetic we see in movies, medieval men actually loved to “peacock” themselves as much as possible and were not afraid to wear bright, contrasting colors. Clothing evolved from simple tunics into cotehardies—fitted garments that showed off the silhouette—and by the 14th century, mi-parti fashion (clothing split down the middle into two contrasting colors) was the height of style. To a real medieval crowd, a modern movie set would look less like a serious historical epic and more like a very boring funeral.

Taverns Were More Airbnb than Adventure Hub

The classic movie tavern—a smoky den with a boar roasting over a fire, a bard in the corner, and a mysterious stranger offering a quest—is a trope borrowed from 18th-century stagecoach inns (and directors’ imaginations), not the actual Middle Ages. If you walked into a village in the 12th century looking for a “pub,” you’d be sorely disappointed. In reality, most inns were simply private farmhouses where the family offered a place for your horse and a shared meal at their table. It was less like a commercial hotel and more like a mandatory, very awkward bed-and-breakfast.

Space was a luxury, which meant you rarely got a private room; in fact, sharing a bed with a complete stranger was a standard, non-scandalous part of the travel experience. In town, alehouses were often just a neighbor’s front room run by a local woman known as an alewife. If she finished a fresh batch of brew, she’d hang a pole with a bush on the end (known as an “ale-stake”) outside her door to let the neighborhood know it was time to gather for gossip and a drink. These were community living rooms, not the dark, clandestine hubs for international espionage we see on screen.

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