Ten medieval years can take an awful toll on a man's appearance

Ten medieval years can take an awful toll on a man's appearance. He duly starts rooting around in the mud, raising pigs and such-like.There was an awful lot of mud in Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, too. When Richard Gere and Julia Ormond enjoy a kiss in the rain, it is mainly to acquire that fashionable wet look, rather than to get dirty.Mud belongs to the European tradition. There are whole faculties of Medieval History professors who hire out their services to European medieval films and insist that there be a lot of historically accurate mud. There was The Return of Martin Guerre, in which Depardieu comes back from the wars - which ones I can't remember, but they must be medieval wars, because after 10 years away no one spots that he isn't the man he claims to be.

As well as no mud, there was also a noticeable absence of myth, magic, Mordred and Merlin, or indeed anything from the M section of the Camelot phonebook. Even the recent First Knight had Camelot looking like a Disney model village, covered in pristine white stone and roofed with electric blue tiles. Franklyn Schaffner's creditable The War Lord, starring Chuck Heston as the Norman chieftain, wasn't very muddy, but it did have a lot of pagan sacrifices Errol Flynn never got his green tights dirty in Sherwood. Ivanhoe did have quicksand, though, which sucked up knights in armour in one quick slurp. Richard Thorpe's prodigious output in the early Fifties included Ivanhoe, Knights of the Round Table and The Adventures of Quentin Durward, all of them starring the very clean Robert Taylor and all of them seeing the Middle Ages not as a muddy age but as a good excuse to unfurl banners in full technicolour. At least he ends up hanged, drawn and quartered, which is very medieval.

There is also a lot of mud, but then it was filmed in Ireland. Hollywood hasn't been very big on mud It prefers to see the Middle Ages as a fairly clean place. To say nothing of his hair extensions, which must have given his medieval hair consultant awful problems. Which would surely be 500 years before the kilt was invented and 500 years after woad went out of fashion. And, of course, unspeakable cruelty, whether on battlefields or in dungeons. I may not know much about medievalism, but I know what I like. Braveheart (reviewed opposite) has a similar devil-may-care attitude to the period. No doubt thousands of Scottish historians will write in to show me up, but it strikes me that Mel Gibson as William Wallace, clad in a loose-weave kilt and wearing blue make-up all over his face, is placing himself somewhere around 1300.

Proles with hideous teeth (there is a line in Tennyson's Idylls of the King about a churl who "sputters through a hedge of splintered teeth"). Serious amounts of religion, tempered by witchcraft, and a horribly active Inquisition Interesting diseases, especially leprosy. I imagine it is a period somewhere between the fifth and 15th centuries AD, somewhere between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the start of the Renaissance, give or take a hundred years But it is not the dates that interest me It is all the things that "medieval" evokes Things such as mud Things such as chaps in armour. Struck by the sea of white faces filling the NEC in Birmingham at last year's national general meeting, Cynthia Howell, a WI member from Nottinghamshire, wrote a letter to Home and Country: "When I travel around the rural Midlands, it is evident that there are a great many black and Asian women bringing up families and trying to improve their quality of life.