Orwell Wrote About the Future. He Also Wrote About the Past.

Written by Simon Williams

Most people read 1984 as a warning about totalitarianism yet to come. A Cold War nightmare. A speculative horror dressed up in grey prose and Ministry buildings.

But spend enough time studying medieval Britain, and something unsettling starts to happen. The book stops feeling like prophecy and starts feeling like a mirror. The mechanisms of control that Orwell described with such precision, the surveillance, the rewritten histories, the managed fear, the criminalised thought, were not inventions of the twentieth century. They were refinements of something far older.

Here are the parallels that should genuinely disturb you.

The Church Confessional Was an Instrument of State Intelligence

We tend to think of the confessional as a deeply private, even sacred space. One person, one priest, one God. But in medieval England, the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 made annual confession compulsory for every Christian. Every soul was required, by ecclesiastical law, to report themselves to a representative of the institutional Church.

Think about what that actually means. A network of local priests, embedded in every village and parish across the country, receiving regular, mandatory disclosures from the entire population. Heretical thoughts, disloyal sentiments, social transgressions. The information flowed upward through a hierarchy with its own courts, its own prisons, and its own executioners.

Orwell described a world in which "nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull." In medieval England, even those few centimetres were, in theory, accountable to the Church. The sin of heresy was, at its core, a thought crime.

History Was Actively Rewritten, and the People Rewriting It Controlled the Archives

The monasteries of medieval Britain were not just places of prayer. They were the scriptoria, the only institutions with the resources, literacy, and institutional continuity to produce and preserve written records. Chronicles, charters, land grants, saints' lives: all of it passed through ecclesiastical or royal hands.

This created a situation with no modern equivalent in scale. The people who benefited most from a particular version of history were often the same people responsible for writing it down and keeping it safe.

When a king needed a conquest legitimised, the chronicles obliged. When a defeated rival needed to be diminished, his name could be omitted or his character quietly blackened across a generation of copied manuscripts. There was no competing archive. There was no independent press. There was, in the most literal sense, a Memory Hole.

Orwell's Winston Smith spent his days at the Ministry of Truth altering old newspaper articles to match the Party's current position. The medieval equivalent was less systematic but no less real. It was just slower, and the monks doing it may not always have known they were doing it at all.

Excommunication Was How You Became an Unperson

In 1984, to be "disappeared" was to be erased. Your photograph removed. Your name deleted from records. Your existence denied by everyone around you, out of fear for their own survival.

Medieval excommunication was not quite the same thing, but its social logic was remarkably similar. To be formally excommunicated from the Church was to be severed from the entire community of the living and the dead. You could not receive sacraments. You could not be buried in consecrated ground. Other Christians were, in practice, discouraged from doing business with you, sheltering you, or associating with you publicly.

In a society where the Church was not a separate institution from civic life but was in fact the framework through which civic life was organised, this was annihilation without execution. You did not cease to exist physically. You ceased to exist socially, legally, and spiritually. Everyone around you understood that contact with you carried its own risks.

The fear was not of the excommunicated person. The fear was of becoming one yourself.

Heresy Trials Were Not About Truth. They Were About Demonstration.

The trials of accused heretics in medieval England were rarely genuine investigations into whether someone held forbidden beliefs. By the time a person appeared before an ecclesiastical court, the institutional conclusion had often already been reached. The trial was a performance with a function: to make the power of orthodoxy visible.

The public recantation, the humiliating penance, the procession through the town in penitential garb, these rituals were not designed to rehabilitate the accused. They were designed to communicate a message to every witness. This is what happens. This is what we do to those who think differently. This is the edge of the permitted world.

Orwell understood this completely. His Room 101 was not really about breaking Winston. It was about producing a person who would, on command, betray the person he loved most. The point was not the confession. The point was what the confession meant.

Propaganda Was Preached From Every Pulpit, Every Sunday

In a largely illiterate society, the sermon was the mass media. The parish priest stood before the entire local population, week after week, and delivered messages that blended theology, social instruction, and political messaging in proportions that varied entirely depending on who was paying attention to what was being said from the top.

During periods of rebellion or political instability, the Crown routinely issued instructions to the clergy about what to preach. Loyalty. Obedience. The divine sanction of the existing order. The sinfulness of resistance. When Henry II needed the population to understand the dangers of questioning royal authority after Becket's murder, the Church's pulpit network was the most efficient broadcast system available.

Orwell called it the Two Minutes Hate. Medieval England called it Sunday Mass. The difference is largely one of production values.

The Language of Power Was Deliberately Inaccessible

Latin was the language of law, theology, medicine, and government record-keeping throughout the medieval period. It was also a language that the overwhelming majority of the population could not read or speak.

This was not, by and large, an accident. Latin created a professional class of literate intermediaries: priests, lawyers, clerks, and officials through whom all formal communication had to pass. You could not read your own land charter. You could not consult the legal code that governed your life. You could not access the theological arguments being used to define the boundaries of acceptable belief.

Orwell invented Newspeak as a language designed to make certain thoughts literally unthinkable by eliminating the words needed to express them. Medieval Latin did something adjacent. It did not prevent thought. It prevented independent engagement with the structures of power. You had to go through someone. And that someone was always, in one way or another, part of the system.

What Are We Actually Looking At?

Here is where it gets uncomfortable.

The standard reading of Orwell is that 1984 describes something new. A twentieth century pathology. The bureaucratic, industrialised, ideological state taken to its logical extreme. And that reading is not wrong.

But if the same mechanisms, surveillance through confession, rewritten archives, social death for dissidents, managed public spectacle, controlled language, were operating in medieval England eight hundred years earlier, then perhaps what Orwell described was not a new invention at all. Perhaps he was describing something that power, when it is sufficiently concentrated and sufficiently threatened, reaches for almost instinctively.

The names change. The technologies change. The theological or ideological justifications change. But the architecture of control, the need to know what people are thinking, to manage what they remember, to make certain kinds of thought socially dangerous, that architecture appears again and again across centuries that are supposed to have nothing in common.

If that is true, then the question 1984 should really prompt is not "could this happen?" It already did. The question is why we keep being surprised when it does.

If you found this interesting, the history of how ordinary people navigated these systems of control, sometimes surviving them, sometimes not, is exactly the kind of territory we explore across Histories and Castles. The past is not a safe distance away.

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