Book excerpt: Walking through Dublin Castle or along the surviving medieval city walls, you can see only glimpses of what it would have been like to live in the city centuries ago. Tales of Medieval Dublin provides a chance for modern audiences to meet the Irish, Norse, and English men and women who lived in this colorful medieval city, and to hear their fascinating stories. While providing the most up-to-date research, the 14 tales in this book are written to appeal to anyone interested in the city's past. They span almost 1,000 years of Dublin 's history and trace the lives of warriors, churchmen, queens, bards, and barons, as well as those individuals who are so often ignored in the historical record, like housewives, tax collectors, masons, lawyers, notaries, peasants, and slaves. This volume serves both as a history of the medieval city, and as a window into the day-to-day lives of the men and women who lived there.