Announcing the "Weird Medieval History" Contest

For reasons that escape me, the marketing people at the Halloween costume website Costumes, Inc. contacted me to ask if I’d run a promotional contest for them here at Got Medieval.  I was all set to turn them down until they anted up the cold, hard cash gift certificates and I figured what the hell?  Sell out early and often, I say.  So here’s the deal:

I want to find the weirdest claim about the Middle Ages** on Wikipedia.***  And I mean the weirdest.  That’s right–so weird that normally oriented typefaces fail to capture the weirdness, requiring the use of type variants that are tilted slightly to the right!  The claim doesn’t have to be weirdly mistaken, either. True but weirdly inappropriate claims or the old weird but true factoids are fine, too.  In return for this nugget of oddity, I am putting up a bounty of a $75 gift certificate to Costumes, Inc.  That’s enough to get the inappropriately sexy Guenevere costume and still have room to buy a wig to go with it.  How could you resist? Here are the ground rules.

• Entries must be received by midnight (EDT) October 18th.  That’s two Mondays from today.
• Entries should be no more than 100 words of quoted text.
• Entries must be posted either to the comments thread here on this post or on the comments on the contest announcement over at the Facebook page.
• The fact must exist on Wikipedia as of noon today, October 4th.  No editing funny stuff into Wikipedia just for the purpose of winning this contest.
• Only one entry per person.  If you submit multiple entries, only your latest will be accepted into judging.
• The weirdness of the factoids will be judged by a blue ribbon panel of medieval experts. Their decision will be final.
• Said experts will be allowed to use any standard they desire, no matter how arbitrary said standard may seem to impartial observers.****
• Ties, should they occur, will be broken by my dog in some as of yet unspecified (but awesome) way.
• Unfortunately, due to customs issues, entrants must be U.S. residents of legal age.
• Winners will be announced on Tuesday, October 19th, so you’ll still have time to shop for Halloween.

All clear?

Now, as further enticement, all entrants will be put into a random drawing for an additional $25 gift certificate to Costumes, Inc.  That’s $100 total in fake store-specific money on the line, people.  All you have to do is scour Wikipedia for weird junk and post your findings here or at the Facebook page.

And finally, as if all this wasn’t enough, Got Medieval readers are entitled to a 15% off coupon at Costumes, Inc.  You don’t even have to tell them that I sent you, but they’ll probably guess from context because the code is “gotmedieval15“.  Use it in good health.  For some reason, the guy who contacted me thought you might want to use the coupon to buy something from their Medieval and Renaissance line, but I know you’re just as likely to pony up for the “Saucie Marie Antoinette” or the “Fierce Flapper,” because my readers refuse to be constrained by artificial periodization.

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*And there’s probably no more than a fifty percent chance that I’d make a fake logo.

**Defined as 500 to 1500 A.D. for convenience’s sake.