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The Internet provides social conditions that allow medievalist ideas to continue to evolve in the twenty-first century. It is fertile ground for medievalist humor, and a significant proportion of that humor comes in the form of memes. Memes were first described in 1976 by Richard Dawkins as 'units of cultural transmission.' They are analogous to genes, replicating and mutating in response to the culture that hosts them, and passed on socially, rather than biologically. The Internet provides a ready social network and an accessible set of technological tools for memes to flourish. This essay explores the ways in which Internet memes foreground the social relations that structure medievalist humor.postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (2014) 5, 199-214.On 14 October 1066, King Harold II of England was famously killed at the Battle of Hastings by an arrow to his eye (Figure 1). The veracity of this story, passed down through popular history, has more recently been called into question. Chris Dennis acknowledges its iconic status while at the same time arguing that the historical evidence does not support it (Dennis, 2009, 14), while Siobhan Brownlie argues that its power as a cultural memory lies not in its ability to represent the truth, but in its ability to speak to the ongoing issue of EnglishFrench relations (Brownlie, 2012, 360-377). Images and ideas may indeed mean something different within different contexts and when different uses are made of

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