Website alert: For historical fiction writers, a new website called After the Plague provides a wealth of information on life, health, and death in Cambridge, England, in the period ca. A.D. 1000–1500. It takes findings derived from scientific investigations of a thousand skeletons of people who lived in and around Cambridge and uses them, not only to generalize, but to reconstruct individual lives. Sixteen essay-length profiles are included.
This image by Mark Gridley, for example, comes from its page on a woman the project has named "Margery." They can tell that she was a blue-eyed blonde whose diet was lacking in protein. From the development of her arms and damage to her back, they deduce that she was a farm laborer. You could probably invent a story by linking three or four of the people they describe. For sure, you can learn a lot about modern scientific methods and medieval life.