The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides)

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Successfully communicating the extraordinary energy of this vibrant, cathedral-building time Alistair Mabbott, Sunday Herald The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Sixteenth Century was published in 2012 by Viking Press [10] The book shows well how citizens of the medieval society lived - it creates a great effect of presence. Cities, villages, buildings, bridges, churches, roads, laws, customs, courts, trade, feudal lords, servants, artisans, merchants... - many aspects of life are presented in the book. Frankly, after ten minutes of thinking, I did not find a topic that was not represented in the book. Dr Ian Mortimer is a historian and novelist, best known for his Time Traveller's Guides series. He has BA, MA, PhD and DLitt degrees from the University of Exeter and UCL. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and was awarded the Alexander Prize by the Royal Historical Society in 2004. Home is the small Dartmoor town of Moretonhampstead, which he occasioanlly introduces in his books. His most recet book, 'Medieval Horizons' looks at how life changed between the eleventh and sixteenth centuries. It is available in the UK and will appear in Germany and Greece before long. Ebook and audiobook ediitons will also appear in the USA next year.

He also writes in other genres: his fourth novel 'The Outcasts of Time' won the 2018 Winston Graham Prize for historical fiction. His earlier trilogy of novels set in the 1560s were published under his middle names, James Forrester. In 2017 he wrote 'Why Running Matters' - a memoir of running in the year he turned fifty. It is the cathedral which you will see first. As you journey along the road you come to a break in the trees and there it is, massive and magnificent, cresting the hill top in the morning sun. Despite the wooden scaffolding at its west end, the long eighty-foot-high, pointed lead roof, with its flying buttresses and colossal towers, is simply the wonder of the region. It is hundreds of times bigger than every other building around it, and dwarfs the stone walls which surround the city. The mass of houses appear tiny, all at chaotic angles, and of different shades and hues, as if they were so many stones at the bottom of a stream flowing around the great boulder of the cathedral. The thirty churches - though their low stumpy towers stand out from the mass of roofs - seem humble by comparison. You have come face to face with the contrasts of a medieval city. It is so proud, so grand, and in places so beautiful; and yet it displays all the disgusting features of a bloated glutton. The city as a body is a caricature of the human body: smelly, dirty, commanding, rich and indulgent. As you hurry across the wooden bridge over Shitbrook, and hasten towards the gates, the contrasts become even more vivid. A group of boys with dirty faces and tousled hair run towards you, and crowd around, shouting, 'Sir, do you want a room? A bed for the night? Where are you from?', struggling between them to take the reins of your horse, and maybe pretending that they know your brother, or are from the same region as you. Their clothes are filthy, and their feet even filthier, being bound into leather shoes which have suffered the stones and mud of the streets for more years than their owners. Welcome to a place of pride, wealth, authority, crime, justice, high art, stench and beggary. Imagine a disease were to wipe out forty per cent of the modern population of the UK – more than twenty-five million people. Now imagine a historian in the future discussing the benefits of your death and the deaths of your partner, your children and your friends … You would want to cry out, or hang your head in despair, that historians would blithely comment on the benefits of such suffering. There is no shadow of a doubt that every one of these people you see in 1348 – whether they will die or survive – deserves your compassion. When you see women dragging their parents’ and children’s corpses into ditches, weeping and screaming – when you listen to a man who has buried all five of his sons with his own hands, and, in his distress, he tells you that there was no divine service when he did so, and that the death bell did not sound – you know that these people have entered a chasm of grief beyond description.” (p.203) In other words, Mortimer succeeds in maintaining a kind of tension between the familiar and the, for us, novel and unusual, and the upshot of it is that rather than travelling through time as a pursed-lipped colonizer might travel a land whose denizens he considers lagging behind the standards of civilization, we will more often than not look at those people from many centuries ago as our fellowmen, in suffering as well as in joy (although they probably had more of the former), in love as well as in hate. As Mortimer himself puts it:The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England is not your typical look at a historical period. This radical new approach shows us that the past is not just something to be studied; it is also something to be lived. All facets of everyday life in this fascinating period are revealed, from the horrors of the plague and war to the ridiculous excesses of roasted larks and medieval haute couture. This is the most fun I’ve ever had with any history book, which is why it’s my third time rereading it. It’s just so interesting and well-presented, and really does what it sets out to do — bring the world of seven centuries past into focus and making it and it’s inhabitants feel real. As lively as it is informative. His (Mortimer's) work of speculative social history is eminently entertaining but this doesn't detract from the seriousness and the thorough research involved Financial Times

This is history at its most exciting, physical, visceral - the past not as something to be studied but as lived experience. This is Ian Mortimer at the height of his time-travelling prowess. From descriptions of what cities and towns were like, to the various societal divisions, common practices, food, etc

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A butcher selling bad meat can expect to be dragged through the streets of the town on a hurdle and then placed in the pillory with the rotten meat being burnt under him. Likewise a baker selling bad bread. A vintner caught selling foul wine is dragged to the pillory on a hurdle, forced to drink a draught of the offending liquor, and then set in the pillory, where the remainder of the liquid is poured over his head. The sweetness of the revenge makes up for the sourness of the wine.” Mortimer] sets out to re-enchant the 14th Century, taking us by the hand through a landscape furnished with jousting knights, revolting peasants and beautiful ladies in wimples. It is Monty Python and the Holy Grail with footnotes, and, my goodness it is fun... The result of this careful blend of scholarship and fancy is a jaunty journey through the 14th Century, one that wriggles with the stuff of everyday life Guardian There weren't many books. Musical instruments were expensive. But beer was cheap and that led quite often to sex, people's most enjoyable occupation. For much of this time period it was mandatory to go to Church, it was a crime not to. So Saturday nights were on the booze and fornication and Sunday was repentance in case of hellfire, which most people it seemed firmly believed in .

An excellent history book. It really shines light on the lifestyles and times of the 14th Century. Borken down into 11 sections, they are as follows: Half of the population is under the age of 21, and most people will die before age 30. Most of the population is immature and inexperienced. People marry at age 14. Many commanders in the Army are still in their teens. Imagine a nation being run by a bunch of hormonal teenage boys!Mortimer, Ian (1 March 2012). The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England. Random House. ISBN 9781409029564. Talking of present-centred approaches to a book like this, there are people who criticize Mortimer for not having paid sufficient attention to women both as subjects of his look into the past and as time travellers who accompany him on his journey. I cannot say that I see much sense in such criticism: The author remarks that in those days it was unusual and, of course, extremely dangerous for women to travel the country on their own, and from this to draw the conclusion that the book is directed at men primarily because it feels as though the author had a male time traveller in his mind when he invites his reader, for example, to follow him into the house of a town merchant and look about him, is unfair and bespeaks a mind that is bent on taking offence because the sex of the time traveller does not play any role at all the way Mortimer conducts us on his tours of virtual history.