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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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.

Only the best non-fiction can be informative and highly entertaining at the same time, and Ian Mortimer walks that line with great skill in “The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England”! I really love his approach, to look at lived history rather than simply at lists of dates, names of kings or important battles. Those things are certainly important, but without a better understanding of the day to day reality in which humans, who were not that different from us, might have lived, they are rather dry and easy to forget. Mortimer wants his readers to get a much more concrete sense of what life was like in 14th century England by discussing It is superbly researched, entertainingly written and full of information and cool tidbits for any history fan. It will help to dispel some of the common myths about the 14th century life. If you would like a great overview of life in this time, you can not go wrong with this book. It does a great job of setting down the way life was during this time and it will give a reader that is unfamiliar with this time a great insight into this period.You might notice something else as you wander through the wood. Where are the conifers? In medieval England there are just three coniferous species — Scotch pine, yew, and juniper — and juniper is more of a bush than a tree. There are very few evergreens at all — holly is the only common one — so the winter skyline is particularly bleak. Every other pine, spruce, larch, cedar, cypress, and fir you can think of is absent. In case you see pine or fir boards used in a lord's castle and wonder where the trees are, the answer is that they are in Scandinavia: the timber is imported. Nor will you find holm oaks, red oaks, redwoods, Turkey oaks, or horse chestnuts. The trees that cover England are largely those introduced during the Bronze Age and Roman periods mingled with the species which repopulated the British Isles after the last Ice Age: rowan, ash, alder, field maple, hazel, sweet chestnut, whitebeam, aspen, some poplars, silver birch, beech, lime, walnut, willow, elm, and hornbeam. And of course the good old oak. Both forms of oak are common: the small sessile variety that thrives in hilly areas, and the far more valuable pedunculate sort used for building houses and ships.

Women are blamed for all intellectual and moral weaknesses in society and are basically viewed as deformed men.

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Medieval boys are expected to work from the age of seven and can be hanged for theft at the same age. They can marry at the age of fourteen and are liable to serve in an army from the age of fifteen.” 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. There are almost no conifer or evergreen trees in the middle ages so the winter skyline is particularly bleak.

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, 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 40 percent of the modern population of the UK—more than 25 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 could 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.” This superb "rough guide" to 14th century England takes a fresh approach to history by thinking of the past not as something simply to be studied, but as something to be lived Aimee Shalan, Guardian The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Sixteenth Century was published in 2012 by Viking Press [10] Around these huge areas of land, bounded by ditches and earth walls, are commons of grassland for sheep, or woodlands to provide firewood and building materials, or wide low-lying meadows in which to grow hay. Commons and meadows are to be found in all areas of England, many thousands of upland acres being given over to grazing sheep. Here and there you will see small fields or enclosures, surrounded either by stone walls or a ditch, bank, and hedge, where the animals are kept when brought in for winter. But such walls and raised hedges are few in number. You could saunter straight off the highway onto the grass verge and into the fields. Many grazing animals do exactly that and trample all over the harvest crops, much to the annoyance of the villagers and the embarrassment of the hayward whose duty it is to protect the crops.

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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 The Royal Palace in the Tower of London. You are, of course, familiar with the White Tower, the great building left by William the Conqueror, but most of the visible castle — including the moat — actually dates from the thirteenth century. Here is situated an extensive royal palace, including a great hall, royal solar (private living room), and a multitude of lordly chambers. In addition, a royal mint is based here, as are the royal library and the royal menagerie. Edward Ill's collection of lions, leopards, and other big cats is kept here from the late 1330s and is continually being supplemented with new animals.