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

Product Information

Finally, and quite the best of all, in 1337 Edward III passed a law forbidding anyone to play football - on pain of death. Any sense of yourself as an individual, with particular desires or needs, always buckles in the face of the greater demands of the community.

The Guardian Plague ahoy | History books | The Guardian

What makes these slightly awkward stylistic choices bearable is that Mortimer knows what he is doing. It is a verbal tic, the present tense especially, which has become the default voice for documentaries and which is now creeping into history writing. Some of the best although also the most unnerving passages in the book describe what sounds like an assault course of dirt, danger and low-grade disapproval from the chorus of busybodies who squat on the sidelines watching your every move. Statistics are all very well, but unless they come clothed in flesh it is hard to know them in your bones.Quite apart from using The Canterbury Tales as a source book for life on the road in the 14th century, he quarries the great unfinished masterpiece for evidence of the high medieval mindset.

The phrase "Women and children first" had a different meaning: the quickest way to lighten a sinking ship was to throw any wimple-wearers overboard. For if one thing is clear in Mortimer's deft summary of life in the high medieval period, it is that you are never alone.Mortimer's argument, spelled out in a thoughtful epilogue, is that these pleasures become possible not by laying critical sense to one side, but by embracing an altogether different approach. On many occasions this wriggling is quite literal: entrails seem to be everywhere, from the pigs' insides slopped in a bucket to the traitors who are forever having their bowels hooked out and burned in front of them.