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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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The plot is clear and voluminous. In non-fiction literature, the plot is usually built around the coverage of a topic, and in this book, the author describes in a logical and consistent way about all aspects of life in medieval England.

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. We might eat differently, be taller, and live longer, and we might look at jousting as being unspeakably dangerous and not at all a sport, but we know what grief is, and what love, fear, pain, ambition, enmity, and hunger are. We should always remember that what we have in common with the past is just as important – real and essential to our lives as those things which make us different. Mortimer, Ian (6 April 2017). The Time Traveller's Guide to Restoration Britain: Life in the Age of Samuel Pepys, Isaac Newton and The Great Fire of London. Random House. ISBN 9781448191970. In the modern world, an English field is a small square patch of ground between two and ten acres. You are used to seeing them all spread out across the hills like a patchwork quilt. They are very different in the fourteenth century. Throughout most of the country — in fact in all areas apart from Devon and Cornwall, parts of Kent and Essex, and the northwest — you will encounter massive, irregularly shaped fields of between seven hundred and twelve hundred acres, with no hedges, fences, or walls. Within each huge field there are individual strips of land, each one of about an acre, marked out and maintained separately by tenants, so that they resemble an enormous set of allotments. These strips are all grouped in "furlongs" — not to be confused with the unit of distance used in more recent times — and the furlongs are surrounded by "baulks," or paths. School history lessons will probably have led you to believe that one in every two or three fields is left fallow every second or third year, but, as you can see for yourself, it is not the huge fields that are left fallow but the individual furlongs within them. Two out of every three furlongs are planted with grain of some sort — mostly wheat, oats, and barley — but every third one is left fallow, grazed in the meantime by cattle, sheep, goats, or pigs. We think of Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558-1603) as a golden age. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time?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. Westminster Palace. The ancient great hall, built in the eleventh century, is the scene of many famous feasts. In the last decade of the fourteenth century, Richard II replaces the old twin-aisled layout with an incredible single-span wooden roof, one of the most stunning carpentry achievements of any age, designed in part by the great architect Henry Yevele. Directly across the courtyard you will see Edward III's bell tower, completed in 1367, also designed by Yevele. The bell hanging within it, called "The Edward," weighs just over four tons and is the forerunner of Big Ben. Also within the precincts are the main chambers of the government, namely the Painted Chamber, the Marcolf Chamber, and the White Chamber (the rooms where the Houses of Parliament meet); the Exchequer, the Royal Courts of Justice, and the royal chapel (St. Stephen's). Here too you will find the private royal residences, the Prince's Palace (the chambers of the prince of Wales), Queen Eleanor's palace, and, most importantly, the Privy Palace, where the king spends time with his family and favorites. Edward II keeps a chamber here for his friend Piers Gaveston; Queen Isabella has one for Roger Mortimer. The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Sixteenth Century was published in 2012 by Viking Press [10]

In this book Ian Mortimer reveals a country in which life expectancy is in the early thirties, people still starve to death and Catholics are persecuted for their faith. Yet it produces some of the finest writing in the English language, some of the most magnificent architecture, and sees Elizabeth's subjects settle in America and circumnavigate the globe. Welcome to a country that is, in all its contradictions, the very crucible of the modern world.

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But what would it really be like to live in Restoration Britain? Where would you stay and what would you eat? What would you wear and where would you do your shopping? The third volume in the series of Ian Mortimer's bestselling Time Traveller's Guides answers the crucial questions that a prospective traveller to seventeenth-century Britain would ask.

From descriptions of what cities and towns were like, to the various societal divisions, common practices, food, etc Mortimer, Ian (2008). The time traveller's guide to medieval England: a handbook for visitors to the fourteenth century. Bodley Head. OCLC 495415230 . Retrieved 15 January 2021.The small towns of medieval England are unlike the cities and large towns. They do not have eighteen-foot-high stone walls around the perimeter. Nor do they have substantial gatehouses. They tend to be gathered around a marketplace, with the parish church on one side (usually the east), with the houses themselves and their garden walls marking the boundaries. The center is generally the market cross. The other principal structures, apart from the church, are the manor house, the rectory or vicarage, and the inns. You will find no guildhall here, nor a monastery or friary, although it is possible there is a hospital, for the accommodation of poor travelers. If not, there may well be a church house, fulfilling much the same purpose. 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. 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. W.H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country, you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time. To understand your own century, you need to have come to terms with at least two others." I like it. If nothing else, one wonderful thing about looking at another time period in this sort of format is as in the introduction, the oft-repeated, but necessarily so, axiom that people never change. There are some shifts in perception and tolerance – bear- and bull-baiting are no longer remotely acceptable in much of the world, and the education of children no longer relies heavily on the rod, and it's no longer considered a hilarious lark to set a trap to string someone up by the ankle … but it's taken centuries to shift such things out of the norm into the abnormal, and the behaviors or the desires toward them do still linger. One point carried through this book is that, fundamentally, a medieval man or woman is not so very different from someone you'd meet on the street right now. (Particularly if "right now" you're walking down a path at a Renaissance Faire, but that's a whole 'nother post.)

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