The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

IAN MORTIMER

Touchstone

A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
Copyright © 2008 by Ian Mortimer

Originally published in Great Britain in 2008 by the Bodley Head,

a division of Random House UK
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department,

1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.
First Touchstone hardcover edition January 2010
TOUCHSTONE and colophon are
registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
For information about special discounts for bulk purchases,

please contact Simon & Schuster Special Sales at 1-866-506-1949
or,
[email protected]
.
The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live event.

For more information or to book an event
contact the Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049
or visit our website at
www.simonspeakers.com
.
Manufactured in the United States of America
1   3   5   7   9   10   8   6   4   2
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Bodley Head edition as follows:
Mortimer, Ian.

The time traveller’s guide to medieval England : a handbook for visitors
to the fourteenth century / Ian Mortimer.
p.      cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. England—Social conditions—1066-1485. 2. England—Social life and

customs—1066-1485. 3. Great Britain—History—1066-1687. I. Title.

HN385 .M67 2008

942.03—dc22    2008278423

ISBN 978-1-4391-1289-2
ISBN 978-1-4391-4914-0 (ebook)

For my wife, Sophie,

without whom this book would not have been written

and whom I would not have met

had it not been for this book.

I would like to thank my editors Will Sulkin and Jörg Hensgen, and all their colleagues at Random House who have helped to bring this idea to fruition, and my agent, Jim Gill, for sound advice. I am very grateful also to Kathryn Warner for giving me feedback on the first draft, and to those who accommodated me on various research trips, namely Zak Reddan and Mary Fawcett, Jay Hammond, Judy Mortimer, and Robert and Julie Mortimer. I would also like to record my gratitude for the helpful suggestions which Peter McAdie and Anne Wegner made during the course of editing this book.

By far my greatest debt is to my wife, Sophie. We first met in order to discuss this book in January 1995. I am deeply grateful to her not only for encouraging me to write it but also for subsequently marrying me. We now have three children: Alexander, Elizabeth, and Oliver. I am grateful to them too for teaching me things about life in all ages which one simply cannot learn from a book.

Moretonhampstead, Devon
March 9, 2008

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Welcome to Medieval England

1
The Landscape

2
The People

3
The Medieval Character

4
Basic Essentials

5
What to Wear

6
Traveling

7
Where to Stay

8
What to Eat and Drink

9
Health and Hygiene

10
The Law

11
What to Do

Envoi

Notes

Full Titles of Works Mentioned in the Notes

Index

The past is a foreign country—
they do things differently there.

L. P. Hartley,
The Go-Between

What does the word “medieval” conjure up in your mind? Knights and castles? Monks and abbeys? Huge tracts of forest in which outlaws live in defiance of the law? Such images may be popular but they say little about what life was like for the majority. Imagine you could travel in time; what would you find if you went back to the fourteenth century? Imagine yourself in a dusty London street on a summer morning. A servant opens an upstairs shutter and starts beating a blanket. A dog guarding a traveler’s packhorses starts barking. Nearby traders call out from their market stalls while two women stand chatting, one shielding her eyes from the sun, the other with a basket in her arms. The wooden beams of houses project out over the street. Painted signs above the doors show what is on sale in the shops beneath. Suddenly a thief grabs a merchant’s purse near the traders’ stalls, and the merchant runs after him, shouting. Everyone turns to watch. And you, in the middle of all this, where are you going to stay tonight? What are you wearing? What are you going to eat?

As soon as you start to think of the past
happening
(as opposed to it having happened), a new way of conceiving history becomes possible. The very idea of traveling to the Middle Ages allows us to consider the past in greater breadth—to discover more about the problems which the English have had to face, the delights they found in life, and what they themselves were like. As with a historical biography, a travel book about a past age allows us to see its inhabitants in a sympathetic way: not as a series of graphs showing fluctuations in grain yields or household income but as an investigation into the sensations of being alive in a different time. You can start to gain an inkling as to why people did this or that, and even why they believed things which we find simply incredible. You can gain this insight because you know that
these people are human, like you, and that some of these reactions are simply natural. The idea of traveling to the Middle Ages allows you to understand these people not only in terms of evidence but also in terms of their humanity, their hopes and fears, the drama of their lives. Although writers have traditionally been forced to resort to historical fiction to do this, there is no reason why a nonfiction writer should not present his material in just as direct and as sympathetic a manner. It does not make the facts themselves less true to put them in the present tense rather than the past.

In some senses this idea is not new. For many decades architectural historians have been re-creating images of castles and monasteries as they appeared in their heyday. Museum curators similarly have reconstructed old houses and their interiors, filling them with the furniture of a past age. Groups of individuals have formed reenactment societies, attempting to discover what it was like to live in a different time through the bold, practical experiment of donning period clothing and cooking with a cauldron on an open fire, or trying to wield a replica sword while wearing heavy armor. Collectively they remind us that history is much more than an educational process. Understanding the past is a matter of experience as well as knowledge, a striving to make spiritual, emotional, poetic, dramatic, and inspirational connections with our forebears. It is about our personal reactions to the challenges of living in previous centuries and earlier cultures, and our understanding of what makes one century different from another.

The nearest historians have come to considering the past at first hand is the genre of “what if?” or “virtual history.” This is where historians consider what would have happened if things had turned out differently. For example, what if Hitler had invaded Britain in 1940? What if the Spanish Armada had been successful? While such speculations are open to the obvious criticism that these things did not happen (with the implication that there is no point considering them), they have the great virtue of taking the reader directly to a moment in time and presenting events as if they were still unfolding. This can bring a real immediacy to a narrative. Put yourself in the shoes of the duke of Wellington at Waterloo, or Nelson at Trafalgar: they were only too well aware of the consequences of defeat. So too were their political masters back in England.
They
certainly considered the past that never was; so to reconstruct what might otherwise have
happened brings us closer to those leaders in the moments of their decision-making. Just think: if Henry IV had not returned to England in 1399 to remove Richard II from power, we would have had several more years—perhaps many more—of Richard’s tyrannical rule, probably resulting in the destruction of the Lancastrian dynasty and all those who supported it. In the spring of 1399 that likelihood was the key political issue and one of the reasons why Henry
did
return. It was also the principal reason why so many men supported him. In this way it is clear that seeing events as happening is crucial to a proper understanding of the past, even if the results are just as speculative now as they were at the time.

Virtual history as described above is only useful for understanding political events; it has relatively little value for social history. We cannot profitably speculate on what might have happened if, say, the Black Death had not come to Europe; it was not a matter of decision-making. But as with a reconstruction of a typical medieval house, virtual time travel allows us a clearer, more integrated picture of what it was like to live in a different age. In particular, it raises many questions which previously may not have even occurred to us and which do not necessarily have easy answers. How do people greet each other in the Middle Ages? What is their sense of humor like? How far away from home do individuals travel? Writing history from the point of view of our own curiosity forces us to consider a number of questions that traditional history books tend to ignore.

Medieval England is potentially a vast destination for the historical traveler. The four centuries between the Norman invasion and the advent of printing see huge changes in society. The “Middle Ages” are exactly that—a series of ages—and a Norman knight would find himself as out of place preparing for a late-fourteenth-century battle as an eighteenth-century prime minister would if he found himself electioneering today. For this reason, this guidebook concentrates on just one century, the fourteenth. This period comes closest to the popular conception of what is “medieval,” with its chivalry, jousts, etiquette, art, and architecture. It might even be considered the epitome of the Middle Ages, containing civil wars, battles against the neighboring kingdoms of Scotland and France, sieges, outlaws, monasticism, cathedral building, the preaching of friars, the flagellants, famine, the last of the Crusades, the Peasants’ Revolt, and (above all else) the Black Death.