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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Mortimer also tries to bring us living history by using the second person and the present tense throughout. 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. So, you are travelling into the city, you are sitting down at table, you are eyeing up a cross-looking band of outlaws and deciding whether it is safe to run. What makes these slightly awkward stylistic choices bearable is that Mortimer knows what he is doing. postmodern practice of confining historical discussions to the sources and letting "once upon a time" take care of itself.

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This relentless presentism can seem irritating, until you remember that the perfect tense, in which history has conventionally been told, is equally arbitrary. Apart from the ever-useful Paston Letters, written by an East Anglian yeoman family as they scrambled to prominence in the wake of the Black Death, Mortimer is obliged to scavenge where he can. 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. 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.He has previously written three very well received biographies of medieval kings which are both readable and erudite (much rarer in popular writing about the middle ages than you might think). Official documents provide poor pickings when it comes to building the kind of narratives which grip and won't let go.

So instead Mortimer goes hunting for scraps of lived experience with which to re-animate his chosen patch of the past.In The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England he 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. You can read about the Black Death until you're blue (or, rather, yellow with funny red blotches) in the face. 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 instance, until the beginning of the 13th century there was no difference between right and left shoes, which must have been useful if you were getting dressed in the dark (and, chances are, you were). His background as a professional archivist throws a cloak of probity over a project which might otherwise have veered towards Ladybird territory. 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. If he sometimes cites a secondary text which seems to be growing whiskers - for instance WG Hoskins's 1953 classic on the English landscape - then you feel reassured that no other source will quite do. 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.In Mortimer's skilful handling, the Wife's inner life, revealed in her linguistic riffs, becomes as telling as anything five centuries later by Freud. 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. You can know it wiped out a third of Europe's population, but until you've seen a man sobbing as he tells you he has buried five sons, or watched as wild pigs chomp on the remains of your loved ones, then history remains a glorified spreadsheet of society's profit and loss.