The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
By Gabrielle Pantera
“I first realized I wanted history to have a present-tense dimension at the age of about ten, in the hall of Grosmont Castle in South Wales,” says The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England author Dr. Ian Mortimer. “I was very disappointed that it didn’t measure up to my imagination – being a quiet ruin rather than a bustling medieval fortress.”
“Subsequently I found it frustrating that I was passionate about the past and yet history teachers seemed determined to feed me history that was designed to be as tedious as possible,” says Mortimer. “The teachers themselves were fine; but they were all slaves to the syllabus – and I’ve never liked being a slave to anything, let alone a slave to someone who was a slave to something as boring as a syllabus. Breaking up forms of writing history has therefore always appealed. Thinking about the past should always have an anarchic edge.”
The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England drops you in the 1300 and you learn all about how people lived, dressed, worked, the difference between the classes and anything else you wanted to know about Medieval times but were afraid to ask.
“The idea began life in 1993 as ‘the Hitchhiker’s Guide to History’ (in honour of Douglas Adams). However, I was advised to concentrate on one period. I chose to write about all the periods that interest me one by one, the middle ages first,” says Mortimer. “While planning the book in 1994, a friend recommended that I speak to a woman called Sophie, who was then working at the HQ of a well-known bookshop chain. I did. Six months later she moved in and two years later we married. In the process I became somewhat distracted. In fact thirteen years passed before I actually sat down to write The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England.”
“I’ve been collecting information on the subject all my life, and visiting sites, museums, etcetera; so in order to keep the writing as fresh as possible, I deliberately didn’t do any research (except referring to the various volumes in my study that I’d collected for the purpose of writing this book),” says Mortimer.
Mortimer has also written an interlinked series of four biographies of medieval individuals, retelling the story of power in England from 1300 to 1415 from the point of view of the biggest ‘mover and shaker’ in each generation.
“The first three are The Greatest Traitor (about Sir Roger Mortimer, 1st earl of March, who governed England from 1327 to 1330), The Perfect King (about Edward III) and The Fears of Henry IV,” says Mortimer. “The fourth of this series, 1415 – a book about Henry V in the year 1415 (the year of Agincourt) – was published in the UK in September 2009. In that book I trace the king’s movements and those of his enemies on a day-by-day basis. A fifth book, Warrior of the Roses, is under contract – for publication in about 2013.”
The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England is a surprisingly engrossing read even if you don’t like history. There are facts that will make you think about all you were taught about history and make you re-think it all.
Rating: 4 stars
The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century by Ian Mortimer. Hardcover, 352 pages, Publisher: Touchstone (December 29, 2009), Language: English. ISBN-13: 978-1439112892 $26.00
