Ian Mortimer

I liked a lot about the Time Traveler's Guide to Restoration Britain, mainly the details about daily life and travel that give context to one of my favorite eras of literature back in my university days. The topics are fairly wide-ranging and do give a good picture of how society was changing in the early modern era.

There is a lot to not like, too. There are no maps or diagrams, which are sorely needed when describing the spread of the Great Fire of London in 1666, or comparing different show more architectural styles that were coming into vogue. While there are color plates with portraits of famous people or photos of significant buildings or art, much is assumed the reader will already be familiar with or has readily accessible. (Frankly, I had a difficult time tracking down easy-reference maps of London in 1666.)

It would have also been very useful to have a list of people featured with brief descriptions. There is a bibliography, but not a good descriptive list of who people are, when they lived, or what they did. Since Mortimer relies on many different sources and jumps between them according to topic, he also jumps between years, and it can be difficult to keep track of everyone.

While this uses a "Time Traveler Guide" concept, it assumes the time traveler is a wealthy white male. Topics about women or minorities - or the vast majority of ordinary men - only come up as they are relevant to the assumed time traveler. This is less than ideal, and was frustrating when I wanted to know about certain very ordinary facts of life. Mortimer goes into great detail about toilet things - he mentions shitting in fireplaces, muckrakers, even men's drawers and other underclothes - but he spares not a single word about menstruation. It seems this is pretty vital information for any time traveler who menstruates, no?

Further, there were two places where Mortimer's white-male interests were painfully clear and made me distrust most of his social commentary: one, he describes how the social structure of the time was misogynistic as an effect of its patriarchy and the Great Chain of Being, then denies that this is actually misogyny since people don't really hate women and besides, women themselves think they are lesser and impure (has Mortimer ever really engaged with the concept of structural misogyny?); two, in the brief section on ethnic minorities, he talks about slavery and explains that non-white people are typically foreign visitors and treated badly, or enslaved people from The Plantations (ie: colonies), and they have no freedom, yet he also describes several black servants who live freely in their own homes when not at work, just like white servants, and seemingly not actually enslaved. Both times, his descriptions and his commentary are at odds, and he dismisses the issues as not relevant.

Most of the book seems to come from three places: Samuel Pepys's and John Evelyn's diaries for daily life in London, and Celia Fienne's journal for descriptions of other places. Where sources diverge, they are mainly also wealthy men and usually of London. It is therefore somewhat understandable that so much of the focus of the book is on the upper classes in London and especially men, but nonetheless this seems to negate the whole point of a Time Traveler's Guide.

Besides, I know for a fact that Pepys referred to his wife's menstruation (he calls it her Mois and her "old trouble") and even John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, refers to it in his poetry, which Mortimer refers to multiple times for its usefulness in shedding light on less socially acceptable opinions. This is only one thing I found to be a noticeable gap in the book, but what else is missing? Why is there so little focus on how ordinary people engaged with the many diversions that the wealthy did? Why is it titled "Restoration Britain" when it's more truly "Restoration London, with occasional sidetrips to look at Scotland through fieldglasses or maybe picnic in Oxford".

I wish the book had been better. It could have been. But the dismissal of women and lack of concern for minorities, except when either affect Mortimer's imagined self, means I can't recommend this book or series to anyone, and I have to hope that something better exists. show less

This is a standard Ian Mortimer book: Meticulously researched, well-written, fixated on minor details, and (probably partly as a result) full of enough crazy hypotheses to staff a whole compound full of survivalists.

One example will have to serve. Mortimer's Appendix II is about the question of who was Richard II's lawful heir. In an extremely irritating act, on p. 366, Mortimer says to go read some magazine article he wrote for his real proof. You know, do you not, Mr. Mortimer, that we show more paid for this book to get the answers, not to be fobbed off on some magazine we may not be able to find?

But Mortimer offers some of the basis for his argument, in a claim that a certain source is actually a modified copy of an earlier source, and that the modified copy contains an incorrect date. So he's hypothesized an earlier source, and then corrected its reading -- and then bases the rest of his argument on the exact force of the Latin word autem.

It's an interesting reconstruction, but it's simply too long a chain of logic to be compelling. At least to me.

The result of this sort of opinion-itis is that Mortimer seems almost to turn the 1390s into a persistent duel between King Richard II and his cousin Henry of Derby (the future Henry IV). I frankly don't buy it.

It all depends on what sort of person Richard II was. In this, I agree with Mortimer: Richard II was an egotistical, narcissistic, empathy-free, irrational, bigoted ignoramus (if it sounds like a description of a certain twenty-first century American president -- yes, I think Richard II does resemble President Narceissistic Personality Disorder).

But the thing about a king with a personality disorder is that things don't have to be personal. Richard II's behavior toward Henry is sufficiently explained by Richard's "It's All About Me" attitude. Anything that interfered with his status -- such as Henry's wealth, or the fact that Henry was a fine soldier and Richard wasn't good at much of anything -- was a threat, and was treated as such.

This is not to deny Henry's multiple skills. He does seem to have been unusually learned for a member of the fourteenth century nobility, and he was indeed a fine soldier, and he had seen more of the world than almost anyone. Perhaps it was all the risks he had survived up to 1399 that made him take the supreme risk of overthrowing Richard II.

For that, we should all be grateful. The overthrow of Richard II was hardly a Glorious Revolution, but it did move England a little more toward a representative government.

Once Henry became king, he made mistakes. Mortimer admits some of them, but he really doesn't pay enough attention to others. When he executed Archbishop Scrope of York and instantly became sick, it left the impression of heaven's judgment upon him. Mortimer, I think, badly under-appreciates this. Do I think Henry's sickness was actually divine punishment? No. Do I think most Englishmen viewed it so? You bet they did. It was an incredibly damaging mistake, and yet Mortimer seems to view it as necessary and reasonable.

Henry IV's real triumph was not so much his reign as the fact that he survived to die in his bed, and to have his son succeed peacefully. In a period when overthrowing monarchs was almost a British sport (with Edward II, Richard II, Henry VI, Edward IV, Edward V, and Richard III all being overthrown at least one, and Henry being overthrown twice), that is in itself a substantial accomplishment. I can't help but think that a better biography would have shown that more clearly. show less

This is a lengthy essay, developed from a speech, about the change of mankind during the Middle Ages. We are wrong, Mortimer argues, if we think of the Medieval period as static, and part of the problem is that we are too much fixated on the advances of modern technology. The Middle Ages knew important technological change as well (and Seb Falk did proofread this book) but above all they brought a change in belief systems and social structures that laid the foundations of the modern show more age.

Mortimer is an eloquent writer. I think the reader should keep in the back of his mind that this is an essay in which Mortimer develops a position and argues it, not a work of research in which every statement is grounded in evidence. For example, I am unconvinced by the author’s claim that an 11th century peasant did not have much individuality. For sure, they lived very communal working lives. They did not leave autobiographies, as almost none of them could write. Lords of the manor controlled much of their lives, sure. But look at the modern office, in which employers have banned the trinkets and pictures of loved ones that adorned desks, and attempted to create sterile deserts of inhuman interchangeability. For sure this is an attempt to deny the expression of individuality, but does that mean that individuality does not exist? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Mortimer stretches the Middle Ages to 1600. I understand that it makes sense in a British context, because the coming to power of James I/IV in 1603 was a watershed moment. But I regret it, in part because 1453 marks the fall of the last remains of the Roman Empire, and in part because those years 1450-1600 were marked by so much instability, violence and intolerance. The romantic in me wants to see the Middle Ages as a relatively happy time before the bloody chaos of the early modern period. (I find that when people use “medieval” in a pejorative sense, these years are often what they are thinking of.) But above all, I think that lengthening the Middle Ages to 1600 weakens rather than strengthens the case that they were a period of change.

This book is a very useful correction on the facile assumptions about our ancestors that still prevail. I suspect that some of arguments that Mortimer uses might well fall apart if someone has the opportunity to analyse the details. But there is enough substance to this book that a few flaws will not decide the case. show less

This is a unique piece of non-fiction and claims to be 'A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century' and that's exactly what it is. With chapters on: the people, what to wear, what to eat and drink, health and hygiene, where to stay, what to do and more it's a comprehensive guide to the times. The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England was illuminating, fascinating, shocking and at times even funny.

I'd like to share with you the medicinal remedy for quinsy, which is an abscess in show more the throat developed after untreated tonsillitis:

Take a fat cat, flay it well, and draw out the guts. Take the grease of a hedgehog, the fat of a bear, resins, fenugreek, sage, honeysuckle gum and virgin wax, and crumble this and stuff the cat with it. Then roast the cat and gather the dripping, and anoint the sufferer with it.

Such a shocking remedy, it's hard to believe how they thought this could possible heal the patient. It was interesting to learn that the milling process to create flour often left small pieces of the mill stone behind which would be baked into the loaves of bread. These small pieces of gravel and stone dust naturally took their toll on the teeth of the people consuming the bread.

I didn't realise that the clothing people were permitted to wear was strictly regulated according to their annual income and land holding. For example:

Yeomen and their families weren't able to wear jewels, gold, silver, embroidery, enamelware or silk; no fur except lamb, rabbit, cat or fox; and women were not permitted to wear a silk veil.

It was also quite interesting to read about how the simple button would come to transform the clothes of this era enabling a movement away from the tunic that had to be placed over one's head to what we now know as a jacket or coat.

An extremely entertaining and informative read, I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in learning about what life was like 600 years ago. show less