Books: The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England

A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century **** 4 Stars

By Gabrielle Pantera

The Time Travelers Guide, inspired by Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Gosh!TV) 12/27/2009 – “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 The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England author Dr. Ian Mortimer. “The teachers themselves were fine, but they were all slaves to the syllabus. Thinking about the past should always have an anarchic edge.”

The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England drops you in the year 1300. Experience how people lived, dressed, worked, the difference between the classes and anything else you want to know about Medieval times but were afraid to ask. The Time Travelers Guide to Medieval England is a surprisingly engrossing read, even if you don’t particularly care about history. For anyone who enjoys history, they’ll be engrossed by the facts that dispel the history taught about that time frame, for instance, the aristocracy had indoor plumbing. An easy read, you can pick it up and read any chapter.

“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 Mortimer. “I was very disappointed that it didn’t measure up to my imagination, being a quiet ruin rather than a bustling medieval fortress.”

Mortimer got the idea for a fun history book in 1993, inspired by Douglas Adams’ A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. However, that was postponed when in a friend recommended he speak to a woman called Sophie, working at the corporate office of a major bookshop chain. “Six months later she moved in,” says Mortimer. “Two years later we married. In the process I became somewhat distracted.” Thirteen years passed before he 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,” says Mortimer.. “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.

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.

The fourth of this series, 1415, is a book about Henry V in the year 1415, the year of Agincourt. That 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 2013.

Next for Mortimer is a volume of scholarly essays about the fourteenth century and how evidence must be deconstructed to determine how reliable it is. “I will reveal what I think happened to Edward II after his fake death in 1327,” says Mortimer.

Then follows six months on a mystery project to appear under a pseudonym. After that there will be a Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England, for delivery to his UK editor in 2011 with publication either that year or the following spring. “After that I’ll write a biography of Richard, duke of York, entitled Warrior of the Roses,” says Mortimer.

Dr. Ian Mortimer was born in Petts Wood in the London Borough of Bromley. “It only had one pub,” says Mortimer. “I had to leave.” Currently he resides in Dartmoor, Devon, where his family lived for centuries before they went to Petts Wood. He lives in Moretonhampstead, a small town on the edge of a moor.

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.

http://www.ianmortimer.com

December 27th, 2009 · 2 Comments