The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

by Ian Mortimer

As postmodernist philosophers have repeatedly pointed out – to the great frustration of many historians – the past has gone, never to return. Knowledge of it as it actually was is impossible.1 That is all very well. But, as this book has shown, there is no reason why we cannot consider medieval England as a living community. It is just another place in time, like France in the twenty-first century, or Germany in the twentieth, and so on. Knowledge of it as it actually was might be difficult – impossible even – but so is knowledge of England as it actually was yesterday. If we accept that the evidence available to us in writing about any place in any time is always going to be partial and incomplete – including a modern country which could be physically visited (for you cannot see all of it at once, or meet everyone) – then certainly one can write a guidebook to medieval England which in theory is as comprehensive and accurate as a guidebook to a modern country.