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

by Ian Mortimer

Understanding the past is a matter of experience as well as knowledge, a striving to make spiritual, emotional, poetic, dramatic and inspirational connections with our forebears. It is about our personal reactions to the challenges of living in previous centuries and earlier cultures, and our understanding of what makes one century different from another.

Many types of source material have been used in writing this book. Needless to say, contemporary primary sources are of vital importance. These include unpublished and published chronicles, letters, household accounts, poems and advisory texts. Illuminated manuscripts show daily life in ways which the texts do not always describe: for example, whether women rode side-saddle. A wealth of architectural evidence is available in the extant buildings of fourteenth-century England – the houses as well as the castles, churches and monasteries – and the ever-expanding literature about them provides even more information. In some cases we have documents which complement the architectural record: building accounts and surveys, for example. We have an increasing array of archaeological finds, from excavated tools, shoes and clothes to the pips of berries found in medieval latrines, and fish bones on the waterlogged sites of ancient ponds. We have a plethora of more usual archaeological artefacts too, such as coins, ceramics and ironware. The extent to which a good museum can give you an insight into how life was lived in the Middle Ages is restricted only by your own curiosity and imagination.

to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is – and always will be – ourselves.

IT

Perfect extract introducing medieval city

NO ONE CAN tell you exactly how many people there are in fourteenth-century England. Estimates tend to be around five million in 1300 (give or take half a million) and around 2.5 million in 1400 (give or take a quarter of a million).1 The one thing that everyone agrees on is that there are far fewer people at the end of the century than at the start: about half as many. The total population shrinks by five to ten per cent between 1315 and 1325, by thirty to forty per cent in the Great Plague of 1348–9, and by a further fifteen to twenty-five per cent over the rest of the century. Large numbers of children cannot quickly reverse these losses. As you will have seen from the effects on the landscape, it is a traumatic experience for the whole of society. Not until the 1630s will the population get back to five million again, and not until the 1740s will it reach five-and-a-half.

Life expectancy at birth can be as low as eighteen, as at the Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy.

If you were to line up every modern English person in age order, the man or woman in the middle would be thirty-eight. If you were to do the same in the fourteenth century, the median would be twenty-one. Half the entire population is aged twenty-one or less.3

When you consider that societies with youthful populations are more violent, tend to be supportive of slavery, and see nothing wrong in holding brutal combats in which men fight to the death for the sake of entertainment, you realise that society has changed fundamentally.

When people declare that ‘children have to grow up so quickly these days’, they should pause and reflect on this fact. Medieval boys are expected to work from the age of seven and can be hanged for theft at the same age. They can marry at the age of fourteen and are liable to serve in an army from the age of fifteen. Noblemen might hold office or be given command of an army before they are twenty. At the battle of Crécy (1346) the command of the vanguard – the foremost battalion of the army – is given to Prince Edward, then just sixteen years of age. It is unthinkable that we would put a sixteen-year-old in charge of a battalion, in combat, today.

Betrothals of boys and girls take place in infancy, and marriage at the age of twelve is approved of for a girl, although cohabitation usually begins at fourteen. Teenage pregnancies are positively encouraged – another significant contrast with modern England. Most girls of good birth are married by the age of sixteen and have produced five or six children by their mid-twenties, although two or three of those will have died. At that age many of them are widows as a result of the Scottish and French wars. That is, of course, presuming they survive the high risks associated with multiple childbirth.

Passage on women and girls

The chronicler John Hardyng, born in 1377, writes a chronicle about the triumph of the first Lancastrian king, Henry IV, in 1399, and lives long enough to rewrite the whole story with the opposite political slant for the Yorkist king, Edward IV, in the 1460s. He is still alive in 1464 at the age of eighty-seven.