The Time Traveler's Guide to Restoration Britain

by Ian Mortimer

As for saying goodbye, that word ‘good-bye’ itself is appropriate. Restoration people understand it to mean either ‘God b[less] ye’ or ‘God be [with] ye’.

Unfortunately his words are overheard by one of the women, who stands up and ‘gives her lungs a breathing’: You white-livered son of a Fleet Street bumsitter begot upon a chair at noonday between Ludgate and Temple Bar! You puppily offspring of a mangy nightwalker who was forced to play the whore an hour before she cried out to pay the bawd, her midwife, for bringing you, you bastard, into the world. Who is it you call whore?44

At the start of the Restoration period, approximately 1,560 of my direct ancestors were alive – not including any distant uncles, aunts or cousins.1 The same applies to you, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on your age.

In other words, my ancestors represented 500 times as great a proportion of the population in 1660 as my whole extended family does at the time of writing.

The point is this: as you look further and further back in time, your nation’s history increasingly becomes your family history. Go back to the eleventh century and every person then living in your country who has a descendant alive now is your ancestor.

We may regard them as inhumane atrocities now but, as outlined at the start of this Envoi, our character is more fully exposed in the mirror of a thousand years than it is in the sensitive politeness of the present day. If we were in the same position as our ancestors, under the same pressures, with the same traditions behind us and the same levels of ignorance and knowledge, then we would see ourselves behave in much the same ways as they did.