The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

by Ian Mortimer

In the case of Exeter, there is the royal castle, with its ancient gatehouse (which is already three hundred years old by the time the Black Prince visits it in 1372).

Have you noticed that the roads are practically the only public spaces? There are no public parks, no public gardens, and large open squares are very rare in English cities except where they serve as the marketplace.

For most of the century the adjacent town of Westminster—joined to the city by the long elegant street called the Strand—is

The theatre in downtown Shreveport is called The Strand

Prostitutes are not tolerated in London except in one street, Cock Lane.

The modern tradition states that the last English wolf was killed in North Lancashire in the fourteenth century but you are very unlikely to meet it. Ralph Higden, writing at Chester in 1340, comments that there are now “few wolves” left in England.11 The last set of instructions to trap and kill wolves is issued in 1289,

There are still some wild boar in the aristocratic hunting parks or chases but they too have been brought almost to the point of extinction, so the chances of your being gored by one are remote. The only really dangerous beast to be encountered in the woods and forests of fourteenth-century England is—as you have probably guessed—man.

the silting up of rivers can hugely affect the patterns of economic development and trade in a region. A prosperous port can very quickly become a ghost town, with a ripple effect on the roads and hinterland.

At the beginning of the century it is not unusual to buy English wine. Many noble and royal houses have extensive vineyards. Not so a hundred years later. By 1400 the vineyards of England have all gone. The mean temperature for the year has dropped by about one degree centigrade.

In the 1350s and 1360s most villages have abandoned houses on the outskirts.

To the medieval yeoman’s eye, the beauty lies in having the necessities of life close at hand.

Practicalities take precedence over beauty and thus become ideals, or things of beauty, in themselves.

Yes, the houses appear to have been scattered all over the place, as if each toft were a giant playing card from a pack that the Devil once tossed over his shoulder in a fit of pique.

Some of this fourteenth-century base thatch lasts so well it may be found in the roofs of houses in modern times, after more than six hundred years—complete with the dried bodies of medieval grasshoppers and ladybirds which happened to be crawling across it when it was cut.

the enthusiasm for watching knights jousting is not totally dissimilar to that of Roman citizens watching gladiators draw blood. There is just one very important difference: medieval audiences know that their tournament fighters are voluntarily risking injury and death. They are aristocratic knights fighting for pride and glory, not slaves forced to hack each other to pieces for the amusement of the bloodthirsty masses.

The average man is a little over 5’ 7” (171 to 172 cm) and the average woman about 5’ 2” (158 to 159 cm).

The poor, on the other hand, tend to be considerably shorter: a disparity due to genetic selection as well as diet. This gives the nobleman a clear advantage when it comes to a fight.

The average height of a peasant was around 5’7 for males and around 5’2 for females; the nobility were closer to modern averages.

At the age of just twenty Edward III declares war on the Scots and leads an army into battle despite being outnumbered two to one.

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.

In the words of one of Chaucer’s characters, a thirty-year-old woman is just “winter forage.”

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.

It is a neat concept and particularly attractive to those doing the fighting and praying, who use it to justify the gross inequalities in society.

Between 1333 and 1346 it is systematically shredded by the English longbowmen, who, although ranked among “those who work,” show that they are a far more potent military force than the massed charging ranks of “those who fight.”

The title of duke takes precedence, being invented in 1337 for Edward III’s eldest son, Edward of Woodstock, later known as the Black Prince.

Top of the pile in England are the archbishops of Canterbury and York. Of these two, the archbishop of Canterbury takes precedence.