The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England — A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century book cover by Ian Mortimer
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The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England

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Adult • History • England
A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century
Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides • Book 1 of 4
Describes peasant and noble lifestyles Explores daily work and earnings Details unique historical practices Captures the essence of medieval society Incorporates firsthand historical accounts

A literary time machine transports the reader into fourteenth-century England and treats the past as a place to inhabit rather than merely study. Mortimer reconstructs daily life by asking practical questions: how people dressed, how they earned and were paid for work, what foods peasants, monks, or lords would offer, and where a traveler might stay.

Using daily chronicles, letters, household accounts, and contemporary poems, Mortimer provides vivid concrete details such as greetings on the street, what was used as toilet paper, why a physician might taste blood, and how leprosy could be identified. The book portrays humanity amid violence, exuberance, and fear.

A time machine deposits you in fourteenth-century England and asks how you would dress, eat, earn a living, and where you would stay.
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Edition information

Book details

Series
Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides Book 1 of 4
Publisher
Touchstone
Publication date
October 25, 2011
Print length
352 pages
Language
English
ISBN
978-1439112908

History + England

Reader guide

What to Know Before Reading The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England

Practical, everyday questions about life in fourteenth-century England. Much of the setup centers on social and material details drawn from chronicles, letters, household accounts, and poems. The book emphasizes concrete habits such as greetings, hygiene, medical practices, food, and lodging. This may appeal more to someone interested in immersive, source-based reconstructions of daily life and the atmosphere of an age marked by violence, exuberance, and fear.

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About the author

Ian Mortimer

Ian Mortimer

Dr Ian Mortimer has been described by The Times newspaper as 'the most remarkable medieval historian of our time'. He is best known as the author of The Time Traveller's Guides: to Medieval England (2008); to Elizabethan England (2012); to Restoration Britain (2017); and to Regency Britain (2020). He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, and has published research in academic journals touching on every century from the twelfth to the twentieth. He also writes in other genres. His latest novel, 'The Outcasts of Time', which takes place across the years 1348-1942, won the 2019 Winston Graham Prize for historical fiction. His first three novels, the Clarenceux Trilogy, set in the 1560s, appeared under his middle names, 'James Forrester'. In the year he turned fifty he wrote a memoir about the meaning of running, Why Running Matters (published in 2019). He lives on the northeast of Dartmoor, in the southwest of England. For more information, see www.ianmortimer.com

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