A guidebook?  To history (yawn!) you’ll be surprised as this is a great book. They say that the past is a foreign country so why not a guide book to show the intrepid traveler all they need to know to get around, understand and get the most from their trip.  This new history book by Ian Mortimer brings that 14th century alive in a vivid, interesting and sometimes startling way.  It’s a cross between Monty Python and Sister Wendy and just as much fun.

Imagine you could get an easy-jet time machine back to medieval England, you'd need this book. It explores everything a usual guide book does, what to see, eat and do. How to greet the people you'll meet, good shopping and events, holidays and local sports, diseases and infections and their often more lethal cures!

Ian Mortimer’s approach to history is paradoxically to make it live again, to make us feel that we are there, that we are part of it, (and it part of us) and to give it a vibrancy and immediacy that most histories lack.  This book is not only informative and packed full of interesting facts but it’s also fun, and that’s its greatest selling point.

From looking for lodgings with an Abbot, to paying for hookers, from the right time to eat meat to what to wear, from what (and how) to drink and how to avoid the plague, the right money to use and how much to spend and most importantly how not to upset or offend the locals, especially in this rather brutal and overwhelmingly superstitious time, this books shows everything. Good and bad and explains why too.

The authors website:

The writing style is fun and spit up into easy to read chapters with some good illustrations and explanations.  I enjoyed this book and apart from learning some wonderful new things - such as a gory cure for melancholy that consist of boiling six fat puppies, chicken feathers and urine up with flowers and salt (eat your heart out Jamie!) - it also brought it home to me that there’s a thread from our own existence right back, directly, to this 14th far away century, from the way we tell the time to the way we drive on the road, it all started here.

With enough horridness to entertain the kids and enough serious social history to keep an adult amused this is a ground breaking way to make history fun again. It’s endless amusing and curious entries do not, for one moment, detract from the amount of serious research and effort that’s gone into this book. Ian Mortimer knows his stuff and it’s a treat to sit down and read this new book.

Out now:  £20.00

From all good bookshops or the publishers here.