Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

What everyday life was really like in Shakespeare's England. The rule of the Virgin Queen, the works of Shakespeare, the defeat of the Spanish Armada and voyages of exploration have given the Elizabethan period its golden glow. Ian Mortimer asks what life actually felt like beneath it. Walk into London in the 1590s and practical questions arrive quickly. Where can you stay? What should you wear? How do you travel? What will you eat? What happens if you become ill, break the law or practise the wrong religion? Using contemporary accounts, household records, travel writing, legal evidence and printed manuals, Mortimer reconstructs a young, crowded and sharply hierarchical society. Population growth, poverty, religious persecution, famine, disease and violence sit beside glorious architecture, global curiosity, theatre and entertainment and some of the finest writing in the English language. This is history experienced through food, clothing, housing, medicine and religion, revealing a society both startlingly unfamiliar and recognisably on the road towards the modern world. ‘A fresh and funny book that wears its learning lightly’ Independent ‘Vivid trip back to the 16th century…highly entertaining book’ Guardian