The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

The past is a foreign country - this is your guide. We think of Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558-1603) as a golden age. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England? If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay? What would you eat? What would you wear? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time? In this book Ian Mortimer reveals a country in which life expectancy is in the early thirties, people still starve to death and Catholics are persecuted for their faith. Yet it produces some of the finest writing in the English language, some of the most magnificent architecture, and sees Elizabeth's subjects settle in America and circumnavigate the globe. Welcome to a country that is, in all its contradictions, the very crucible of the modern world. A historian’s answer to Doctor Who, Ian Mortimer is a polymath whose prolific publishing record includes forays into fiction (where he also writes under the pseudonym of James Forrester) and poetry alongside his primary historical and biographical works. He is best known for his Time Travellers Guides, transporting readers to Medieval, Elizabethan and Restoration England. He is also the author of key historical biographies including The Greatest Traitor, The Perfect King: The Life of Edward III, Father of the English Nation, The Fears of Henry IV: The Life of England's Self-Made King and 1415: Henry V's Year of Glory.