Has it ever happened to you that you were worthily engaged on a hefty work of literary fiction, something meaty, of indisputable credentials, something described by the New York Times Book Review as a "masterpiece", perhaps?, but then some little book on a shelf in a shop, in St Pancras international railway station perchance, interposed itself?
Well this book is that interloper, the one that had me standing there reading extracts in Foyles while I waited for my Eurostar back to Brussels and ultimately thinking: "well I suppose I'd better buy it now." Though I initially set it aside to wait its turn, it ended up jumping the queue, and, well, here we are.
The idea of this book is not, I think, as original or - except insofar as executed by a serious professional historian - as radical as it likes to pretend. It is simply that one should try to think of the past as a place that one might actually visit, travel round, directly experience, rather than study and analyse. Hence the notion of a "guide book", actually more comparable to some sorts of travel writing than actual guide books. In any case, the conceit works well, telling us about medieval England as if it might be possible to go there.
Fortunately, the author doesn't push his idea to the point at which it becomes a gimmick. He does not for example say: "For your your journey from London to Chester, ask directions to the Red Boar Inn in Camden, pay four groats for a horse and guard well against cut-purses", but is more along the lines: "No-one had a map in the fourteenth century, so travel between any two distant points inevitably meant taking the journey in short, say, ten-mile steps, and asking the way onward. It was wise to link up with others heading the same way to travel in groups for some protection against robbers". See the distinction?
Anyway, it works. It brings alive the human reality of the middle ages - specifically England in the fourteenth century - far better than any other book I have encountered on the subject. As you might expect, a good deal of the pleasure is in the awfulness of it to our modern eyes: the living conditions, the rigid social hierarchy, the unpredictable and savage system of justice, the casual cruelty to children, women and animals, the hygiene, the food, the disease and the unbelievable medical practices... Yes, there's all that, but it's far from just that. The author has too much understanding and sympathy for these people and their world to make them a simple horror story - indeed that's very much his point. These were people like us, living at a different time. What might we look like to a visitor from 600 years hence?
So Mortimer tries to assess the medieval world by its own standards. He is good, for example, on things like his comparison of the various options a traveller has for overnight lodging on an extended journey, looking at the relative merits of a private household (could be a good option), an inn (often not a good option), a religious foundation (a reliable but not necessarily comfortable or pleasant option) or a lordly manor (his clear preference - at least if the lord of the manor is present).
Another point where his approach seemed to me to work well, and contrasts sharply with conventional history, was his discussion of the Black Death (known then as the "Great Plague"), a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, which resulted in the population of England at the end of the fourteenth century being only about half what it was at the beginning. He tries to talk about this scourge as it would have appeared to people at the time, evoking their utter terror, incomprehension and despair when faced such wanton and widespread death.
Modern historians, correctly no doubt, often point out the ultimately progressive impact of the plague, which fatally undermined the feudal system (which, incidentally, Mortimer shows as having been lived as less unambiguously and unilaterally oppressive than we moderns like to imagine). But the conventional approach also undermines a certain kind of understanding as to how this tragedy was lived. "Imagine" he says, " a disease were to wipe out forty percent of the modern population of the UK - more than twenty-five million people. Now imagine a historian in the future discussing the benefits of your death and the deaths of your partner, your children and your friends .... You would want to cry out, or hang your head in despair, that historians could so blithely comment on the benefits of such suffering. There is no shadow of a doubt that every one of these people you see in 1348 - whether they will die or survive - deserves your compassion". (It goes on)
Don't worry, it's very far from all moral outrage about historians' treatment of our ancestors, I simply quote that because it struck me as a good illustration of the angle to this book, one that is valuable, fresh and interesting for anyone wanting a feel for this distant world which is, of course, also our world.
Recommendation? I'm not a historian myself, so don't expect me to comment on the merits of this "as history". However, I found it attractive, gripping, fascinating, surprising and something which put me altogether more in sympathy with the fourteenth century, which can't be a bad thing, can it? So, yes, I recommend it. If Foyles is to be believed this is a UK bestseller, so it looks like a lot of people have found this book appealing, perhaps interfering with their other reading...
So now back to the hefty literary fiction. That'll be the next note, interlopers permitting.
