Everyday Life In Medieval London

Step back in time to medieval London to find out about the lives of those working and living there.

Everyday Life in Medieval England captures the day-to-day experience of people in the middle ages - the houses and settlements in which they lived, the food they ate, their getting and spending - and their social relationships. The picture that emerges is of great variety, of constant change, of movement and of enterprise. Many people were downtrodden and miserably poor, but they struggled against their circumstances, resisting oppressive authorities, to build their own way of life and to improve their material conditions. The ordinary men and women of the middle ages appear throughout. Everyday life in Medieval England is an outstanding contribution to both national and local history.

The perfect almanac for lovers of all things medieval

An in-depth guide to life in medieval England, including class, housing, spirituality, fashion, grooming, food, commerce, jobs, health, law, war, and more. Imagine you were transported back in time to Medieval England and had to start a new life there. Without mobile phones, ipads, internet, and social media networks, when transport means walking or, if you’re fortunate, horseback, how will you know where you are or what to do? Where will you live? What is there to eat? What shall you wear? How can you communicate when nobody speaks as you do and what about money? Who can you go to if you fall ill or are mugged in the street? However can you fit into and thrive in this strange environment full of odd people who seem so different from you? All these questions and many more are answered in this new guidebook for time-travelers: How to Survive in Medieval England. A handy self-help guide with tips and suggestions to make your visit to the Middle Ages much more fun, this lively and engaging book will help the reader deal with the new experiences they may encounter and the problems that might occur. Know the laws so you don’t get into trouble or show your ignorance in an embarrassing faux pas. Enjoy interviews with the celebrities of the day, from a businesswoman and a condemned felon, to a royal cook and King Richard III himself. Have a go at preparing medieval dishes and learn some new words to set the mood for your time-travelling adventure. Have an exciting visit but be sure to keep this book at hand. “Fun and creative. . . . If you want a handy guide to take on your journeys to the past or you just want a book to better understand the past, I highly suggest you read this book, “How to Survive in Medieval England” by Toni Mount.” —Adventures of a Tudor Nerd

'A holiday in the complex, joyful, indelicate medieval world' John Higgs, author of Watling Street Chaucer's People is an absorbing and revealing guide to the Middle Ages, populated with Chaucer's pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales. These are lives spent at the pedal of a loom, maintaining the ledgers of an estate or navigating the high seas. Drawing on contemporary experiences of a vast range of subjects including trade, religion, toe-curling remedies and hair-raising recipes, bestselling historian Liza Picard recreates the medieval world in glorious detail.

The reissue of Joseph and Frances Gies’s classic bestseller on life in medieval villages. This new reissue of Life in a Medieval Village, by respected historians Joseph and Frances Gies, paints a lively, convincing portrait of rural people at work and at play in the Middle Ages. Focusing on the village of Elton, in the English East Midlands, the Gieses detail the agricultural advances that made communal living possible, explain what domestic life was like for serf and lord alike, and describe the central role of the church in maintaining social harmony. Though the main focus is on Elton, c. 1300, the Gieses supply enlightening historical context on the origin, development, and decline of the European village, itself an invention of the Middle Ages. Meticulously researched, Life in a Medieval Village is a remarkable account that illustrates the captivating world of the Middle Ages and demonstrates what it was like to live during a fascinating—and often misunderstood—era.

Barbara A. Hanawalt's richly detailed account offers an intimate view of everyday life in Medieval England that seems at once surprisingly familiar and yet at odds with what many experts have told us. She argues that the biological needs served by the family do not change and that the ways fourteenth- and fifteenth-century peasants coped with such problems as providing for the newborn and the aged, controlling premarital sex, and alleviating the harshness of their material environment in many ways correspond with our twentieth-century solutions. Using a remarkable array of sources, including over 3,000 coroners' inquests into accidental deaths, Hanawalt emphasizes the continuity of the nuclear family from the middle ages into the modern period by exploring the reasons that families served as the basic unit of society and the economy. Providing such fascinating details as a citation of an incantation against rats, evidence of the hierarchy of bread consumption, and descriptions of the games people played, her study illustrates the flexibility of the family and its capacity to adapt to radical changes in society. She notes that even the terrible population reduction that resulted from the Black Death did not substantially alter the basic nature of the family.

“A lovely, witty treasure trove of a book, spilling over with historical gems . . . a very human history: sometimes weird, always wonderful.” —Dan Jones, New York Times-bestselling author Have you ever found yourself watching a show or reading a novel and wondering what life was really like in the Middle Ages? What did people actually eat? Were they really filthy? And did they ever get to marry for love? In Life in Medieval Europe: Fact and Fiction, you’ll find fast and fun answers to all your secret questions, from eating and drinking to sex and love. Find out whether people bathed, what they did when they got sick, and what actually happened to people accused of crimes. Learn about medieval table manners, tournaments, and toothpaste, and find out if people really did poop in the moat. “To say that this book was fun to read would be an understatement. Cybulskie’s knowledge radiates in every page of this short book . . . It was educational and entertaining all at the same time. Simply a wonderful resource for novice medievalists and writers of historical fiction and nonfiction alike.” —Adventures of a Tudor Nerd “All in all, this is an excellent book to put to bed many of the myths surrounding medieval existence that persist in the popular imagination. Easy to read and well worth the time to read it. I highly recommend this book if you want to get a mostly unbiased view of medieval life.” —Battles and Book Reviews