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Welcome to the history extra podcast.
Did you know that Elizabethan Londoners were good kissers, that medieval drinkers used beer to fight off the flames of a raging inferno, and that Jane Austen doesn't paint an entirely accurate picture of the early 19th century?
These are just some of the facts served up in Ian Mortimer's New History of England.
And here, in conversation with Spencer Mizzen, Ian takes us on an immersive tour of a nation's past.
So Ian, your new book follows a series of A to Z talks you've been giving to audiences around the country over the last little while.
I wonder if you could tell us a bit about those talks and how they inspired you to write this book.
The A to Z.
Well, they began as a means of promoting my Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England.
So the second in the series.
It's very difficult to promote a Time Traveller's Guide.
I started off with the medieval one.
Going to various places and there was quite a call for me to go and talk about medieval time travellers.
And I found myself in various places.
I always try and sort of start where I was giving the talk and describe walking down the streets in the 14th century.
It became extremely burdensome in terms of getting everything right, talking to local audiences, of course, who know their environment far better than you can after a few hours of research.
And I was thinking, this isn't going very well.
I need some way of encapsulating this period in an enjoyable way that is easier to promote.
And I came across the idea of an A to Z for Elizabethan England.
And I tried it out.
And the very first one was, I think it was in Cirencester, and I was speaking alongside Mark Morris.
I was going first, he was going second.
And I just enjoyed my A to Z of Elizabeth England so much that Mark had to get up after I got to M And he said look, for God's sake, I need to do a talk too.
And I just realised that moment when he interrupted me.
This is actually going to go really well when I've got the stage to myself.
And so I did one for all of the books and went back and did one for Medieval as well.
And they became really good, fun performance pieces because they were always ad-libbed.
There was an awful lot of character in there.
But also you can jump really quickly from factual material which is going to hit people, to fiction or surprise people to something which has got pathos or whatever.
I mean, you can change the mood.
So they became a very versatile way of talking about the past.
And did you find that they landed well with the audiences?
Oh, yes.
By far the most entertaining talks I've ever done.
Obviously, there are some talks where you're giving a specific relation of their local.
No, some local talks or some thematic talks are perfectly seated.
But generally speaking...
You can adapt the talk as you're going along because all you got is that A to Z structure.
Everybody knows the alphabet.
And I would be frequently told at the end oh, I was meant to be catching a train, but I had to hang on and see what you would say about X, Y and Z.
So clearly people really enjoyed it.
And as a result I sort of increasingly tailored them to the audiences for the purposes of enjoyment.
And why have you chosen these four particular time periods?
What is it about the medieval Elizabethan restoration and regency period, periods that really piqued your interest?
Well, I mean, there are separate reasons for all four.
The medieval one is centred on the 14th century simply because I'd written three medieval biographies of characters who had done a lot of primary source material research.
And also, I've always felt the 14th century was the epitome of the Middle Ages in many ways.
It has all the characteristics that people are looking for in a medieval timeframe.
But also with regard to England, it's nicely located.
We haven't got the complications of the Angevin Empire and things like that.
So Elizabethan, well, I'm a big Shakespeare fan.
So that was a natural one to do.
And also my PhD runs from 1570 through to 1720.
My PhD was in medical assistance to the dying.
And I ran from Elizabethan times three to Queen Anne's reign, really.
So Elizabethan and restoration naturally sat there, but distinct enough that there were two different subjects.
The mistake would have been trying to align one with the other.
They had to be distinct in time.
And Regency, I've just always loved the Regency.
And it's been a period of time I feel very settled in, partly because I grew up with Regency antiques around me.
In fact, the table in which I'm in front of me right now is made in about 1815.
So it's just been a place I've naturally inhabited.
Also, I'd add, everybody says, oh, when's the Victorian one coming out?
There's not going to be a Victorian one.
The closer you get to the modern world, the less surprised people are, the more they know it already and the more complicated every single point is.
So that when you're dealing with a society of 16 million people, as you are at the end of the Regency period, that's far more complicated than dealing with a medieval society of 45 million 5 million people.
So I will do more time travellers guides, but they will be in a very different form from the four I've done to date.
Your approach to history through your time travellers guides, which you've been talking about there, has always been an immersive one, hasn't it?
You like to drop the reader or the listener into a particular time period and kind of say to them This is what it would have been like to have been there.
How do you think you'd have reacted?
What do you see as the benefits of this approach?
It makes people think differently.
Why do we study the past?
Why are we interested in history?
Well, a lot of people don't think about that question.
They just are interested, and that's fine.
But why do we really have an interest in the past?
It's to understand the meaning of things.
We have a very unfortunate situation in this country and, I think, throughout the Western world, where we have allowed academia to hijack what history is.
So everything becomes about academic excellence and demonstrating superior knowledge.
And actually, it's pretty meaningless.
We put hundreds of millions of pounds into historical education, and it's the education that matters, not the history that comes out of it.
There is a great meaning to understanding our place in time.
And by using an immersive approach, I can remind people that these are real people we're talking about.
We're not talking about abstract stories or things that don't matter to them.
Our past has all gone to make the modern world and to create the individuals we are today.
It has great meaning for us.
And this is a way of bringing forward that meaning.
And that, to my mind, is the goal.
I don't always write in this way.
I do write on an academic level as well, and I do write things which are more specific.
And some of my pet subjects are still on the drawing table.
How do we know what we think we know about Edward II's death and other questions like that are still very current in my mind.
But yes, on the whole, the things I take most pride in in literary forms are the ones that bring out meaning.
So you also write that you don't need a lot of evidence to make a point.
Do you think historians are sometimes guilty of bombarding their audiences with too much evidence?
Absolutely.
The academic process tends to sort of be a sledgehammer frequently in order to crack a nut.
It emphasizes the academic excellence, the superiority of knowledge, a breadth of insight and all these things which are frequently really of only interest to the academic community.
In telling a story frequently.
You could just take one fact and elaborate on that in a wider context, and it would have just as much power, probably more.
I mean the editorial line less is more is one that I think a lot of academics should acknowledge and learn from.
But unfortunately we do not teach our best educated historians in this country how to write, or still less how to write for a wide public.
Something else you also write is by reading your new book we can really learn about ourselves in the modern age.
What do you mean by that?
I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit.
Well, if you want to look at what society is today and you read the papers, you'd see all sorts of different dimensions.
But if you were to look at that same cut across society, across society three, 400 years, you'd have a very different, deeper picture.
And if you want to know how we react in times of famine or plague well, you could probably find somewhere around the world where there's a famine you could study, but it'd be very difficult to access the information in a way that was relevant.
If you want to know how the English react in times of famine or plague, then you need to look back at our historical records.
And if you think, oh well, we don't have famine or plague now, then you're just looking at us in the very shallow mirror of the present moment.
To get a deeper understanding of what humanity is and our place in time, you need to look at the historical record and you need to understand how past experiences affected people at the time and how they reacted as individuals, but also how they reacted as communities.
And you don't get that just from reading a newspaper.
I mean, were you surprised by how different people were in these four discrete periods?
Or conversely, were you kind of taken by how much united them?
That's a good question.
I mean, the answer is yes and no.
Was I surprised?
In some ways, yes.
Fascination with blood, the bloodthirstiness, the lack of care for animals, things like that, things that are part of my everyday life.
Of course, these people in the past, especially when you go back before the end of the 18th century, They're very different in their sensibilities, their complete belief in God and salvation.
If you go right back to before this period, if you go right back to the early Middle Ages and the expectation, the divine will touch upon the daily life on a regular basis, that really is an indication of extraordinarily different mindset.
Having said that, I've written the line that if you were to take a baby from today, say a little girl, and bring her up in the 14th century well, presuming she survived all the diseases and everything else, she could probably acclimatise perfectly well to being in the 14th century.
And likewise, if you took a young boy from the 14th century and brought him up today.
There is that fluidity of humanity whereby I think we could adapt, and we are enormously adaptive as people.
So are they that different?
I would have said that the nurture is all important here.
And, what's more, it raises that other question, that if you scratched us, would we not bleed in the same way as our ancestors?
Well, if we were facing famine plague, as I mentioned a moment ago, would we not react in similar ways?
And I think we probably would.
So in some respects, these people are very, very different in the way they behave.
But in other respects, I think there's a lot more similarity than we would really want to admit.
In your envoy at the end of the book, you ask the reader which of these four historical periods they have most preferred to have lived in.
What about you?
Which one would you like to have lived in the most?
Whenever the medical assistance is the best.
None of them in this particular case.
I mean, it was better in the 18th century, the 19th century than it was in earlier ages.
The realities of life in the past times are that they were brutal.
I mean, the life expectancy at birth was short.
But even if you survived to age 20, the chances of living another 20 years were enormous roughly 50 50 in the middle ages, in the elizabethan period and not much better in the 17th century.
So the degree to which death is all around you and suffering is all around you, medical ailments are all around you.
I think we should have no rosy picture of the past for those reasons.
In terms of the excitement, i find them all equal.
I mean, i do not have a preferred period of history as such.
I think It's the people I'm interested in, and the periods are interesting because they present people with different challenges.
It's not that one is a more likable one or another.
They are very interesting.
I mean, in some ways, the most interesting of all the early Middle Ages when life really was tough.
You know, I do not want to go back to the 10th century.
Thank you very much.
I mean, if you look at the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for the years around 1000 AD.
Famine was striking roughly every four years.
It was constant warfare.
It was just miserable.
And the hierarchies of society that were developed to deal with this, and the lack of individuality in the feudal system and the manorial systems of being able to feed people in times of dearth.
I mean, everything was just miserable.
But at the same time I find that really interesting, because so much of our modern world was created in that crucible.
What about your audiences?
I mean, over the period of time you've been practicing history, have you found that their tastes have kind of changed?
Certain time periods become more popular, while others have maybe waned a little bit in terms of general interest.
I don't think there's been any waning of interest in the Regency period.
If anything, things like Bridgerton on TV have caused more people to come to it.
The everlasting renewal of interest in Jane Austen has meant that Regency has just grown and grown and grown in interest, importance to people.
Often, I think, for the wrong reasons.
They think it's all delightful.
Jane Austen does not present a very good picture of the suffering of industrial Britain, for obvious reasons,
My favourite line actually was in the review of that book was in The Times where the reviewer said AM
Mortimer would have shown Jane Austen parts of the Regency she didn't know herself.
Which is true, because I do go into the suffering in Liverpool and things like that.
The medieval period is interesting because it has sort of seen patches shift in interest.
I
Some big selling books have brought other aspects of the medieval period to the forefront.
I think in the whole the Restoration has always been the least popular bit of English history.
For some reason.
The late 17th century.
People haven't got a handle on it.
And this is true internationally.
My second biggest market is in Germany.
And they published the medieval Time Traveller's Guide and did very well with that.
They did the same thing with Elizabethan.
And they did Regency.
They weren't interested in doing the late 17th century.
There is this period where we're shifting from the strangely different religious, violent society of pre-modern times to the modern
And that cusp the scientific revolution in the 17th century.
The bureaucratic revolution in many ways is a period of such confusion to people.
They haven't got a handle on it and they avoid it.
And in some ways, that's the most interesting bit.
I mean how we go from putting our greatest faith in God to redeem us to putting our greatest faith in professionals, doctors and educated men to redeem us or to help us survive.
I mean, that is a hell of a transformation.
It was part of my PhD and I remember saying it's one of the most fundamental changes that the human race has ever experienced, going from greatest trust in a divine entity to greatest trust in our own capabilities.
And yet people avoid it.
People aren't interested.
And I see no indication that is changing.
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Now, Ian, if it's okay by you, I thought I might just pick out a few anecdotes from the book.
You write that in the Middle Ages, half the population could expect to be dead by the age of 20, which is obviously a pretty shocking statistic.
You also point out that, following the Black Death, which itself killed up to about half of the population, life expectancy actually increased.
And that seems on the face of it quite counterintuitive.
So how exactly did that work?
The Black Death, which was the biggest calamity Europe has ever had.
It killed roughly half the population in seven months.
Varying amounts, varying proportions depending on where you were.
It freed up a lot of capital.
We had just as much land as before.
We had almost as many animals as before.
We had access to as much grain as would feed 5 million people.
But of course, there were many fewer people to consume it.
Now, there was obviously a decline.
So animals went unmilked and cheese was left unmade and grain was left to go rotten.
But after things stabilised over the course of really two or three years, the assets left were so much more plentiful for the remainder that the people who survived that they had a far better diet.
Now, if you want to survive youth, the best thing you need is a decent diet.
Your mother needs to have a good enough diet to be able to produce enough milk, so you're not ill in your infancy.
And therefore, reducing infant deaths is a key part here.
And that depends on the mother's health.
And so the improved diet all round meant that people had a better standard of living, ate better and could live longer.
And that is the key.
And because the Black Death was indiscriminate in its killing.
It just took out somebody or people from all different ages, babies through to old people.
So therefore, there wasn't a sort of tapering off effect.
So you saw everybody living longer after this mass.
I don't use the word cull because it wasn't intentional, but you know the mass mortality.
I really enjoyed the entry in which you describe how foreign visitors to england remarked on how much elizabethan londoners love to kiss one another and were, by all accounts, quite good at it, though we english have got this sort of reputation as being a little bit sort of buttoned up and standoffish.
I mean, how did this come about?
I have got no idea how it came about really.
I mean, when i came across it, i mean i did come across it through all the foreign accounts, i mean alessandro, manuel and uh, people like that.
So I was really quite taken because, as you say, we're not known for being particularly amorous in our approach to strangers, especially.
There is two aspects about Elizabethan England I found really surprising.
One is the kissing, but also the other one is the origins of good fellowship in the ale house.
Now, people today think of the English as, as you say, a little bit standoffish.
But if you look back into our pub culture which is one of my special subjects and I'm writing a book on that you find when we go back into the 16th century, there is this sense of good fellowship.
The community comes together.
We are actually close.
We're just close in particular environments.
And so, therefore, I think a lot of our reputation isn't actually well-deserved.
It's just observed by people in particular environments that the English cold are because of this or because of that.
Put the English together in the pub and they are anything but standoffish.
And I think in Elizabethan England the sense of how you should behave had grown up, probably in London, probably with some idea of how genteel etiquette should be portrayed or how people should behave as a certain degree of breeding, if you know what I mean within the London community.
I don't know the answer, but that's my area of speculation and the way I go if I had to answer that question.
Now Ian, speaking of pubs.
We've all heard of the Great Fire of London, but maybe we haven't heard of the Great Fire of Northampton of 1675.
Now you reveal in the book how one Northampton landlord and his patrons found a novel and effective way of fighting off the flames of that fire.
Can you tell our listeners a little bit more about that, please?
This is a great story.
It comes from the journal of Thomas Baskerville, who was a travelling gentleman.
And he arrived in Northampton a matter of days after the Great Four of Northampton, which took out about 80 of the town.
And it did take out all the pubs, bar one.
And this was right in the middle.
And it was a pub called, appropriately, The Last.
Now, Northampton had a reputation for making shoes and boots even in those days.
And the last meant a shoemaker's last.
So it was a shoemaker's last hanging above the door.
And Thomas Baskerville looked at this building, this devastation all around him, and he saw that this one timber-framed building had survived the fire.
And he just couldn't work it out.
So he knocked on the door opened it went inside, found the innkeeper inside or the landlord inside with his leather apron on.
And he said I have to ask you, how has this building survived the fire when everything else around it has been destroyed?
Anyway apparently, when the fire broke out, the landlord said that all the drinkers in there decided whether they're going to go home and rescue their own homes or they're going to stay and collectively try and preserve the pub.
And being good drinkers, they decided to preserve their pub.
They hauled all the barrels of ale or beer by 1675 it would have been beer more likely up onto the roof of the building.
And they slowly poured the beer down the outside of the building to keep it cool throughout the fire.
It was a huge risk if you think about it.
But they saved the building in this way.
And I put in the book.
It's probably the great moment in the annals of British firefighting that the members of a pub decide to fight fire with beer and win.
Okay, I just want to return to the Regency period briefly.
You mentioned Jane Austen and the fact that the Regency might not necessarily have been a greater time to be alive, as maybe some people might believe.
And one point that really stood out to me when I was reading the book that you made was that, despite the great leaps forward of the agricultural revolution and then subsequently, the industrial revolution, inequality actually rocketed in the 18th century.
How did that come about?
Economic forces, very simply economic forces.
I mean, the Industrial Revolution was an extraordinary period and the English not the British, but the English particularly made maximum advantage of it.
If you think in terms of a town like Preston and you've got a few landlords in the area and at the start of the period it's like a market town really.
But then it starts to turn industrial.
People come in because they know there are jobs there.
They know there is work there.
But then they all are competing for that work.
So their wages don't necessarily go up.
In fact, if anything, because they're competing for wages, the wages go down.
At the same time, they're all competing for somewhere to live.
So they're all trying to outdo each other when it comes to rents.
So rents go up, wages go down.
The people who want that work find they're being squeezed between lower wages and higher rents.
Their real wealth hugely diminishes.
The real wealth of the person who owns the land or the person who's employing them is skyrocketing.
Therefore, you've got this greater inequality push because there are so many more people.
And that's what it comes down to.
It's a consequence of the agricultural revolution and people not starving to death in their youth or not dying of diseases brought on by malnutrition in their youth.
Because so many more people are living to adulthood, there is a glut of potential workforce.
And that is the essence of the industrial revolution.
It's not about machines.
It's about people working, industry.
And because of this oversupply of labour, the economic forces mean that if you've got a job in these places, you were forced to pay high rents, you were paid low wages and your neighbours were benefiting hugely.
So there is this huge pull so that the life expectancy for the working class in this period is huge, sometimes less than half that of the middle classes.
And in places like Preston and Ashton-under-Lyne you see the life expectancy at birth go down to 13 or 14, the lowest I've seen recorded for any place anywhere on Earth ever.
Now, despite this, you write that the widespread attainment of individual freedom is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, achievement of the past 700 years.
I think you write.
Why do you think that's so important?
As I said, each of my A to Zs is for Zenith, in all five of them.
And for the Middle Ages, I wrote about the zenith of the cathedral builders.
For Elizabethan England, the zenith of English literature in terms of William Shakespeare and restoration was the zenith of scientific revolution and classical music for the Regency period.
When it came to looking at the period as a whole, you can't think along those same ways.
You can't look at one cultural thing as being better than any other, and that being the epitome of it.
How do we really benefit from the last 700 years?
And, as so often, what you need to do when you have to answer a question like that is not look up in the book.
But you need to go out for a walk, go out for a long walk.
It's an important research tool, go out for a long walk.
And I did.
And the more I thought about it on that walk.
I started off with the suffering of the early Middle Ages and how people gave up their individual liberty really to help the communities to give themselves a better chance of survival and became pretty much well, in many cases enslaved or serfs.
They had given up their freedom, and Seeing the last 700 years as being a reversal of that not giving up freedoms, reclaiming freedoms and actually having the liberty literally to go for a walk and write what I wanted this seemed to me the most remarkable and yet unsung achievement.
One, you could look at William Shakespeare.
Would he have understood that his ten great-grandparents had probably been enslaved, as all our ancestors were?
No, he probably wouldn't have appreciated that.
Even for Elizabethan times, we have taken a lot of our liberties for granted.
We've claimed a lot more, but that simple freedom to get up and go where you want.
Of course our liberties have increased and increased and increased down the years perhaps are decreasing now, but we have seen the most remarkable shift and I think that is something to champion.
And Ian, I'm going to finish on a memory you relate in the book from your childhood.
You recall your excitement as a 12-year-old boy visiting three castles in the Welsh marshes.
I think it was Grossmann, Skemfrey from White Castle.
So, from your point of view, if there was one tactic we could employ to instil a love of history in today's 12-year-olds, what would it be?
It's got to be something experiential along those lines.
It's not going to come from a book.
It's not going to come from being told something.
People need to see for themselves.
You need to show, not tell, as it were.
And showing in the very place where something happened is the way to bring these things out.
I was precocious on the history front as a child so I wouldn't necessarily say you're going to get the same result from everybody if you took them to the same three castles.
But if you took people to a remarkable place, an atmospheric place, and told them some of the things that happened there and some of the people involved, then they might actually see things in a different light.
Or put them out on a period boat in high seas and then talk about traveling around the world.
You're not going to get that sort of experience.
I think it's the experience of these things.
Paul Ley, the editor of History Today, once asked a really interesting question at the Institute of Historical Research, which was a room full of historians.
And he said how many people here were inspired to become a historian through reading a historical novel.
And about 80% of the room put their hands up.
And it was extraordinary how that, in some ways, work of historical fiction, a work of historical lies in some ways but semi-truth telling, let's call it that had inspired people to find the real truth.
So to take people to the edge of a past experience and say this is what it was like, imagine then.
I think that is the way.
And I think that is partly why the Second World War has such a pull on younger people especially.
They can see the remnants and imagine the terror and the drama of the war.
Getting close is the answer.
That was Ian Mortimer speaking to Spencer Misen.
Ian is a British historian best known for his time traveller's guides.
His new book, which takes readers on a tour of four periods in English history the 14th century, the Elizabethan Age, the Restoration and the Regency is Mortimer's A to Zs of English history.
