Excuse the smell, the mud on my boots and the straw in my hair. I’m just in from a trip to the 14th century and I’m tired, cold and when I’ve had a cup of tea I’m having a shower. Plodding back home along the Fosse Way it took some head scratching to find my own house; I knew it was hereabouts but even with the newish Norman church opposite as landmark it took a while to part the mists and pull back the ivy of the past. I wasn’t entirely sorry when the medieval one-storey hovel faded back through time and my nice racing green front door with brass fixings emerged, though as I closed it, the church clock bonged the time, I could still smell the woodsmoke from a neighbour’s chimney and beneath that the rural pong of early muck spreading. Not everything changes.
I did get the ironing done however, and very reluctantly told Alexa to ‘Close my audiobook’, Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. Subtitled ‘a handbook for visitors to the fourteenth century’, it’s the third time I’ve gone on this particular journey and it never fails to entertain, surprise and shock. This time it also pretty much moved me to tears, listening to a writer with infinite capacity to make history leap off the page and smell, sound and act like an esquire, a jester, a juggler, a peasant, a housewife or in fact any one of the ancestors we all must have had, even if we haven’t discovered them yet and possibly never will.
Without romantic notions and sentimentality, Mortimer’s view of history and by association, social and family history, is very like my own. Yes, ‘the past is another country; they do things differently there’ as L.P. Hartley puts it in The Go-Between, but where he is referring to lost innocence, it’s hardly living history. Mortimer’s Time Travel guides* don’t discount academic evidence, just as we must not do in our research. But his premise is that real lives did exist in time and place, living, breathing, fighting, loving, dying, in hope and fear, joy as well as sadness, and there is no reason we can’t understand those lives through our own curiosity and imagination. In other words, to quote Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mocking-Bird, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ I would of course add ‘her’!