The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century (Ian Mortimer’s Time Traveller’s Guides)

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Official documents provide poor pickings when it comes to building the kind of narratives which grip and won't let go. As Mortimer points out, if you are to experience the 14th century the way he intends, then you must do so in the unspooling moment, oblivious to what lies ahead. For instance, until the beginning of the 13th century there was no difference between right and left shoes, which must have been useful if you were getting dressed in the dark (and, chances are, you were). The result of this careful blend of scholarship and fancy is a jaunty journey through the 14th century, one that wriggles with the stuff of everyday life.

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So, you are travelling into the city, you are sitting down at table, you are eyeing up a cross-looking band of outlaws and deciding whether it is safe to run. Mortimer's argument, spelled out in a thoughtful epilogue, is that these pleasures become possible not by laying critical sense to one side, but by embracing an altogether different approach. On many occasions this wriggling is quite literal: entrails seem to be everywhere, from the pigs' insides slopped in a bucket to the traitors who are forever having their bowels hooked out and burned in front of them. Statistics are all very well, but unless they come clothed in flesh it is hard to know them in your bones. For if one thing is clear in Mortimer's deft summary of life in the high medieval period, it is that you are never alone.Finally, and quite the best of all, in 1337 Edward III passed a law forbidding anyone to play football - on pain of death.

Quite apart from using The Canterbury Tales as a source book for life on the road in the 14th century, he quarries the great unfinished masterpiece for evidence of the high medieval mindset.

Apart from the ever-useful Paston Letters, written by an East Anglian yeoman family as they scrambled to prominence in the wake of the Black Death, Mortimer is obliged to scavenge where he can. Any sense of yourself as an individual, with particular desires or needs, always buckles in the face of the greater demands of the community. You can read about the Black Death until you're blue (or, rather, yellow with funny red blotches) in the face. If he sometimes cites a secondary text which seems to be growing whiskers - for instance WG Hoskins's 1953 classic on the English landscape - then you feel reassured that no other source will quite do.