[image]
[title]
Episode one
Next time you’re grumbling that the tube’s delayed, be bloody grateful you weren’t born in Elizabethan England. If you survived childhood without succumbing to deadly influenza, or vicious beatings by your father (flogging children was common practice), you might go on to scrape a living from a patch of stony land and bring up your family in a smoke-clogged hovel before popping your clogs in your thirties. Probably writhing in agony from bubonic plague.
That’s even before accounting for the indignity of the communal crap: people gathered at the river’s edge to relieve themselves in the same way that groups of smokers huddle outside the modern office for a quick puff today. Ian Mortimer’s journey through the lives of the ‘common people’ in the seventeenth century skillfully unpacks the clichés (architectural splendour, Shakespeare, big ruffs) and is unsparing in its examination of the daily brutalities that were the lot of most.
It’s a bit unrelentingly austere (surely there were some festivals, or pubs even, to ease the pain?), but full of informative detail and ‘well, I never!’ insights, nevertheless.