The Historian as Time Traveler

For most historians, the idea of actually visiting the past is something of a joke. For a start, it is impossible. What’s more, it always will be – if anyone in the future were to invent a time machine capable of going backwards in time, by now they would have visited us. On top of that, the idea of asking historians to address historical questions arising from being in the past is the sort of anachronism that trivializes history as an intellectual discipline. Most historians are employed not to do impractical things, such as imagine what life in the past was really like, but rather to perform more constructive tasks, such as teaching students how to assemble evidence, analyses it, and develop cogent arguments about the development of society. Think about it: if a handful of students were actually to go back to the eighteenth century, what they might see and hear there would be of little or no use to them in writing their essays on their return, for it is the understanding of the extant evidence that is the bedrock of history as a discipline. Historians are generally agreed: the concept of time travel is best left to science-fiction writers, novelists, authors of children’s books and film-makers.

In this respect, the history profession is missing a trick. People in all walks of life are fascinated by the fundamental question of what life was like for our ancestors. Whether one is talking about Ancient Egypt or the French Revolution, there is a near-universal interest in the past itself, including the events that took place. Such interest far exceeds the debates that scholars have about various aspects and interpretations of the past. Almost everyone, it seems, wants to know what it would have been like to live in a different century. And yet serious historians are reluctant to tell them, even though they are perhaps in the best position to do so.

In The Time Traveler’s Guide to Medieval England, I attempt to address this issue. I ask myself: if a group of readers from the modern world were to visit fourteenth-century England, where would they stay? What would they wear? What money would they use? How should they tell the date and time? What would they eat and drink? In fact, considering the number of years for which there were serious grain shortages, would they eat at all?

In adopting the conceit of visiting the past, the social history of fourteenth-century England suddenly becomes much more immediate. The form of a guidebook, structured around the needs of its readers, allows the historian to immerse the readers in matters of everyday life. What will you drink? Ale and wine. (Water is rarely drunk, and milk generally is given to women and children. Beer is very scarce, being imported.) How do you tell the time? To do this you will need to understand the difference between the hour of the day (which is twice as long in summer as in winter, as there is twice as much daylight) and the hour of the clock (which is a regular sixty minutes). What might you use for cleaning your teeth? Cardamom and licorice. Alternatively, try aniseed, cumin and fennel. Note, these spices won’t actually clean your teeth or prevent decay but they will make your breath smell less noxious, and since bad smells are associated with impurity and sinfulness, that is half the battle.

I said above that historians are "missing a trick." The truth is that they are missing several tricks. There is much more to this than the mere popularizing of a subject by writing it in an accessible format. The guidebook structure allows the historian to address certain preconceptions about historical understanding. For instance, it is commonly thought that people did not often travel far from their home parishes prior to the advent of the railways. But, this being a guide to the living past, the historian can explain who all these people on the roads of fourteenth-century England are: men traveling to the county town to serve on juries or to take a prisoner for incarceration prior to trial. Men traveling to vote for their member of parliament, or to serve as a representative in that gathering, or in the ecclesiastical equivalent (convocation). Men and women traveling to prove a will in an ecclesiastical court, men traveling in thousands to serve in the English army in France, royal messengers taking writs to local officials, clerics visiting diocesan churches, clerks and bailiffs attending to their lords’ manors – monks too attending to the business of their monasteries. And pilgrims galore, itinerant musicians and lords and lordly retinues traveling between manors. And then the hundreds of merchants traveling between the 1,700 market towns and the 1,600 fairs held up and down the country... The preconception that medieval freemen did not often travel is quickly and easily shown to be a modern prejudice, based on assumptions about limited forms of transport.

Perhaps an even greater reward is the fact that one has to address questions that simply have not occurred to historians geared to an educational syllabus. Given that the reader – the potential visitor to medieval England – is at the heart of this book, one has to address not only his or her preconceptions but also areas of complete doubt. What are the implications of society being hugely superstitious? The people can believe anything is possible, therefore they are remarkably open-minded when it comes to experimentation – scientific and otherwise. What are the implications of half the population being under the age of twenty-one, or the fact that men are expected to beat their sons, and women are encouraged to keep their daughters ‘under the rod’? Is the extreme violence of medieval society connected with these aspects of daily life? Alternatively, what do people use for toilet paper? Many historians might consider such questions ‘beneath them’ (if you will pardon me for saying so) but there can be no doubt that people in all ages have had to address this issue. In a guidebook to the past, no subject is without human interest, and therefore no subject that is off-limits to the historian.

This perhaps brings us to the major point. History does not just have to be an adjunct to an all-round education, centered on the evidence. It can be centered on the reader – while still maintaining an intellectual rigor – to the benefit of historians and their students as well as the readers. It raises new areas of debate that have meaning within, as well as outside, the profession. Ultimately it allows us to address the question of how Mankind has changed, or stayed the same, over the course of six or seven hundred years. This is surely the Philosopher’s Stone of historians, for history is not about the past per se but about understanding humanity over time. My own vision is that, through such literary methods, serious history can be melded with imaginative literary methods, and can rise above the tedious and repetitive aspects of education as surely and inspiringly as a violin soloist can rise above the hours of practice and theory in the academy.