Reviews
Flitting happily from period to period at will, you can alight on a note on the royal hounds and huntsmen in 1136, be equipped to discuss siege warfare (using the correct vocabulary), choose a destination for a pilgrimage or a religious order to join. The working methods of the Exchequer are usefully explained and you are duly warned as to what behaviour would have landed you in the pillory in London in 1419. The intricacies of the Tudor Court are plotted, the Anglo-Scottish border clans mapped, and the Armada fleets anatomised. Seventeenth-century banquet menus, including boiled teats and seagulls, are pored over and Charles II's bastards catalogued. Euphemisms for gin, and the evocative names of strong beers and of Nelson's gunboats are listed. You will learn how to live as a clerk on £50 a year in London in 1767, what, and for what offences, you will be fined as a cotton spinner in one of the new factories around 1800, and the chances of being hanged in the 1820s and 30s. There are nineteenth-century 'rich lists', a breakdown of life below stairs in a stately home around 1900, and much, much more.
"As individual, idiosyncratic and unexpected a history as you are ever likely to find - I loved it."
John Julius Norwich
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