Ian Mortimer > Quotes

“‎W. H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is--and always will be--ourselves.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“Justice is a relative concept in all ages. The fourteenth century is no exception.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“As you travel around medieval England you will come across a sport described by some contemporaries as 'abominable ... more common, undignified and worthless than any other game, rarely ending but with some loss, accident or disadvantage to the players themselves'. This is football.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“History is not just about the analysis of evidence, unrolling vellum documents or answering exam papers. It is not about judging the dead. It is about understanding the meaning of the past—to realize the whole evolving human story over centuries, not just our own lifetimes.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“You might find it alarming to think that your doctor will not actually need to see you in person but might make a diagnosis based on the position of the stars, the colour and smell of your urine, and the taste of your blood.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“There's so much beauty in the world, don't close your eyes to it just because you've lost your own small patch of happiness.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“While the traditional image of knights in armour is accurate and widely accepted, the equally representative image of knights wearing corsets and suspender belts is perhaps less well known.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“Literature is a means to delight the mind and embolden the spirit.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

“Oscar Wilde once quipped, “The old believe everything, the middle-aged suspect everything and the young know everything.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“The man who has no knowledge of the past has no wisdom.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“All gentlemen of any rank with whom he holds conversations can speak Latin, French, Spanish or Italian. They are aware that the English language is only used in this island and would consider themselves uncivilized if they knew no other tongue than their own.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“You might be offered oatcakes as well as bread (especially in the north). If these do not tempt you, consider eating "horse-bread." This is made from a sort of flour of ground peas, bran, and beans–if contemporaries look at you strangely, it is because it is not meant for human consumption.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“Guy de Chauliac’s advice to those wishing to avoid infection is as follows: ‘Go quickly, go far, and return slowly.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: a Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“It is commonly said that a good horse should have fifteen properties and conditions, namely: three of a man, three of a woman, three of a fox, three of a hare and three of an ass: like a man, he should be bold, proud and hardy; like a woman, he should be fair breasted, fair of hair and easy to lie upon; like a fox, he should have a fair tail, short ears and go with a good trot; like a hare, he should have a great eye, a dry head and run well; and like an ass, he should have a big chin, a flat leg and a good hoof.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“Most Elizabethan men will shake their heads in disbelief if you suggest the idea of the equality of the sexes. No two men are born equal—some are born rich, some poor; the elder of two brothers will succeed to his father’s estates, not the younger—so why should men and women be treated equally?”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

“Lord Acton’s famous phrase: ‘power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
― Ian Mortimer, Edward III: The Perfect King

“In Elizabethan England you will only find small codpieces. Large ones, stuffed with wool and looking like an erect male member, are out of date”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

“W H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is—and always will be—ourselves.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“How then should we regard the past? Indeed, why should we study it at all but to prove to our fellow men that we can, and for the skill of disputation? The answer lies not in preferring the blurred, grand vision to the scrupulous detail, nor does it lie in the opposite prejudice: neither contains sufficient truth. Instead, we must find our own way, in the sure knowledge that we too will enter that underworld, where the sun does not shine and the wind does not blow. If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity, and not as the passing shapes that we may glimpse every day in a looking glass, which then are gone forever.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“As you sit there watching a performance of a Shakespeare, Johnson, or Marlowe play, the crowd will fade into the background. Instead, you will be struck by the diction. There are words and phrases that you will not find funny, but which will make the crowd roar with laughter. Your familiarity with the meanings of Shakespeare's words will rise and fall as you see and hear the actors' deliveries and notice the audience's reaction. That is the strange music of being so familiar with something that is not of your own time. What you are listening to in that auditorium is the genuine voice, something of which you have heard only distant echoes. Not every actor is perfect in his delivery; Shakespeare himself makes that quite clear in his Hamlet. But what you are hearing is the voice of the men for whom Shakespeare wrote his greatest speeches. Modern thespians will follow the rhythms or the meanings of these words, but even the most brilliant will not always be able to follow both rhythm and meaning at once. If they follow the pattern of the verse, they risk confusing the audience, who are less familiar with the sense of the words. If they pause to emphasize the meanings, they lose the rhythm of the verse. Here, on the Elizabethan stage, you have a harmony of performance and understanding that will never again quite be matched in respect of any of these great writers.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

“So, as long as you can get enough to eat, and can avoid all the various lethal infections, the dangers of childbirth, lead poisoning, and the extreme violence, you should live a long time.
All you have to worry about are the doctors.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity, and not as the passing shapes that we may glimpse every day in a looking glass, which then are gone forever.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“Collectively they remind us that history is much more than an education process. Understanding the past is a matter of experience as well as knowledge, a striving to make spiritual, emotional, poetic, dramatic, and inspirational connections with our forebears.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveller's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“In this new century, people are all divided and unsatisfied, hoping that God will smile on them personally.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“The last day I was here, in eighteen forty-three, was the only time since the plague when we were not at war.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time

“Ladies may have reading parties in the gardens of aristocratic houses, being read to as they sit on the grass surrounded by flowers and trees.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“There are considerable complexities attached to other measures. It is not so much that they vary as that they may be differently interpreted, according to what it is you are trying to measure. A foot in length is the same as your modern foot of 12 inches but if you are measuring cloth then you use the ell, normally 45 inches—but 27 inches if the cloth is Flemish. Probably the most complicated measures are those involving liquids. A gallon of wine is not the same volume as a gallon of ale. A standard hogshead contains 63 wine-gallons or 52.5 ale-gallons. Except that there is no such thing as a standard hogshead; there is a standard for wine, another for ale, and a third for beer (which is imported). If you are buying beer in London, a hogshead amounts to 54 ale-gallons; if you are buying ale, it amounts to 48.”
― Ian Mortimer, The Time Traveler's Guide to Medieval England: A Handbook for Visitors to the Fourteenth Century

“So much dung, filth, and entrails of dead beasts and other corruptions is cast into ditches, rivers and other waterways, and many other places, within about and near to the cities, boroughs and towns of the realm… that the air is greatly corrupted and infected and many maladies and other intolerable diseases do daily happen…’64 They ordered fines of £20 to be levied on all those who had not remedied the situation within a year, and passed the responsibility for keeping the streets clean to local officers.”
― Ian Mortimer, Henry IV: The Righteous King