THOUGHTS ON...

This month, Diane Lindsay uses the pages of her favourite history guides to imagine herself in the shoes of her 14th-century ancestors, and wonders, exactly how did they like their breakfast cooked…?

Breakfast in the 1300s. Diane Lindsay reflects on the feasting habits of her Medieval ancestors at that most important meal of the day

Excuse the smell, the mud on my boots and the straw in my hair. I’m just in from a trip to the 14th century and I’m tired, cold and when I’ve had a cup of tea I’m having a shower. Plodding back home along the Fosse Way it took some head scratching to find my own house; I knew it was hereabouts but even with the newish Norman church opposite as landmark it took a while to part the mists and pull back the ivy of the past. I wasn’t entirely sorry when the medieval one-storey hovel faded back through time and my nice racing green front door with brass fixings emerged, though as I closed it, the church clock bonged the time, I could still smell the woodsmoke from a neighbour’s chimney and beneath that the rural pong of early muck spreading. Not everything changes.

I did get the ironing done however, and very reluctantly told Alexa to ‘Close my audiobook’, Ian Mortimer’s The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England. Subtitled ‘a handbook for visitors to the fourteenth century’, it’s the third time I’ve gone on this particular journey and it never fails to entertain, surprise and shock. This time it also pretty much moved me to tears, listening to a writer with infinite capacity to make history leap off the page and smell, sound and act like an esquire, a jester, a juggler, a peasant, a housewife or in fact any one of the ancestors we all must have had, even if we haven’t discovered them yet and possibly never will.

Without romantic notions and sentimentality, Mortimer’s view of history and by association, social and family history, is very like my own. Yes, ‘the past is another country; they do things differently there’ as L.P. Hartley puts it in The Go-between, but where he is referring to lost innocence, it’s hardly living history. Mortimer’s Time Travel guides* don’t discount academic evidence, just as we must not do in our research. But his premise is that real lives did exist in time and place, living, breathing, fighting, loving, dying, in hope and fear, joy as well as sadness, and there is no reason we can’t understand those lives through our own curiosity and imagination. In other words, to quote Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mocking-bird, ‘You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.’ I would of course add ‘her’!

To me, in family history as in life, it isn’t the differences which allow us to know our ancestors through time, but the things we have in common. Mortimer cites the nameless 14th-century writer of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, who not only brings myth powerfully to life but also writes movingly of the death of his tiny daughter, ‘a pearl without a flaw’.

Alas! I lost her in a garden, Through grass to ground she fell away.

If ever we wondered whether our ancestors mourned their many lost children as profoundly as we do…

My current favourite image is Geoffrey Chaucer’s poor widow woman in The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, whose fare was:

Milk and brown bread – in which she found no lack,

Fried bacon and sometimes an egg or two.

Having got up late today (a privilege not afforded to many of my ancestors, to be sure) that’s exactly what my husband and I had for our missed breakfast/late lunch/early dinner. I find that extraordinarily cheering. I can’t quite join up to a 14th-century ancestor even on my earliest line, but of course I had one. I suspect mine was a flawed priest clinging onto a cosy hospitaller’s living up the road in Lutterworth, but I’m unlikely to prove it. It’s so distant, he could also be one of yours. Think of that! I wonder if he liked his eggs fried on both sides and his bacon crispy enough to snap in half. I can only guess, but I’d eat my hat if he wasn’t called William.

*Also explore the Time Traveller’s Guides to Elizabethan England, Regency Britain and Restoration Britain by the same author.

About the author

Diane Lindsay has been addicted to family and local history for more years than she cares to admit, still teaches it to anyone who will listen, and often slips it cheekily into her creative writing class. She has enough brick walls to keep her going for many years and plans to live long enough to knock down every one. She finds it very hard to take herself too seriously.