The Time Traveller's Guide To Elizabethan England

[poliphilo]

Ian Mortimer's Elizabethan England is all plague, famine, crime, cruelty, religious intolerance, misogyny and child abuse. I tumbled to what he was doing when he represented the however-many it-was compulsory saints days as something imposed on a groaning populace by the lordly church without mentioning that they also served as jolly holidays.  If you cherry-pick your facts and relentlessly accentuate the negative you can make any society seem hellish-  and that includes our own (God save you) even though we do possess the flush toilets and electric lights the Elizabethans suffered without.

Comments

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

They did have a flush toilet! As invented by Sir John Harington, the Queen's godson, translator of Orlando Furioso, writer of epigrams ("Treason doth never prosper, / What's the reason? / For if it prosper / None dare call it treason"), and general court goofball. He wrote about it in A New Discourse upon a Stale Subject: The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1586) [Ajax = a jakes, geddit?].

Unfortunately he forgot to invent the u-bend, so it didn't really take off.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes. Of course. I remember seeing a reconstruction of the Harington loo at the lavatory museum in Stoke.

Harington wrote that? I never knew. It's one of my favourite epigrams.

[davesmusictank.livejournal.com]

I have his book in paperback which i have yet to read, as well as his Tie Traveller's Guide To Medieval England

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I wonder if the books are as dour and grim as the TV programme?

[moth-wingthane.livejournal.com]

I didn't get to watch the programme yet but I have recorded it. I'm feeling as though I might be better off just deleting it.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Give it a whirl. I found it tendentious but, all the same, it told me things I didn't know.