"Superbly lively and filled with telling anecdote." (Toby Clements The Big Issue in the North)"Amazing" (Alison Weir)"He has a novelist's eye for detail, and his portrait of an England in which sheep are the size of dogs, 30-year-old women are regarded as so much "winter forage", and green vegetables widely held to be poisonous has something of the hallucinatory quality of science-fiction" (Daily Telegraph)"[Mortimer] sets out to re-enchant the 14th Century, taking us by the hand through a landscape furnished with jousting knights, revolting peasants and beautiful ladies in wimples. It is Monty Python and the Holy Grail with footnotes, and, my goodness it is fun... The result of this careful blend of scholarship and fancy is a jaunty journey through the 14th Century, one that wriggles with the stuff of everyday life" (Guardian)"This is not only an unusual book, but a thoroughly engaging one" (Literary Review)

Explains what life was like in the most immediate way, through taking readers, to the middle ages, and showing various things from the horrors of leprosy and war to the ridiculous excesses of roasted larks and haute couture.