The Time Traveller's Guide to Elizabethan England

We think of Queen Elizabeth I's reign (1558-1603) as a golden age. But what was it actually like to live in Elizabethan England ?

If you could travel to the past and walk the streets of London in the 1590s, where would you stay ? What would you eat ? What would you wear ? Would you really have a sense of it being a glorious age ? And if so, how would that glory sit alongside the vagrants, diseases, violence, sexism and famine of the time ?

In this book Ian Mortimer reveals a country in which life expectancy is in the early thirties, people still starve to death and Catholics are persecuted for their faith. Welcome to a country that is, in all its contradictions, the very crucible of the modern world.