How to survive a day in the 14th century

Do you think you'd have been able to survive a day in 14th century England? In this episode of the History Extra podcast, Ian Mortimer puts that to the test. Speaking to Charlotte Vosper, he guides us through a typical day in the 1300s, and reveals why it would have been so difficult to stay alive. Today we are immersing ourselves in the 14th century and we're going to be discussing how to survive a day in England in the 1300s. We thought a great way to do this would be to think about how people experience medieval England through their senses.

So, Ian, imagine I've just woken up in an ordinary English home in the 14th century. What is the very first thing I'd feel or sense? It has to be said, it depends which end of the 14th century you're talking about being ordinary, because the living standards changed remarkably over the course of the 14th century, principally because of a certain thing right in the middle of it called the Black Death, which I'm sure we're going to talk about later. But if you're waking up in an ordinary English home in, let's say, 1301, the start of the century, you're probably going to be sleeping on an earth floor, on a straw mattress around a fire in the middle of the hall in an ordinary house. Yes, people of wealth and prestige status were living in chambers, in manor houses and castles, but your ordinary working man and woman were sleeping on the floor of their hall around the fire.

And at the end of the century, as you're getting into 1390s, 1400, those same people The grand great grandchildren probably of the people in 1301, they'd have been living in an upstairs chamber. So most houses by the end of the 14th century had upstairs chambers as well as ground floor halls, and people had started sleeping upstairs. So things are all getting a little bit more civilized and a little more private and fewer wisps of straw in your ear as you wake up. Yeah, you definitely don't want a bit of straw in your ear when you wake up first thing in the morning.

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