Fresh from his acclaimed tour through 14th-century England, Ian Mortimer travels forward 200 years in his time machine. Setting us down in the reign of Elizabeth I, he aims to recreate, as he puts it, "the reality of the past", to help the reader understand more vividly the doubts, hopes, customs and practices of daily Elizabethan life. His choice of age is a shrewd one: as well as being populated by instantly recognisable individuals Shakespeare, Sir Francis Drake and "Gloriana" herself it is a world in many respects distanced from that of his previous book. In the late 16th century people understood the world differently and, thanks in no small part to Elizabeth's religious settlement of 1559, they understood God differently too.
Like its predecessor, this is largely a work of social history. Leading us through the Elizabethan landscape, Mortimer adopts the same conversational style, made intimate by the second-person asides that direct our gaze through town and city streets, chambers, closets and theatres, moving fluently across the vast disparities in wealth and living standards that separated the richest and the poorest. Ranging from England's landscape and its people, to how to behave and what to eat, drink and wear, the book presents a well-chosen accumulation of social, cultural and economic detail.
Mortimer underscores the changes, big and small, that make Elizabethan England distinctive: a burgeoning population, especially in towns and cities; the outlandish fashions of the well-off; the increasing ubiquity of glass windows, the arrival of tobacco (recommended by one enthusiast as a preventive "against rheums and other diseases engendered in the lungs") and the announcement of the first public lottery. He charts, too, the state's efforts to assert its control, legislating on everything from Gypsies to treason. This, after all, was an age in which the Elizabethan state was, or felt itself to be, under threat. As Mortimer points out, for Catholics, life became increasingly hard throughout the reign: "Just 35 years see Catholicism change from being the respectable norm to the religion of a persecuted minority."
Mortimer has an eye for telling anecdotes, and in these, his book is at its best. He relishes the inadvertently entertaining fulminations of the Puritan Philip Stubbes, who in another time would surely have been writing indignant letters to his local newspaper. "Is this murdering play now an exercise for the Sabbath day?" he thunders of football, which admittedly was a rather more violent game then than it is now. Equally striking are the theatricals of the highwayman Gamaliel Ratsey who, on the point of being hanged, saw heavy stormclouds approaching and stretched out his last words long enough to ensure that the attendant officials were thoroughly drenched.
Mortimer is at pains to point out how hard life remained for women, particularly and inevitably those of the lower ranks. To cite one of a number of examples, a servant called Joan Somers is raped and then accused of the sin of fornication. At the other end of the social spectrum, he remarks on the queen's habit of inadvertently being found in her underclothes when male ambassadors were admitted to the royal presence.
At times, however, the detail can become overwhelming, with page-long tables and quotations following each other in rapid succession: at these points, this feels more like a sourcebook or digest than a guide, and its aim of placing the 21st-century reader in the Elizabethan environment becomes obscured. What's more, in aiming to define the particular qualities of Elizabethan England which, he claims, is both an age of exceptional individual creativity and brutality Mortimer runs the risk of historical anachronism.
He also on occasion ringfences the period too closely, contrasting it with the "middle ages" a distinction that Elizabethans themselves would not have recognised and there is a tension between his desire to place the reader in the moment and to pin down the qualities that broadly define the age.
Certain claims for Elizabethan innovation do not ring true: the rich often drank out of glasses (as opposed to tankards) well before Elizabeth's reign, while they had long before abandoned the great hall for the comfort of smaller and less draughty chambers. Similarly, the early 15th-century gardener tending the ornate arbours and alleys of the "Rosamondesbower" at the royal palace of Woodstock might have had something to say about Mortimer's claim that formal gardens were an Elizabethan development.
In the "envoi" at the book's end, Mortimer interprets the age as one of opportunity, in which many of the profound changes in society "are made by individuals" he cites the likes of Shakespeare, Elizabeth's righthand-man William Cecil, Lord Burghley and the queen herself something which, he claims, is impossible in our own institution-bound 21st-century world. The book doesn't quite convey, though, why the Elizabethan age should have been quite so distinctly individual-friendly if indeed it was.
None of which should obscure that Mortimer has again written a vivid and highly entertaining book. Echoing the view of the social historian Christopher Dyer that to know of past societies is to understand ourselves, he has found an attractive formula with which to present the lives of ordinary people in history, and to bring history to life.
Thomas Penn's Winter King is published by Penguin.
