As soon as you start to think of the past happening (as opposed to it having happened), a new way of writing history becomes possible. The very idea of travelling to the middle ages allows us to consider the past in greater breadth – to discover more about the problems which the English have had to face, the delights they found in life, and what they themselves were like. As with a historical biography, a travel book about a past age allows us to see its inhabitants in a sympathetic way: not as a series of graphs showing fluctuations in grain yields or life expectancy but as an investigation into the sensations of being alive in a different time. Generally the only opportunity a writer has to describe a lost world is through the medium of historical fiction but there is no reason why a non-fiction writer should not present his material in just as direct and creative a manner. It does not make the facts themselves less true to put them in the present tense rather than the past.

Medieval England is potentially a vast destination for the historical traveller. The four centuries between the Norman invasion and the advent of printing see huge changes in society. The ‘middle ages’ are exactly that – a series of ages – and a Norman knight would find himself as out of place preparing for a late fourteenth-century battle as an eighteenth-century prime minister would if he found himself electioneering today. So, then, it has to be just one century. The key reason for picking fourteenth-century England as a destination is that it probably comes closest to the popular conception of what is ‘medieval’, with its chivalry, jousts, etiquette, art and architecture. It could even be considered the epitome of the middle ages, containing civil wars, battles against the neighbouring kingdoms of Scotland and France, sieges, outlaws, monasticism, cathedral building, the preaching of friars, the Flagellants, famine, the Peasants’ Revolt and the Black Death.

Many types of source material have been used in putting this book together. Obviously contemporary primary sources are the most important. The latter include unpublished and published chronicles, letters, household accounts, poems and advisory texts. Equally obviously, secondary sources have hugely informed me when compiling this book, as indeed they have throughout my career. In addition, I have used contemporary illuminated manuscripts which show daily life in ways which the texts do not always describe. A wealth of architectural evidence is available in the extant buildings of fourteenth-century England – the houses as well as the castles, churches and monasteries – and the ever-expanding literature about them offers even more information. In some cases we have documents which compliment the architectural record, building accounts and surveys, for example. We have an increasing array of archaeological reports, from excavated tools, shoes and clothes to the pips of berries found in medieval latrines, and fish bones on the water-logged sites of ancient ponds. We have a plethora of more usual archaeological artefacts too, such as glazed jugs and coins. The extent to which a good museum can give you an insight into how life was lived in the middle ages is restricted only by your own curiosity and imagination.

But most of all, it needs to be said that the very best evidence of what it was like to be alive in the fourteenth century is an awareness of what it is like to be alive in any age, and that includes today. Our sole context for understanding all the historical data we might ever gather is our own life experience. We might eat differently, be taller, and live longer, and we might look at jousting as being unspeakably dangerous and not at all a sport, but we know what grief is, and what love, fear, pain, ambition and hunger are. It is important to remember that what we have in common with the past is no less worthy of note than those things which make us different. Consider a historian in seven hundred years’ time trying to explain to his contemporaries what it was like to live in the early twenty-first century. Maybe he or she will have some books to rely on, some photographs, perhaps some digitised film, the remains of our houses and the odd council rubbish pit to dig up, but overall he or she will concentrate on what it is to be human. W.H. Auden once suggested that to understand your own country you need to have lived in at least two others. One can say something similar for periods of time: to understand your own century you need to have come to terms with at least two others. The key to learning something about the past might be a ruin or an archive but the means whereby we may understand it is – and always will be – us ourselves.