Why the most important years in history were from 1347 to 1352

A group of retired Somerset farmers were sitting about in the early 1960s, so Ian Mortimer’s story goes, debating which farming invention had most changed their lives. Was it the tractor? Fertilisers? Pesticides? Silos? No, they agreed, it was the Wellington boot.

Mortimer tells this old story to illustrate that ‘it is not always the most dramatic changes that make a difference to our lives’. And for all the wars, plagues, renaissances and revolutions documented in this lively survey of 1,000 years of western history, they are outweighed by quieter forms of change: the rise of peace in the 11th century, for instance, or that of record-keeping in the 13th. Later, there are all the ‘-isations’ — urban, industrial, liberal, global.

In other hands, this could have been a grindingly worthy book, but as you’d expect of the author of the bestselling Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval England, it’s rather fun. We learn that buttons arrived in the 1330s, and that, when William of Rubruck finally made it to the Mongol capital of Karakorum in 1254, he found the Hungarian-born son of an Englishman waiting for him, along with the nephew of a Norman bishop. Mortimer turns a decent phrase, too: ‘Whereas in 1001 it was rare to see any priests,’ he observes, ‘in 1100 it was hard to get away from them.’

Unusually, the statistics are often more colourful here than the anecdotes, some of which, perhaps inevitably, have been round the block rather. Consider the Black Death, which killed some 45 per cent of Englishmen and women in seven months. To replicate that ‘intensity of killing’, Mortimer suggests, ‘You’d be dropping an atomic bomb every day on a different city for a year and three months.’