Snapshots of the Middle Ages in the Canterbury pilgrims

What does the term ‘medieval’ mean to you? Most of us have some idea of the Dark Ages, the centuries roughly spanning the departure of the Romans and the early, or indeed late, Middle Ages (which Ian Mortimer extends to the Renaissance). For those brought up on school history, or who revere the nous of the Romans, it was a time when civilisation declined. But the ‘Dark Age’ moniker is increasingly accepted as unfair, with historians arguing hotly and convincingly that the period was anything but dark. Seb Falk’s recent The Light Ages showed that major scientific exploration was under way in the late Middle Ages. Following on from this, Mortimer now explains why the period matters, and why it was once overlooked.

For a deft conjuring of the time, he points us to Chaucer’s ‘motley group of characters making pilgrimage from the Tabard Inn in Southwark to Canterbury’: a knight, a reeve, three nuns, a businesswoman from Bath, a prioress, a friar, a merchant, a scholar, a sergeant-at-law, a seller of pardons and a miller, among others. These figures help to encapsulate the diversity of the late-medieval world, even if they are just snapshots of the vast stretch of time from 1000-1600 – the date range Mortimer uses to assert his thesis.

One of his key contentions is that we now define success and progress in the past in terms of technological development – considering, for example, the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century to be one of the greatest transformative periods:

As a society, we worship technology. You could say that faith these days is not so much a conscious belief in a divine being as a subconscious one in technology – In Technology We Trust.

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But his descriptions of the creativity and innovation taking place in the Middle Ages in architecture, construction, art and literature – let alone the sheer speed at which such changes were happening – leave one staggered.