Elizabeth's London by Lisa Picard

It's nice to think about the past, but can we really know what it was like to live in the past? Can fit our modern selves into a mindset informed by the past and discover what it was like to live back then? Can we leave what we in the modern era know and find a past sensibility inside us?

Lisa Picard's "Elizabeth's London" attempts to do just that, by breaking down life in London into sixteen parts, each one taking us further into the life of the city, and the people living in it. To start with, the History of the city, from it's pre-Roman forbears to its Roman incarnation, Londinium. From there, it is a short trip to Elizabethan London itself.

Our introduction to the city comes the same way that a foreign visitor would enter London in Elizabeth's time: up the River Thames. Each detail in the book is taken from contemporary accounts written by both Londoners and foreign visitors to the city, so each step of the way is presented in vivid detail.

From the River itself, we are taken to the water supply for the city and where it came from. The Thames still had fish in it at the time, so it was not so polluted as it later became. From there, we go on to the main buildings, and what the streets looked like, What the interiors may have looked like, and the gardens and open spaces in homes and in parks.

From there, on to the people. Illnesses and Medicine. Foreigners (including Blackamoors and Lascars), Clothes and beauty, Food and drink, Family, marriage Sex, and children (not necessarily in that order), Education, Amusements, Government and Guilds, Crime, Punishment and the Law, The Poor and Religion, Superstition and the Occult (with Witchcraft and Magic).

By the end of the book, you can go some small way to finding out how the people of Elizabethan London viewed their world, and the reactions of foreign visitors to the city and the people who lived there.

This book is absolutely jam-packed with information. I found the section on Education the most interesting, mainly because the Elizabethans still did math in Roman letters. If you have M times DC, what is the answer? We can do this because we can translate the Roman numerals into Arabic numbers, and then back again after we have derived our answers. But the Elizabethan Englishman didn't have that luxury. And that gives you an idea of how different things are today!

Any person who is really interested in Elizabethan times will really enjoy this book, as will students of history and those interested in times past. Enlivened with plenty of pictures, you might be able to transport yourself back to the past via this book. (By the way, the answer would be XC, the X and C having a line over them, or 90 thousand.)