Through the Windows of an Ordinary House (VCH Lecture)

Join Dr Ian Mortimer on a journey through English history as seen through a single, ordinary building as he ponders how history would look from one consistent point of view?

Our national history is a patchwork quilt of stories – the North in the Industrial Revolution, the London of Samuel Pepys’s diary, and so on, but from the perspective of one building; local interests would be blended with national ones, and social and political history would appear indistinguishable. Some things would loom larger; others would appear locally less significant. We would see our past differently.

This talk is an experiment along these lines. It draws from the forthcoming book in which Dr Mortimer examines how life would have appeared to the people who lived in his house in Moretonhampstead, on the edge of Dartmoor, from the Middle Ages to now. It shows the importance of not dividing local and national history, nor separating social and political developments, but seeing every aspect of life in concert, to gain the fullest picture.

Dr Ian Mortimer is a historian and author of the Sunday Times bestselling Time Traveller's Guides - to Medieval England, Elizabethan England, Restoration Britain and Regency Britain, as well as four critically acclaimed medieval biographies, a prize-winning novel and several other titles.

This talk is the annual Victoria County History lecture held at The Museum of Somerset.

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