Pick of the day: The Time Traveller’s Guide To Elizabethan England
9pm, BBC2
What did folk eat, how far did they travel, what work was available and was it possible to survive on four old pence a day?
Although most of us have images of courtiers in fine clothes swanning around lavish palaces, the reality is that most Elizabethans lived in poverty.
In the first of this new three-parter, Dr Ian Mortimer examines what it must have been like to live in a dank, smoke-filled, rural hovel.
What did folk eat, how far did they travel, what work was available and was it possible to survive on four old pence a day?
Mortimer also looks at the religious controversies of the time that threatened to pull the country apart and the astonishingly cruelty accepted as the norm in Elizabethan England.
