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Ian Mortimer transports viewers back to Elizabethan England and reveals, in vivid detail, a living, breathing Tudor world. Viewers learn how ordinary Tudor housewives turned plants into medicine, how the middle classes kept themselves clean using linen cloths, how the poor made pottage, how cooks of the rich devised recipes for new ingredients, and how Tudors learned to read and write.

Although most people have images of courtiers in fine clothes and lavish palaces, the reality is that most Elizabethans are poor. What is it like to live in a dank, smoke-filled hovel in the countryside? How will you cope in a world of darkness? What will you eat, how will you travel, what work will you get? How can you survive on as little as fourpence a day? 

Ian also looks at the religious controversies threatening to pull the country apart, as well as revealing an astoundingly cruel Elizabethan England, not just to animals but also to women and children. Plus, there are surprises along the way. For example, did you know that witchcraft is legal - and that even the church employs witches?