Juliet Barker. 1381. The Year of the Peasants' Revolt.

A nicely written piece of historical fantasy, in the spirit of Game of Thrones. Her late 14th century English commoners live to their late fifties despite three large waves of bubonic plague and staggering death rate at childbirth, eat hi-protein diets straight from a London supermarket, understand the connection between infection and bodily hygiene and some even have indoor plumbing. Did I forget domestic servants saving to buy stone houses? Strict enforcement of municipal edicts in an almost illiterate society? She herself mentions that an ability to read a psalm by heart was considered a sufficient evidence of clerical vocation.  Barker announces an entirely different popular image of the Middle Ages "a nineteenth-century invention."

There is little explanation how this squares with (a well-documented) meager yields of crops (1:3-1:5) in Medieval England and other mainstream economic histories. If there was such a disparity in the living conditions between Late Medieval British Isles and the rest of the world (including lands with much more temperate climes), what is the particular reason?

Her book can be read as a page-turning novel but given her fast and loose treatment of facts (an army of 36,000 French facing 6,000 English at Agincourt based on a single line of pro-British historian) I cannot say how accurate it is.