If I was to time travel, how far back could I go and still have a conversation with someone in my high street?

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I am sorry if I have asked this before, it is one of those things that I think about every now and then, but have no idea what the answer is.

My home town is now a West London suburb and has a quite long history.

I'm fairly sure that if I travelled back 100 years, I would still be able to understand the language of people around me, maybe even 200 years, though I imagine the accent would be a heck of a lot different to nowadays.

300 years ago? I doubt if I could understand much of what was being said.

I have no evidence to base my thoughts upon, so I was wondering if anyone out there could give a rough estimate as to how far back I could travel, and still understand people.

Thanks for the correction HectorVector . I would have no idea, was merely assuming what I read in Wiki to be true.

Which is probably not a wise thing to do.

You can read some very odd stuff on Wiki sometimes. The description of Mexicans had been deleted by the time my brother went to look, but the entry requirements for girls wishing to attend DH's old school were up there for days.

The thing I have always wondered is what you would do when you had traveled back in time? I have very few historically transferrable skills! Considered cooking, but would sure I couldn't cope with a wood fired oven, coarse flour, wringing things necks etc...something medical would be great if you could take a bag of stuff with you (or even have a few packs of ibuprofen in your pocket!), I'm sure my sewing skills would not be up to scratch and my secretary hand wouldn't pass muster. I think the folk that would be best off would be those who could play the fiddle - but even then, could you lay your hand on an eighteenth century instrument and still beguile/make money?

Wet nurse. possibly my only historically transferable skill...

Rich man's mistress. :)

Is it true that Cornish Welsh and Breton are all mutually intelligible?

Up to a point, I think. They were once all the same language, or very closely related, but as the Saxons encroached and cut the Cornish off from the Welsh, and caused some Celts to flee to Brittany, the three peoples- and their languages- became separate. So I think, during the intervening 1400 years, the languages evolved separately quite a lot.

Speakers of the above were known as "P" Celts, as opposed to speakers of Irish/ Manx/Scottish Gaelic, who were known as "Q" Celts. That's because a hard "C" in Irish (no, I don't know why they're not called "C" Celts!) would become a hard "P" in Cornish. St. Ciaran crossed the sea from Ireland to Cornwall...and became St. Piran!

The last "true" Cornish speaker was Dolly Pentreath, from Mousehole, indeed in the 18thC. Although I thought the "trueness", as it were, was that she was the last not to speak English. But I might be wrong there.

No, I'm going with wet nurse too!

I often think I'd have survived better in the past than I do now. I am a frustrated peasant.

Yes, I think if you could avoid the sexual or general physical expolitation you would be ok. Best thing you could do would be to smuggle enough gold with you to set up a nice little business/be indenpendent as a "widow" and then give nice, equality driven work to a few friendly drudges...

....But I always imagine it would happen without you being prepared for it - ref to plots of any number of 60s/70s childrens books!

I've bought Doomsday Book on Kindle, as someone mentioned it above.

It's AMAZING! I love reading the parts where they describe how the modern (well, slightly futuristic) historian got into character by doing things like ripping off the tops of her nails so it looked like she did manual labour all the time, growing her hair long enough and having a synapse-interpreter for the language (so as she learnt Middle English, it could translate for her more efficiently).

Ooh, so pleased you're enjoying it zizzo

I found the 'present day' bits a little odd but loved the time-travelly part (which is most of it).

Make sure you have plenty of hankies ready for the end though.

Yeah, the contemporary parts are strange - not sure when the book was written but it sounds like they're in the 1960s, almost using telegrams and messengers and phone exchanges, not 2056

Oh no! Sad endings stay in my mind the longest!

Very vivid accounts of the period she travels to - especially language.

I will say no more as don't want to spoil for those who haven't yet read it.

I thought she had travelled to the 1000s at first when her interpreter failed and I saw all the language written down, and the names seem like something out of the 1000s...

Especially Uchtred, which I thought would have been extinct by the 1300s!

But I'm 75% of the way through now and pretty sure that's not the twist.

Doomsday is fiction?

Smuggling gold is a good idea, but I don't actually have any apart from my wedding ring.

How long could I live off the proceeds of the sale of my (not especially valuable) wedding ring in the middle ages?

It would probably be best to take something that's relatively cheap now but used to be worth a great deal Peppercorns? Nutmeg or cinnamon? Tulip bulbs if you could be sure of ending up in a time when they were stupidly prized? Would have to be something light and easy to carry and non-perishable, so you could hide it under your skirts to avoid being robbed.
Then you could sell them and live off the proceeds.

peking, Uhtred (same name, different spelling) definitely still around as a name in c. 1300, if that's what you mean? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uhtred_(Benedictine_theologian)

I think they'd have loved us for basic maths. My brother told me that in Renaissance Italy, banking houses kept some mathematical processes as trade secrets! I reckon anyone with a GCSE would have been like a genius.

Peppercorns an excellent idea.

The book I mentioned earlier, The Sterkarm Handshake, turns out to be v interesting in relation to this thread. One of the 16th c people comes to the 21st and meets a local man who makes sense of his language by comparing it to the local dialect words his grandfather used to use.

btw, tulip bulbs perhaps not much use because how could you prove what sort of tulip they were, other than by planting them?

Wouldn't people at the time have had exactly the same problem, though? And you could plant it, let it flower, let everyone marvel, then sell.

Yes so you would only buy from a dealer you trusted, rather than a weird person with a funny accent, I think.
If you've got the time you could wait for it to flower. It makes things a bit complicated though.

Oh, yes ... hadn't thought of that. Hmm.

I think there was a time in Dutch history when people were indeed stupid enough to buy tulip bulbs from anyone, then the market crashed and they ended up losing fortunes and eating then. This is the version I learned at school. It may or may not be true.

Or try the Wiki version