The Year 1000
by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger
(Little, Brown and Company, 1999)
Ink was a treacly liquid in those days. You crushed the oak galls in rainwater or vinegar, thickened it with gum Arabic, then added iron salts to colour the acid.
Page 3.
Here is the earliest surviving example of an Englishman lay got life in a daily routine, juggling tie, the schedule of the earth, and the life of the spirit.
Page 5.
If you were to meet an Englishman in the year 1000, the first thing that would strike you would be how tall he was - very much the size of anyone alive today.
Page 9.
It was during the centuries that followed the first millennium that overpopulation and overcrowding started to affect the stature and well-being of western Europeans.
Page 9.
It was a world without buttons, which had yet to be invented. Clothes were still fastened with clasps and thongs.
Page 10.
Most adults died in their forties, and fifty-year-olds were considered venerable indeed.
Page 10.
Compared to farming technologies in many other parts of the world at that time, the wheeled and iron-bladed plough of northwestern Europe was supercharged, enabling just two men to tear up a whole acre of soil with the help of the beasts which not only provided the “horsepower,” but enriched the fields with their manure.
Page 11.
The wheeled plough was the foundation of life for English people living in the year 1000. … It was the reason why, by the turn of the millennium, England was able to support a population of at least a million souls.
Page 11.
The challenge of how to formulate a working system of dates had consumed the energies of the brightest minds for centuries, with every culture and religion devising its own system of reckoning, and in Christendom confusion centred particularly on the timing of the Church’s most important festival - Easter.
Pages 11-12.
The Irish had been Christians long before the English. St. Patrick had established his church in Ireland a century and a half before Pope Gregory’s envoy Augustine arrived in Canterbury to found the English church, and it had ben missionaries from Ireland, not Kent, who had Christianised Scotland and the north of England.
Page 13.
If any country worked to dates we would recognise today, it was England, and that was because of the Venerable Bede, who popularised the use of the Anno domini system through his famous work De Temporum Ratione, “On the Reckoning of Time.”
Page 14.
Good and evil were living companions to people in the year 1000. When someone was said to have the Devil in him, people took it quite literally.
Page 16.
People identified with the personalities and quirks of saints, as today they feel they know soap opera stars.
Page 18.
The God of the Middle Ages was a God who intervened actively in daily life. … So one function of worship was to secure divine intervention on your own behalf.
Page 18.
The Anglo-Saxons knew of three continents - Europe, Africa, and Asia - and they also knew about India.
Page 19.
Heaven was visualised as being something like the royal court. God sat there in judgement like the king, and paid most attention to those who could catch His ear. On earth it was the great warriors and magnates who enjoyed that access. In heaven it was the saints.
Page 19.
Since there was no formal process of canonisation as there is today. A beloved local abbot or abbess could become a saint in their locality within a few years of their death.
Page 22.
Women who possessed sufficient strength of character were able to claim power and exercise authority in the England of the year 1000.
Page 26.
Skull measurements show that the brain capacity of a man or woman living in the year 1000 was exactly the same as out own. These were not people we should patronise. … the ideal type to choose as companions on a desert island, since they were skilful with their hands, and they could turn their hands to anything.
Page 26.
A well-pruned plant yields more than a wild one. So just as the wheeled plough embodied millennial man’s mastery of the soil, the skilful pruning of branches demonstrated his ability to create a profitable working partnership with god’s bushes, vines, and trees.
Page 28.
By the year 1000, most of the towns and villages of modern England had been settled by the sea-farers, who turned out to be good settlers and farmers.
Page 28.
Between 450 and 600 the Anglo-Saxons took over most of the area which corresponds to modern England, and they referred to the dispossessed Britons as wealisc, meaning “foreign” - from which we get the word Welsh.
Page 29.
There are absolutely no swear words or obscenities in Anglo-Saxon English, at least as the language has come down to us in the documents composed by its monkish scribes. The Anglo-axons could swear to do something, or could swear by something, but there is nor record of them swearing at anything at all.
Page 30.
By the year 1000 Alfred had been dead for a century, but he ranked alongside the Venerable Bede as a shaper of England’s developing identity.
Page 32.
By the year 1000, a hybrid language had been stirred together by the integration of the two great waves of invaders, and a common tongue existed that was at least roughly understood in every corner of the country.
Page 34.
Language helped and reflected political unification.
Page 34.
The cultivator and his family were the backbone of the land.
Page 39.
It was the quietness of life in a medieval English village that would most strike a visitor from today.
Pages 39-40.
Of all the varieties of modern pollution, noise is the most insidious.
Page 40.
By the end of the first millennium almost every modern English village existed and bore its modern name.
Page 41.
The village where he lived was the beginning and almost the end of the Englishman’s world. He knew that he lived in Engla-lond, and he probably knew the name of the king whose crude image was stamped on the coins that were starting to play quite a role in the village economy.
Page 42.
The average Anglo-Saxon could probably recognise every duck, chicken, and pig in his village and knew whom it belonged to - as he knew everything about his neighbours’ lives.
Page 43.
In the year 1000, the same Christian names were often passed down traditionally inside families, but there were no surnames. There was not yet any need for them.
Page 43.
Prior to 1066, virtually all the documentary sources - wills, land deeds, and the literature of the day - clearly show that the basic underpinning of the rural economy in several parts of England was a class of workers who can only be described as slaves.
Page 45.
The purpose of war from the fifth to the tenth centuries was as much to capture bodies as it was to capture land.
Page 45.
Bristol was a slave port, trading with the Viking merchants based in Ireland. According to contemporary chronicles, eleventh-century Dublin operated the largest slave market in western Europe.
Page 46.
In the year 1000 very few people were free in the sense that we understand the word today. Almost everyone was beholden to someone more powerful than themselves.
Page 47.
In the year 1000 people could not imagine themselves without a protector. You had a lord in heaven ad you needed a lord on earth.
Page 47.
It is a late twentieth-century innovation to scorn the concept of “service.”
Page 48.
The great English churchman of the time was Wulfstan of York, the Billy Graham of the year 1000, whose fire-and-brimstone sermons had folk trembling.
Page 48.
Following Bede’s calculations, the English Catholic church celebrate Eater on the first Sunday following thew first full moon after the spring equinox.
Page 53.
People dated their lives by the years when the land and weather failed.
Page 55.
Fasting was the church’s way of harnessing hunger to spiritual purposes, and Easter came t the end of the forty-day fast of Lent. Occurring when it did, in the final months of winter when the barns and granaries were getting bare, there was a sense in which Lent made a virtue of necessity.
Page 57.
All Anglo-Saxon animals were free range, and the Anglo-Saxons would have been shocked t the idea of ploughing land to produce animal feed. Ploughland was for feeding humans. So farm animals were lean and rangey, their meat containing three tines as much protein as fat. With modern, intensively reared animals that ration is often reversed.
Page 58.
The eating fork was not invented until the seventeenth century, and when you went to a feast you took your own knife.
Page 62.
Mead was the reveller’s drink of choice, according to the sagas. It was a supersweet, alcoholic beverage with quite a kick, brewed from the crushed refuse of honeycombs. Les common was wine - which was also less alcoholic.
Page 62.
Anglo-Saxon wine was kept in wooden barrels and leather flasks.
Page 62.
Most Anglo-Saxon wine a light and fruity, rather like Beaujolais nouveau today, consumed soon after the harvest, and only intended to last until the next harvest came round.
Page 62.
Ale was the drink of the Middle Ages, much safer to consume than water, since its boiling and brewing provided some sort of protection against contamination.
Page 63.
The ceremonial feast was the setting in which the Anglo-Saxon monarch displayed his power and dignity. The royal court was something like a circus, touring an annual round of locations in which it successively satisfied then exhausted its welcome.
Page 63.
In 1000 A.D., in fact, England enjoyed a prosperity and civilisation unmatched in northern Europe.
Page 67.
The earliest known date on any European coin is 1234 A.D.
Page 68.
England’s coinage was the most advanced in western Europe in the year 1000.
Page 68.
It was the Normans who first set about obliterating evidence of the robust native culture that existed in England be fore their arrival in 1066. … But it was the chaos that followed Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century which led to the worst destruction of all.
Page 71.
The Anglo-Saxons were clearly sheep-rearing folk.
Page 73.
The spinning wheel did not appear in Europe until the thirteenth century, but the had spindles and loom components regularly unearthed from Anglo-Saxon excavations suggest that wool-making must have ben a common household process.
Page 73.
The successive Viking waves of raiding out of Scandinavia in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries reflected scarcity and disorder at home.
Page 75.
Archaeological remains show no evidence of the Vikings wearing their fearsome horned helmets, which seem to be the imaginings of subsequent generations.
Page 77.
The invasion of 1066 is generally thought of as French, and that was certainly true in linguistic terms. But its roots and self-image went back to the Vikings.
Page 81.
In the year 1000 the forests were farmed like fields. Wood was the fuel of the times, and it was also the principal building material, the substance of choice for every sort of household implement and repair.
Page 85.
The Romans based their occupation of Britain around a few fortified and elegant urban communities, which were resorts and garrisons as much as they were towns. Living in a city, or civis, was the essence of Roman civilisation, and the barbarians who subdued Rome were literally “uncivilised” in that they were not city dwellers.
Page 86.
The classic definition of an Anglo-Saxon town was that it had a defensive wall or stockade, a mint, and a marketplace.
Page 87.
Most of the country towns of modern England originated in the tenth century. Roughly 10 percent of England’s population was living in towns by the year 1000, which meant that the country’s farming methods had developed the efficiency to produce a 10 percent surplus.
Page 87.
The development of town life was to hasten the development of family surnames, which, like street names, were often based on trades and occupations.
Page 90.
It was considerably easier to travel and to transport merchandise in the year 1000 over water than over land. It was not until the eighteenth century that European engineers constructed highways to match the roads over which the Romans had transported their legions so efficiently.
Pages 93-94.
Sea battles were always fought within sight of land.
Page 94.
Social theory in the year 1000 divided the community into those who worked (the peasants, traders, and craftsmen), those who fought and administered justice (the kings and lords), and those who prayed.
Page 103.The
chant was thew heartbeat of religious devotion in England in the year 1000. … The chanting of the liturgy was one of the centralising forces of Christendom.
Page 104.
Signing up for the monastic life meant saying goodbye forever to a full night’s sleep, since two hours after midnight was the time set for the night office.
Page 105.
Study and contemplation were the guiding themes of monastic life between prayer times.
Page 105.
The entire generation of monastic settlement inspired by St. Augustine and his successors in the seventh century was wiped out by the Vikings in the waves of attacks that were finally checked and reversed by King Alfred in the 890s, and it was only in the tenth century that there had been a rebirth of the monasteries.
Page 108.
All of England’s monasteries in the year 1000 had been founded or refounded in the previous fifty years. Crown and church had a common interest in strengthening national respect for institutions of authority, and the monasteries were the crucial factor in fostering Alfred’s secret ingredient for national success: the monks spread knowledge through their schools, and they also amplified knowledge through their effective monopoly over the written word.
Pages 108-109.
The writing stand of each monk held two books, the manuscript on which the scribe was working and the volume form which he was copying, for to be leaned in the year 1000 was to copy. You did not innovate. You learned by absorbing and reproducing the wisdom of the earlier authorities.
Page 109.
The monasteries of the first millennium were creating the cultural Noah’s Ark on which our own understanding of the past is based.
Page 109.
The glory of medieval manuscripts lies in the drawings which are aptly described as illumination.
Page 112.
The sin of the heretic was to believe the wrong thing.
Page 112.
More than meat, milk, or any type of vegetable, bread was the staff of life for people in the year 1000.
Page 118.
The bread of the early Middle Ages was round, coarse, and quite flat by modern standards, not baked in a tin, with the texture of a pita bread, nan, or chapati today.
Page 118.
In Central Europe the peasants ate rye bread, but in England wheat was the grain of choice, and barley was definitely judged second-best.
Page 118.
The mill, like the plough team, was a communal facility that the village operated jointly, adding sophistication to the economy, and providing yet another incentive for people to make use of cash.
Page 119.
If the late twentieth century is scented with gasoline vapour and exhaust fumes, the year 1000 was perfumed with shit.
Page 119.
The siting of the latrine pits of the first millennium shows ho imperfectly people understood the basic rules of cleanliness and health.
Page 120.
Both in villages and towns the latrine was sited at or near the backdoor of most houses.
Page 120.
The thatched roof, rough organic walls, and beaten-earth floor of the medieval house provided a myriad of refuges for insects and bacteria.
Page 121.
While people had no knowledge of modern germ theory in the year 1000, they were well aware of the contagiousness of diseases.
Page 123.
In the year 1000, the internal workings of the body had been explored and were understood as thoroughly as people knew that the world was not flat.
Page 123.
Sheep, cattle, and poultry all made multiple contributions to the economy of the rural household, but the omnivorous pig was the most versatile and least trouble of all.
Page 134.
Farm animals were distinctly smaller in the year 1000 than they are today - and they were also smaller than they had ben six centuries earlier.
Page 134.
The greatest dietary gap by modern standards was the absence of any type of sugar.
Page 136.
Honey was the principal source of sweetness in the year 1000. It was so precious it was almost a currency in medieval England.
Page 137.
The the absence of honey, another source of sweetness was the crushed pulp of grapes left over form the making of wine.
Page 139.
Archaeological evidence indicates that the years 950 to 1300 were marked by noticeably warmer temperatures than we experience today, even in the age of “global warming”
Page 139.
To be Christian was to be modern in the year 1000, the token of a society’s eagerness for centralised authority, an organised coinage and taxation system, and, above all, a cohesive national identity that was energetically preached and sanctified by the church.
Page 144.
A thousand years ago England’s wildlife was more exotic than it is today.
Page 149.
The hunting restrictions which the Normans introduced after 1066 were one of the principal sources of friction between the native population and the new regime.
Page 150.
Medieval hunting was both a metaphor and a preparation for war. It kept horse and rider fit, and, more significantly it fostered the camaraderie of the warrior band. It was like a training session.
Page 150.
Between 950 and 1066 England was the most fought-over kingdom in western Europe. Its merchants were trading and its farmers were producing the food that was needed to sustain an expanding population.
Page 150.
It is the unmentionable reality of civilisation that it depends on fighting. All the great societies have been based on military success.
Page 152.
The greatest lords were the greatest thugs, for the English aristocracy, like the military elite of every European country in the year 1000, was a cadre that had been trained to kill.
Page 152.
The chivalry of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table was a fable developed a century and a half later, based on the possible existence of a British chieftain named Arthur who fought in the dark confusion which followed the departure of the Romans.
Page 153.
The fundamental rule of warfare in the year 1000 was to avoid battle wherever possible. Whole summers could be occupied by armies manoeuvring to avoid each other.
Page 154.
Excavations has uncovered English arrows with personal markings which suggest that bowmen tried to retrieve their arrows after a battle, since each beaten iron arrow tip represented quite an investment.
Page 155.
The Anglo-Saxon army was the last army in western Europe to fight as one homogeneous host. It was not divided into separate divisions of cavalry, infantry, and bowmen - unlike the Normans - and this was one of the reasons why the Normans won at Hastings and the Anglo-Saxons lost.
Page 155.
The major and decisive distinction which the Bayeux tapestry does make clear bout the two sides at the Battle of Hastings is that the Normans rode horses, while the English fought on foot.
Page 156.
A mile away, nobody heard a thing without gunfire or explosions, early medieval battles were a series of muffled confrontations enlivened only by the metallic clash of sword on sword and by the war cries - “Dex Aie” (“God’s help”) from the Norman side and “Out! Out!” from the English as they repulsed attackers form their shieldwall, probably uttering their call in what we would consider a North country accent.
Page 157.
No army went campaigning in the winter if it could help it, and during the summer every able-bodied man had work to do on the land. By October, however, your soldiers had finished gathering in the harvest, while the countryside was dotted with barns full of grain - the ideal moment for raiding.
Page 157.
There were no playing cards in the year 1000. They did not appear in Europe until the fourteenth century.
Page 158.
The Old English for a human being was mann. All human beings were menn, the term being used for both sexes, in the same way that women are today supposed to be included in the meaning of such words as “mankind.”
Page 163.
Anglo-Saxon kings did not succeed on the basis of primogeniture. All the king’s offspring were known as aethelings - throneworthy - and from this gene pool the royal family would select the aethling who seemed best qualified for the job. It was the practical way to maintain the wealth and preeminence of the ruling clan.
Page 165.
Until the middle of the tenth century it had been quite routine for priests to be married.
Page 169.
Enshrined in the language of Englisc: men were called waepnedmenn, “weaponed-persons,” while women were wifmenn, “wife-persons,” with wif being derived from the word for “weaving.” In a world where order was uncertain and shops virtually nonexistent, the man’s job was to provide protection, while the woman provided clothes, and this division of responsibility was reflected in the grave goods with which pagan Anglo-Saxons were buried: male skeletons were found with their swords, spears, and shields; women are buried with spindles, weaving batons, and small, symbolic sewing boxes that contain needles, thread, and even minute samples of cloth.
Page 171.
Marriage law was essentially about the allocation of property.
Page 172.
The gallows stood outside every medieval town ad g rural crossroads, displaying its grisly cargo, which would twist in the wind until the birds picked the bones clean. It was not a pretty sight, and it was not intended t be. Along with trial by ordeal, hanging was the most effective deterrent that could be devised in an age without police or prisons.
Pages 174-175.
Only the literate were in a position to concern themselves greatly with what would happen when the year DCCCCLXXXXVIIIJ became a simple M.
Page 187.
A precise reading of Revelation does not predict that the world will end with the completion of a thousand years. It prophesies, rather, that the devil will be unleashed to work his mischief.
Page 188.
Just as conventional calculations are swallowed up by the modern microchip, so the mechanism of the abacus obliterated the need to write out figures, speeding calculation in a magical fashion. Its potential effect on the business, intellectual, and scientific processes of its time was comparable to the impact of the computer today.
Page 191.
Death, disease, and discomfort were daily companions in the year 1000.
Page 194.
The simplest things were so difficult to accomplish. … Every basic artefact represented hours of skill and effort and ingenuity, in return for a very meagre material reward.
Page 194.
The poetry of the year 1000 celebrated the qualities of the hero, and just to survive on a day-to-day basis every man and woman had to be precisely that.
Page 195.
Autocracy, in the long run, was not to prove the way ahead. It was inflexible and hidebound, fatally resistant to the spirit of innovation on which progress depends.
Page 196.
Consent and social co-operation are among the most difficult elements to define in any society but they were to prove crucial for the long-term future of the English way.
Pages 196-197.
The first Arabic numerals made their earliest appearance in a western document in 976 A.D., and though centuries were to elapse before these numerals came into common commercial use, they pointed the way to the numeracy on which modern science, technology, business, and economics are all based.
Pages 197-198.
In the eighteenth century Edmund Burke would argue that the sanctity of property was the basic prerequisite of economic enterprise, since incentive an have no meaning until society makes it possible for property to be held securely.
Page 198.
Nationality was the engine of England’s progress in the centuries that followed the year 1000.
Pages 198-199.
Though English democracy, technology, and economic enterprise were to secure many conquests in the course of the next thousand years, it was the strength and flexibility of the English language which secured the most universal conquests of all.
Page 199.
What C.S. Lewis called the “snobbery of the chronology” encourages us to presume that just because we happen to have lived after our ancestors and can read books which give us some account of what happened to them, we must also know getter than them.
Page 201.