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The Year 1000
What's Good? The whole book is good. It answered all my questions, asked me a few more and answered those as well. Lacey and Danziger have based the book on a thousand year old document called the Julius Work Calendar. The first chapter of The Year 1000 describes the technology used to create such documents and how it has been preserved over the centuries.
With one chapter devoted to each month of the year, the narrative is based on illustrations gathered from the Julius Work Calendar. Where an picture shows men working in the fields, Lacey and Danziger discuss the importance of the harvest, and the general diet of an Anglo-Saxon family. A picture showing a man stealing planks introduces a chapter on crime and punishment in a time when technology hadn't advanced far enough to build reliable prisons.
There is also an interesting discussion about whether the common person was worried about their new millenium. The Venerable Bede had popularised the date system we use today in the 700s, so people actually knew about it. There was also a variation of the Y2K bug we have today: Arabic numerals and technology such as the Abacus were not popular yet, and those who could do arithmetic used Roman numberals. Try multiplying MCXIV by CXCIX in your head. According to The Year 1000:
The scholar Alucin said that 9,000 should be regarded as the upper limit beyound which figuring was not possible, and when that was written out as MMMMMMMMM one could understand what he means.
(Page 191)
The authors cover a wide range of topics from weapons technology to Anglo-Saxon medicine to religion to the discovery of the new world by Leif Eriksson. Whether you're a history buff or not, you won't get lost or confused reading this book. The style of writing is very accessible and you can easily read a couple of chapters in a luch break, which is how I did it.
What's Bad? These are not so much bad things as "I wish there were more things". The Year 1000 only covers Anglo-Saxon England. You will find a little information about the Vikings and the Normans, but that's all. The authors never set out to show their readers a picture of the whole world and the sub-sub title of the book is An Englisman's World.
Fortunately Lacey and Danziger provide a bibliography and source notes for those who want to find out more. I'm certainly going to finding out a bit more about Europe and Arabia.
So What's In It For Me? The Year 1000 will appeal to a wide audience. If you like reading about the past, or enjoy finding out the origins of technology, society or language, or if you just want to put the current millennium hype into perspective, this book is for you.
Purchase this book at fatbrain.
Table of Contents
- The Julius Work Calendar - The Wonder of Survival
- January - For All the Saints
- February - Welcome to Enga-lond
- March - Heads for Food
- April - Feasting
- May - Wealth and Wool
- June - Life in Town
- July - The Hungry Gap
- August - Remedies
- September - Pagans and Pannage
- October - War Games
- November - Females and the Price of Fondling
- December - The End of Things, or a New Beginning?
- The English Spirit
- Acknowledgements
- Bibliography
- Source Notes
- Index
Everytime I come into work at this major corporation that I work for, and find people who manage people, people who manage people who manage people, and people who train the people managing the people who manage the people, and even people who don't do ANYTHING at all, I realize, we've come quite a long way from subsistance farming and feudalism back in 1000 or even 1600 for that matter.
:)
Think about the diverse tasks and how few of us are actually involved in production of the means by which we all live, yet at the same time we all do live. Efficiency gains and technology have allowed 2% of us to feed the other 98%, freeing them up to hack code.
Just-another-gee-whiz-post.
-- Truth goes out the door when rumor comes innuendo. -- Groucho Marx
Who are you calling common? ;)
Someone will say, "First Post" (and be wrong).
Someone else will say "This isn't News For Nerds" (and possibly be right).
I'm going to say "Beowulf" and be on-topic (for once)
For the ignorati, Beowulf is an epic Anglo-Saxon poem/story.
HH
Yellow tigers crouched in jungles in her dark eyes.
She's just dressing, goodbye windows, tired starlings.
So where did the idea of panic in the year 1000 come from? Mostly it came from Enlightenment-era historians, who were often anti-religious; ISTR that Stearns points at Jules Michelet as originating the story in his history of France, Because it agreed with their prejudices, other historians gave Michelet's stories wide exposure, but there doesn't seem to be any actual historical evidence for them.
7777 is -far- worse then 9000, in Roman numerals, being MMMMMMMCCCMLXXIIX. Try squaring that! :)
1000 AD was about the peak of the Viking age, in Europe, when their empire stretched from Kiev to the shores of Newfoundland in America, and from the arctic circle down to the mediterranean basin.
Chainmail was popular, but very difficult to make. Each link was alternatively welded and riveted. Given that a suit typically had 100,000 links, and weighed 50 lbs, it was not something a lot of people had a spare suit of. (Mind you, chainmail is great for weekends. No need to iron it!)
Millenium fever did not really exist, in the same way, as not everyone used the Gregorian calendar. The Julius calendar was still in fashion, for all it's problems. But, those places that recognised the millenium -did- have problems with doomsday cults and other such stuff.
1000 AD also saw the tail-end of the British Dark Ages, which ended with the Norman Conquest. The Dark Ages started with the Roman withdrawl, in 450 AD. Whilst not really "dark", this time marks a period of significantly less mass technology. Personal technology (eg: ornaments, jewelry, etc.) was at it's finest, and has never been superceded.
1000 AD was almost 500 years after the Irish discovered America (St Brenden the Navigator) and about the time Leif Erikson discovered the same country. (America has the distinction of being discovered by more civilisations than any other in history. Rumours that they left in disgust, after seeing Microsoft, Los Angeles and Disney World are denied.)
1000 AD was 1200 years after the Greeks discovered the world was round, that it orbited the sun and that the stars were further away than anything else that could be observed.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
While Venerable (St.) Bede was the one who popularised the BC/AD base for the current calendar, it was "Dennis the short" (a monk) who came up with this about 200yrs before Bede, who died in 735.
FWIW St. Bede's bones were moved after his death, and are now at Durham Cathedral, which was built a few hundred years later (completed in 1132), which is still in use today, and has the most awesome stained glass windows. If you're into stained glass, then Coventry Cathedral is also a must-see.
What does it matter if the new Millennium is celebrated in 2000 or in 2001? I know that the Millennium starts in 2001, but it hardly matters to me that the calendar is one year offset from Way Back Then(tm). Celebrating the new Millennium December 31st, 1999 is like celebrating your birthday a saturday because it actually falls on a monday: you're better off celebrating when the timing's right than when it's -really- supposed to happen.
I mean, it's just an excuse to par-tee anyway.
"The wages of sin is death but so is the salary of virtue, and at least the evil get to go home early on Fridays."
I agree and disagree with you (no doubt this is typical slashdot behaviour).
Prisons were reserved for notorious criminals (to a point, given the plethora of capital crimes - not that there was a common law worthy of the name at that point) and rich people (for practical reasons - a rich man at that time would be a feudal lord in his own right, with a more or less substantial fighting force at his disposal. Personal incarceration was a way of demonstrating one's power over them, and was generally a political rather than a criminal act.) Agreed, prisons as such did exist.
It's more interesting to uncover why they were so reserved. It wasn't because they preferred to deal out harsh and physical punishments, but because there was no way to set up the administrative apparatus to finance and run a system of incarceration. You have to go all the way to the eighteenth century to see that happening - and as soon as it did, crime "boomed". The first part of Hughes' The Fatal Shore covers this in gruesome detail - prisons throughout the land were packed with the overflow caged in hulks, and executions were performed in wholesale. Australia was a safety valve, especially for political prisoners, although the majority of deportees were petty criminals.). In other words, it may have been possible to build a prison, but not to run the system to fill it, staff it, and empty and refill it.
What is important to note is that there were no public records save ecclesiastical ones (baptisms, deaths) until the seventeenth century or thereabouts. A modern criminal system, which incorporates the concept of incarceration, penance (as in penitentiary), and rebirth of the criminal into civil society (see the reformer Jeremy Bentham for more on that topic), requires such records, even if for mere criminal records, to gauge the quality and quantity of punishment. In other words, the appropriateness of punishment.
Older criminal systems did not consider the necessity for penance on the part of the criminal. It simply wasn't part of their moral calculus. In this sense they did not believe that when you committed a crime you should be punished for it; they believed that a crime was an offense against the power of the sovereign, and it was on these grounds that you were punished (Foucault, both Madness and Civilization and Discipline and Punish).
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There is no premature anti-fascism. -Ernest Hemingway
Well? Don't we? In the late Roman period, glass was counted as a precious stone, and vessels made of it were thought of the same way we would a piece of pure jade today. We make walls of glass today, and if it breaks, we toss it out. I'm sitting here topless, while the wind howls outside, and a nice hot bath is drawing in the tub. I've got a roast fowl for my gnawing pleasure, an Oriental rug underfoot, scented candles, music playing at my beck and call, and the Magic Loom sends messangers of pure light to carry my words to the ends of the earth....and I live under the poverty level!
My other favorite Millenial topic is the identity of the Beast. As detailed in the thirteenth chapter of Revelations, there is not one, but two beasts, the 666 guy, and the Master of Illusions. Disaster strikes 666, and he looks dead, but his collegue MoI makes him look alive again. (Whether he is or not, is a Good Question.) This would point to someone in a database field, and to someone who can rig SFX, especially digitally. The largest database company in the world is Oracle, which keeps records for the CIA, among other worthies. Larry Ellison is notoriously accident-prone: he nearly lost an arm while falling off a bicycle. His best friend is Steve Jobs, who runs Pixar. This would mean that BillG. is on the side of the angels. Of course, this is being written by someone who likes angels....
teleny, friend of cats.
Grrr!!! *kicks TARDIS* K9! Go and get your memory banks fixed!
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I can do it on paper, only making it even clearer why the Romans didn't do much with big numbers.
MCXIV
x CXCIX
-------
Multiply each digit through, taking into account if it is negative. I'll use bold to represent the overline (a modern notation for writing large values of Roman numerals).
XMCXL
- MCXIV
+ CXMCD
- XMCXL
+ CXMCD
-------
Cancel out the XMCXL's, and convert everything to contain no subtraction within the numerals.
CXMCCCC + CXMCCCC - MCXIIII =
Now, for the subtraction, borrow an LXXXXVIIIII.
CXMCCCLXXXXVIIIII + CXMCCCC - MCXIIII =
Cancel out equivalent numerals that are subtracted, and concatenate the rest.
CCXXMCCCCCCLXXXVI
And convert back into standard Roman Numerals.
CCXXMDCLXXXVI
Now imagine chiseling all this into stone.
Makes you glad that the Arabs came along, and we can just say 1114 x 199 = 221686, doesn't it?
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
For those interested in millenialism and the millenium controversy, PBS had an interesting NewsHour interview with Stephen Jay Gould about two years ago. The interview discusses topics from his then-recent book, Questioning the Millennium, which has just been reissued. Here are links to it at Amazon and f atbrain.