The Year 1000

Being the history major that I was, I was happy when Joe Mahoney offered to review Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger's new book The Year 1000 - What life was like at the turn of the first millennium. Looks back at a year in the life of a common Englishman, circa 1000 AD, in a very entertaining and informative way. The Year 1000 - What life was like at the turn of the first mil author Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger pages 230 publisher Little Brown & Company, 02/1999 rating 8/10 reviewer Joe Mahoney ISBN 0316558400 summary Fascinating glimpse at the world and life of an Englishman in the Year 1000. The Scenario I found The Year 1000 whilst browsing the shelves of the bookstore across the road from work. With all the hype and speculation about the new millennium and the infamous Y2K bug, the title grabbed my attention straight away. The subject matter also appealled to my inner-geek: what was life like in Y1K? What technology did they have? What didn't they have yet? How did the average Joe make a gold coin? What did the beer taste like back then? All important questions I'm sure you'll agree.

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

1. The Julius Work Calendar - The Wonder of Survival
2. January - For All the Saints
3. February - Welcome to Enga-lond
4. March - Heads for Food
5. April - Feasting
6. May - Wealth and Wool
7. June - Life in Town
8. July - The Hungry Gap
9. August - Remedies
10. September - Pagans and Pannage
11. October - War Games
12. November - Females and the Price of Fondling
13. December - The End of Things, or a New Beginning?
14. The English Spirit
15. Acknowledgements
16. Bibliography
17. Source Notes
18. Index

Comments

subsistance farming

[Uruk]

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.

Millennial hysteria in 1000

[AMK]

Peter N. Stearns wrote a good book called "Millennium III, Century XXI", on how people react to artificial calendrical times of transition. One thing he points out is that the idea of widespread hysteria in the year 1000 is a myth. Several different calendrical systems were still in use at the time, and the current system wasn't the most common one. (As late as the 14th century, people were still often dating things as "In year X of King Y's reign", for example.)

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.

Not insufficient tech, but too little bureaucracy

[twit]

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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