by Robert Lacey
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. Jack Frost was not “weather” to people who had to survive without central heating through a damp medieval winter. He was mischief personified - a kinsman of the Devil, nipping noses and fingers, making the ground too hard to work. He was one of a legion of little people, elves and trolls and fairies, who inhabited the fears and imaginings of early medieval folk.
But the Church had its own army of spirits, the saints who had lived their lives - and often lost their lives - for the sake of Jesus’ teaching, and the principal purpose of the Julius Work Calendar was to provide a daily diary of encounters with those holy folk whose lives were an example and promise of how things could get better. This was the spiritual function of the calendar, and at a more basic level it provided a guide through a wonderfully varied collection of human characters whose lives, adventures, and personalities provided entertainment, as close as any medieval document could get to gossip.
Personal portraits did not really exist in the early Middle Ages. Even kings were only depicted as symbolic and idealised figures on their coins. But when it came to the lives of the saints, you had a chance to analyse their personalities, pondering the peculiarities of a character like Simeon Stylites, the fifth-century hermit who spent much of his life living naked on top of increasingly high pillars, or learning from the life of Mary of Egypt, the patron saint of fallen women. Mary was an Egyptian who left home at the age of twelve and went to live in fifth-century Alexandria, where she became a prostitute for seventeen years. Through curiosity she joined a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, paying for her passage by offering herself to the sailors. But on arriving at the holy city with her fellow pilgrims, she found it impossible to enter the church. She felt herself held back by an invisible force, and when she lifted her eyes to an image of the Virgin Mary, she heard a voice telling her to cross the river Jordan, where she would find rest. So, according to legend, she bought three loaves and went to live in the desert, spending the rest of her life there living on dates and berries. When her clothes wore out, her hair grew long enough to cover her modesty, and she dedicated the rest of her life to prayer and contemplation. Mary featured frequently in medieval chronicles and church statues, identified by her long hair and by the three loaves that became her emblem.(10)
People identified with the personalities and quirks of saints, as today they feel they know soap opera stars. The hagiographies that recounted their stories were bland and stereotyped eulogies, usually written by loyal followers and friends. But human clues lurked in the details, and every saints day of the month offered its own drama. In the monasteries, morning prayers were said to that day’s holy figures. Prayer was a way of asking a saint to pay attention to your own particular worries. Singing was a beautiful way of saying, “Please listen.” The God of the Middle Ages was a God who intervened actively in daily life. That was the message of the miracles executed by Jesus and continued by his saints. So one function of worship was to secure divine intervention on your own behalf.
After prime, the first service of the day after sunrise, the monks would repair to their chapterhouse - the monastery meeting room - where the lives of that day’s saints would be read out, and one of the sermons preached in chapel might well take an incident from the life of that particular day’s saint as the jumping-off point for some practical teaching.(11) January 5 offered the feast day of Simeon Stylites, the pillar-dwelling hermit, while other days featured Isidorus of Seville, who had proclaimed that there should be a cathedral school in every diocese; St. Genevieve, who saved Paris from Attila the Hun, and whose candle was blown out by the devil when she went to pray at night; St. Lucien, who was imprisoned for his faith by the emperor Diocletian; St. Timothy, a companion of St. Paul who was stoned to death by the heathens; St. Secundinus, who wrote the earliest known Latin hymn in Ireland; and the hermit St. Paul of Thebes, who was said to have survived more than a hundred years of piety and austerity in the desert.
Each hero or heroine had their own lesson to teach. It could carry you through the day, a psychic talisman of encouragement, and the geography of the saints’ adventures - from Antioch to Seville, then north to Paris and Ireland - provided a lesson in itself about the varied shape and character of a world which extended further than we might imagine. The Anglo-Saxons knew of three continents - Europe, Africa, and Asia - and they also knew about India. Late in the ninth century King Alfred sent money to help the Christian missionaries there.
England itself was a network of magical sites. The altar of every church contained the physical relics of at least one saint. The origin of the tradition whereby many modern churches are dedicated to a particular saint goes back to the founding principle of Roman church belief that a saint is intimately present wherever his or her relics might rest. 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. Their holy lives and suffering on earth had earned them direct transfer from earth to God’s presence, without any waiting in purgatory, while their bodies, or the body parts reposing in the altar of their church, were believed to be still living. Many were the reports of saints’ tombs being opened and evidences of life being discovered - growing hair or nails, or unperished limbs still containing blood - proof of the vitality and effectiveness of the Christian god. The churches whose saints proved particularly potent became centres of cults and pilgrimage.
When King Ethelbert of Kent received the first group of Christian priests who brought him greetings from the Pope in Rome in 597 a.d., he insisted on meeting them in the open air, so the wind would blow away any spells that they might try to cast upon him with their alien magic.(12) Four hundred years later the Christian magic had all England in its thrall, and the shrines of its saints provided the nation with its energy centres. Up in the north were the relics of the Venerable Bede, cherished since his death in 735 by the monks of Tyneside and Wear. Within fifty years of his death his cult as a saint was well established by local testimony that his relics had worked miraculous cures, and the potency of Bede’s bones was such that many laid claim to them. In the mid-eleventh century they were transferred to Durham. Down in Wessex, Glastonbury claimed some relics of Bede to augment the abbey’s reputation as one of the most holy spots in England. According to later legend, Jesus himself had walked in ancient times at Glastonbury “in England’s pleasant pastures,” and St. Joseph of Arimethea had travelled here to plant the famous Glastonbury Thorn, which had been taken from the Crown of Christ, and which flowered every year at Christmas.(13)
At the heart of Wessex, in the great cathedral at Winchester, lay the body of St. Swithin, bishop of Winchester in the middle of the ninth century, and the object of a busy cult within a century of his death. According to Aelfric, the schoolteacher and great prose writer of his day, the sick flocked to Winchester in vast numbers to be cured by St. Swithin. “Within ten days,” recorded Aelfric, “two hundred men were healed, and so many within twelve months, that no man could count them. The burial ground lay filled with crippled folk, so that one could not easily visit the cathedral.”(14)
Aelfric was a teacher in the monastery school in Cerne Abbas, a few days’ ride from Winchester, where he himself was educated, so it seems most likely that he was reporting from firsthand observation. Living and teaching for more than a dozen years in the shadow of the Cerne Abbas giant, the great pagan fertility god with rampant genitalia carved out of the chalk hillside above the village, it is not surprising that the ironic and quizzical Aelfric should have displayed a detached view of certain human claims to contact with the supernatural: “Some dreams are in truth from God, even as we read in books,” he once wrote, “and some are from the Devil for some deceit, seeking how he may pervert the soul.” But of the miracles in th
e crowded tenth-century cemetery of Winchester, Aelfric had no doubt: “All were so miraculously healed within a few days,” he wrote, “that one could not find there five unsound men out of that great crowd.”(15)
This was an age of faith. People believed as fervently in the powers of saints’ bones as many today believe that wheat bran or jogging or psychoanalysis can increase the sum of human happiness. The saints had lived real lives. They had measured their principles fearlessly against adversity - and many had lived quite recently, 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. Mass outpourings of grief like that which attended the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 were the first step to sainthood in the year 1000. The next step was the testimony of the faithful to portents and miracles occurring.
You were not on your own. That was the comforting message of the little Julius Work Calendar with its twelve monthly recitations of saints’ festivals. God was there to help, and so was a whole network of fellow human beings, from the distant past up to your own era. In the year 1000 the saints were a presence as vital and dynamic as any band of elves or demons. They were a living community to whom one prayed, and among whom one lived.
February: Welcome to Engla-lond
It is time to meet someone from the year 1000 - at least to the extent that dry, legal documents can provide human contact across the years. Here is Aelfflaed, a noblewoman who died some time between 1000 and 1002, leaving huge estates in Essex and East Anglia.(16) Here is Wulfgeat of Donnington in Shropshire, a more modest landowner with estates that he bequeathed to his wife and daughter.(17) And here is the charitable Bishop Aelfwold of Crediton in the West Country, who died in 1008, anxious to free all the slaves who had worked on his estates.(18)
We know about Aelfflaed, Wulfgeat, and Bishop Aelfwold from their wills, and, by the nature of wills, we know more about their material possessions than we can discover about their personal, spiritual lives. But Aelfflaed’s will tells us that she had supervised the farming of many acres with apparent success, giving orders to men in a male-dominated society, while Wulfgeat of Donnington clearly found nothing unusual in leaving his lands to be run by his womenfolk. There are no women depicted on the Julius Work Calendar, but, as we will see, women who possessed sufficient strength of character were able to claim power and exercise authority in the England of the year 1000. One would expect a bishop to leave some pious bequests, but Aelfwold’s will lets us know that there was slave labour in Anglo-Saxon England - while suggesting that people felt uneasy enough about the fact to free slaves when they passed on to another life. The dry legal documents that have survived a millennium provide only clues, but with their help, and with other sources of evidence, we can start to creep a little way, at least, into real minds and hearts.
Skull measurements show that the brain capacity of a man or woman living in the year 1000 was exactly the same as our own.(19) These were not people we should patronise. They were practical, self-contained folk, not given to excessive agonising or self-analysis, to judge from the few who committed their thoughts to paper - 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. They knew how to make and mend, and when their day’s work was done, they could also be very good company, since one of the most important things they had learned in their lives was how to entertain themselves. The knowledge in their heads had rarely come directly from books - only a small minority of them could read - and they retained the data without the help of filing cabinets or mechanical storage systems. They had learned everything by observing and imitating, usually by standing alongside an adult who was almost certainly their father or mother, and by memorising everything they needed to survive and enrich their lives.
Their poetry and stories were only just beginning to be written down. The Anglo-Saxons learned most of their folklore by heart. They could tell long, complicated tales of their family histories - who begat whom, back to when their ancestors had first arrived in England from the forests beyond the sea. And they loved to recite their ancient folk poems by heart - violent and bloodthirsty sagas of wild beasts and warriors, which retained the echo of the voyages that had brought their forefathers to the “outermost islands” on the edge of the great ocean.
The poet Robert Graves remarked on how the heave-ho of Old English poetry sounded like rowing, with the rhythm of the verse recalling the dip and drag of oars back and forth, and certainly the great Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, reciting an ancient story and surviving in a book that was written around the year 1000 itself, came to special life when describing a sea journey:
Over the waves, with the wind behind her
And foam at her prow, she flew like a bird
Until her curved neck had covered the distance
And on the following day, just when they hoped to,
Those seafarers sighted land,
Sunlit cliffs, sheer crags
And looming headlands, the landfall they sought.(20)
Beowulf (translated here by Seamus Heaney) was unusual for being written down, which makes it particularly precious evidence - like the Julius Work Calendar. February’s calendar drawing shows a vigorous yard of vines getting pruned, a process which, by tradition, started on St. Vincent’s Day, January 22.(21) As with the depiction of ploughing in January, the sketching of this apparently routine agricultural process was heavy with meaning, since the purpose of pruning is to direct the growth energies of a plant into the channels desired by the cultivator. It is all about human control - 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.
The plant limbs writhe and twist almost threateningly in this particular labour of the month. Bursting with Jack-and-the-Beanstalk vigour, the vines seem imbued with as much life as the men who are tending them. But the cultivators maintain their control, thanks to their serps, the long, flat blades of iron, like hand-held ploughshares, that embodied their capacity to shape their environment - and it is the modern English landscape which provides the most enduring physical evidence of what the men and women of the year 1000 did with their lives. The Anglo-Saxons placed their imprint indelibly on the shape of the English countryside. By the year 1000, most of the towns and villages of modern England had been settled by the seafarers, who turned out to be good settlers and farmers. And their still more widespread legacy was the language that they spoke - a tongue of extreme strength, simplicity, and richness which has proved to be the primary foundation of how millions all over the globe today speak and think and frame their ideas.
The English language arrived in England, it has been said, on the point of a sword - and it arrived twice. Its first invasion was with the Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and other tribes of northern Holland and Germany who crossed the North Sea in the years after 450 to fill the vacuum left by the departing Romans. They were robust and determined aggressors - “warriors eager for fame,” according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, “proud war-smiths” who were relatives of the same German “barbarians” who had headed south to get involved in both sides of the battles over Rome (many Germans fought as mercenaries on the side of Rome). They experienced little difficulty in assimilating the friendly British and they drove those who were recalcitrant back into Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland - the western crescent of windswept moors and mountains which has been called the Celtic fringe.(22) 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,
To the dispossessed Celts, the Germanic invaders were all Saxons - from which comes the Scottish word of abuse Sassenach. But many of the ne
w arrivals started to classify themselves as Angles. Bede took up the word, describing them as gens Anglorum, and their language became known as Englisc (Angle-ish) - a tongue that was spoken to a rhythm and contained many words which we can recognise today without understanding a single thing. They organised themselves into a collection of small kingdoms, from Northumbria in the north, down through Mercia, which occupied roughly the area of the modern Midlands, while the south of the country was split between East Anglia, Kent, Essex, Sussex, and Wessex (the kingdoms of the East Saxons, South Saxons, and West Saxons).
Computer analysis of the English language as spoken today shows that the hundred most frequently used words are all of Anglo-Saxon origin: the, is, you - the basic building blocks.(23) When Winston Churchill wanted to rally the nation in 1940, it was to Anglo-Saxon that he turned: “We shall fight on the beaches; we shall fight on the landing grounds; we shall fight in the fields and the streets; we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.” All these stirring words came from Old English as spoken in the year 1000, with the exception of the last one, surrender, a French import that came with the Normans in 1066 - and when man set foot on the moon in 1969, the first human words spoken had similar echoes: “One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Each of Neil Armstrong’s famous words was part of Old English by the year 1000.
Perhaps this is also the place to remark that many of the earthy epithets often described as “Anglo-Saxon” did not arrive until comparatively recent times: fokkinge, cunte, crappe, and bugger were all much later imports, probably coming from Holland as the later Middle Ages shaded into the great age of seafaring and exploration. 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-Saxons could swear to do something, or could swear by something, but there is no record of them swearing at anything at all.
