The Year 1000- What Life Was Like At the Turn of The First Millennium

by Robert Lacey

  “Which fish do you catch?” asked the Master in Aelfric’s schoolroom dialogue. “Eels and pike, minnows and burbot, trout and lampreys,” replied the pupil playing the role of Fisherman.

  For modern tastes, this list contains a disconcerting proportion of wriggly and eel-like creatures. The burbot, also called the eel-pout, was a flat-headed fish with two small beards on the nose and one on the chin, while the lamprey was even uglier, sometimes described as a water snake and featuring a large sucker-like mouth with which it attached itself parasitically to other fish. Rich and oily like all eels, lampreys were considered a particular delicacy in the Middle Ages, and famously ended the life of King Henry I, William the Conqueror’s youngest son, who was chronicled as dying in 1135 of “a surfeit of lampreys.”

  Aelfric’s fisherman was a talkative and candid character:

  Master Why don’t you fish in the sea?

  “Fisherman” Sometimes I do, but rarely, because it is a lot of rowing for me to the sea.

  Master What do you catch in the sea?

  “Fisherman” Herrings and salmon, porpoises and sturgeon, oysters and crabs, mussels, winkles, cockles, plaice and flounders and lobsters, and many similar things.

  Master Would you like to catch a whale?

  “Fisherman” Not me!

  Master Why?

  “Fisherman” Because it is a risky business catching a whale. It’s safer for me to go on the river with my boat, than to go hunting whales with many boats.

  Master Why so?

  “Fisherman” Because I prefer to catch a fish that I can kill, rather than a fish that can sink or kill not only me but also my companions with a single blow.

  Master Nevertheless, many do catch whales and escape danger, and make a great profit by it.

  “Fisherman” You are right, but I dare not because of my timid spirit!

  Aelfric had evidently heard of fishermen ganging together in hunting packs of small open boats, as they still do in the Faroe Islands, to corner a whale in an inlet, then drive it ashore. Craspois, salt whale blubber, was imported to London around the year 1000, and some nutritionists have wondered if this reflected a physiological need. Anglo-Saxon dwellings were so poorly heated, runs this theory, that the diet of the time had to provide an extra-thick layer of body insulation.

  Feasting, however, was about much more than mere nutrition, since conviviality lay at the very heart of Anglo-Saxon life. The memorandum of estate management attributed to Wulfstan depicted the seasonal celebrations as moments for which the community lived, and the archbishop himself was famous for his lavish hospitality, even as he personally observed the rules of clerical restraint. Abstaining as a pious monk from both alcohol and meat, he nevertheless provided his guests with generous quantities of both, sitting in their midst while consuming his own meagre fare. His personal inclinations made him the vegetarian in the corner, but his role as archbishop and prince of the church made it important that he should also demonstrate hospitality and act as the lord of the feast.

  The epic poems of the time all come to rest in banqueting halls. Who is not familiar with the classic medieval scene of lord and lady gathered with their retainers in a great wooden hall like an old tithe barn? There are beams and rafters and draughts through the walls, with a fire in the middle of the floor and damp rising up through the greasy floor covering of rushes, into which have been flung the old chicken bones. It is a tableau much caricatured in modern costume dramas, but archaeological excavations confirm most of the physical details, right down to the blow-fly maggots germinating among the refuse on the floor.

  “The warriors laughed, there was a hum of contentment” runs Beowulf’s description of an Anglo-Saxon feast, and we catch that same atmosphere from the April drawing in the Julius Work Calendar, with the revellers seated side by side on what the heroic poems call the medu-benc - the mead bench. In the year 1000 a noble feast was a lavishly staged affair, and the wills of the period suggest that people’s most prized possessions were the accoutrements with which they entertained. Reading the inventories, you can imagine yourself at the dinner party - hall tapestries and seat covers, “a table cover with all the cloths that go with it,”(44) candlesticks, and elaborate drinking vessels which must have resembled the drinking horn being filled by the young lad on the left of this month’s calendar drawing. Archaeological excavations have uncovered some particularly large and beautiful drinking horns, along with ceremonial jewellery and ornamented goblets - but no cutlery. The eating fork was not invented until the seventeenth century, and when you went to a feast you took your own knife.

  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.(45) Less common was wine - which was also less alcoholic. The yeasts on English grapes rarely produced more than 4 percent alcohol, and there were no hermetically corked glass bottles in which the drink could acquire a laid-down “vintage” character, since the corked wine bottle was not developed until the eighteenth century. Anglo-Saxon wine was kept in wooden barrels and leather flasks.

  “I am a binder and a scourger and soon become a thrower,” ran a riddle of the time, inviting puzzlers to guess the identity of an alcoholic beverage. “Sometimes I cast an old fellow right to the ground.”(46)

  The answer was mead, not wine, for most Anglo-Saxon wine was light and fruity, rather like Beaujolais nouveau today, consumed soon after the harvest, and only intended to last until the next harvest came round.

  Nor was beor strong enough to produce intense intoxication. Hops were grown in the year 1000, but they were used only in cloth-dyeing processes. Not until the fourteenth century is there evidence of hops being generally used to give English beer its bitterness - as well as a longer shelf life. Like wine, the ale of the year 1000 had to be consumed without delay, and it was probably quite a sweet beverage with a porridgy consistency.

  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. The solid texture of all Anglo-Saxon beverages was reflected by a utensil that is used today only in the kitchen - the sieve - which is found in the early Anglo-Saxon graves of highborn women in the form of decorative sieve-spoons. These elaborate and precious implements were signs of status, possibly worn round the neck as a sommelier wears his wine saucer today, since it was the ceremonial duty of highborn women to serve the drinks at their menfolk’s feasts:

  Wealhtheow came forward [relates Beowulf],

  Mindful of ceremonial - she was Hrothgar’s queen.

  Adorned with gold, that proud woman

  Greeted the men in the hall, then offered the cup

  To the Danish king first of all.(47)

  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. The Easter gathering was one of the principal courts of the year. We can imagine the coming and going of fifty to two hundred people, arriving with their horses that had to be fed and watered, along with the petitioners, favour seekers, and great of the land invited to join the king in worship, do business, reaffirm loyalty, and feast in the time-honoured fashion.

  The great kingdoms and empires of these years were built around the personalities of charismatic leaders like Alfred and Charlemagne, and the maintenance of power depended on itinerant pressings of the flesh. In the year 1000 the king of England was Alfred’s great-great-grandson, Ethelred - nicknamed “Ethelred Unred” by unkind chroniclers after his death. “Unred” was mistranslated in later years as “Unready,” and Ethelred has been known to history as “the Unready” ever since.

  In fact, “Unred” meant “ill-advised” in Old English. It was a rhyming pun on the Englisc meaning of Ethelred’s name: “of noble counsel.” He was “the well-advised, ill-adv
ised” - “of noble counsel, rubbish counsel” - and that paradox summed up the character of his lengthy reign. In the year 1000, Ethelred had already been on the throne for twenty-two years, and life as one of his subjects had been a complicated and contradictory experience: the best of times in some ways, but the worst of times as well.

  May: Wealth and Wool

  If King Ethelred Unred - Ethelred the Unready - had died in or around the year 1000, he might have had a reputation to match that of his distinguished forebear Athelstan, the first king of all Engla-lond. After 1000 a.d. Ethelred was to struggle with a succession of problems which eventually drove him into exile and an ignominious death. But viewed from the year 1000, it was arguable that he had brought England’s first millennium to a laudable close. The kingdom was more unified and richer than ever. In 1000 a.d., in fact, England enjoyed a prosperity and civilisation unmatched in northern Europe.

  The evidence is in the coins. They are found almost everywhere that late Anglo-Saxon remains are excavated. Thin and smooth, they are elegant little wafers of hammered high-grade silver which nestle cosily in the palm. They are duller and lighter than modern machine-made coins, but they are bursting with personality - and also with clues to the complex getting and spending which they sustained.

  The image of Ethelred himself is marked with the same ambivalence that characterised his reign. On one coin, which depicts the hand of Providence reaching down dramatically out of the clouds, the king looks wise and saintly, something like a bishop. He has a ceremonial cope pulled around his neck. But on another, on which he is shown wearing a fiercely spiked military helmet, Ethelred looks like a crazed version of Alexander the Great. He wears a cockatoo headdress and seems raring to take on the world. Both images are essentially symbolic, intended to convey the idea of kingship, rather than a photographic reproduction of Ethelred’s face, and they may reflect the varied messages that Ethelred was trying to convey at different times as he struggled to cope with the shifting challenges of his reign.

  It is the letters on the coin around the face which tell us more - though unlike modern coins, they state no date. (The earliest known date on any European coin is 1234 a.d.) Instead, the coded hieroglyphics tell us who minted the coin and where, and from this data we can reconstruct the framework of a remarkably sophisticated economic and administrative system that reached from one end of England to the other.

  England’s coinage was the most advanced in western Europe in the year 1000, with a network of over seventy local mints spread around the country, each of them inside a market town, or within a dozen or so miles of one. This made it possible for money to be carried safely to and from the mint within the hours of daylight. The mints were probably protected by stockades, and each was directed by a “moneyer” who was in charge of the coin-making process.

  By the reign of King Ethelred at the end of the tenth century, English coins were issued for limited periods of validity - no more than two or three years. At the end of that period the coins ceased to be legal tender, and to redeem their value you had to take them to your local mint where, for every ten you returned, you received eight or nine of the new issue. The difference between what you gave and what you received constituted a government tax, and that made the ”moneyer” effectively the king’s tax collector.

  People accepted this system because it guaranteed good and trustworthy coins. The soft silver alloys of the time were easy to shave or clip, so regular issues of fresh-minted coins made counterfeiting more difficult. The English silver penny, the standard English unit of currency in the year 1000, was not pure silver, but it contained a high and constant proportion of silver in its alloy - about 92.5 percent - and Anglo-Saxon kings kept that proportion constant.

  The local moneyer was probably a full-time government official in busy mints like London, Winchester, and Canterbury, where there was a heavy inflow of foreign coins to be melted down and reminted. In the more distant, provincial mints, the moneyer may well have been the local jeweller or goldsmith, who produced coins under licence from the king. Harsh penalties were laid down for issuing coins that were basely alloyed or too light: “If a moneyer is found guilty [of issuing base or light coins],” reads Clause 14 of Athelstan’s Second Code of Laws “the hand shall be cut off with which he committed the crime, and fastened up on the mint.”(48)

  Each moneyer had his own licensed die, or coin stamp, with which he would imprint every coin with his personal details. We can imagine the die mounted on a wooden stand, beside the bench on which the moneyer beat out the sheets of silver alloy to the correct thickness and ratio of precious metal to alloy. He then cut this sheet of metal into identical small squares, each of them a coin blank slightly larger than the circumference of the die on his bench. To produce one penny, the moneyer would place a blank onto the die, and would strike the blank smartly downwards with a mallet. This drove the blank into the die, imprinting the lower surface of the coin with the moneyer’s mark and local details.

  To complete the making of the coin, the moneyer would then place the official die that was engraved with the royal head and the distinguishing particulars of the new issue on top of the blank and strike downwards for a second time. When the edges had been trimmed, the result was one silver penny, and if people wanted a half-penny, then they cut it across the middle. In the year 1000 a half-penny was exactly that - a half-circle of dull silver alloy.

  England’s seventy or so mints hand-produced five to ten million coins every two to three years by this meticulous and controlled process, an enormous quantity of bullion unmatched by any other country in Europe. Some of the silver came from England itself. There were small silver workings in Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Devon, and the Mendip Hills in Somerset. But modern chemical analysis of the many hoards that have been excavated shows that the ore was, for the most part, mined in Germany, where rich silver deposits had recently been discovered in the Harz mountains. This indicates that silver bullion was flowing into England in large quantities in the years leading up to 1000 a.d. - a very healthy balance of trade. But what was England selling to the outside world to generate such a positive cash flow?

  Here we venture into territory where the scarcity of evidence calls for historical detective work, since documentary sources on life and events in the years around 1000 are tragically sparse - in singular contrast to our own day, where the most trivial corners of life generate mountains of data every day. The modern chronicler of, say, sexual behaviour at the end of the second millennium already has thirty-six cartons of documents to cover the high jinks of the President of the United States alone - which is thirty or more than the storage space occupied by the modern transcripts of everything surviving in Englisc.

  The historian who would examine such a private subject as sexual behaviour in the years around 1000 has virtually nothing to work with beyond a group of sentences in the Life of St. Dunstan, describing the decadent King Eadwig, who scandalised the great of the land by failing to appear at his coronation feast in 955 a.d. When Dunstan dared to enter the royal bedchamber, he found the jewelled crown of England disrespectfully thrown on the floor, and the king energetically enjoying the charms of a young lady who, for all we know, could well have been the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a White House intern - with her mother cavorting in the same bed beside her.(49)

  It was the Normans who first set about obliterating evidence of the robust native culture that existed in England before their arrival in 1066. Every Anglo-Saxon cathedral was almost totally rebuilt. 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.

  Priceless ancient manuscripts were burned, used as drum-skins and roof insulation, or to line beer barrels and bind books.(50) As a consequence, it only takes a morning to read all surviving Anglo-Saxon poetry - and of England’s principal commerce at the turn of the first millennium we know even less than we do about King Eadwig’s sex life.

  Tw
o hundred years after 1000 a.d. England was clearly established as the principal supplier of high-quality wool to northern Europe. By the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the Cotswold villages and towns, the South Downs and saltmarshes, the lowlands of East Anglia, and the slopes of the Yorkshire Pennines were all prosperous areas thronged with sheep. They were the basis of a flourishing industry that exported wool to the great cloth factories of Flanders, and subsequent documentary evidence demonstrates how wool was the source of England’s wealth - the backbone of its economy and culture. When the Lord Chancellor started presiding over the House of Lords, he sat on a woolsack. Journeymen travelled to the local markets to buy up the produce of England’s many thousands of prosperous sheep farmers, and a network of packhorses and muletrains systematically transported the wool in convoys to the ports of southeast England, where merchants organised profitable flotillas to ferry the wool bales across to the Low Countries.

  But we can only deduce that all this existed - or was starting to exist - in the year 1000, for while documents survive that testify to tenth-century trade in wine, furs, fish, and slaves, there is no similar paperwork that shows England exporting wool or woolen cloth. The evidence is indirect, like the legacy of place names - the Isle of Sheppey, for example, and towns like Shipton and Shipley whose names suggest a livelihood derived from sheep. Anglo-Saxon wills regularly discuss the disposition of sheep by the hundred, and excavations reveal sheep bones, sheep shears, wool spindles, weaving batons, and all the paraphernalia of cloth production.

  The Anglo-Saxons were clearly sheep-rearing folk, and our calendar drawing for this month reflects that - a flock of delightfully frisky and wool-covered sheep cavorting under the eye of equally contented shepherds. May was the month of shearing, when the animals were first washed and the sheared wool then rinsed in a series of baths. Where necessary, it was lightly greased with butter or lard to facilitate the separation of the individual wool fibres with the heads of thistles or teazles that were used like combs. Then the spinning could commence.(51) The spinning wheel did not appear in Europe until the thirteenth century, but the hand spindles and loom components regularly unearthed from Anglo-Saxon excavations suggest that wool-making must have been a common household process.