by Robert Lacey
Once the harvest had been gathered in early medieval times, every farmer and householder had to work out the basic equation of survival through the winter. How long would the larder last, and which animals looked like consuming more fodder than their life expectancy could justify? September was the month when ailing and elderly livestock was turned into sausages and pies, and the pig was the crucial factor in this calculation. The cultivated harvest in the fields was matched by the woodland “mast” of beechnuts, acorns, chestnuts, and other fruits of the forest. Autumn was when the hogs were at their fattest.
You could make use of virtually every bit of the medieval pig, which, foraging alongside and sometimes mating with its wild cousins, had a distinctly boar-like appearance. Its snout was long and aggressive, and it had long legs. Hung in the rafters for a month or so, its sides of bacon made a virtue of the smoke that hung heavy in the thick and pungent atmosphere of the Anglo-Saxon home. Its stomach lining provided tripe. Its intestines provided skin for sausages, and its blood was the main ingredient for black pudding. 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. “Pannage” was the term for the natural, self-foraging diet with which pigs sustained themselves in the Middle Ages, and the value of medieval woodland was often expressed in terms of how many pigs that sector of forest could support.
Farm animals were distinctly smaller in the year 1000 than they are today - and they were also smaller than they had been six centuries earlier. The Romans had worked systematically on improving the yield of their meat crop with relatively scientific livestock breeding programmes, but the Anglo-Saxons did not bother. Archaeological excavations show the bones of cows, pigs, and sheep getting progressively smaller through the centuries, then getting bigger again with the introduction of scientific husbandry in the later Middle Ages. In the years around 1000, a plough team of eight oxen was needed to break up virgin land. By the fifteenth century, four to six better-bred beasts were enough (92) - though this also reflected improvements in plough technology.
The Anglo-Saxons loved their animals. Just as they could recognise the livestock of their neighbours, the chances were they had a pet name for every creature in their own extended family, and they would have revelled in the anthropomorphic menagerie of Walt Disney. Their poems took delight in attributing human characteristics like steadfastness and cunning to the members of the animal kingdom, seeing them as fellow occupants of a world in which human and animal interests were intermingled. Mother Nature’s children were all their brothers and sisters.
September was the month when the orchard yielded its richest harvest. Orceard was an Anglo-Saxon word derived from Weortyeard, a garden or plant yard. Archbishop Wulfstan’s account of the well-run estate describes fruit grafting as one of the annual tasks, and another manuscript of the time indicates that plums were developed at Glastonbury by grafting onto the rootstock of the native sloe bush. (93) Monastic communities were particularly well placed to exchange fruit grafts and plant clippings in the same way that they exchanged books for their libraries. The abbey at Ely was famous for its vineyards, as well as for its orchards and a plant nursery which cultivated several varieties of fruit
trees. (94)
Apple, pear, plum, fig, quince, peach, and mulberry trees all featured in the garden plan of one grand monastery designed, though never actually built, for Ireland’s missionary monks on the shores of Lake Constance in Switzerland. (95) St. Benedict’s command that monks should not consume meat was interpreted by most communities to mean meat from red-blooded, four-legged animals, so poultry was considered immune from the prohibition, as were rabbits, which the Normans brought to England after 1066. But the monastic diet still tended to the non-carnivorous, with a high dairy content and a healthy proportion of nuts. The monks of St. Gall planned to grow chestnuts, almonds, hazelnuts, and walnuts on their estate, and when it came to vegetables, their kitchen garden made allowance for onions, leeks, celery, radish, carrots, garlic, shallots, parsnip, cabbage, parsley, dill, chervil, marigold, coriander, poppy, and lettuce.
These fruits and vegetables were almost certainly more tasty than their modern equivalents, but, like the livestock of the year 1000, they were considerably smaller. Even when allowance has been made for withering and shrinkage, the fruit pips and seeds discovered in early English archaeological sites are smaller than those of today - and several staples that we take for granted in our modern diet are noticeable for their absence.
There was no spinach. This did not appear in European gardens until spinach seeds were brought back from the Crusades in the twelfth century. Broccoli, cauliflower, runner beans, and brussels sprouts were all developed in later centuries by subsequent generations of horticulturalists. Nor were there any potatoes or tomatoes. Europe had to wait five centuries for those, until the exploration of the Americas, and though the recipe books describe warm possets and herbal infusions, there were none of the still-to-be-imported stimulants - tea, coffee, or chocolate.
The greatest dietary gap by modern standards was the absence of any type of sugar. Venetian records describe a shipment of sugar cane reaching Venice for the first time in 996 a.d., probably from Persia or Egypt, (96) but sugar was not imported any further into Europe until the end of the Middle Ages, (97) and it did not swamp the European palate, creating the modern sweet tooth, until the development of the Caribbean sugar plantations of the seventeenth century. Anglo-Saxon skeletal remains are remarkable for the relative absence of dental and jaw decay.
Honey was the principal source of sweetness in the year 1000. It was so precious it was almost a currency in medieval England. People paid taxes with it, and it was a lucky day when a swarm of bees settled in your thatch:
Christ, there is a swarm of bees outside,
Fly hither, my little cattle,
In blest peace, in God’s protection,
Come home safe and sound!
The church devised this prayer to help the faithful take advantage of the opportunity, and it developed into quite a lengthy invocation:
Sit down, sit down, bee!
St. Mary commanded thee!
Thou shalt not have leave,
Thou shalt not fly to the wood.
Thou shalt not escape me,
Nor go away from me.
Sit very still,
Wait God’s will! (98)
Bees did not produce only honey. Propolis, the reddish resin used by worker bees as a building material, provided a healing balm that was greatly prized for the treatment of wounds - while a measure of beeswax commanded an even higher price than an equivalent measure of honey. Beeswax made the best candles, which shone with a bright and steady light, exuding a pleasant smell that was infinitely preferable to the aroma of a guttering tallow candle made from mutton fat.
“Take some earth,” ran another recipe for claiming a swarm of bees. “Sprinkle it with thy right hand under thy right foot and say: ‘I hold it under foot; I have found it!’ “
This was a pagan charm, an ancient precursor and rival to the prayer devised by the church, and its opening words established the owner’s claim to the swarm in the same way that the modern rugby player digs his heel into the ground when he catches the ball and shouts “Mark!”
The next stage was to cast a handful of grit or gravel over the swarm and cry out:
Stay, victorious women, sink to earth!
Never fly wild to the wood.
Be as mindful of my good
as each man is of food and home. (99)
The medieval beekeeper may have believed that the bees actually heard his words and understood them, but a modern beekeeper’s explanation of the charm’s effectiveness is that bees are genetically programmed to cluster round the queen and to take her down to earth in a protective bundle when they sense danger - be it in a storm of hail or in a scattering of grit cast by a predatory Anglo-Saxon. (100) When it came to bee husb
andry, the English had made considerable advances over the Romans, who presumed that the chief bee in any hive must be a male. The Romans also believed that when bees swarmed, they were setting off to war against some rival hive. The Anglo-Saxons, however, had worked out that the chief bee in every colony was a female, and they also understood that when bees swarmed it was a matter of proliferation and the creation of another colony.
In the absence of honey, another source of sweetness was the crushed pulp of grapes left over from the making of wine. The Normans’ Domesday survey of 1086 listed no less than thirty-eight vineyards in England, with Ely marking the most northerly spot, seventy miles northeast of London. It was a warmer world. 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.” Meteorologists describe this medieval warm epoch as the ”Little Optimum,” and they cite it as the explanation of such phenomena as the Viking explosion into Russia, France, Iceland, and the northwestern Atlantic.
The northerly retreat of icebergs and pack-ice under the impact of warmer temperatures is a plausible explanation of why Lief Eriksson was able to sail round the top of the Atlantic as far as Newfoundland in or about the year 1000, and why he found vines there. During the “Little Optimum,” Edinburgh enjoyed the climate of London, while London enjoyed the climate of the Loire valley in France, a difference of 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit - the equivalent in modern American terms of San Francisco’s climate moving north to Seattle. (101)
Weather was a subject of intense interest to the Anglo-Saxons, and with their seafaring heritage they reckoned they understood it well.
“If the sky reddens at night,” wrote the Venerable Bede, “[it foretells] a clear day; if in the morning, it means bad weather. . . . Also, when during a night voyage, the sea glitters about the oars, there will be a storm. And when dolphins often leap above the water, by what they say, there will result a wind rising, and breaking clouds will open the heavens.” (102)
One ninth-century manuscript was dedicated exclusively to thunder and what it might mean: “In May, thunder presages a hungry year. ... In the month of July, thunder signifies crops turning out well, and livestock perishing. . . . If it thunders on Sunday, this is considered to presage an extensive mortality of monks and nuns. . . . Of thunder on Wednesday, there is no doubt that it presages the death of idle and scandalous prostitutes.” (103)
The modern reader has to wonder what went through the mind of the monk or the nun who was reading these predictions and who recalled, say, the last time they heard a fierce clap of thunder on a Sunday, but saw none of their colleagues dropping down dead. Auguries have an eternal fascination, and for those who take them seriously, it never seems to matter if cold reality proves them wrong. In the year 1000 people gave the benefit of the doubt to the intangible aspects of their life. It was an acknowledgement that they did not know all the answers, and it also served, perhaps, as an insurance policy in the event that the facts on which they were relying proved faulty.
King Alfred took no chances. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle gave the great king an impressive genealogy which traced his ancestry back from the ninth century to Noah and thence, via Methusaleh and other Old Testament figures, back to Adam - “the first man and our father who is Christ. Amen.” (104) But the king’s family tree also showed that he claimed descent from one of the greatest of the Germanic gods, Woden, master magician, calmer of storms, raiser of the dead and governor of victory, (105) with another section of the royal genealogy featuring such figures as the mythical Beow or Barley, the basis for the folk figure John Barleycorn, who was an ancient pagan focus for rituals of sacrifice.
The old gods still stalked the furrows of Anglo-Saxon England. The word pagan comes from pagus, Latin for “the countryside,” and it was among the “pags,” or the rustics, that the old magic lived on. When the ploughman went out to cut his first furrow in January or February, you might have seen him say a prayer as he knelt to scoop a shallow nest in the soil for a cake that his wife had baked:
Earth, Earth, Earth!
Oh Earth our mother!
May the all-wielder, Ever-Lord grant thee
Acres a-waxing, upwards a-growing,
Pregnant with corn and plenteous in strength. (106)
The cake was baked from the same grain that the farmer was hoping to cultivate, and Bede related how February was popularly known as “the month of cakes,” after the cakes or placentae “which in that month the English offered to their gods.” (107)
Bede and the other monkish chroniclers were not inclined to celebrate England’s heathen heritage. You have to comb their writings carefully for clues to paganism. But even in their Christian loyalties they conveyed a live-and-let-live impression of the relations between England’s old and new religions:
I cannot abandon the age-old beliefs that I have held. . . . [declared Ethelbert, the last pagan king of Kent, according to Bede’s history, as he addressed Augustine and his fellow Christian missionaries in 597]. But since you have travelled far, and I can see that you are sincere in your desire to impart to us what you believe to be true and excellent, we will not harm you. . . . Nor will we forbid you to preach and win any people you can to your religion. (108)
Bede went on to describe how King Ethelbert had provided the Christian missionaries with a base inside Canterbury, and how Pope Gregory, sending instructions from Rome, exhibited parallel tolerance:
You are familiar with the usage of the Roman church ... [the Pope told Augustine], But if you have found customs, whether in the church of Rome or of Gaul or any other that may be more acceptable to God, I wish you to make a careful selection of them. . . . For in these days the church corrects some things strictly, and allows others out of leniency. Others again she deliberately glosses over and tolerates, and by doing so often succeeds in checking an evil of which she disapproves.
Gregory suggested to Augustine that England’s old pagan temples should be turned into Christian churches “in order that the people may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they have been accustomed,” and, as a result, there are modern English churches which can be traced back to the site of Bronze Age barrows. Rather than sacrifice to Mother Earth, Anglo-Saxons were encouraged to direct their prayers to the Virgin Mary, and having accepted Sunday and Moon-day, the church also tolerated Tiw’s-day, Woden’s-day, Thor’s-day, and Frigs-day, the English days of the week that were named after the old Norse gods Tiw, the god of war, Woden, Alfred’s father of the gods and of the royal house of Wessex, Thunor, the god of thunder, and Frig, the goddess of growing things and fertility. Saturn’s day was another pagan hangover - from the Romans.
King Aldwulf of East Anglia, who was a contemporary of Bede’s, recalled how he had seen in his boyhood the temple created by his predecessor King Redwald, who wanted to keep in favour with both religions and had had two altars constructed side by side. At one altar the king partook of bread and wine, “the holy sacrifice of Christ,” while at the other he sacrificed in the old style. (109) Bede made it very clear that this must be considered an ignoble and ignorant attempt to serve two masters, but his description of why King Ethelbert eventually decided to become Christian was couched in bloodlessly pragmatic terms. According to Bede, the king of Kent did not switch to the new religion through any deeply personal or emotion-led revelation, but simply because he came to judge that the new belief system offered better prospects for him and for his kingdom than the old.
New magic for old was the language of conversion. The plain-talking Boniface made his mark in Germany when he cut down a sacred grove of trees and used the wood to build a new church for Jesus. The local shamans predicted disaster, but lightning did not strike, and Boniface was soon presiding over mass conversions. The beautiful fourteen-foot-high stone cross that stands at Gosforth in Cumbria is carved with a panoply of Norse gods, with the evil god Loki chained beneath a venomous serpent, while Woden fights of
f a wolf amidst a cluster of dragons - and the figure of Christ looms crucified at the apex of the battle, not so much the only god as the most powerful one.
The millennium saw a rush of European regimes anxious to join the Christian club, from Vladimir of Kiev, King of the Rus, who was baptised in 988, to the Viking assembly of Iceland and King Stephen of Hungary, both converts in the year 1000 itself. As these societies around the geographical margin signed up for inclusion in the belief system of the European core, one is tempted to see a modern parallel with the nations of Europe’s fringe, all standing in line to join the European Economic Community at the end of the second millennium. 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. When Canute established himself in England in 1016, he set up his Danish court in Winchester, where, in a series of ceremonies in the great cathedral that were carefully publicised by the religious chroniclers, he used Christianity to sanctify his new power and authority.
Canute’s decision to run his North Sea empire from England, and not from Scandinavia, was a tribute to the cultural and political status that the country had achieved by the beginning of the eleventh century, but it was also a tribute to England’s religion. In the battle between paganism and Christianity, Christianity had come out on top, and in quite a rush. The cavalcade of Christian conversions in the final years of the century has another modern parallel: after decades of bitter and tense conflict between two mighty ideologies, one had collapsed as the millennium approached, leaving the other in charge of the agenda with a conclusiveness that had long been preached with fervour, but which had not been that obvious when the battle was at its height.
