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

by Robert Lacey

  The risk was severe for those who could not buy their way out of trouble. The wergild system meant that the rich could pay for their transgressions at the rate of 125 pounds of silver for each human life. So while a murderous nobleman could avoid the death penalty by paying for the life he had taken, it was most unlikely that a thief had the funds to make any sort of restitution. Whether women were hanged just like men, we do not know. But it seems likely that this was one aspect of life and death in the year 1000 to which sexual equality did apply.

  December: The End of Things, or a New Beginning?

  Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven with the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hands. He seized the dragon, that serpent of old, the Devil or Satan, and chained him up for a thousand years; he threw him into the abyss, shutting and sealing it over him, so that he might seduce the nations no more till the thousand years were over. After that he must be let loose for a short while.

  Revelation 20:1-3

  There were no such things as gossip columnists in the year 1000, but if Vanity Fair had existed, it would certainly have found room for the writings of Ralph Glaber. Glaber was a Burgundian monk who wrote a five-volume history of his times which constitutes our principal surviving source as to how people might have felt in the year 1000 about the shift in the calendar from one millennium to the next. Computer anxieties aside, most people today are looking forward to 2000 and the years beyond with reasonable optimism. But a thousand years ago people had never lived through such a major milestone, and biblical passages like the Revelation of St. John proposed unpleasant possibilities. Would the world come to an end? Would there be another millennium? Would life continue, but in some less pleasant form, reflecting the unchaining of Satan that St. John had described?

  Ralph Glaber wrote his history with these questions in mind. He entered his first monastery in 997 a.d. Scarcely a dozen years old, he seems to have been possessed of a troublemaking character which set him apart from his fellows. As one historian has put it, Glaber had an “instinct for dissent,” (127) for in the course of his fifty years, the troublesome monk was shown the door of monasteries in Auxerre, Champeaux, Dijon, Beze, Suze, and finally the great abbey of Cluny. But Glaber s wanderings provided him with a patchwork of perspectives that was rare for his time. He was in touch with the bush telegraph of the year 1000. No cell-bound hermit, he wrote in a chatty, over-the-garden-fence style, and if it is impossible to confirm everything that he wrote, he still provides a vivid and believable glimpse of how some people, at least, experienced the first millennium.

  In the lead-up to 1000, Glaber gathered reports of a terrifying comet that had crossed the sky:

  It appeared in the month of September, not long after nightfall, and remained visible for nearly three months. It shone so brightly that its light seemed to fill the greater part of the sky, then it vanished at cock’s crow. But whether it is a new star which God launches into space, or whether He merely increases the normal brightness of another star, only He can decide.... What appears established with the greatest degree of certainty is that this phenomenon in the sky never appears to men without being the sure sign of some mysterious and terrible event. And indeed, a fire soon consumed the church of St. Michael the Archangel, built on a promontory in the ocean [Mont-Saint-Michel off the coast of Brittany] which had always been the object of special veneration throughout the whole world. (128)

  In conjunction with his description of the portentous comet of 989 - known today as Halley s comet - Glaber described other auguries:

  In the seventh year from the millennium . . . almost all the cities of Italy and Gaul were devastated by violent conflagrations, and Rome itself largely razed by fire. . .. As one, [the people] gave out a terrible scream and turned to rush to confess to the Prince of the Apostles. (129)

  Many eminent men died around this time, recorded Glaber - though this could be said of almost any era - and there was an outbreak of heresy in Sardinia. “All this accords,” wrote the monk, “with the prophecy of St. John, who said that the devil would be freed after a thousand years.” (130)

  Glaber had met the Devil, who appeared at the end of his bed several times. As the monk recalled from his visions, the Prince of Darkness was a shaggy, black, hunched-up figure with pinched nostrils, a goat’s beard, and blubbery lips with which he whispered seditious thoughts in an attempt to subvert the holy man: “Why do you monks bother with vigils, fasts, and mortifications?” cooed Lucifer on one visit. “One day, one hour of repentance, is all you need to earn eternal bliss. ... So why bother to rise at the sound of the bell when you could go on sleeping?” (131)

  Some historians have cited this Dr. Faustus-like episode as discrediting the reliability of Glaber’s testimony. But the monk’s account of his vision neatly voiced the paradox which the doctrine of repentance poses to any Christian: if repentance guarantees salvation, why not enjoy a few good juicy sins before you repent? If anything, Glaber’s dream indicated the reasoning of a sceptical mind - and his history did not dwell excessively on St. John’s gloomy prophecies of millennial misery. After the monk’s account of the natural disasters of the 990s, he moved smartly on to the year 1003:

  Just before the third year after the millennium, throughout the whole world, but especially in Italy and Gaul, men began to reconstruct churches, although for the most part the existing ones were properly built and not in the least unworthy. But it seemed as though each Christian community were aiming to surpass all others in the splendour of construction. It was as if the whole world were shaking itself free, shrugging off the burden of the past, and cladding itself everywhere in a white mantle of churches. (132)

  Glaber described a world that had been holding its breath, expecting the worst. The worst had not happened, and as the monk travelled the countryside between Burgundy’s great monastic houses, he had the chance to observe at firsthand the explosion of ecclesiastical stone building that marked the start of the eleventh century. It was echoed all over northern Christendom. To judge from the evidence of Anglo-Saxon England, there were teams of masons who travelled from community to community, offering package deals by which they erected parish churches to virtually Identikit plans. Their buildings must have shimmered, light and beautiful in the green medieval countryside just as Glaber described them - and so they still do.

  Glaber linked his “white mantle” of new churches to a world that was making a fresh start, but thirty years later another set of anxieties loomed. Strictly speaking, the reign of Christ on earth did not begin until the death and resurrection of the Saviour, which occurred, according to the New Testament, when Jesus was thirty-three years old. So might 1033 prove to be the year when the dire predictions of the book of Revelation would be fulfilled?

  After the many prodigies which had broken upon the world before, after, and around the millennium of the Lord Christ [wrote Glaber], there were plenty of able men of penetrating intellect who foretold others, just as great, at the approach of the millennium of the Lord’s Passion, and such wonders were soon manifest. (133)

  Heresy broke out again around 1030 a.d., this time among the Lombards. There were horrendous famines which forced men into cannibalism, more beloved and distinguished church figures passed away, while pilgrims set off for Jerusalem in vast and unprecedented numbers. “It was believed,” wrote Glaber, “that the order of the seasons and the elements ... had fallen into perpetual chaos, and with it had come the end of mankind.... It could portend nothing other than the advent of the accursed Anti-Christ who, according to divine testimony, is expected to appear at the end of the world.” (134)

  Book IV of Glaber’s History then described the manifestations that followed the happy passing of the 1033 “apocalypse”:

  At the millennial anniversary of the Passion of the Lord, the clouds cleared in obedience to Divine mercy and goodness and the smiling sky began to shine and flow gentle breezes. . . . At that point, in the region of Aquitaine, bishops, abbots, and other men devo
ted to holy religion first began to gather councils of the whole people. .. . When the news of these assemblies was heard, the entire populace joyfully came, unanimously prepared to follow whatever should be commanded them by the pastors of the church. A voice descending from Heaven could not have done more, for everyone was still under the effect of the previous calamity and feared the future loss of abundance. (135)

  Glaber’s reporting is confirmed by other sources. For several decades in the middle of the eleventh century huge crowds gathered in open fields in France to venerate relics and to swear oaths of peace. The movement was known as the “Peace of God,” and economic historians have explained the phenomenon in terms of the church’s wish to protect its estates in an era of petty warfare. Populist preaching whipped up feeling against lawless noblemen, and it is highly likely that some preachers may have called on millennial frettings for their purposes.

  The theologian Abbo of Fleury recalled a pre-millennial sermon in his youth which did precisely this. A Parisian preacher had announced that “as soon as the number of a thousand years was completed, the Anti-Christ would come and the last judgement would soon follow.” (136) Abbo pooh-poohed the preacher’s anxieties by quoting some alternative passages of scripture, but in England the eloquent Archbishop Wulfstan of York had no reservations about invoking millennial fears. It was in 1014, when the war between Ethelred and the Danish invaders was at its bitterest, that England’s greatest preacher composed his famous Sermon of the Wolf to the English:

  Dear Friends. . . . This world is in haste and is drawing ever closer to its end, and it always happens that the longer it lasts, the worse it becomes. And so it must ever be, for the coming of the Anti-Christ grows ever more evil because of the sins of the people, and then truly it will be grim and terrible widely in the world. (137)

  Wulfstan’s corruscating sermon has come down to us in written form. It was intended to be read by monks and delivered by priests from parish pulpits, but in its mesmeric passion one can almost hear the tones of the archbishop as he himself declaimed it. Even in translation, his prose rings with the compelling rhythm of a Jesse Jackson or Martin Luther King:

  The devil has deceived this people too much, and there has been little faith among men, though they speak fair words, and too many crimes have gone unchecked in the land. . . The laws of the people have deteriorated altogether too often since Edgar died; and holy places are everywhere open to attack, and the houses of God are completely deprived of ancient rites, and stripped of all that is fitting; and religious orders have now for a long time been greatly despised; and widows are forced to marry unrighteously; and too many are reduced to poverty; and poor men are wretchedly deceived, most cruelly cheated and wholly innocent, sold out of this land far and wide into the possession of foreigners; and through cruel injustice, children in the cradle are enslaved for petty theft widely within this nation; and the rights of freemen suppressed and the rights of slaves curtailed, and the rights of charity neglected; and, to speak most briefly, God’s laws are hated and His commands despised. (138)

  Preaching in 1014, Wulfstan made no reference to the anniversaries of 1000 and 1033 on which Glaber dwelt, but his words carried the same sense of crossing some awesome threshold in time. People were holding their breath in England, as Glaber described in France. Dates were not Wulfstan’s concern, but the miseries of England were, and the archbishop had no doubt that the Vikings in their dragonships were acting as instruments of the Anti-Christ: “We pay them continually, and they humiliate us daily. They ravage and they burn, plunder and steal and carry off to their fleet. And lo! What other thing is clear and evident in all these events, if not the anger of God?” (139)

  As the year 2000 approaches, modern historians have debated whether the concerns expressed by Glaber and Wulfstan constitute evidence that Christendom marked the first millennium as a specially significant point in time. Those who doubt the reliability of Glaber’s testimony, and who explain Wulfstan’s sermon solely in terms of England’s sufferings at the hands of the Vikings, point to the many English wills that were composed in the 990s. These were all written with the clear and calm assumption that the world was going to continue exactly as it always had. Not a single Anglo-Saxon will or charter makes any reference to a forthcoming apocalypse, and it would certainly be wrong to imagine crowds gathering together in Engla-lond, to count down in modern style to the end of an old era and the beginning of a new.

  The December drawing of the Julius Work Calendar, our final encounter with the group of nimble little figures who have laboured with such good humour month by month through the year, shows business as usual. The good folk are flailing, winnowing, and carrying away the produce of their harvest ready for next year in a basket of especially fine woven wattle, and there is every reason to believe that that is precisely how most of Engla-lond prepared for and greeted the beginning of the second millennium. Only the literate were in a position to concern themselves greatly with what would happen when the year dcccclxxxxviiiI [999 - the Anglo-Saxons followed the older Roman style of numbering.] became a simple m, and they would have had little agreement as to the specific day and hour at which the moment should be marked: December 25th? January 1st? Lady Day?

  The profusion of possible starting points for a “new year” showed how imprecisely time was divided for most people in the year 1000 - and they had heavyweight authority for their vagueness. It was ludicrous and impertinent, argued the philosopher St. Augustine of Hippo, for man to impose his own mortal calculations on the workings of God. According to the “business as usual” school of modern historians, the millennial preoccupations of Glaber and Wulfstan hold no more significance than the jeremiads of the gullible and doom-laden who agonise in every society - the medieval equivalents of believers in ufos, the Bermuda Triangle, and the X files.

  And yet. And yet. . The appeal of Wulfstan’s remarkable sermon derives from the power with which it captures and gives expression to the spirit of its times. Its pervading feeling of doom has a resonance that is deeper than the imagining of a single clergyman, while Ralph Glaber s history rings with the same echo. Glaber’s narrative may have been colourful, but it was not concocted out of thin air. Sin, punishment, and Anti-Christ were clearly linked in these vivid contemporary visions to a common concern with a crossroad in time. The world was turning, and though it is in the nature of the world to turn, the ending of the first millennium clearly provided some people with the stimulus to contemplate that fact with extra seriousness, and to ponder the wonder and despair contained within the eternal platitude.

  Down in Rome the worrying new millennium was ushered in by a worrying new Pope. A precise reading of Revelation does not predict that the world will end with the completion of a thousand years. It prophesies, rather, that the Devil will be unleashed to work his mischief, and as people looked around for evidence of where or who the Anti-Christ might be, they fixed on the Papacy and its controversial new occupant, Gerbert of Aurillac, who had taken the title of Pope Sylvester II.

  Named after the small town in Aquitaine where he was born in 941 a.d., Gerbert went to Spain as a young man to explore the mathematical and scientific techniques of the Saracens, where he also dug around for the classical texts of Plato, Aristotle, and the dangerously worldly love poems of Ovid. Gerbert studied the diseases of the eye, and as a gifted musician, he built his own version of the new mechanical wind-organs. He built himself a planetarium, filled with wooden spheres, to work out the movements of the heavenly bodies. He wrote a treatise on the astrolabe. If anyone embodied the anxiety-provoking spirit of a new age, it was this clever and disputacious man who made as many enemies as Ralph Glaber, but who rose to significantly greater heights.

  It was the patronage of the Ottonian dynasty which gave Gerbert his eminence. Inspired by the ambition of Otto I, the German king who sought to re-create the empire of Charlemagne and to relocate its headquarters in Rome, the Ottonians dominated the politics of Europe in the decades leading
up to the millennium. Gerbert came to the attention of Otto II in one of the set-piece philosophical debates that were the heavyweight boxing championships of the time. Scholars and students would travel from all over Europe to watch these public debates, cheering on the learned contestants as they argued the pros and cons of a philosophical proposition.

  Gerbert triumphed in a day-long debate at Ravenna in November 980 where his quickness of wit earned victory for the proposition that physics is a branch of mathematics, not a separate discipline in its own right. Otto II had presided over the tournament as master of ceremonies and referee, and the emperor seized on Gerbert as an intellect who could add lustre to his ambitions. The Ottonians were looking for class wherever they could get it. In the 930s Otto I had married King Athelstan’s sister Edith to acquire some of the lustre of Europe’s oldest royal dynasty, the house of Wessex. After Otto II’s death in 983, Gerbert remained a client, adviser, and court mathematician to his successor, Otto III, only a child at his accession, and he also gave advice to the Frankish duke Hugh Capet, who made himself king of France in 987 in no small part thanks to the counsel and influence of the wily churchman.

  It was small wonder that the high-powered intellect and wide-ranging political influence of Gerbert came to inspire envy and mistrust. The man must have contracted a pact with the Devil, argued his detractors, and they used Gerbert’s fondness for scientific instruments and the scanning of the heavens as evidence of necromancy. Gerbert’s dabbling with the ancient manuscripts which he had secured through his dealings with the infidel Saracen compounded his offence, and when, thanks to the influence of Otto III, he became Pope on the very eve of the millennium, his critics had all the proof they needed. Gerbert, the first-ever French Pope, could only have secured his throne by selling his soul, it was said. The Anti-Christ had come to power in Christendom just as St. John had prophesied.