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

by Robert Lacey

  Gerbert died only three years later, and this was taken as final confirmation of his apostacy. The Devil could not wait to reclaim his own. Legend had it that Gerbert’s dying request was that his body be cut into separate pieces so that Satan could not carry him all away, and this tale was taken so seriously that six and a half centuries later, in 1648, Vatican researchers had his body exhumed. The skeleton was found intact.

  When Gerbert became Pope in 999, his choice of the title Sylvester II invited deliberate comparison with the first Sylvester, who had been bishop of Rome at the time of Constantine, the earliest Christian emperor. But the feast of the first Sylvester was December 31, New Year’s Eve in classical Rome, and the linking of this second Sylvester with the pagan date was more grist to the mill of his critics. The new Pope’s most suspicious innovation of all was his espousing of the abacus, the exotic calculating machine which was revolutionising the arithmetic of the time. The use of Roman numerals had a paralysing effect on calculation. It was hard enough to add mcxiv to cxcix, but to multiply one set of letters by the other was virtually impossible. The scholar Alcuin said that 9,000 should be regarded as the upper limit beyond which figuring was not possible, and when that was written out as mmmmmmmmm one could understand what he meant.

  With the abacus, however, these complex calculations could be accomplished with a few flicks of the beads of a counting frame, or, more usually in western Europe, with the movement of counters on a chequered table - hence the development in England early in the second millennium of the government counting house, the exchequer. Just as conventional calculations are swallowed up by the modern microchip, so the mechanism of the abacus obliterated the need to write out figures, speeding calculation in a magical fashion. Its potential effect on the business, intellectual, and scientific processes of its time was comparable to the impact of the computer today.

  The abacus was one of the new and bewildering dimensions to mathematics and general thinking which included zero and infinity. These are two of the fundamental concepts which are necessary to understand a universe that operates by logical rules of its own, rather than being the inscrutable plaything of a divine creator, and they opened the way to a new world. The flowering of all these fresh ideas lay in the future - and they did not come to England until after 1066. But thanks to Gerbert of Aurillac, the first millenniums Bill Gates, they arrived in Christendom almost exactly with the year 1000, and after their arrival, life would never be the same again.

  The English Spirit

  And then there is also a need that each should understand where he came from and what he is - and what will become of him.

  Wulfstan, Archbishop of York from 1002 to 1023

  A green and pleasant England with ample space to breathe, the sound of birdsong and church bells, the sharp smell of drifting wood-smoke on an autumn evening - life in the year 1000 can be evoked with some powerfully attractive images, and they are complemented by the mesmerically beautiful treasures that have been recovered from Anglo-Saxon churches and archaeological sites: two delicately entwined ivory angels from Winchester, twisting and fluttering heavenwards like the double propeller of a sycamore seed;(140) a walrus tusk, now in Liverpool Museum, that must have been carved sometime very close to 1000 a.d., with two cheeky sheep peering out from below the manger of the Christ child;(141) and from the tomb of the great Archbishop Wulfstan, who died in 1023 a.d., an exquisitely slender bronze cloak pin - the very pin, presumably, with which he fastened his vestments before mounting to the pulpit - with a minuscule latticework of tracery etched onto its diamond-shaped head.(142) The craftsmanship could not be bettered today

  But then in a grave at Kingsworthy in Hampshire are found the bones of a mother with the skeleton of her baby still inside her, trapped on its way along her birth canal. The woman must have died in the throes of labour without relief of medicine - let alone the drastic release offered by Caesarian section, which is not recorded as being attempted in England until the sixteenth century, with no mother reported as surviving the procedure until the eighteenth. (143) Reconstruction of the Kingsworthy mother’s pelvis shows it to have been narrow and constricted, while the bones of the infant are larger than average, suggesting a birthweight of nine to ten pounds.(144) So the best explanation of these remains - as for those of another tragic skeleton found in London with foetal bones inside the abdomen - is that the mother died, almost certainly of sheer exhaustion, after long hours of trying vainly to deliver a child that never had a chance of being born. Death, disease, and discomfort were daily companions in the year 1000, and living through the annual round of toil set out in the pages of the Julius Work Calendar represented a veritable triumph of the human spirit.

  The simplest things were so difficult to accomplish. It took enormous time and effort to manufacture just a single coin, or to turn on a hand lathe the wooden cups that would today be produced in vast quantities by a machine. Every basic artefact represented hours of skill and effort and ingenuity, in return for a very meagre material reward. Kings and eminent churchmen lived in relative comfort, but there were no large or exaggerated profit margins for anyone. For the vast majority of ordinary people life was a struggle in even the smallest respect. Imagine wearing scratchy underwear made of coarse, hand-woven wool, since there was no cotton. Only the wealthy could afford garments of linen -and that was woven to a texture that would be too itchy for many a modern skin. The poetry of the year 1000 celebrated the qualities of the hero, and just to survive on a day-to-day basis every man and woman had to be precisely that.

  The most obvious difference between the year M and the year MM is the billions of extra people for whom this second millennium will possess some significance. Today the Jewish, Buddhist, and Moslem systems of datings still hold sway in their own cultures, where 2000 a.d. is numbered as 5760, 2544, and 1420 respectively. But the concept of the year 2000 and a new millennium has come to hold meaning for the world’s many non-Christian societies, if only because of the computer systems which have turned out to be tied more intimately than intended to the system of dating popularised thirteen centuries ago by the Venerable Bede. For reasons grand, petty, and sometimes just coincidental, the culture that was developing in the misty northwest corner of Europe around the year 1000 has spread its values all over the modern world - and the drawings and Latin verses of the Julius Work Calendar provide some clues as to how and why this has happened.

  The Calendar is dedicated to work and prayer. Its message is that you must labour as unquestioningly as you worship your God, and, as put into practice through the best part of the millennium that followed, this fundamental work ethic was to prove the basis of material success in England and in every other society that shared it. Already in these drawings are intimations of what was to come in the industrial West. The January ploughman is handling his massive, stall-fed oxen like so many machines. They are animals, but he is using them as enormous engines that could accomplish so much more work in so much less time than could be achieved by unassisted human labour. It was this sort of mechanical energy which produced the food surplus that, over the centuries, was to support the ever-increasing proportion of English people living in towns - and it was through the towns that mass prosperity, and mass political freedom, were eventually won.

  Looking at Europe in the year 1000, there were many societies for which one might have predicted wealth and empire ahead of England - and potentially at England’s expense. The ambitious Ottonian emperors controlled the old capitals of both Charlemagne and the Roman Empire. In Constantinople, the rulers of Byzantium maintained the tradition of that city’s imperial greatness, while down in Spain, the Saracens threatened further conquests in the direction of the Christian kingdoms to the north. And then there were the empires based in Baghdad, Persia, and India - and further east in Korea, China, and Japan.

  But all these locally dominant power structures were autocracies - and autocracy, in the long run, was not to prove the way ahead. It was inflexible a
nd hidebound, fatally resistant to the spirit of innovation on which progress depends. The English may have looked foolish when they paid their Danegeld to the barbarous Vikings in the years around 1000, but at least they knew how to generate their money through enterprise rather than through crude conquest, and the taxes that were doubtless raised with great grumbling could only have been levied and paid over so repeatedly on some ultimate basis of popular consent.

  Consent and social co-operation are among the most difficult elements to define in any society, but they were to prove crucial for the long-term future of the English way. Sharing the technology of the plough-team was an exercise in communal organisation. Archbishop Wulfstan’s description of how an agricultural estate should be run in the year 1000 depended on slave labour and was built around the authority of a lord of the manor, but that authority could only operate by respecting the rights of the community. The English described themselves as “subjects” in the year 1000, as they do today, but ten centuries of political development were to earn them rights and privileges that made them the envy of “citizens” elsewhere.

  Less attractively, the English were also about to embark on a long phase in their history in which they paid signally little respect to the rights of others. Within a hundred years they were to embark on their programme of global expansion that began with the Crusades - Christendom’s gleefully seized opportunity to hand back to the infidels a solid taste of the aggression from which Europe had already suffered - and England happily joined in that attack. She could thank the Normans for her warhorses, for her stone castles, and for a sharp new cutting edge to her military technology, but she financed all this with wealth that came from the wellsprings of the old Anglo-Saxon economy. Archaeology tells us of the coinage that both expressed and made possible the growing potency of English commerce, and this was to be enhanced by contemporary improvements in mathematics. The first Arabic numerals made their earliest appearance in a Western document in 976 a.d., and though centuries were to elapse before these numerals came into common commercial use, they pointed the way to the numeracy on which modern science, technology, business, and economics are all based.

  The handful of wills and charters that have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon England reveal another ingredient of that society’s future. The mundane precision with which these documents describe every detail of a particular estate boundary shows the seriousness with which the possession of property was taken in the year 1000, and though this was by no means unique to England, it was to prove another ingredient in the country’s future success. In the eighteenth century Edmund Burke would argue that the sanctity of property was the basic prerequisite of economic enterprise, since incentive can have no meaning until society makes it possible for property to be held securely. (145)

  The ultimate guarantee of this security was a respect for the law, the fundamental engine of healthy social growth - the idea that no man can be above the law, least of all lords and kings as they exercise their power. This was already inherent in the law codes regulating English life in the year 1000, and it helped provide this industrious society with an extraordinarily well developed sense of national cohesion. The concept of the nation state had yet to be articulated, and that concept was to engender much bloodshed and suffering, but it provided the lodestone of English existence for the next thousand years.

  As we today look forward to a millennium in which supranational, global organisation appears a very obvious key to the future, some may regard nationality as an outmoded concept. But nationality was the engine of England’s progress in the centuries that followed the year 1000. Archbishop Wulfstan’s mesmeric sermon to his fellow countrymen was both a doom-laden lament and a clarion call to England’s sense of itself. Geography was one vital factor, and language provided another, for though English democracy, technology, and economic enterprise were to secure many conquests in the course of the next thousand years, it was the strength and flexibility of the English language which secured the most universal conquests of all.

  The earliest documents that were written in Englisc tended by their nature towards formality if they were legal documents, and to conventional heroics if they were poems. But one Old English poem does survive that conveys something of the inner questioning, along with the stoic spirit of destiny, that inspired men and women to keep on battling with the realities of life at the turn of the first millennium:

  Often and again, through God’s grace,

  Man and woman usher a child

  Into the world and clothe him in gay colours;

  They cherish him, teach him as the seasons turn

  Until his young bones strengthen,

  His limbs lengthen . . .

  Entitled “The Fortunes of Men,”(146) the poem was a meditation on fate - wyrd in Englisc, literally “what will be” - for having described the fresh and innocent joy of a young mother and father raising their children, the anonymous author went on to examine the different destinies that a first-millennial child might actually encounter in the course of its life:

  Hunger will devour one, storm dismast another,

  One will be spear-slain, one hacked down in battle . . .

  “The Fortunes of Men” offered a comprehensive catalogue of the hazards that a young man - or his worrying parents - might fear in England in the year 1000, from falling out of a tree at apple harvest time, to a quarrel at a feast where the drink flowed too free:

  One will drop, wingless, from the high tree...

  One will swing from the tall gallows...

  The sword’s edge will shear the life of one

  At the mead-bench, some angry sot

  Soaked with wine. His words were too hasty . . .

  But life could offer joy and achievement as well - “a young man’s ecstasy,” suggested the poet, “. . . strength in wrestling . . . skill in throwing and shooting . . . good fortune at dice ... a devious mind for chess.” Surveying the up-side, “The Fortunes of Men” set out the earthly pleasures of which people dreamed at the turn of the first millennium, though the nature of the pleasures that the poet envisaged for those favoured by Fate and God suggested the workings of a distinctly male ambition. The poet’s wish list of sport, easy money, and a good time in the pub was that of any red-blooded twentieth-century lad:

  One will delight a gathering, gladden

  Men sitting at the mead-bench over their beer ...

  One will settle beside his harp

  At his lord’s feet, be handed treasures...

  One will tame that arrogant wild bird,

  The hawk on the fist, until the falcon

  Becomes gentle; he puts jesses on it...

  The poet left his audience with the big question: which way will your life turn - to happiness or to some living tragedy? And wyrd, the answer in the year 1000, was as imponderably challenging as “What Will Be” today. Only God, or Fate, could tell.

  What C. S. Lewis called the “snobbery of chronology” encourages us to presume that just because we happen to have lived after our ancestors and can read books which give us some account of what happened to them, we must also know better than them. We certainly have more facts at our disposal. We have more wealth, both personal and national, better technology, and infinitely more skilful ways of preserving and extending our lives. But whether we today display more wisdom or common humanity is an open question, and as we look back to discover how people coped with the daily difficulties of existence a thousand years ago, we might also consider whether, in all our sophistication, we could meet the challenges of their world with the same fortitude, good humour, and philosophy.

  Acknowledgements

  This book had its origins in an idea by Danny Danziger, who picked up very little English history while studying at Harrow School. Rather more studious was his classmate Tyerman - today Dr. Christopher Tyerman, Head of History at Harrow - and we would like to thank Christopher for the historical expertise with which he has overseen our project, though the respon
sibility for mistakes is, of course, our own.

  As working journalists, our notion was to ask the questions about everyday life and habits that conventional history books often ignore, directing our questions at some of the most eminent historians and archaeologists in the field. Christopher helped us pick them, and we would like to thank these experts for tolerating our ignorance and for sparing time to answer our questions and, in many cases, for reviewing draft versions of the manuscript. We have spent the last eighteen months in the year 1000. They have spent most of their lives there, and our debt to their knowledge and generosity is beyond measure:

  Dr. Anna Abulafia, Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge

  Dr. Debby Banham, Newnham College, Cambridge

  Dr. Matthew Bennett, Royal Military College, Sandhurst

  Dr. Mark Blackburn, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

  Dr. John Blair, Queen’s College, Oxford

  Professor Don Brothwell, University of York

  Dr. Michelle Brown, Department of Manuscripts, British Library, London

  Professor James Campbell, Worcester College, Oxford

  Professor Thomas Charles-Edwards, Jesus College, Oxford

  Mr, Eric Christiansen, New College, Oxford

  Rev. John Cowdrey, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford

  Dr. Katie Cubitt, University of York

  Dr. Ken Dark, University of Reading

  Professor Christopher Dyer, University of Birmingham

  Dr. Richard Eales, University of Kent