Product Description

In the year 1000 the world was one of mystery and magicians, monks, warriors and wandering merchants - people who feared an apocalypse and who had no idea what year it was or what lay beyond the nearest valley. It was a world of dark forests and Viking adventures in which fear was real and death a constant companion. People felt they walked hand-in-hand with God, and envisaged him so literally that even Christians were sometimes buried with supplies for the journey to the new life in heaven. Narrated through the progression of the seasons, this book presents a recreation of English life at the end of the first millennium AD.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #43715 in Books
• Published on: 2003-09-25
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

Review
* 'Thoroughly enjoyable . a superb insight into life as it was lived a thousand years ago' INDEPENDENT * 'A brilliant little book, well-written, knowledgeable, insightful, accessible, a model of how popular social history should be written' GLASGOW HERALD * 'A series of deftly-turned vignettes of what it was like to live in England at the turn of the last millennium . a quirky and engaging book' SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

GLASGOW HERALD
'A brilliant little book, wellwritten, knowledgeable, insightful, accessible, a model of how popular social history should be written'

About the Author
Robert Lacey is an internationally renowned historian and biographer. Danny Danziger is a journalist and interviewer for THE INDEPENDENT and SUNDAY TIMES magazine. He is co-founder, along with Robert Lacey, of COVER magazine.

Customer Reviews

The Year 1000
Readable, entertaining, informative, surprising and lively. This book is like no other I have read on pre-Conquest England. While most books deal rather dryly with thegns and eaoldermen and the coming of Christianity, this book focuses on what life would have been like for the ordinary man and woman of the time. It is full of illumnating anecdotes about such things as the various types of worm people might have in their guts and the process of minting a silver penny - and what happened to you if you were found to be forging them - not a happy fate. It offers insights into the life of the monk and nun - and tells you where their ink came from to copy their devotional texts. It gives a powerful impression of how life could be very rich, or almost unbearable in times of famine. It deals with diet, religious beliefs, work and labour, slavery and bondage, the legal system, women, the class system, the economy, medicine, paganism, town and country life, battle and war, and all this in a fresh and lively manner. The authors make liberal use of sources to illustrate their topic, to great effect. This text is not written by academics, but it is a very useful insight into the world of 'real' men and women. Highly recommended.

Very readable
A really very readable account of everyday life around the turn of the first millenium AD (with the odd bit of political history thrown in here and there). You really don't need any background knowledge to enjoy this, and it's written from the point of view of human interest rather than with any dry academic aims. Very enjoyable.

He remains an Englishman...
The turn of the millennium (the last millennium, that is) in England was an interesting world to behold -- the country was struggling toward unity, but still wary of invaders from across the various seas (an invasion trend that would stop less than 100 years after the turn of the millennium). The typical Englishman was well-fed, but the kinds of food might astound modern readers; when the people got indigestion back then, medical treatments were even more bizarre.

Into the world, Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger venture with humour and insight. Lacey and Danziger, established writers in related topics, have traced a journey through history by tracing the typical life during a year at the turn of the year 1000, through the Julius Work Calendar, on reserve at the British Library, lost for a time due to miscategorisation. The authors (Lacey and Danziger) makes use of this interesting framework of month-by-month chronicling to develop the details of daily life and work in England in the year 1000.

The different months take the paradigm for different topics -- February looks at geography; August looks at medicine (and the frequency of flies); November looks at the issues of gender relationships. Among the fascinating facts that come out in the analysis are the kinds of cyclical patterns that occur in history --Lacey and Danziger point out that under Canute, an unfaithful wife would meet with a horrible fate, but that legislation died with him, until the Commonwealth period several hundred years later, when it would be revived.

The authors do not stick exclusively to English shores -- they discuss the general world situation, as it would impact English development. Lacey and Danziger close the year and discussion with the figure of Gerbert, who would become pope Sylvester II, having been the scholar of note under the Ottos, successors of Charlemagne. His strange innovations, like prefering Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) to Roman numerals, introducing 'exotic' machines like an abacus to the world made him suspect -- however, Lacey and Danziger refer to him as the first millennium's Bill Gates, revolutionising computational power for good and forever.

Lacey and Danziger warn against the 'snobbery of chronology', as C.S. Lewis terms it -- we don't necessarily know better or live better than our ancestors, and sometimes our distorted views of the past much be called into check. For example, it is commonly held that people today are taller than people in the past; while this trend is true over the past several generations, prior to that, it is not true -- the average Englishman today is only slightly taller than the average Englishman of the year 1000.

From riddles and games for a dark and stormy night (playing cards would not be invented for several hundred years) to the origins of serfdom and family life, this is a fascinating text.