The Year 1000: An Englishman's Year [Paperback]

The Year 1000 is packed full of details and anecdotes that are designed to entertain first and educate second. For instance, did you know that monks wore underpants, communicated by sign language so as not to break their vow of silence and (rather bashfully) called their toilet a necessarium? Before our very eyes, history is cut into tasty, easy-to-swallow pieces. As a result, the book is accessible and enormously enjoyable, assisted by the light-hearted and direct style.

As an introduction to the era, it's a roaring success, but if you're looking for serious historical analysis, then steer well clear as it will most likely cause you to spontaneously combust. The authors occasionally try too hard to link the past with the present, which, whilst providing much of the amusement, does not always provide sound judgement. One priceless, if ultimately unconvincing theory suggests that a natural form of the drug L.S.D. was responsible for driving the peasants wild during the winter famine. Maybe they were getting into practice for Woodstock.

The Year 1000 can be summed up thus: perfect entertainment, imperfect history. But when it's this much fun, it doesn't really matter does it? And it's nice to think that maybe Monty Python got it right after all...

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.