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

by Robert Lacey

  It also had town planners. Alfred’s burhs were laid out to very regular grids, often arranged as a square, with a regular distance between the streets. Their designers obviously knew about surveying - as is clear from one document which takes us into Winchester on market day. The cattle were herded in the main street and into nearby Gar street, where modern excavations have uncovered the remains of pens, hurdles, and manure of sheep and cattle. The animals passed on to Fleshmonger street, later known as Parchment street, where they were butchered by the tradesmen who lived and worked on the same premises. Nearby was Tanner street, where the catties hides were processed into leather, and also Shieldmaker Street, where craftsmen fashioned the tanned leather onto wickerwork or round wooden boards.

  We can imagine this busy chain of business working its way through the commercial part of the town, while over at the cathedral the pilgrims arrived by the hundred to venerate the relics of St. Swithin. The town records show a hosier, a shoemaker, and a soapmaker in position to sell their wares to the visitors, along with two meeting halls where the prosperous citizens gathered to feast and drink - early evidence of the civic banquet. (62) These Winchester burghers seem to have been a jolly bunch. The development of town life was to hasten the development of family surnames, which, like street names, were often based on trades and occupations - Tanner, Weaver, Carpenter, and so on. But, in the meantime, Winchester’s cheery inhabitants identified each other with affectionate or derisive nicknames: Clean-hand, Fresh-friend, Soft-bread, Foul-beard, Money-taker, Penny-purse, and Penny-feather. (63)

  Trade was the life of the town, and by the year 1000 England’s merchants had been trading for some time in goods that came from exotic and faraway places. As the Venerable Bede lay dying in 735 a.d., he had called for the “treasures” that he wished to distribute to his fellow monks, and first out of his treasure chest came pepper (64) - which, growing in the East Indies, had travelled tens of thousands of miles by mule train and ship to reach Baghdad and the Mediterranean. It was probably in the northern Italian town of Pavia, the ancient capital of Lombardy, that English merchants had picked up Bede’s pepper. Pavia was the great centre of commercial exchange between northwestern Europe and the East, and accounts of the time vividly describe merchants’ tents being pitched in the fields beside the river Ticino on the outskirts of the city. Prominent among the merchants were the gens Anglicorum et Saxorum, who haggled over silks, spices, ivory, goldwork, and precious stones with merchants from Venice and the southern Italian ports of Amalfi and Salerno. (65)

  It had been a tough journey for the Englishmen, down through the Rhineland and over the Alpine passes, and it was small wonder they were in a bad temper when they got there. According to one early eleventh-century document, the English had taken offence at the opening of their bags and baggages by the Pavian customs officials, and had grown violent. The kings of Lombardy and England subsequently held discussions about this outbreak of English hooliganism abroad, and it was agreed that England’s merchants could have the right to trade in Pavia free of tolls and transaction taxes, provided that they paid a collective levy every three years.

  It is the earliest detailed example of a commercial treaty in English history, and under its terms the English purchased their licence to trade with the triennial payment of fifty pounds of pure silver, two fine greyhounds with gilded and embossed collars, two shields, two swords, and two lances. In an additional clause that was presumably intended to reduce the incentive for local extortion or bribery, provision was made for the Pavian official in charge of the market to receive two fur coats and two pounds of silver as his own cut on the deal.

  It was important to stay on the right side of the customs man. A few years earlier, Bishop Liudprand of Cremona, a Lombard envoy, had been stopped by Greek customs officials on his way back to Italy when they opened his bags and discovered that he was carrying bolts of the famous purple silk of Byzantium, the ultimate in prestigious apparel. Liudprand complained that he had brought home purple silk before, but got nowhere:”That,” he was told,” was in the time of a negligent ruler.” Liudprand then claimed that the Byzantine emperor himself had given him special permission. “The emperor,” said the customs man, “must have meant something different. These things are forbidden. . . . This distinction of dress should belong to those alone who surpass other nations in wealth and wisdom.”

  Liudprand could not contain himself. “In Italy,” he retorted, “our lowest prostitutes and fortune tellers wear this colour,” and he reported the whole incident to his master:

  So, you see, they judge ... all other nations unworthy to go about clothed in this way. Is it not indecent and insulting that these soft, effeminate, long-sleeved, bejewelled and begowned liars, eunuchs and idlers should go about in purple, while our heroes, strong men trained to war, full of faith and charity, servants of God, filled with all virtues, may not! If this is not an insult, what is? (66)

  Aelfric’s “Merchant” had evidently found a way of getting round such problems. Asked about the goods that he was in the habit of bringing to England, he headed his list with “purple cloth and purple silks,” followed by “precious jewels and gold, unusual clothes and spices, wine and oil, ivory and bronze, copper and tin, sulphur and glass, and many similar things.”

  “Do you want to sell your goods here,” asked the Master, “for just what you paid for them there?”

  “I don’t want to,” replied the Merchant, displaying an unapologetic profit motive.” What would my labour benefit me then? I want to sell dearer here than I buy there so that I gain some profit, with which I may feed myself and my wife and my sons. ... I board my ship with my cargo and sail to lands overseas, and sell my goods, and buy precious things which aren’t produced in this country. And in great danger on the sea I bring them back to you here; and sometimes I suffer shipwreck with the loss of all my goods, scarcely escaping alive.” (67)

  The young monk who could rattle this speech off in Latin would have had an impressive command of the language - not to mention basic economic theory, agricultural organisation, and current affairs. Complementing the drawings of the Julius Work Calendar, the wry and quizzical writings of Aelfric provide our richest insights into everyday English life in the year 1000 - including even its seafaring character. Viking raiding fleets may have been running rings round King Ethelred’s attempts at naval defence, but there were clearly some Englishmen who saw themselves as people with a maritime heritage, for writing towards the end of Ethelred’s reign, Aelfric looked back nostalgically to the years “when no fleet was ever heard of except of our own people who held this land.” (68)

  England’s numerous seaports were proof of this heritage. Port was originally an Anglo-Saxon word that meant “market” The port reeve supervised the marketplace as the shire reeve supervised the shire. But by the tenth century the word also carried its modern meaning as a trading location on a harbour, and the array of English ports from Ipswich down to London and around the south coast was impressive. These centres of commerce significantly outnumbered the ports along the facing stretch of the Low Countries and northern France, and they were some of the fastest-growing communities in the country.

  This reflected the fact that it was considerably easier to travel and to transport merchandise in the year 1000 over water than over land. It was not until the eighteenth century that European engineers constructed highways to match the roads over which the Romans had transported their legions so efficiently. Hundreds of light wooden sail-and oar-powered boats shuttled up and down the rivers of medieval England in a network of navigable waterways that reached a surprising distance inland. The great royal residences were all built on or near water. Oxford and Cambridge were both ports before they were university towns, with busy trading jetties. Exeter, Worcester, Norwich, and Stamford also flourished on river traffic.

  But the little ships that glided so busily between England’s county towns did not fare so well on the open sea. Aelfric’s “Merchant”
was not exaggerating when he spoke of the risk of shipwreck. Nothing could be taken for granted. It was a matter of thanks to God if the narrow passage between Dover and Calais was accomplished without mishap. Accounts of Athelstan’s army moving north against the Scots describe ships and men moving in tandem up the coast - and the navy would have stayed very safely within sight of land, for it was rare for a ship to spend a night on the open ocean if that could be avoided. Even the Vikings, the maestros of sea travel, who made up tents onboard and would travel through the night on their long ocean voyages, would come in to land after dark whenever they could. It was so much safer to make up fires and cook supper on a beach, or under the shelter of trees. (69)

  Sea battles were always fought within sight of land. Engagements on the open sea required a scouting system that was not attempted until the time of King Henry V, and since medieval ships had no guns or missiles, righting was a matter of hand-to-hand sword combat in sheltered inshore waters. Part of King Alfred’s response to the Viking menace was a levy system whereby certain towns and localities were responsible for building and manning their own warship - the maritime equivalent of the fortified burhs - and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle even credited Alfred with designing a new sort of ship to take on the Vikings. If it was anything like the Scandinavian longships that were harrying England in the ninth and tenth centuries, it was probably some eighty feet long by fifteen feet wide - which was slightly narrower, but also slightly longer, than the seventy-five-foot-long Santa Maria in which Columbus crossed the Atlantic in 1492.

  After many years of historical debate, we now know for certain that one summer around the year 1000, a Scandinavian longship preceded Columbus to the New World by nearly five centuries, making landfall in Canada. For several generations, Norwegian sailors had been creeping westwards around the top of the Atlantic, island-hopping first to Shetland and the Faroe Islands, then onwards to Iceland. The search was for pasture and timber, which took the explorers on to Greenland in the 980s, and then still further west, since the currents of the northern ocean were bringing driftwood over the horizon. The travellers may also have been following the cod, for it seems to have been the Viking technique of wind-drying cod on the prow of their ships that provided the nourishment the Norsemen needed to travel on round the coast of Baffin Island, Labrador, and eventually to Newfoundland, which they named Vin-land - because, as they boasted on their return, they had found vines growing there.

  This rosy description of a warm and fecund new world was one of several reasons why later Icelandic accounts of one Lief Eriksson reaching the other side of the Atlantic sometime around the year 1000 were doubted by historians for many years. But between 1961 and 1968 excavations at L’Anse-aux-Meadows in Newfoundland uncovered cooking pits, boathouses, metal ornaments, and some eight or nine house sites of quite certainly Norse origin - along with evidence of vine cultivation. The remains of the site have been dated to within a few years of 1000 a.d., proving that it was possible for the carpenters of the time to have pinned, jointed, and tied several thousand pieces of wood together with sufficient strength and flexibility to carry men through the bufferings of the North Atlantic - while also indicating that the men of the first millennium were not, perhaps, the geographical dunces that later centuries suggested.

  It suited some thinkers in the eighteenth-century Age of Reason to look down on the Middle Ages as a primitive and backward time when men believed that the world was flat, and that venturing too far away from Europe might entail the risk of ships dropping over the edge. But King Alfred’s explanation of the solar system in one of the classical translations which he commissioned, and may even have carried out himself, talks in unambiguously spherical terms, comparing the earth to “the yolk in the middle of an egg which can move about [within the confines of] the egg. Similarly the world remains still in its station. Outside, the play of the waters, the sky, and the stars, and the bright shell itself revolve around it every day - long has it done so!” (70)

  Alfred was obviously mistaken in his belief that the sky, stars, and “bright shell” of his egg travelled round the earth. That pre-Renaissance misconception was not corrected until the famous observations of Copernicus and Galileo. But the idea of the revolving heavens argued for similar roundness in the earth, and Alfred was clearly thinking in three-dimensional terms. When Charlemagne and the emperors of the time wanted to symbolise their earthly power, they put their hands upon an orb. Bede compared the earth to “the ball that boys play with,” and when navigators in the year 1000 stood upon the prow of their ship, looking out at the curve of the horizon - both as it curved from left to right, and as it curved away from them - they drew the obvious conclusion. And to judge from Leif Eriksson, they were certainly not scared of sailing off the edge.

  July: The Hungry Gap

  July was hay month in the year 1000. It was the first great harvest of the year, a time of worry about the weather and the need to get the grass cut and dried before the rain could spoil it - and all to feed the animals, since the midsummer harvest produced no food for humans. Hay was fodder to keep the livestock going through the winter. So when the arduous work of haymaking was done, the medieval cultivator found himself facing another stretch that was harder still - the toughest month of the entire year, in fact, since the spring crops had not yet matured. The barns were at their lowest point and the grain bins could well be empty. Tantalisingly, on the very eve of the August harvest, people could find themselves starving in the balmiest month of all. July was the time of another phenomenon quite unknown to us in the modern West - “the hungry gap.” (71)

  In Piers Plowman, the late medieval fable of the land, we read how July was the month when the divide between rich and poor became most apparent. The rich could survive on the contents of their barns, and they had the money to pay the higher prices commanded by the dwindling stocks of food. Grain and bread prices could soar to exorbitant levels. But this scarcity made July the month when the poor learned the true meaning of poverty. As Piers sleeps in the fable, Patience comes to him in a dream, showing him how the poor suffer as they try to survive through their annual midsummer purgatory, grinding up the coarsest of wheat bran, and even old, shrivelled peas and beans to make some sort of bread.

  Midsummer was also the season when that other sardonic observer of peasant life, the Flemish artist Pieter Breughel the Elder, painted his famous tableaux of crazed rural festivals. At the very end of the Middle Ages, Breughel depicted countryfolk wrapped up in fits of mass hysteria, and the historical accounts of these rural frenzies have explained the delirium in terms of the slender diet on which the poor had to subsist during the hungry gap. People were light-headed through lack of solid food, and modern chemistry has shown how the ergot that flowered on rye as it grew mouldy was a source of lysergic acid - LSD, the cult drug of the 1960s.

  This hallucinogenic lift was accentuated by the hedgerow herbs and grains with which the dwindling stocks of conventional flour were amplified as the summer wore on. Poppies, hemp, and darnel were scavenged, dried, and ground up to produce a medieval hash brownie known as “crazy bread.” So even as the poor endured hunger, it is possible that their diet provided them with some exotic and artificial paradises. “It was as if a spell had been placed on entire communities,” according to one modern historian. (72) There are no accounts from the years around 1000 to match these descriptions of “colossal somnolent vertigo” which have been explained in terms of mind-bending substances, but who can tell? It is nice to think that, by accident or design, the poor of the year 1000 were tuning into transports of delight that matched the pleasures of their betters carousing in the great hall.

  Social theory in the year 1000 divided the community into those who worked (the peasants, traders, and craftsmen), those who fought and administered justice (the kings and lords), and those who prayed. This last group obviously included, as it would today, the parish clergy with their pastoral duties of care to the laity. But in the Middle Ages there was a
n even larger group of holy folk who did nothing but pray - the men and women who had dedicated their entire lives to God, and had gone to live in monasteries. In the year 1000 there were thirty or so monasteries dotted across the English countryside from Carlisle in the north down to St. Germans in Cornwall, and they were the economic centres of their communities. (73) They employed local labourers to work in their fields, but the monks carried out certain agricultural tasks themselves, since the combination of practical and spiritual was the essence of the monastic life as laid down by St. Benedict in the sixth century. Trying to formulate a routine that would keep good order in his own community of monks at Monte Cassino in southern Italy, Benedict produced a Rule that became the model for monasticism all over Christendom.

  It was Benedictine monks who brought the word of God to England in 597. They ran the great cathedral churches at Canterbury, Rochester, Winchester, and Worcester. Their dormitories, refectories, libraries, and chapterhouses were part of the straggle of holy buildings that made up the religious campus around each cathedral, and their haunting plainsong chants set the tone of the services, echoing around the choirs and off the pillars of England’s principal houses of God.