The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium : An Englishman's World (Hardcover)

~ (Author), Danny Danzinger (Author), Danny Danziger (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"August was the month when flies started to become a problem, buzzing round the dung heaps in the corner of every farmyard and hovering over the open cesspits of human refuse that were located outside every house."

Although daily dangers were many, housing uncomfortable, and the dominant smells unpleasant indeed, life in England at the turn of the previous millennium was not at all bad, write journalists Lacey and Danziger. "If you were to meet an Englishman in the year 1000," they continue, "the first thing that would strike you would be how tall he was--very much the size of anyone alive today." The Anglo-Saxons were not only tall, but also generally well fed and healthy, more so than many Britons only a few generations ago. Writing in a breezy, often humorous style, Lacey and Danziger draw on the medieval Julius Work Calendar, a document detailing everyday life around A.D. 1000, to reconstruct the spirit and reality of the era. Light though their touch is, they've done their homework, and they take the reader on a well-documented and enjoyable month-by-month tour through a single year, touching on such matters as religious belief, superstition, medicine, cuisine, agriculture, and politics, as well as contemporary ideas of the self and society. Readers should find the authors' discussions of famine and plague a refreshing break from present-day millennial worries, and a very stimulating introduction to medieval English history. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

Offering a delightful, often astonishing portrait of everyday life in Anglo-Saxon England in the year 1000, this wonderfully earthy chronicle, while timed for the end of this millennium, distinguishes itself from the sea of millennial titles by focusing on the end of the last one. Lacey (Sotheby's?Bidding for Class), a popular British historian, and London-based journalist Danziger (The Orchestra) focus on aspects of daily living. The Anglo-Saxons, a practical, self-contained, fervently superstitious people, were 99% illiterate, yet their language would become their most widespread legacy. Bristol was a slave-trading port, and the use of "bondservants" was a basic underpinning of the rural economy (the Norman invasion of 1066 would replace servitude with feudalism). There was no sugar, but honey was so valued that it became a form of currency. Personal hygiene was almost nonexistent, and most adults died in their 40s. Engla-lond, as the country was called, endured the best and the worst of times, enjoying unmatched prosperity but also falling prey to Viking raids, a menace that King Ethelred (the Unready) exacerbated by paying protection money. The narrative is organized in 12 chapters?one for each month?plus a closing chapter assessing the Anglo-Saxon legacy. Prefacing each chapter is a nimble, remarkably modern-looking, secular drawing of laborers' activities reproduced from the Julius Work Calendar, probably created by a cleric working in Canterbury Cathedral around 1020. This is a superb time capsule, and the authors distill a wealth of historical information into brightly entertaining reading. Agent, Curtis Brown.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 230 pages
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company; 1st edition (February 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316558400
• ISBN-13: 978-0316558402
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (99 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #707,587 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Year 1000, January 9, 2000

By	M. Brooks (Simi Valley, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

In this book, Lacey and Danziger break the year 1000 into twelve chapters, one for each month, and include important events preceding and following that year. The authors then take you back in time to live the life of an anglo-saxon peasant (contrasted with the life of the privileged) on a month-by-month basis. Having read a great deal of English and European history, I found the book well written, accurate (scholarly in its research while almost casual in its style) and placed in such an "every man" perspective as to be an engrossing read. It is a quick read with interesting period illustrations kicking off each chapter/month.

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars If you are busy, catch up on your essential history here, March 5, 2001

By	Roger McEvilly (the guilty bystander) (Sydney, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium (Paperback)

This is a light, easy-to-read, short, informative, witty, and amusing look at life 1000 years ago, in England. If you are a busybody at work or in life, and don't have time for endless volumes of detailed historical analysis, and want something light, short, and to the point, this is the book for you. Take it on a short holiday, read it on the train on the way to work, or just amuse yourself at home with a lighthearted look at life 1000 years ago. You may be surprised at some of the insights outlined here.

For example their diet was very different to ours. No spinach, tomatoe, potatoe, tea, coffee or chicken. Farming life was hard, and overall hygiene was of little importance, as without knowledge of disease subsistence and survival was placed higher on the list than clean dinner plates. Smelly residences were taken as given, as one simply lived with the inconvenience of dung from animals as part of ones daily life. No smoke from cars, or cigarretes, or noise from airplanes and highways, but smelly dung was eveywhere. There were no forks at the table, just knives. If you dropped your food on the floor, you ate it, but one recited a saintly word for the privelage. Clothes were less flamboyant, but coloured by innovative dyes. The queen in chess was of little importance and power, until Queen Elizabeth came around several centuries later. There sorts of details are just a few of the many intriguing bits of information presented in the book.

There is lots more, but you will have to muse over these in that 21st century train, bus, leather lounge, clean-sheeted bed, or by that modern resort swimming pool yourself. Lucky aren't we? Perhaps in another thousand years people will read about these sorts of things in their different lifestyles, think themselves lucky, and be thankful for our memories and contribution. I have no doubt they will.

33 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Year 1000, December 10, 1999

By	John H. Tarpley (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

The book is written by journalists, not historians, and that in itself makes it all the more valuable for the general reader. Alas, too many historians write for other historians, and their prose is so stilted and dry as to be unreadable. But this book is a joy to read. Using the Julius Calendar as a device to introduce us to the everyday life of Anglo-Saxons in England in the years leading up to the first millennium, the authors present us with a perfect picture of what life must have been like on a seasonal basis, from January through December. I highly recommend this book to readers interested in the social history of that period who do not wish to wade through a thousand pages of scholarly boredom.