What is it about the middle ages that captures the imagination of every schoolboy? Is it the swords, the war, the anarchy, the open-spit roasting? Is it that unmentionable little part of our lizard brain that developed over millions of years on the savanna, killing for food, warring for women, and doing whatever it needed to to inject its genes into another generation? Do we all still have a bit of the savage in us, and long to imagine a world not too different from our own, with houses, and towns, and nations, and kings, and a pope, and money, but where raping and pillaging and plundering is just another way to spend some time abroad?

That may be why you're into the middle ages, ya sicko, but me, I'm just interested in the history. Which is why I thoroughly enjoyed The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger. It's a slim little book--it covers only life in England, and the fact is, there ain't a hell of a lot of documentation on what life was like back then--but it's packed with a whole lot of neat facts for a guy who's interested in that era (for purely historical reasons) like me.

According to the book, the people of England circa 1000 were a tall healthy people, fed on lean meat (beef and chicken, but surprising little mutton, which was considered slave food). They were fun-loving, always finding time for a feast, or a festival, or a fete. Lacey and Danziger are regrettably sketchy on the details of the Englishers' sex life back then (the authors point out that a historian interested in the sex life of a single man in 1999--the President of the U.S.-- would have 36 cartons of documents to study, which is 30 more than the transcript of everything surviving from the era that their book covers), but we can assume that they had sex, the evidence being that they bore progeny, and artificial insemination was a technology that would be many hundred years in coming.

The only real sexual tidbit we get is an episode from the life of the unfortunately named King Eadwig, who skipped his coronation feast to cavort in the sack with some young lady who "for all we know could have been the Anglo-Saxon equivalent of a White House intern" and her mother. So the Kings, at least, made out pretty well. No doubt the commoners did their part also.

They had a good bawdy sense of humor, though--we know that for sure. Lacey and Danziger quote the following riddle from an Eleventh Century text from the Canterbury Cathedral library:

I am a strange creature, for I satisfy women . . .
I grow very tall, erect in a bed.
I'm hairy underneath. From time to time
A beautiful girl, the brave daughter
Of some fellow dares to hold me
Grips my reddish skin, robs me of my head
And puts me in the pantry. At once that girl
With plaited hair who has confined me
Remembers our meeting. Her eye moistens.

That describes, of course, an onion. Quality comedy from a zany era in European history.

If we know little about their sexual habits, we know a bit more about the drug culture, which was extensive, believe it or not. See, for several months out of the year, before the harvest, the people had to do with little or no food. When it finally came time to eat, they would have huge festivals in which they would serve rye bread, which when it molds produces the chemical source of LSD, and a sort of hash brownie made of ground hemp and poppies which they called "crazy bread." The contemporary accounts of these festivals, in which near starving countryfolk gorged themselves on hallucinogens and narcotics, described them "as if a spell had been placed on entire communities." No doubt.

So by now you're thinking that life in England back in the year 1000 was all fun and LSD, and it might have been if it wasn't for the constant raids by those damn Vikings. You just never knew when the dragonships would come rolling in and the murderous thugs would leap ashore, kidnapping all the fit young men and nubile young women, stealing gold and silver, and killing anyone they couldn't place a value on. Towns would pay ransom money to keep the Vikings at bay, but it only lasted so long until some summer another wave and pillaging, plundering, raping Norsemen would come ashore and the terror would begin anew.

But the English society stood in sharp contrast to that of the Vikings. These were a people with a solid set of laws, mostly based around monetary penalties. A law that an adulterous woman should "lose her nose and ears" never really caught on, but the system of fines was extensive. If you slept with a slave in the royal flour mill, it would cost you 25 shillings. If you fondled a freewoman's breasts, it would cost you 5 shillings, and if you raped her, 60 shillings. If you slept with another man's wife, he was allowed to kill you.

There was money built into the marriage law. The groom's family would typically pay for a virgin girl, but interestingly, the money would go directly to the girl thus giving her a bit of financial enfranchisement. There was actually a surprising amount of gender equality back then--women could own property, receive inheritance, and even divorce their husbands. The English were not a benighted people in that regard by any stretch. Even in the area of beekeeping they realized that the leader of the hive was the queen--unlike the Romans, who had assumed that the leader of anything most certainly had to be a male.

And in other scientific areas they did pretty good, too. They knew the earth was round. They knew about blood flow and basic anatomical structures. Hell, they even elected as Pope a guy named Gerbert of Aurillac whose chief claim to fame was winning a day-long Battle of the Brains debate in 980 by arguing that physics is a branch of mathematics and not a separate discipline unto itself. Like I said, wild times back then.

As a guy who almost minored in Linguistics (I was only 28 credits short) I found the stuff on the language particularly interesting. Old English was a strong, robust language. The authors point out that each of the words in Neil Armstrong's "One small step . . ." line existed in English by the year 1000. And an analysis of Winston Churchill's famous lines that begin "We shall fight on the beaches . . ." reveals that each of those words existed in English in 1000 except for one. Is it any surprise that the word "fight" comes from English, and the word "surrender" from the French?

Though I have to wonder about the authors' conclusion that the English didn't have any swear words back then. They reason that words like "fokkinge", "cunte", "crappe", came in to the language later, based on the fact that none of the documents transcribed by monks(!) had those words in them. How many documents produced by the church nowadays contain the word "cunt"? Well, for all I know, all of them--you wouldn't catch me reading church documents.

Anyway, the cool facts and nuggets are piled high in this little book. For anyone interested in the history of the middle ages, or who thinks the life of a Viking doesn't sound half bad (ya sicko), it's worth checking out.