The Year 1000

I’ve been reading The Year 1000: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium. Picked it up on the cheap at the library book sale. It’s a cool little book - interesting, and engagingly written (more non-fiction by journalists). Like the sub-title says, it focuses on what life was like for ordinary people of that time. It’s very specifically about England, treating Scotland and Wales as neighboring countries and Europe as distant lands across the sea, which at the time time they were. It covers the major political events and viking raids and such, but mostly from the standpoint of how those affected merchants and farmers and influenced the development of towns.

I think the most interesting point is how complex society had already gotten then. I’ve always thought of it as a time of mud and turnips, where progress was mostly a matter of less mud and more turnips. They were just starting to claw their way back up from the depths of the Dark Ages. All of the social and governmental institutions created by the Romans were long gone. All their roads had decayed beyond use. (Land travel in Roman times was faster than it would be again until the 18th century.) Monasteries (the only source of formal education) were just getting started. Ninety percent of everyone were farmers, living on the edge of starvation.

But they’d built up that tiny surplus so that the other ten percent could be soldiers, merchants, and administrators. That seems to be some sort of tipping point. Somewhere in there, you get enough extra food that people can do something other than grow it or fight over it. You start needing and being able to support the infrastructure of trade - transportation and markets. You get specialist craftsmen: Blacksmiths, tanners, weavers, carpenters. You get brewers surprisingly early on.

Some of that surplus and specialization went into the church, which was becoming a significant institution in providing basic social services. Whatever your feelings about them, priests were pretty much the world’s first knowledge workers; so that’s another sort of milestone. This was long before the Crusades and Inquisition and witch trials and all that sort of ugliness. Back then, they were pretty reasonable people, focusing on the practical needs of their communities. Monasteries were a combination orphanage, school, hospital, old folks home, travel lodge, and library.

By the year 1000, they’d already gotten past a barter economy. The government was stamping coins, in small, licensed mints in every market town. They had a surprisingly sophisticated and hack-resistant system for production and quality control. Coins were only valid for about three years, after which they had to be exchanged for new ones, but fewer, allowing the government to rake off a certain percentage. There were tax collectors and a black market for dodging them. (It may be that the appearance of professional tax assessors is what really marks the tipping point of civilization.) There were contracts and a legal system for enforcing them; cooperative ventures with outside investors; and international trade, with bales of wool going out to markets in western Europe, and silver and luxury goods coming back. England was prosperous enough to incur persistent infestations of Vikings, and even rich enough to bribe them to fuck off.

Don’t get me wrong - I wouldn’t live then by choice. They still starved when the crops failed, and died in all sorts of appallingly pointless ways. But that actually makes it all the more impressive what they did accomplish. You get the sense that life may have been hard, but it didn’t entirely suck. There was lots of manual labor, but there was also beer. They didn’t mope around wishing they had Playstations.