This was an excellent, pithy and very accessible history about what common people's lives were like in England in 1000 A.D. I learned many interesting facts. I would recommend this to any history buff, especially Anglophiles. ( )

Easy reading. I love to read about everyday life a long time ago, after all, it wasn't just kings and queens then either.

This was apparently one of those turn-of-the-millennium books from the hoopla building up to the year 2000. Two English journalists got the idea to interview historians about what life was like for Anglo-Saxons in the year 1000 CE. Obviously it is difficult to pin too much down to a precise date back then, so they speak generally about the period ca. 950-1066, or even more broadly when necessary. Not so much a book of history, the authors describe the daily life of the people at that time, ranging from the poorest to the richest. Their writing style is delightfully easy to breeze through. I am amazed at how quickly I finished the book. The book is divided into chapters by month, each preceded by the corresponding drawing from the Julius Work Calendar, a manuscript from around 1020, probably produced at the scriptorium at Canterbury Cathedral. There are many curious insights in the book: such as the source of the word “exchequer” being the black-and-white checker boards used as calculators (derived from the abacus) in northern Europe in those days; the relationship between warrior and civilian (every man was expected to fight in those days, but not all men were “warriors”), between slave and free (any time you ran into hard times the solution was to sell yourself into slavery to some noble or rich person); how people of the time had a much healthier diet in many ways, and were as tall as modern people, contrasted to the people of later centuries up through the 17th century or so, who were actually shorter owing to their worse diets; that midsummer between the hay harvest in July and the food harvest in August was the worst time of the year for the husbandmen, because they were still eating from last year’s harvest, and wouldn’t replenish their food stocks until the end of August; that King Sweyne Forkbeard of Denmark took over England as king by the time of his death in 1014, and that Danes held the throne until Harthacanute, Canute’s grandson, died in 1042; that the hullabaloo over Y2K can be compared (dimly, in my opinion) to the millennial fear of the end of the world in Y1K. This is a fascinating book, and a delightful introduction to the world of medieval England.

Absolutely loved it ( )

This book is a quick and easy read, with some interesting little facts thrown in that might be useful to get a conversation started in a bar or pub. Neither author is a medievalist, and the "research" for this book was, according to the acknowledgements, to interview a few dozen actual medieval scholars on various aspects of Anglo-Saxon life at the turn of the first millenium, then fit these factoids on to a frame of reference utilizing a contemporary document, the Julian Work Calendar. This way, we go month by month to see what people were up to (starving, usually, it turns out) and how society was organized.

Rather than a true work of scholarship, the impetus behind this book, written in 1998, was to capitalize on the hoopla surrounding the second millenium. Still, there are some interesting bits, and a fair amount of pathos (peasants linking arms and throwing themselves into the sea to escape the aforementioned starvation; skeletons of a mother and child, dead in childbirth simply because the child's head could not fit through the pelvic opening), and the book rises somewhat above the level of simple bathroom reading. A fairly decent book for someone with a passing interest in medieval English culture, but not interested in the scholarly apparatus. 9/08