Type of bind: Hardcover
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Little Brown and Company
Manufacturer: Little Brown and Company
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 230
Printing Date: 1999-02
Publishing house: Little Brown and Company
Sale Popularity Level: 986380
Studio: Little Brown and Company
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
'The Year 1000 is a vivid and surprising portrait of life in England a thousand years ago. A world that already knew brain surgeons and property developers and, yes, even the occasional gossip columnist. Uncovering such wonderfully unexpected details, authors Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger bring this distant world closer than it has ever been before. How did people survive without sugar? How did monks communicate if they were not allowed to speak? Why was July called 'the hungry month'? The Year 1000 answers these questions and reveals such secrets as the recipe for a medieval form of Viagra and a hallucinogenic treat called 'crazy bread.' In the spirit of modern investigative journalism, Lacey and Danziger interviewed the top historians and archaeologists in the field. Their research led them to an ancient and little-known document of the period, the Julius Work Calendar, a sharply observed guide that takes us back in time to a charming and very human world of kings and revelers, saints and slave laborers, lingering paganism and profound Christian faith. This exuberant and informative book concludes as the shadow of the millennium descends across England and Christendom. While prophets of doom predict the end of the world, A.D. 1000 sees the arrival of such bewildering concepts as infinity and zero, along with the abacus-the medieval calculating machine. These are portents of the future, and The Year 1000 finishes by examining the human and social ingredients that were to make for sucess and achievement in the subsequent thousand years.'
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 very 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
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
Very thought provoking. Sets a good yardstick to compare with our current culture and lifestyle.
Rated by buyers -
This book is divided up as a year in the life of the people of medieval England, each chapter representing a month and describing the daily lives of people on the farms and in the cities.
Rated by buyers -
A good introduction to the time period with lots of interesting factoids. This is a light read but not a substitute for deeper information needed by the advanced student. Enjoyable but not something I would re-read.
Rated by buyers 
-
Enjoy the tidbits, forget the connections.
Lacey's book, an easy and quick read, is delightful in a certain way. Reading all of the interesting factoids he has gathered is like eating the expensive kind of potato chips--delicious and you can't stop. However, because the book was published as the year 2000 approached, Lacey is compelled, perhaps by his publishers, to offer up some heavier, and much more indigestible, fare in the form of comparisons between the year 1000 and the year 2000. Read quickly past these superficial observations and skip the summarizing last chapter altogether.
Rated by buyers 
-
Gift for a grandson who is a medieval history buff. Looking through it, it interestingly displays life as it was lived in medieval England, and I am sure he is going to love it.
Find other books like this one:
