The Year 1000: What Life Was Like At the Turn of the First Millennium
In the year 1000 the world was one of mystery and magicians, monks, warriors and wandering merchants - people who feared an apocalypse and people who had no idea what year it was or what lay beyond the nearest valley. It was a world of dark forests and Viking adventures in which fear was real and...
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In the year 1000 the world was one of mystery and magicians, monks, warriors and wandering merchants - people who feared an apocalypse and people who had no idea what year it was or what lay beyond the nearest valley. It was a world of dark forests and Viking adventures in which fear was real and death a constant companion. People felt they walked hand-in-hand with God, and envisaged him so literally that even Christians were sometimes buried with supplies for the journey to the new life in heaven. Narrated through the progression of the seasons, this book presents a recreation of English life at the end of the first millennium AD.
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Format: hardcover
ISBN:
9780316643757 (0316643750)
Publish date: January 28th 1999
Publisher: Little Brown and Company
Edition language: English
One of two books I remember reading in honor of the millennium; the other was Stephen Jay Gould's Questioning the Millennium. So one look back and one look forward. The look back was fascinating. Although I know more about the history of the British isles than any place outside the US it remains imp...
As I said above, this book was quite fun to read. It was an interesting angle to use archaeological evidence and historic documentation to extrapolate an ethnography of the early English people. The division of the chapters to reflect aspect of culture based on what the common man of the day would h...
bookshelves: winter-20142015, published-1998, history, fraudio, medieval5c-16c, nonfiction, lifestyles-deathstyles, tbr-busting-2014, weapon-evolution, washyourmouthout-language, vikings, true-grime, slaves, religion, politics, plague-disease, period-piece, ouch, newtome-author, medical-eew, food-g...
Quick, skimmy overview. Highlight is the smutty riddles.
If you like social history, I think The Year 1000 deserves to be a general reader's classic.
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