Rating: 
Summary: An Honest and Worthy Book
Review: Even if this book was simply an attempt to cash in on the turn of the millenium a couple of years ago, it is nevertheless a fascinating and well written piece of popular history. Indeed, contrary to what some reviewers say, I think this book would be welcomed by historians. It neither glamorizes nor sensationalizes the privations and accomplishments of the time, but rather sets about putting medieval life (especially in England) into a larger communal context. There is no overemphasis on kingship and battles, but rather an attempt to portray the gritty and sometimes harrowing details of daily life. This is a "what it was like" approach to history that remains conservative in its goals and straightforward about its sources. In following the book of days around the calendar year, we get insights into the daily life of peasants and aristrocracy alike -- with a special emphasis on how the moving calendar had an impact on the lives of the people living on the land. This is a special and modest insight, and I think an interesting one. The book is, for all that, quite short and very readable. Now that the millenium is passed, this book remains a worthy and valuable contribution for those who want a taste of the Earth over a thousand years ago.
Rating:
Summary: I Need my Coffee in the Morning
Review: Gross, that is what I think of how people lived back then, it would be like you are on the longest camping trip ever except only I set of clothes, no sleeping bag or tent and no potable CD player. How did people live like that, then again that is probably what the people in the year 1000 thought about the cave men? This book does a wonderful job in describing what the average city and farm person went through in his normal daily grind back in the year 1000. The author paints a rich, detailed picture of what the life was like from the food they ate to the set up of the common mans house. This is just a fun book to read. There are no heavy scientific terms even though one of the authors is a scientist. If you have an interested in what was life like back in the "old days" then this is a great place to start. It is an enjoyable book that will hold its interest and value for years to come.
Rating: 
Summary: A terrific idea that is well executed
Review: I admit that I was a little suspicious of Robert Lacey after his particularly staid books on the royal family. In this book, however, he is bright, susprising and inventive. Breaking the year 1000 into months and describing the daily life of village was inspired. His account of the year 1000 rings true and you can enjoy his descriptions of what happened throughout a year when the seasons mattered.I initially thought the book would was a bit of gimmick, but I can now see that it is both a lively and serious history of a period.
Rating:
Summary: A great read!
Review: If you're like me, and you're interested in this time period but do not want to read an 800-page treatise on Anglo-Saxon daily life, then this is the book for you! It's a fun, empathetic, and interesting look at life in 11th century England.
Rating:
Summary: The Year 1000
Review: In this book, Lacy and Danziger break the year 1000 into twelve chapters, one for each month, and include important events preceding and following that year. The authors then take you back in time to live the life of an anglo-saxon peasant (contrasted with the life of the privileged) on a month-by-month basis. Having read a great deal of English and European history, I found the book well written, accurate (scholarly in its research while almost casual in its style) and placed in such an "every man" perspective as to be an engrossing read. It is a quick read with interesting period illustrations kicking off each chapter/month.
Rating: 
Summary: An entertaining look at our ancestors
Review: One of the remarkable things about Anglo-Saxon history is how little we know about it. As the authors of this compact guide to life in England around 1,000A.D. attest, there is at least thirty times more information available about the sexual proclivities of the 42nd President of the United States than about the entire first millenium of English history. Most chronicles were destroyed: firsty by the Normans - who sought to obliterate evidence of the robust native culture - and then during the chaos that followed Henry the Eighth's rejection of the Roman church. This latter orgy of destruction saw the almost complete annihilation of all manuscripts in Englisc, the Anglo-Saxon language from which modern English has descended, and the even greater and inexplicable destruction of virtually all visual art in English churches.
The authors' depiction of life at the end of the first millenium breaks away from many of the Anglo-Saxon stereotypes we hold in our collective unconsciousness. For example, do you think of pre-Norman Englishmen and women as short and malnourished, with rotten teeth? Well actually, their average height was similar to people in England today and they had very good teeth because their diet contained no sugar (sugar cane was imported from the Caribbean some six hundred years later). Although life was short (averaging forty years) and physically hard by today's standards, it had a particular richness, as this passage shows:
"They were practical, self-contained folk, not given to excessive agonizing or self-analysis. They knew how to make and mend, and when their day's work was done, they could also be very good company, since one of the most important things they had learned in their lives was how to entertain themselves. The knowledge in their heads had rarely come directly from books - they had learned everything by observing and imitating, usually by standing alongside an adult who was almost certainly their father or mother, and by memorizing everything they needed to survive and enrich their lives."
This fascinating book is, like the Anglo-Saxons themsleves, practical and self-contained. It is divided into chapters that correspond to the months of the year, so we learn, for example, that July was the toughest month because it was immediately pre-harvest and stored food was at its lowest level. The possibility of famine was ever present and "haunted the imagination" (infanticide was not considered a crime in times of famine). We learn that there were frequent outbreaks of mass delirium because the people often consumed the equivalent of LSD in the ergot-infected grain they made into bread.
There is a lot of absorbing trivia in the little information we do have about this time, for example:
There was no toilet paper, but there was moss.
The monks' euphemism for a toilet was a "necessarium".
Infection was often called "elf-shot".
King Henry the First died from eating "a surfeit of lampreys" (eel-like fish).
The weather was warmer than today (this was a considerable help to the Vikings who reached present-day Newfoundland around about 1,000 AD) and there were many vineyards in England.
There were no prisons so justice tended to be summary and brutal - the punishment for a woman who committed adultery was the removal of her nose and ears!
The authors address the state of mind of everyday people as the millenium approached and compare it to today's febrile imaginings. In both cases, St John's Revelations played a part in convincing people (mainly clerics) that the end was nigh:
"Then I saw an angel coming down from heaven with the key of the abyss and a great chain in his hands. He seized the dragon, that serpent of old, the Devil or Satan, and chained him up for a thousand years; he threw him into the abyss, shutting and scaling it over him, so that he might seduce the nations no more till the thousand years were over. After that he must be let loose for a short while."
In spite of this eschatological fervor, it appears the approaching millenium was not of major concern to the average Anglo-Saxon, for whom it was "business as usual". In fact after the year 1,000 had elapsed there was a veritable outbreak of optimism and many "oaths of peace" were passed. There was much worse to come - the destruction of much of the Anglo-Saxon way of life after the Norman invasion (ironically the Normans were Vikings - the constant scourge of Anglo-Saxons and Celts - who had previously overrun northern France), and the unimaginable cataclysm of the Black Death in the mid-14th century, which changed the world forever (chronicled brilliantly in Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous14th Century).
In fact you get a definite sense of plus ca change in reading this history: many clerics gave thundering sermons decrying the state of the "modern world", and their complaints sound remarkably similar to today's radio shock-jocks and assorted oratorical fanatics:
"The devil has deceived this people too much, and there is little faith among men, and too many crimes have gone unchecked in the land. The laws of the people have deteriorated."
Lacey and Danzinger paint a clear picture of life in a relatively benign period of Medieval history and leave us with no doubt that the values and way of life of the Anglo-Saxons still influence us today in our language, our system of law and our very character.
Rating:
Summary: Easy to Read, Interesting Facts, A Bit Disorganized
Review: The authors have written an interesting and timely book. I liked all of the factoids and descriptions they gave about life one thousand years ago in England. Fascinating to see how our ancestors did it (life) facing challenges we have long ago conquored. The organization of the book tends to break up the narrative. It is mildly annoying in places, as are comparisons to current news that will, unfortunately quickly make this book look dated. This situation is caused by the author's using a period calendar as a backdrop to their story and organizing the book around the twelve months of the year and the seasonal activities of the Anglo-Saxons under study. A quick read and overall enjoyable.
Rating:
Summary: The Year 1000
Review: The book is written by journalists, not historians, and that in itself makes it all the more valuable for the general reader. Alas, too many historians write for other historians, and their prose is so stilted and dry as to be unreadable. But this book is a joy to read. Using the Julius Calendar as a device to introduce us to the everyday life of Anglo-Saxons in England in the years leading up to the first millennium, the authors present us with a perfect picture of what life must have been like on a seasonal basis, from January through December. I highly recommend this book to readers interested in the social history of that period who do not wish to wade through a thousand pages of scholarly boredom.
Rating:
Summary: Reminds us that there was life in England before 1066
Review: The major purpose of this book is to illustrate and focus on what life was like in Anglo-Saxon England around the year 1000. The authors use a previously little known document called the "The Julius Work Calendar", which was designed to be used by monks to track saints' days, to provide the framework by which they could tell a story of life at the turn of the first millennium. They used the illustrations and accompanying Latin verse of each month on the calendar as a basis for each of the 12 chapters in the book. In these chapters, Lacey and Danziger described the particular activities that could be expected to be done during the corresponding month and also made many other tangential and anecdotal observations. Some of these include the fact that the Anglo-Saxon of the year 1000 was generally healthier than Britons of a few generations ago; that Honey was a form of currency; that most adults died in their 40's; details about exactly how Unready Ethelred was by his ill conceived notion to pay protection money to the Vikings! This work is a popular history, written in an open style and is well researched and well sourced. It succeeds in dispelling some of the myths about medieval people and life in the Middle Ages and also serves to remind all that there was an England before 1066.
Rating:
Summary: He remains an Englishman...
Review: The turn of the millennium (the last millennium, that is) in England was an interesting world to behold -- the country was struggling toward unity, but still wary of invaders from across the various seas (an invasion trend that would stop less than 100 years after the turn of the millennium). The typical Englishman was well-fed, but the kinds of food might astound modern readers; when the people got indigestion back then, medical treatments were even more bizarre. Into the world, Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger venture with humour and insight. Lacey and Danziger, established writers in related topics, have traced a journey through history by tracing the typical life during a year at the turn of the year 1000, through the Julius Work Calendar, on reserve at the British Library, lost for a time due to miscategorisation. The authors (Lacey and Danziger) makes use of this interesting framework of month-by-month chronicling to develop the details of daily life and work in England in the year 1000. The different months take the paradigm for different topics -- February looks at geography; August looks at medicine (and the frequency of flies); November looks at the issues of gender relationships. Among the fascinating facts that come out in the analysis are the kinds of cyclical patterns that occur in history --Lacey and Danziger point out that under Canute, an unfaithful wife would meet with a horrible fate, but that legislation died with him, until the Commonwealth period several hundred years later, when it would be revived. The authors do not stick exclusively to English shores -- they discuss the general world situation, as it would impact English development. Lacey and Danziger close the year and discussion with the figure of Gerbert, who would become pope Sylvester II, having been the scholar of note under the Ottos, successors of Charlemagne. His strange innovations, like prefering Arabic numbers (1, 2, 3, etc.) to Roman numerals, introducing 'exotic' machines like an abacus to the world made him suspect -- however, Lacey and Danziger refer to him as the first millennium's Bill Gates, revolutionising computational power for good and forever. Lacey and Danziger warn against the 'snobbery of chronology', as C.S. Lewis terms it -- we don't necessarily know better or live better than our ancestors, and sometimes our distorted views of the past much be called into check. For example, it is commonly held that people today are taller than people in the past; while this trend is true over the past several generations, prior to that, it is not true -- the average Englishman today is only slightly taller than the average Englishman of the year 1000. From riddles and games for a dark and stormy night (playing cards would not be invented for several hundred years) to the origins of serfdom and family life, this is a wonderful telling of history with fact, fiction, literature, politics and more rolled into a common thread.
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