The Year 1000- What Life Was Like At the Turn of The First Millennium by Robert Lacey

Author:Robert Lacey [Lacey, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9780349113067
Amazon: 0349113068
Publisher: ABACUS
Published: 2003-11-15T06:00:00+00:00

August: Remedies

August 1, Lammas day, is one of the oldest English country festivals. Shakespeare’s Juliet had her birthday “come Lammas eve at night,” and to this day Lammas is one of the quarter-days in Scotland’s financial year. Lammas sounds as if it had its origins in some sort of religious festival deriving from “lamb” and “mass,” but its origin was actually the annual Anglo-Saxon round of farming and survival. Lammas was hlaf-maesse, loaf-mass, the day when the hungry gap ended and the first loaf could be made from the new harvest. “I must sustain myself till Lammas when I hope to have harvest in my barn,” declared Piers Plowman. “Then I can have the kind of meal I like.” (77)

The Julius Work Calendar drawing for August makes clear that harvesting for the loaf-mass was an activity that involved the whole community. No less than seven labourers, more than in any other drawing in the cycle, are gathered together, busily sweeping their sickles, cutting the wheat, binding it into sheaves, and loading it into another neatly carpentered Saxon cart. “Ten hours of darkness, fourteen hours of daylight,” noted the calendar’s hour count for August, and every single working hour of the month was filled with urgency, since the bread harvest was the very fulcrum of survival. More than meat, milk, or any type of vegetable, bread was the staff of life for people in the year 1000. “I make people’s hearts strong,” boasted the “Baker” in Aelfric’s Colloquy.”I am the stamina of men.” (78)

The bread of the early Middle Ages was round, coarse, and quite flat by modern standards, not baked in a tin, with the texture of a pita bread, nan, or chapati today. The natural gluten in wheat bread provided a “raising” agent which gave it more air than bread made with rye or barley, but it was probably quite old and tough by the time most people ate it, since outside the towns and the monasteries there were few specialised bakers producing fresh bread every day. Country people must have regularly eaten bread that was a week or more old, softening the crust by dipping it into the gruel-like pottage of grain and vegetables which was the plain but healthy staple of the Englishman’s diet. In Central Europe the peasants ate rye bread, but in England wheat was the grain of choice, and barley was definitely judged second-best. Saints demonstrated their humility by eating barley bread, and one hagiography relates how the emperor Julian took offence at being offered barley bread by St. Basil.”Barley is only fit for horses,” declared the emperor indignantly, and offered the holy man some grass in return. (79)

Grain was ground into flour in one of the recently constructed watermills. When the Normans carried out their 1086 Domesday inventory of the land they had conquered, they discovered that England contained 5,624 watermills, just about one for every village and hamlet, and many of these must have been in operation by the year 1000. The

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