Millennial Concerns Not New

The world was very old, precisely 4,952 years old, according to learned brains of the time, and novel and disturbing things were happening.

Never had so much money been in circulation, and never had so many seemed so eager to possess it. As Europe approached the year 1000, the population--and cities--had begun to grow. Tracts of forest were being cleared and planted to feed the additional mouths. On the fir-fringed shore of Lake Paladru, here in the foothills of the northern French Alps, three new settlements surrounded by stockades of thick oak logs were erected, distant forerunners of suburban sprawl and the gated community.

New technologies were afoot, as powerful in their way as a 667-megahertz microprocessor, and older technologies were working their way even to backwaters of Europe. A strange type of computing machine, the abacus, was arriving from the East, championed by the pope himself.

To the north of this lake, in a monastery in Burgundy, a restless and asocial cleric, Ralph the Bald, surveyed the Western world a millennium ago and decided that he didn’t like most of what he saw.

“Alas, since the beginning of time, mankind has ever been forgetful of the benefits conferred by God, and prone to evil; like a dog returning to its vomit,” Ralph the Bald, well plugged into the Internet of his time--the network of monasteries and abbeys scattered across medieval Europe--wrote in his quirky, imperfect Latin.

“The leaders of the clerical and temporal orders alike fell into avarice, and they resorted, even more than had formerly been their wont, to robbery to satisfy their lusts. Middling and lesser people followed their example and plunged into monstrous sin,” he wrote. “Whoever before heard of so many incests, so many adulteries, illicit marriages between those of the same blood, shameless concubinage, and so much competition in evil?”

Ten centuries behind us--a mere blink of an eye in the span of human history--life and times around 1000 seem in many ways more remote and harder to fathom than the ancient civilizations of Greece or Rome.

The centralized model of political authority incarnated by the court of Charlemagne 200 years earlier was collapsing. Modern nations of Europe were in their infancy or yet to be born. For centuries, invaders had been sweeping in from the north, south and east.

Firsthand accounts of the time are scanty and mostly limited to the writings of monks. Even leading contemporary historians say they have a nearly impossible time imagining how the common people thought and felt.

Yet between this vanished world and our own, there are parallels. Some alive at the end of the first millennium, like critics of moral permissiveness in the United States now, lamented how much better and more upright life used to be. In an age of contradiction and confusion, there was a longing for order and the old and familiar.

The evidence that exists indicates that, like now, many people felt unsafe--not just from robbers and murderers, but also from the never-distant threats of starvation, marauding nobles and foreign invaders.

A Look at Life Inside the Fortress

Today, the hamlet of Charavines, population 1,251, is a quiet resort of small hotels and vacation homes catering to the summer trade and weekend visitors from nearby Grenoble and Lyons. But 1,000 years ago, the 50 or so people who came to the southern tip of Lake Paladru to try to make a new life armed themselves with swords and crossbows, selected a site protected by water on three sides, and kept a wary watch on what was going on outside their fenced-in compound.

Yet they, and other medieval men and women, also had their joys and entertainments: singing, gambling, telling stories, watching itinerant jugglers or entertainers and their trained bears. We know this in part because at Charavines, the rising level of the lake forced colonists to abandon their three lodgings of logs, dried earth and thatch after less than 40 years. When they departed, they left behind an unparalleled trove of clues about their lives.

Preserved in the straw that settlers used for floor covering and the chalky mud of the lake bed, objects including flutes, fishhooks, chess pieces, backgammon counters and dice have been found by scuba divers. One of the carved wooden dice was obviously used by a cheater: It has two sixes. Then, as now, men shaved with razors, women wore earrings and brooches, and people of both sexes used combs to groom themselves.

For amusement, there were bawdy riddles and love songs--the latter the special creation of women in countries bordering the Mediterranean. The lyrics of some of these truly golden oldies aren’t far from some of our top 40 ditties: “Mother, I waited last night for my love at the fountain, but he didn’t come,” laments one text found in Spain.

Leaving their stockade for the last time, the long-ago inhabitants of Charavines ventured out into an uncertain world with a questionable future.

Some Good Reasons for the Pessimism

Ralph the Bald, one of the most meticulous reporters of these times, was hardly alone in his pessimism. Common wisdom was that the world was on a downhill slope, headed for the Last Judgment. The first long poem in the nascent French language, written down in this period, starts on this wistful note: “Before, the world was great.” Europeans didn’t think they were living in the Middle Ages, but in the Final Age.

Unceasing warfare and pillage, recurrent crop failure, famine, epidemics, floods, the breakup of central authority, upheaval in society, ignorance and superstition--such were the facts of life. In the lands that would become modern France, at least nine-tenths of the population was made up of illiterate peasants, serfs or slaves living in meadows or in clearings hacked from the forest. They subsisted on porridge, bread and cakes of rye, barley and wheat.

If one made it to 40, one was considered old. For want of food, children might be breast-fed until age 3. When grain, game, mushrooms, nuts and berries ran short, some of the ancestors of the modern-day French--today so finicky about cuisine--resorted to gobbling down clay or waylaying and eating their neighbors.

Life’s lot, for almost everyone, was a mix of toil, indolence and resignation to the forces of nature and to those who had power, authority or a sword.

By 1000, most of Western Europe had accepted Christianity, but pagan customs remained widespread. The church offered the promise of eternal salvation but little earthly solace. Believers were taught to be fearful of divine wrath and to obey God’s laws or face eternity in hell.

“Who could, with an abacus in hand, tally up the cares that absorb the serfs, of their long marches, of their hard labors?” Ascelin, archbishop of the French city of Laon, asked. “The master is fed by the serf, he who claims to feed him. And the serf does not see the end of his tears and sighs.”

For true Christians, death was to be welcomed as deliverance from such trials.

No Sugar or Coffee, but Demons Galore

Nothing then was more natural than the supernatural: Saints’ relics were believed to produce miracles and drew huge crowds. Western European churches at one point held 12 heads of John the Baptist and 60 of his fingers. Ralph the Bald wrote matter-of-factly of a dragon in the sky, and described meeting the devil himself.

Forests were haunted with lost souls, werewolves, demons, sylphs and ogres.

A thousand years ago, Europeans immediately would have grasped the dangers that lurked in the woods depicted in “The Blair Witch Project” or the sorcery of the Harry Potter books. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that in terms of what we fear, we are still children of the Middle Ages.

It was an era without such now commonplace items as sugar, the potato, eyeglasses, the table fork, chocolate, coffee, tea, corn, the magnetic compass, spinach, mechanical clocks, wristwatches and the printing press.

The day began with the crowing of roosters. Trying to break pagan beliefs that made people fear the night, priests declared it a sin to wait indoors until the cock’s call. At dusk, the day ended.

It was a quiet, machine-free world. It also stank. The 400 monks at the Cluny monastery in Burgundy, the largest building in the Western world at the time--and an establishment that Ralph the Bald was kicked out of--took two baths a year. Many peasants lived in hovels with their livestock and might have slept next to the privy.

West Wasn’t Hub of Civilization

The Western world seemed to be at an ebb. Readers of Latin could peruse the works of classical writers and sense how inferior life had become since Rome was sacked in the 5th century. The Caltech of the age was the Moorish court at Cordoba in southern Spain. Arabs were the leading scientists and thinkers. Western Europeans also had little to rival the dazzling wealth and artistic sophistication of their Christian brethren in Constantinople, the center of the Byzantine East.

For Christians, a third of the year was made up of holidays and feasts, when it was a sin to work. There is some irony in this: Medieval men and women may have had to engage in long, backbreaking drudgery at planting and harvest time, but their 20th century descendants, including Americans, put in far more hours week in and week out.

Life, to the recurring rhythm of the sun and the changing seasons, was far closer to present-day existence in the villages of India or Africa than to the hustle and bustle of modern Europe. Yet out of this age of near-subsistence farming and terrified piety, modern Western civilization, and its dominant current of American life, grew. Some reasons were not evident at the time; there also may have been an element of luck.

What was on the technological cutting edge in Western Europe around the first millennium? An innovation in harnessing oxen and horses, around the shoulders or foreheads rather than the neck, tripled the load a beast of burden could pull. Use of the metal-tipped, wheeled plow--which greatly increased the area a peasant could plant, boosting food production and the number of people who could be fed--became more widespread.

The iron horseshoe, though not new, was coming into general use, multiplying a horse’s range and carrying capacity. An upsurge also began in the construction of water-powered mills for grinding grain into flour, making bread easier to produce and providing another sturdy foundation for a population increase.

Slowly, European society and the economy also were changing. Around 980, something of a building boom began in Western Europe. New villages such as the settlements at Lake Paladru were started. Markets sprang up to handle a modest, but increasing, trade in silk and other fabrics from the Arab world and Byzantine Empire, plus perfumes, gold, furs, swords, jewelry and other metalwork.

A caste of traders and merchants, often Jews, formed. This was the embryo of the bourgeoisie and middle class that would play the key role in the social, economic and political revolutions to come centuries later. At Charavines, the colonists, though able to make their own wooden plates and forge their own horseshoes, purchased pottery from a kiln 30 miles away.

They paid either with money minted by kings and other powerful nobles--40 coins have been recovered from the lake--or with hams from the pigs they raised.

Weather Change Helped Spur Progress

Along with these transformations, there was an element of good fortune. By 1000, the terrifying and destructive invasions of Vikings, Moors and Hungarians were behind most of Europe. And the weather, it seems, got better. It became sunnier, warmer and drier, making the growing of grain, the staple foodstuff of the peasantry, less chancy.

This happened at such a crucial juncture that among the 15 researchers currently investigating the Charavines site, some now believe that the warm spell, and no action of people at the time, was the true spark for the demographic and economic expansion begun in Western Europe around 1000.

Not that people then would have believed in progress, a modern notion with no place in the medieval worldview. It is doubtful the average peasant was even conscious of what year it was, or when 999 (or DCCCCLXXXXIX, as experts say a monk would have written it with his pen fashioned from a sharpened reed) segued into 1000.

The resident priest would have needed to know how to calculate the year, so as to know when Easter, the most important of Christian holidays, fell.

Depending on the place and social circle, the year began at Easter, Christmas or the day the Virgin Mary was said by the church to have begun carrying the Christ child. In some areas, people counted the passage of time according to how long the king or local sovereign had been on the throne.

As for later historians’ lurid reports of a “Great Fear” around the end of the first millennium, and supposed mass panic at the imminent coming of the antichrist, these conclusions now seem false to most scholars.

Millennium Wasn’t the Crucial Date

There appears to have been more unease--at least among church leaders and the nobility--as 1033, believed to be the 1,000th anniversary of Christ’s crucifixion, loomed.

In his five volumes of writings, Ralph the Bald reported an upsurge then in pilgrims setting off for Jerusalem, presumably intending to get their spiritual affairs in order before the world came to an end.

As 1000 came and went, existence for most people would have been the same harsh grind, in some ways more insecure than ever. A host of local warrior-potentates, greedy for land and the labor of serfs, was coming into being. They would be the core of the feudal system with its rigid hierarchy of nobles, clerics and serfs that would soon dominate Western Europe.

In this earlier period, the warriors were pretty much at liberty to loot and destroy what they could. Chivalry, like Gothic architecture--another glory of the Middle Ages--was still in the future; to a French writer around 1000, the nobility were bullies seeking to “oppress the inferior.”

Alarmed at the nobles’ rapacity and lack of Christian mercy, a movement of outdoor meetings, led by the clergy, began in 989 in the Aquitaine region of southwestern France. Men with armor, swords and the other accouterments of battle were compelled to come before the priests and people and swear oaths not to attack the church, women, the poor, children and other defenseless persons--failing which, bishops threatened to raise the peasantry against them.

The warriors reverted quickly to their old ways, but a vital strain in Western political thought--that all power must be subject to some sort of control, and that it should not be wielded against the interests of the majority--had been affirmed.

And even when aristocracy and autocracy seemed to be the way of the future, population growth and an economy based on market trading were establishing the preconditions for a very different future for the Western world.

In the divine order of things, there was supposed to be no room for merchants or cities, arguably the greatest catalysts for change in the Western world over the last 1,000 years. The omission is understandable: At the first millennium, cities were still amazingly small, with Paris, the most populated place in northern Europe, counting only 20,000 inhabitants, or even fewer.

Anti-Semitism Grew With the Population

Economic and demographic forces already in motion ensured future urbanization from the British Isles to Italy, whatever priests or bishops might be preaching about God’s blueprint for society. These growing concentrations of humanity had unpredictable side effects: Western Europe’s first violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism date from this time, as Christians in large numbers came into contact with Jews for the first time. In France, Ralph the Bald recorded, Jews were chased from their homes, thrown into rivers and put to death by the sword.

Around 1000, an Italian monk at a monastery in Novalesa disapprovingly wrote of the people of his time as “moderns.” What was old was good, he meant, and what was new was bad. Yet while educated men worried about the decline--and very probably the end--of the human race, others were building and innovating. The vast majority was struggling to just get by.

About the same time, as a war between the English and Danish invaders was at its most pitched, one of Ralph the Bald’s fellow clergymen on the other side of the English Channel, Archbishop Wulfstan of York, shared his dire thoughts on what lay ahead. His words are a caution to those today who would try to predict the future.

“Dear friends,” Wulfstan wrote in a sermon meant to be read by monks and parish priests from their pulpits, “this world is in haste, and is drawing ever closer to its end, and it always happens that the longer it lasts, the worse it becomes. And so it must ever be.”