Life in the England of AD1000 was grim. About 10 per cent of the population were slaves; in the South West 20 per cent. The punishment for a male slave accused of theft was to be stoned to death by his fellow slaves. Men would club together to buy a female slave to gang rape; when they grew bored, they would sell her into the foreign slave markets and buy another. The practice was so widespread that Wulfstan, the bishop of Worcester, felt compelled to publicly denounce it.
Virtually all of the rest of the population were unfree: they were villeins, bordars and cottars, serfs of varying status. A villein, the wealthiest, might have more than 30 acres to work, but he was still bound to the land and wholly subject to his lord. Most people moved so little that they needed only a first name to identify themselves. They lived, died and were forgotten. Even among the knightly class, hereditary surnames were rare in 1050.
It was a subsistence economy. In parts of the country barter was still the predominant mode of exchange. There were famines in 1005, 1012, 1016, 1025 and 1031, followed by a reported seven years of famine beginning in 1042. Then came William the Conqueror, whose campaign of conquest and terror in the north left its inhabitants eating dogs, cats, rats — and, in extremis, each other. Not that violence was the preserve of the Normans: of the 77 laws issued by King Alfred, 34 were exclusively concerned with rates of compensation for severed limbs and other specific violent injuries.
And yet, as Ian Mortimer argues in Medieval Horizons, to write off the entire Middle Ages as a period of unchanging misery, only relieved by the arrival of scientific thought in the 17th century, is to misunderstand and misrepresent the era entirely. Quite the reverse is true: much of what we value in modernity has its roots firmly in the later medieval period, which he defines as 1000 to 1600. But we don’t see its contribution because we over-value technology as a measure of progress — as if, to paraphrase, the iPhone were a more significant marker of progress than the astrolabe.
Mortimer’s approach is thematic. He wants us to think in terms of expanding conceptual horizons rather than material inventions. Every time you use a clock, for instance, you are are using intellectual concepts developed by medieval minds. At the turn of the first millennium, a day comprised 12 “hours” of daylight and 12 “hours” of darkness. This meant that a daylight “hour” was roughly twice as long at midsummer as it was at midwinter.
The creation of 24 regular hours, measured by clocks — themselves marvels of precision engineering — whose bells rang each hour, transformed every aspect of society and revolutionised the way lives were ordered. By 1400 clocks were common in abbeys and palaces; by 1500 they were everywhere. They brought a new-found predictability — as well as more control over the lives of others. A 1515 statute set a labourer’s summer working day to precisely 5am to 7pm.
Across medieval society were emerging organisations, systems and structures that still define much of how we live. In 1000 education in England, outside of monastic houses and elite households, was non-existent. Perhaps 0.25 per cent of the population were literate. Successive church councils in 1179 and 1215 decreed that every cathedral, then every church, should have a school. Then came the universities — 19 across Europe by 1300 — and with them curriculums to be argued over and challenged. These institutions catered only for male students, but the 15th-century arrival of print — perhaps the most influential of all medieval technologies — turbocharged the spread of literacy and learning among women too. As with education, so with the law, medicine, finance and so on.
But one of the greatest changes the medieval period wrought was on our inner space. At first this took the form of spiritual reflection and atonement for individual behaviour. A visiting Swiss bishop in 1070 imposed penances on the Normans who fought at Hastings (which typically might include fasting, prayer and public acts of humility and abasement) — a year of such penances for each Saxon killed, 40 days for each Saxon wounded.
Religious writings, such as Aelred of Rievaulx’s mid-12th-century Mirror of Charity, urged self-knowledge. But the very title of that work nods to other, secular developments: the rediscovery of mirror-making techniques in the early 1100s literally changed how people viewed themselves. The emergence of guides to behaviour — we might call them self-help books — such as Daniel Beccles’s The Book of the Civilised Man, is another 12th-century phenomenon. Beccles offered practical advice on everything from singing in chapel to choosing a prostitute, as well as tips on etiquette: it was shameful to break wind in company, he thought. People cared how they were judged by each other now as well as how they would be judged by God.
Mortimer’s upper date limit of 1600 is beyond the range of what most people think of as medieval. Arguably, that is the point. Medieval Horizons doesn’t set out to be a comprehensive survey of medieval England, but rather challenges us to rethink the Middle Ages and its social, cultural and intellectual innovations. Mortimer is a compelling advocate for our medieval inheritance. He is right that we should be proud of it.
This review first appeared in the 11 February 2023 issue of The Times.
Mathew Lyons 