Book Review for Year 1000

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A Review of Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger’s The Year 1000: What Life was like at the Turn of the First Millennium Robert Lacey and Danny Danziger’s book, The Year 1000: What Life was like at the Turn of the First Millennium, is a brief and somewhat lightweight narrative approach to the life of the average person in the year 1000. To say that it is “lightweight,” however, is not an indictment of the book. Rather, the authors’ light approach to the material is one of several positive attributes that the book possesses. The Year 1000 is an adequate book that may be used to offer good, basic information to people who are new to this part of British history. Summary Marketed as a book that describes the life of the ordinary person during the year 1000, at first glance, Lacey and Danziger’s book would appear to be too short to accomplish its task. However, it is a well-organized book, whose organization allows the author to pack a great deal of information into the space allotted. Lacey and Danziger have divided the book into 14 sections. The first of these sections describes the Julius Work Calendar, which they use to divide the majority of the rest of the book. The authors explain that the Julius Work Calendar was used as a guide, both spiritual and temporal, on how people should live their lives in the year 1000. Unlike modern workers, who might perform the same tasks on every day of their work year as part of an unvarying schedule, the ordinary person in the year 1000 needed to vary his or her work tasks dependant on the season. Lacey and Danziger explain, in some detail, the difficulty in developing a universal calendar that Britons and others experienced; however, in the eighth century, a working calendar was created. From this original calendar, the Julius Work Calendar evolved, noting “Golden Days,” the “Kalends,” “Nones,” and

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