Bloodfeud

I have been thinking about England from the time of Alfred the Great to that of William the Conqueror, or from the second half of the 9th century to the early part of the 12th. I just finished reading Bloodfeud by Richard Fletcher. About a year ago I read The Year 1000 : What Life Was Like at the Turn of the First Millennium by Danny Danziger and Robert Lacey. I am in the middle of Richard Cornwell’s Alfred novels (The Last Kingdom and The Pale Horseman).

The setting

It was relatively warm in Europe from 650 AD to 1100 AD (explaining some of the ease with which the Vikings prospered in Iceland and traveled to so many faraway places). (It was cold again from 1150 AD to 1300 AD.) The population was much less than that of today. (The population of the United Kingdom is about 60 million, while that of the British Isles a thousand years ago may have been one million.) It was the period before the First Crusade (1095) and before the Black Death hit Europe (1347).

This was a time of agricultural societies, with few towns of any size. There were, or course, no potatoes, corn, squash nor others of the new world crops. Nor was there refrigeration, nor the availability of spices and sugar. It was before coffee or tea, but it was a time some wine could be produced in the British Isles. There were wheat, barley, some vegetables, and some familiar fruits. There were cattle, pigs and horses, but meat would not keep and had to be eaten fresh. The aristocrats hunted, and I suppose the odd rabbit or fish might have found its way to the pot of a poor family, Diet would have been pretty uninteresting and pretty dreadful by modern American standards. People in the British Isles would have spent a lot of time gathering wood and drawing water. Travel was easiest by boat, even if the boat was propelled by oars and human muscle.

The Romans left Britain in the 5th century, and Germanic tribes including the Angles and the Saxons had invaded and established kingdoms in much of what is now England, driving Celts, Britons and others into corners of the islands. But Scandinavian peoples were in a centuries long process of replacing the Anglo-Saxons. Indeed, as these peoples successfully conquered and settled parts of Ireland and France (Normandy) the incursions into what is now England continued incorporating their new bases. For the period from the 9th to the 12th century, Britain would have hosted a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual society.

There is very little written record from this period – the Anglo-Saxon chronicles and the Doomsday books from the time of William the Conqueror are the best sources. Consequently, good historians can’t say much with certainty. I found Fletcher’s book hard to read, but a useful reminder of how painful it must be to tease out information on the period from the available sources, and how untrustworthy those sources seem to be.

Institutional Change

Bloodfeud was an institutionalized process. The bloodfeud that is the centerpiece of the Fletcher book went on for decades and generations, killing after killing. Bloodfeud is an institution that has been found in several cultures, and paralleled wergild, the payment of financial reparations for injuring or killing someone. Under bloodfeud, retribution killing of one who killed a relative was socially acceptable in the upper classes, indeed admirable. It was not until after William the Conqueror and his followers extended regal power geographically and institutionally that the courts represented an alternative institution for the settlement of wrongful death. I think this substitution of one institution for another is very interesting during this period, and is perhaps the main story told in Fletcher’s book.

This was a time when Christianity was transforming British life. Priests were frequently married (but did not regularly officiate at the marriages of others) at the beginning of the period, but celibacy was increasingly imposed. Abbeys were created (and destroyed in Viking raids). So too was a system of nunneries, and churches were built across the country. The authority of Rome would have been extending to this outer fringe of Christianity, as the richest people started making the occasional pilgrimage. The other side of the coin is that the earlier religions were going out of fashion.

Families were apparently important. Fletcher comments that (for the upper classes) betrothal was a more important event than marriage, as betrothal established the link between families and set the economic terms of the bargain. On the one hand, there would not have been enough money for individuals to live alone; on the other hand, the extended family would have been limited due to the high death rates.

The sense of community would have been expanding. People tied to the land, too poor to own a horse, in areas poorly served by roads would not have moved around a lot. On the other hand, the Norse, Danes and others would have traveled internationally. We read of the royal families and high aristocracy moving from court to court, and theirs would have been quite a different sense of community. But one assumes that the common folk would have identified with a village, and perhaps a local squire. But power was extending, and people with time might well have identified with a county, and indeed a country.

Economic institutions were changing. More coins were going into circulation, suggesting that a money economy was being substituted for a barter economy. Towns and trade were growing, suggesting that markets were expanding and trade was being institutionalized. Slavery existed, free persons could fall into slavery through economic misfortune, and slaves could be manumitted by their owners.

Still, there would have been very little economic specialization, and few of the institutions we depend upon to articulate and coordinate the diverse productive activities of our society. In the farmstead, built by the family and neighbors, the women would have spun and woven, cooked, and cared for infants and young children. Farmers would farmed, carrying out all the tasks from planting to harvest, from breeding livestock to slaughtering animals and curing the meat.

From the point of view of modern society, one of the oddest features of the time was the institutionalized system by which bands raided or invaded into the British Isles. Kings were expected to and sought to protect their subjects from outside raids, but were faced by insurrections, and were apparently frequently unable to offer effective protection. And eventually the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy was almost totally replaced by Scandinavian and ultimately Norman aristocracy. The winners took all!

It must have been a terrible time for the vast majority of the people. They could have their property stolen by Vikings, or taken in taxes by aristocrats paying for their warfare. They could be killed in the fighting. If the crops were bad, they died of hunger; if an epidemic occurred they died of disease; and there was very little they could do about it.

What were people like?

The books don’t tell you much about the “normal folk”. They were not the subject of the records left from that time, and they are not the people we enjoy as protagonists in our fiction. They would have been unschooled and illiterate (only the priests and a few of the aristocrats would have learned to read and write). They would probably have been small, in a society with not much food to give to the kids. They would have a lot of residual disability, having lived a hard life without medical services. They would be dirty, lacking the sanitary facilities necessary for what we take to be decent hygiene, and having a culture in which such hygiene had not yet been given value.

Children would often have died in infancy or childhood, mothers in childbirth. Indeed, there would have been very few old people. As a result, their attitudes toward death and age would have been very different than ours. They would probably seem insensitive to a modern American, and would have accorded respect due to age to people we might consider quite young.

I suppose that folk were more verbal than we are. The way to get new information would be to have someone tell it to you. The way to remember something would be to go over it again and again. (Conversation would have probably been pretty dull to us, with people talking interminably about crops and pests, animals and family histories.) I bet music was important, and that people sang; what else would there have been to do for entertainment?

So why is this essay in this blog?

It occurs to me that the experience with poor people in developing nations might be better preparation for understanding the normal folk of 1,000 years ago than any experience in a rich country or any reading we could do.

Looking at the evolution of a European society over centuries gives some perspective to our view of international development. The institutions change radically over such a period. The Europeans of a thousand years ago, my direct ancestors, were probably more different to me culturally than people in other countries are today.

We live much better and longer today than did my ancestors, and that is due to an accumulation of capital, which in turn is due largely to the accumulation of knowledge. But it is the political, social, economic and cultural advances made by those ancestors that created the conditions under which knowledge and capital could accumulate.