What Was Normal Life Like In Anglo-Saxon Britain? | Life In Anglo-Saxon Times | Chronicle

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Laughter] [Music] who are the Anglo-Saxons well there are two answers to that one is a very simple one bead in his history of the English-speaking peoples tells us that the Anglo-Saxons were the angles Saxons and jutes and he says that these people come from angle which is basically Southern Denmark um Saxony which is more or less what we regard as a Saxony nowadays in other words the area around Hamburg and Jutland which is obviously North Jewish peninsula that used to be what everybody accepted but archeology has rather complicated that that picture and we no longer really believe that the the majority of the Jews came from Jutland in fact archaeologically they seem to have more links with frizzier in other words modern Holland and even if you look at the other groups they're not pure groups of angles Saxons and Jukes the angles settling in in the north of England on the whole the Saxons settling in Essex Sussex and further to the west of that in fact you find a much more mixed pattern and what you've got to really envisage is a group of Barbarian peoples on the continent in the fifth and early sixth centuries tribal groups which are always changing complex complexion complexity joining other groups and these groups gradually forming larger groups which migrate and which in time will Define themselves in the way that we Define themselves Define them but which were not defined in that way at all in the fifth and sixth centuries During the period of migration when they come over to England [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] history hit is like Netflix just for history fans with exclusive history documentaries covering some of the most famous people and events in history just for you with familiar faces such as Dan Jones and Dr Eleanor janega we've got hundreds of documentaries covering the greatest figures and events of medieval history we're committed to Bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else sign up now for a free trial and Chronicle fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Chronicle that's Holgate Village is actually a history education center which has been running now for about 10 years listed in about 19 history as a way of interpreting the past for people living history so as of interpreting the past we've only been on the present site here at the farming museum for about three years and that's been long enough time to build a village and establish some crops and get some livestock but the plan for the next few years is to extend the site and actually make it bigger and better research more accurate ways of building the buildings and getting better livestock and better crops the village is actually based around a settlement of the Dark Ages and we have a major problem in studying the Dark Ages in that there's no written records very few written records that give detail about how people lived or what they got up to um what they ate or what jobs they did um history of that period tends to be very much about Kings battles dates and while those are important in their own right they only make up about five percent of what was actually going on so a study of those dates and kings and battles doesn't really tell you a lot about the daily life of people about what they were doing even a king had to have somebody to sort of clean his throne for him and Stoke his fire for him and so what we tend to do here is steer away from the dates and the statistics and get more onto the daily life of people what it was like to actually live a thousand years ago how people actually made their daily bread as it were um and for that purpose we've constructed a Dark Age settlement which we tell people when their eye is not real it's impossible impossible to build a real Dark Age settlement and get it absolutely right even the the real experts would have to admit they couldn't do it because we just don't know enough about their buildings when we come to excavate buildings in archeology what we actually find are the floors and the walls to a height of three or four feet we never find the rules intact and of course the buildings had fallen into disuse before they fell apart so what you're finding is very fragmentary evidence it's a bit like looking at a jigsaw puzzle with half a bits missing you get a vague idea of what there is there but the precise details are often missing and for that we have to use a fair amount of educated guesswork the site is actually visited by 15 000 children a year who all spend the best part of the day out on the village living as Saxon or Viking or Dark Age people would have lived and it's quite an eye-owner for children just particularly come from inner cities they've never actually encountered livestock at close range they've never encountered some of the jobs they have to do in in our world in 1995 we live in a very push-button world if you want to get warm you switch up a thermostat if you want to get some food you get on the supermarket if you want some clothes you go down to the shops and buy them our ancestors couldn't do that and a thousand years ago their priorities were staying warm staying closed and staying fed but there were no shops to get their food from there were no tails to go to spider clothes off the Peg and you certainly haven't got a thermostat for essential heating they had to get it all for themselves so it would have been a fairly arduous life for them which is probably why their lives were shorter than ours and harder work everything everything had to be wrestled from the land it was a constant battle against starvation people talk about Warriors and battles and Kings but the biggest killer in the Dark Ages was probably disease and starvation but it wasn't battle battles themselves are feeling far between the biggest enemy with starvation people spent 90 of their working day fighting against that enemy that is a big enough enemy without needing anything else we base our business on two principles really the first is that if you were a teacher with a class of children and you were going to teach cookery you wouldn't just give them a recipe book because if you did they get bored with it they'd want to try the recipes out you cook well we do the same thing with history here we don't just talk about it we do it um you have to have careful bounds for that you have to set parameters out otherwise you could be giving them the wrong idea and that's why when we get people on the site we explain it's not a real Village we're not real dark Edge people we're recreating the atmosphere of what it would have been like otherwise you could be giving them the wrong impression the second principle we base our business on is a famous Chinese philosophy which is used a lot in education and that's I hear and I forget I see and I remember but if I do I understand now that is written through everything we do that is our fundamental philosophy philosophy they've got to do it to understand it it's no good pointing to a field and saying to a group of children that needs to be tilled in order to grow crops you've got to throw the tool and say get on with it because if you don't work you're not going to eat which was the philosophy our ancestors had if they didn't get out and do it no one's going to bail them out I didn't have any government to bail them out in that respect the way it happens today in some cases they have to get out there and do the job themselves 95 of the population a thousand years ago were getting their living from the land essentially they were farming they might have been part-time Traders they might have been part-time blacksmiths or Carpenters but even kings-owned farms and even a king if he didn't get his hands dirty farming would still take an interest in his fields and his crops and the way his land was being used because it was the only way of getting food so at the end of their working day here they've had a day working on the village living with people who live [Music] we give them a meal that's fairly accurately researched and at the end of the day they take home with them um some flour ground from grain that's been grown on the village they take home a sample of grain from the fields they take home this flower they've ground and they take home a little bread bun they've baked from the flower they take home a bundle of Twigs that they've collected in the fields these aren't any normal Twigs these are Twigs the children have collected themselves in the fields and they also take home textile samples that they've worked on carded wool spunwool woven wool so what they actually take home with them in only small samples but it's enough they take on their achievement for the day they take home things for staying warm staying clothed and staying fed and in all the cases the things they take home are things they've made for themselves they've not just seen it happen they've done it for themselves so it's like here and I forget I've seen I remember but when I do I understand thank you foreign [Music] Chronicles are a difficult document at first sight it tells us the whole history of the Anglo-Saxons right the way through from the Year Dot through to the uh period 893 and it's then actually continued right the way up into the 11th and in one manuscript up into the 12th century and at first sight you therefore have a whole history of the Anglo-Saxon period the difficulty with this is that it was composed in a particular period of time it's composed sometime in eight nine two to three almost certainly commissioned by Alfred or somebody at Alfred's Court as a document responding to the crisis of the Viking invasions and what you have therefore is a history drawn together for a very particular reason the propagandist reason to unite the people of Wessex of Alfred's Kingdom in a particular crisis period and in that period it's not terribly surprising that everything is slanted to Alfred's point of view and you actually have therefore a history of Wessex yes very definitely but a history of Wessex which is made up of stories which may well have been put in the wrong years or which may have been invented altogether there are certain points you can see in the early part of it where you're dealing with pure invention for instance the uh figure called Port who lands and founds Portsmouth is quite clearly uh simply a way of explaining the name Portsmouth the man Vector who lands in the Isle of Wight um the insular vectus is quite simply a man who explains the name of the Isle of Wight so there are passages like that which are easy enough to discount there are other passages relating to battles particularly relating to battles Associated say with cholin one of the early figures in the west Saxon Dynasty which may or may not be true and which may or may not be placed in the right period we're not quite certain whether the chronicler had any good reason for putting things in specific days or whether he just found a series of nice empty spacesuits in the 5th Century and in the sixth Century into which he could fit convenient stories and that seems to be what happens in the early histories of Kent and also of Wessex which you find in the Anglo-Saxon College foreign [Music] in the types of settlement people lived in those days depending on where you lived and what sort of settlement it was the size of the settlement they did vary enormously um in the main the buildings in any settlement would have been made from materials that were locally available within 10 miles of where the settlement was built so in an area where you've got a lot of stone lying around upon moorlands and places like that the buildings would have been constructed to Stone a lot of stone in them in an area where it was heavily forested that have used a lot of trees I mean they they weren't going to start shifting equipment hundreds of miles when they got materials locally available and some Dark Age settlements Anglo-Saxons particularly called Bergs or fortified settlements they would have had a wall and a ditch around them and they were a defended settlement um others were just like a linear Village it was just a straggle of houses down a road say Road Track communication is very difficult a thousand years ago and people were lucky to move 30 40 miles a day if they were a royal messenger let alone a a farmer or some local one thing you would have found on entering an Anglo-Saxon Village whether it was a straddle of affiliate houses down a main street or a large settlement with 45 warland one thing a modern person would be surprised at is just how much of the actual building space was given over to storage equipment we have supermarkets to store our things in today they didn't um and and a fair proportion of every house and every building was given over to storage of things like fodder for the animals and bedding and spare food most people had a hail off in these Farm in the farm houses and in there you'd store most of your food for the year if that was empty so is your stomach the buildings themselves very often have Timber construction or stone walls with a Timber rule thatched with straw or with Turf as we've never found any rooms intact and we wouldn't know we don't know exactly how they they did work the rules how they built them but it appears that many of them that were turfed or thatched so the villages themselves that have been single family dwellings there might have been some some Villages actually we think now have a large Hall which was like a central dwelling place and then around it scattered small workshops and private sort of sleeping areas for people so they could go off and be on their own or little family units but it varied enormously in some places is one family one house in other places it was communal living in a hall with little sleeping Quarters off but they did they did vary enormously [Music] an actual Anglo-Saxon house would have been made of either stone or Timber my experience of construction comes from Timber so if we deal with Timber ones um the houses were all constructed along a very basic Autumn construction on a very basic design and that is you would when you were building a house you would start off by digging post holes the archaeologists often say the study of the Dark Ages these pits post holes and Bones because they're the only things they find post holes were dug so you could sink a trunk of a tree or something as a post for all the upper rights of the house the interesting thing we find is in many places when they dig these post holes out they find the post hole is no deeper than a man's arm they obviously weren't making life difficult for themselves they weren't going to dig anything deeper than they could scoop out you then put a stone in the bottom of it to act as a foundation and then it would go your Timber beams and upright and then fill the Earth in with cobbles and Rubble pack Cobble Earth and Rubble around Hamburg holding to hold the post upright a series of uprights and then you put a cross rail around the top a wooden cross rail around the top so you've almost learned like a wood hinge from that you then have to fit the sloping beams of the roof we assume because they've never found a roof intact although it's a fairly safe assumption there were v-shaped roofs and the roads themselves would then have lats running across them which were probably made of something like hazel or Willow something good and springy solid that you could walk up and onto that you would then attach your thatch the walls themselves were infilled either with cut planks which would have been an expensive way of doing it because somebody had to cut those by hand or they would have used wattle around every village there would have been an area of Woodland that was deliberately managed as what we call copis they would cut trees down to a very low level trees particularly like hazel or willow trees and let new shoots spring out and every so many years they cut these shoots off and they made thin springy branches very straight and it's from those that people even today make wattle hurdles or panels they would wattle the walls of the houses some cases planks in some case in other cases Watling and then onto that wattle you smear a gooey mess over mud and straw you can use animal done animal done has a lot of little creepy crawlers living in it which helped create air pockets in the mud because the main job of door of modern stories it's like a giant mud Aero bar it's like a giant mud honeycomb you put it on the walls up to a foot thick or more apply a layer every so often what you get is a very thick mud funny cam and the air acts like cavity wall insulation keeps heat in in the winter and it keeps the house cool in the summer but that needs to be protected they used to put a lime wash on the door which hardened it almost like cement but it still needed to be protected from the worst of the weather from frost and from rain and that's why in many illustrations you've actually seen a very overlapping route the eaves of the roof come down a long way and that's to give a lot of protection to the walls and also to help balance the structure because of course there were no proper foundations to them so the modern straw door being actually acts as insulation to keep the air temperature regulated indoors there would have been a door to a building very often probably only one door door for an hour and there's a lot of argument about whether they had windows or not in them they certainly didn't have glass in them but the we found from practical experience here on on the village that if you want to do things like weaving or delicate sewing or food preparation or anything and the weather's too bad to go outside and do in the open air you can't do it in a gloomy dark house you need some sort of light so um the big argument about what they had windows or not we tend to put wooden shutters in our houses at certain points which can be kept shut to keep the weather out but can also let a fair amount of daylight in for delicate jobs that need to be done so whether they had wooden shutters or not we're not entirely sure we found from our experience it helps although the houses varied enormously in shape and size well certainly in size they all had roughly the same layout inside it would be an earth or clay floor some parts of the year they may have put rushes or straw on to act as an insulation because the Earth would get down but in the main it was packed hard clay floor uh and in the center of the house there would have been a fire pit a long fire pit the fires our ancestors burned were remarkably sophisticated things many people today that you just light a fire and that's it you don't the fire is a very controllable thing uh and if you're going to have a fire inside a house you've got to try and have a fire that produces minimum smoke with maximum heat and also you want a lot of light off it now as anyone who's ever cooked over a charcoal barbecue will know you don't cook over open Flames because that Scorch is the food but doesn't cook it through so in a long fire pit which could be four or even five feet long two feet wide there would be a probably a central fire burning which provided light and as the wood burned down there the ashes the hot ashes like the charcoal and a barbecue was scraped further down the fire pit to provide the heat for various cooking jobs that were going on most Anglo-Saxon houses were probably a combined kitchen storeroom dining room living room bedroom stable Workshop Mill and barn all rolled into one the only thing they probably didn't have in them was a toilet pit because until the image of the flushing toy that nobody wanted to toilet inside the house but they were basically doing a lot of the jobs that houses do today the difference between the houses we live in today and the houses they lived in is in degree rather than kind their houses may not look like ours but they were doing the same jobs as our houses as our houses do [Music] there were laws in Anglo-Saxon Society there must have been some before the first written codes that we've got there must have been lawmen who knew traditional law and to enforce it in some way or other but the earliest code we've got is a code of Albert of Kent and that is almost certainly written down as a result of the missionaries coming to England bringing literacy with them the code of Eiffel book begins with with a long section on the church and clearly these missionaries have actually managed to get their or in Fairly firmly to defend the Privileges of the church but after that it's largely a list of compensations the sort of thing that you have to pay when you've cut off a neighbor's thumb or something like that that kind of law continues with a second code which comes from Kent later on in the 7th century and then with a code also in the 7th Century from Wessex after that you have a real problem in trying to follow the history of anglo-saxon ball because Arthur the great king of Mercier in the second half of the eighth century is said to have compiled a law code well we don't actually have a manuscript of it the chances are that it was in some way connected to a big church Council for which we do have the church canons now the great collection of of law codes that we have and indeed the reason why we have most of these early law codes comes from Alfred's Reign Alfred puts together all earlier law into a law code of his own and it's a very special code because it is deliberately a code bringing together the law of the peoples of Kent of Wessex of Mercia to show that he was the rightful ruler of all these areas but it's really after Alfred it's with his son Edward yelder and his grandson athelstan that you start to get a change in war you then find that Kings start issuing something which looked much more like educause they're actually codes issued in specific years dealing with very specific issues and these run right the way through the 10th Century you have a whole cluster of them at the end of the century and you also find them in the reign of knut in the beginning of the 11th century and these codes are very largely influenced by a man called wolfstone who was in fact Archbishop of York and they tend to have a very large very considerable religious input into them and really it's with wolfstan's work that the history of anglo-saxon law comes to an end foreign [Music] the sort of techniques that they had to work with we're fairly limited the materials particularly limited we're used to having dozens of different types of material today in the main in those days it was wool or linen small amounts of silt were imported but in the main it was wool Alden in the linen was grown from the flax plan which they grew in Fairly large quantities they also used it for fire lighting and the world of course came off the backs of sheep the shape of the dark Edge period often didn't need shearing the wool actually came off in your hands and although I had a very short staple as it's called The Wall was actually that long awful lot of the sheep it's we've we have some sheep at our village which which are very similar to the shape of that period and the wall is a very high quality um if we start at the feet with Anglo-Saxon clothing for the man and we'll talk first about the shoes shoes are made of various types of leather and one of the things that we found through trying to be dark age people well not trying to be them but living is dark age group in the 20th century is that Footwear doesn't last very long our ancestors obviously never walked a lot on gravel or tarmac or or cobbles and things like that because if they did their shoes would have worn out very quickly we discovered that if we copied original shoes taken from excavations we copied them accurately the stitching and the leather the shoes wore out very quickly in daily use seven days a week our staff are wearing them and they very quickly wear out so what we've had to do is cheat slightly like so many other things we do here we've had to actually affect a compromise and we've really admitted if if you look at the shoe I'm wearing it's a fairly accurate copy of a boot from the Dark Age period it's sewn by hand it's it's stitched properly using thick pig skin but we've had to put a soul on it with Nails in because otherwise this boot would last me three weeks as it is this one's lasted me again it's already been through one set of Souls so walking around you're not driving in a car or anything you're on foot all day so it starts to wear out we think what they probably did was they put a lot of sheep fleece in the bottom of the shoe not only did the lanolin in the Sheep fleece help to waterproof the feed it also provided a springy pad to walk on and it helped keep the feet from too much mud or mess but they certainly probably their boots certainly weren't waterproof they would have certainly leaked in bad weather would have expected to get muddy and wet feet trousers for men there were styles for tight trousers and styles for Fairly baggy trousers but in the main a lot of anglo-saxon men cross-garted their legs now there's been a lot of speculation why they did this um partly for decoration there's no explaining decoration sometimes Fashions change as they do today they did then although their Fashions changed lots more slowly because they hadn't got access to as much cloth to change their Fashions but cross-garting the legs was probably very fashionable it also helps to stay warm in the winter because it cuts down drafts of the trouser leg and keeps the wall next to the skin but it's also very functional if you're working out in the fields or you're working around Bramble Hedges or something you catch clothing and by cross-cartering we found in app living on our Village today as we do cross-cartering makes your legs a lot more comfortable I'm on with them where perhaps a linen undershirt which is what this is I'm wearing here a linen made of linen she's a lot finer better next to the skin and then for really cold whether you'd wear a heavier over shirt which could go down as far as the knee but the length of shirts and tunics did vary sometimes they have braid around the edge sometimes they were just left playing it obviously depending on what you're going to be doing and fairly rich people would have several sets of clothing most of the sort of normal people would probably look at her and wants that full set and a belt around the waist probably with a metal buckle could even be of antler or bone the one I'm wearing is made of deer ankle and so as a strap end it's made of deer on clay and then a cloak there were various ways of wearing a cloak I'm wearing mine on the shoulder with a brooch called a pen annular pen onions have a break in them whereas an annual approach was a full ring both types were worn though the sacks are turned to fave annual approach favor annual approaches for the women it was shoes again and they were not entirely sure about underwear but they certainly wore a long gown that went very near to the ankle and then for San Anglo-Saxon them in there was a choice of either a tube dress which is just like a tube of material with straps over it or developed from that the wrap around apron which is an apron that goes three quarters of the way around the body but is left open at one side very often the dresses had a drawstring around the neck and this is so women could actually open the drawstring to feed young children they could put them under the apron to feed them because they weren't bottle feeding them in those days very much it was almost certainly natural feeding the women would wear some jewelry both men and women liked jewelry it wasn't just worn to look nice it was a way of displaying wealth women tended to wear a device called a whimper a garment called a wimple which covers the head and the back of the neck it just leaves the face exposed now there is an argument that a lot of this was to do with the early development of Christianity and that women weren't supposed to show their hair but a more practical reason we found for Dark Age women is that they're working over open fires and a lot of them had long hair and if you bend over and open fire with long hair you're going to lose it so they wore a wimple to protect their hair for the same reason the apron the apron was probably there to protect them from the Ash and the dust and the dirt and the heat when they were working around the fire all day you could even add the women who work on average find that they often use their apron to grab a panhandle or something because it might be hot or dirty so the apron gets dirty and not your clothing underneath foreign [Music] [Music] the religion of the Anglo-Saxons well that changes you've got to envisage that when the Anglo-Saxons leave the continent in the fifth and sixth centuries they're essentially a pagan group of peoples from North Germany and as far as we know they worshiped for woden perhaps saxonic who seems to have been the god of the Saxons we know very little about their religion obviously the Christians who wrote down accounts of the early Saxon period didn't actually want to record what was to be recorded about paganism and therefore we basically left to use what we can from things like place names we find occasionally the name woden or Thor in place names sometimes archeology helps us though surprisingly less than one might have expected as yet no Pagan Temple has been discovered and it may be that there wasn't much in the way of temple building for the Anglo-Saxons though they may have used some Roman buildings leftover Roman buildings for cultic purposes we know a little bit more about their burial rights which must include some sort of religious practices we know that the angles tended to cremate people and this obviously tells us something about religious practices but on the whole our evidence is very very slight there's only one major story in bead relating to paganism and that is when Edwin is converted and the high priest koifi borrows a spear from the King which he should not have carried he mounts a stallion she should not have ridden and rides up to the temple at Goodman home and throws his spear into it desecrating it and that's one of the two stories indeed there's one other about King redwall who supposedly had an altar in a temple to four as well as one to Christ but that may even have been a Christian building which was actually paganized rather than a pagan Temple which was christianized we're much better off once we come to the religion of the Saxons after they convert to Christianity in other words after the Roman Mission arrives in 597 in Kent and after the mission for my owner comes to northumbria in the Years After 634. what you have done is a very considerable Christian tradition based on Bishops yes also very significant monasteries parishes only gradually beginning to evolve now the Christian history that we can see in all this is very large the monastic history and that's again because our sources tend to be monastic we tend to see things through the eyes of bead All Through The Eyes of other writers of saints Lives who once again tend to be monastic figures and what we see there is really a very literate Society a society cultivating Latin the writing works on the scriptures transcribing the scriptures and producing some of the most famous books that were ever produced in the Middle Ages things like the lindisfarne Gospels foreign [Music] [Music] depending on where you lived if you live near a coastal in a coastal region there'd have been a lot of seafood because the fish was readily available if you live near a river as most settlement to base near rivers there would have been a lot of freshwater fish you would even use a lot of shellfish as evidence in archeology archaeological digs of of oysters and mussels and quite a lot of other types of shellfish being eaten even in land but in the main it was Farm projects it was what you could grow around you or get wild from the woods that you would eat the diet was seasonal there would have probably been a glut of food for people around September October traditional Harvest Time in fact in the Viking Icelandic calendar that time of the year was called Slaughter month October and that's when they killed off all the animals they couldn't keep over the winter months and salted the meat down to keep it for the winter correspondingly in February that time of the year was known as fat sucker morozuka when people were losing weight so their diet varied not just in what they made but in in the seasons we're used to getting apples all year round now it would have been unlikely they could have done that then even if they preserve them the types of food they ate in the main cereal crops were grown the further north you go in the world the less chances of growing them you go up to Iceland you can't get a lot to grow at all in England there was a fair amount of cereal crops grown there was barley there was Rye there was a type of early form of wheat not like the wheat we have today and those oats were sown and these cereal crops went to make the two of the basic Staples of life and that was bread and beer the crops then have to be harvested by hand at Harvest Time Around August cut down by hand and stacked in the fields in stooks to dry and it would then be brought in and stored in the Barns and The Lofts in the village where it would be brought out and thrashed when it was needed flashing it involves using a flail which is like two sticks joined with a piece of leather in the middle and you would flail the stool to get the grain off the stalks the stalks could then go for animal bedding or for batching very little was wasted in a Dark Age Village so the grain having been thrashed then had to be widowed that involves throwing it in the air and catching it in the chaff the bits that are in edible are Blown Away In The Wind they could be gathered on use for animal food then mixed with brown uh the grain then had to be put into your corn which was like two stones with a sloping in her face um the grain was poured into a hole in the top the corners turned round and the action of the two stones turning together broke the grain down into its flower it's the same principle that the big flour Mills used today but they've got enormous several turn stones powered by electric motors this was a hand-powered clone and it could take several hours to get in a flower for one big loaf of bread so somebody somewhere each day was having to grind that flower fresh so the bread was then baked in flat cakes around the fire there were peas and beans grown in the fields and some basic root vegetables things like onions cabbages were grown not the extensive range of vegetables we had today and of course no tomatoes no potatoes nothing like that these could be used to make a fairly tasteless vegetable stew which they would boil not realizing they were boiling the goodness out of it because they knew nothing about vitamins or nutrient contents of food they were just going on what was available it wasn't Choice it was necessity you could boil a stew of vegetables flavor it with herbs one of the big problems in the Dark Ages with metal cooking pots were very valuable they were either kettles which were made up of bits of metal riveted together firewelded together or cold ones which were cast but they were extremely expensive things to own and a lot of dark age women may do with cooking in a wooden bucket now this is a technique which baffles people today until it's demonstrated to them and it does show that our ancestors were far more sophisticated than were given credit for what you basically do is put a large Stone in the fire and leave it in there for several hours a lot of these stones that we find when they dig up archaeological sites they have turned pink and cracked because the heat a lot of them have a hole in them they bought a hole in it so that you can slide a rod through to lift it out of the fire Because by the time that stone came out the fire it was glowing and the stone may look dirty when it comes out the fire covered in Ash but it's as clean as a surgeon's knife as that stone because the temperature is such that nothing would live on it that stone is then taken over to the bucket of stew or soup whatever and the stone is lowered in and the resulting heat transferred from the stone to it we can boil the liquid in three minutes we've had two gallons of water from Stone Cold to boiling hot in three minutes on our village there's not a gas stove and Earth can do that [Music] they drank an awful lot of beer in those days and people today seem to think it was just life was one long round of drunkenness it's unlikely that's how it was that they never got any work done and they'd have all had hangovers which their phrase for it was to have carpenters in your head the phrase for a hangover in the Dark Ages and the bear was probably brewed so it was fairly weak and it didn't didn't have a lot of strength to it apart from the fact that it tasted nice and apart from the fact that it did if it was strong have a fairly nice effect but an evening event or something was that the bear was sterile it was one of the few star all drinks they could get the water from a well particularly if the toilet pits were nearby wouldn't be very Savory and although they knew very little about bacteria and germs they did know that drinking water from Wells and drinking water from streams could actually make you ill drinking beer is the one drink you can drink that you know will not make you too ill because it's been brewed the alcohol has killed the germs in it whilst they didn't know the technical reasons behind that they knew that's what would happen honey honey was put in the beer to make it stronger for special occasions and then you're getting a drink very similar to Mead which is a very strong fortified drink made with honey ferments because the natural sugar in the honey ferments and makes the alcohol stronger in fact at an Anglo-Saxon wedding ceremony they drank out of beer with honey in it they drank beer with honey in it for about a month after the wedding an agreed period of time both families met in each house as the marriage was often arranged they had to get to know each other after the wedding so they met in the same house and drank beer with honey in it every night together and they drank it in honor of the Moon because the moon was a symbol of women it was a symbol of fertility of babies it was a symbol for women so they drank beer with honey in it for a month a moon's month that's why the period after an Anglo-Saxon wedding was called the honeymoon [Music] thank you Saxons as Warriors that is again something which where you see dramatic changes over the whole Saxon period as far as we understand early Saxon warriors were basically members of a Lord's warband they probably signed up with somebody who was who had a boat to cross the channel and basically they follow him in order to get booty and um also to perhaps settle on land as a result of their campaigns you see a little bit of that in a letter of beads written in the last year of his life in 735 where he's very very concerned about the diminution of Royal War Burns and he's very concerned that Kings have given away too much land to the church they can't actually reward their followers and therefore have a large enough Army to defend the kingdom now these early War bans so far as we can see only really operated in the summer they seem to have operated in a very short period of something like 40 days they were groups that were called out to fight basically in a very very short summer campaigning season now they get hit very hard by the Vikings because the Vikings don't operate this same system of a sort of closed season for fighting the Vikings once they've got over here once they've established themselves in camps once they're wintering they're prepared to fight at any time of the year and indeed all their great successes come in the winter so what you find is a dramatic change at the end of the 9th century when Alfred realizes that he's got to do something about the military organization of the Kingdom and as far as we can see he does two very significant things first of all he divides his potential Armed Forces into two and those people those groups are to serve at different times of the year so in fact a larger period of the year is covered by a standing army [Applause] the other thing with Alfred does is he develops towns with walls and he organizes a defense for those Wars and you therefore have for these towns these birds as they're called a system of Defense with men having to man the walls in times of crisis [Music] [Applause] although there were trading centers where you could buy and sell Goods in a lot of rural communities which is how most people lived you have to be fairly self-sufficient you'll be long months before a Trader came through or you've got the chance to go to a local market so people tend to make a lot of their own things particularly their own clothing every house would have had some sort of loom in it where they would have woven textiles and most of it for their own use very little for sale the Wall came off the back of the sheep fairly dirty and grubby and it had to be washed and then card it to get the fibers strained these were done on metal or bone cones they do say they used to use teasels as well we've not had very good results using diesels but they did actually card them all to comb it all the right direction that got rid of all the bits that you didn't want all the rubbish that she'd be picked up while I was wandering around and that's called discarding getting rid of all the rubbish you don't want off the wall the wall is then taken off the cones and today the phrase is a roll like you're left with a rollag of wool and it's like a roll of wall with all the fibers going around the same direction this is then spun on a spindle well or a drop spindle this is pre-spinning wheel days it was basically a weight like a flywheel made of lead or stone or bone or clay and through it ran a thin piece of wood called the spindle the spindle had a hook at the top to catch the wool and the wall was wound onto it as it was made and the way it worked was to spin the spindle and as it spun round and round and round in a clockwise around to clockwise Direction he tethered the wall through your fingers that you carded let go the spindle though and it spun the wall around to weave it into a thread so the wall was woven from that thread it would be washed there was a lot of lanolin kept in the wool the chemical that keeps sheet waterproof because it helped to bind the fibers and helped to make the wall thick their Reckoning the estimate is it was about 10 miles of thread in a dark age man's trousers so there's an awful lot of wall needed to be spun by the women the children and the men the women would carry a spindlew around with them all the time and that's why you find so many spindles spindle whirls the lead weights and play weights in fields because they were obviously dropping them occasionally losing them um everybody would have a go at spinning wall it was then woven on looms which were wall looms they lent against the wall and you had a handlebar which opened out the warp threads which went down a little and then you had a the wall which was passed through the cross threads the warp or roof threads were passed through in and out and each time you moved the handlebar one way or the other you open the threads in alternate directions It's Like the Wolf or were thrown through and one noise we know you would have heard in a dark age house is the plaque thump of a loom day in day out because it was a very intensive process to make that cloth and in fact if you look at the way the clothing was made it was often made as simple as cut as possible so as not to waste any of the cloth had been made it was very very valuable [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] is a very difficult one to deal with in Anglo-Saxon history partly because it's so rich and it's not just Rich because an enormous amount happens in it it's also Rich because it's very very well documented and it's very well documented because I Alfred ensured that it was well documented so you've got a propaganda perspective on this the first thing obviously is the tunnel for it survives the Vikings and he comes to power in Wessex in 871 at the moment of an extreme Viking crisis Wessex is just about to Keel over under the Viking threat he lasts through until 899 by which time the Vikings are in fact um really a spent force in terms of Invaders in Southern England Alfred was not just a figure who defeated the Vikings he was a figure who reorganized his kingdom and part of that reorganization was a religious and cultural reorganization he probably commissions the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle though we're not absolutely certain about that and one of the great works that he tried he has translated is the pastoral care of Gregory the Great and he has it sent around to all his Bishops informing them of their duties and how they must carry out the pastoral care of their flocks and obviously one of the things underlying this is organizing the Kingdom on a good Christian basis and what Alfred had in mind was that if the kingdom was set on a good Christian basis God would reward him for his reorganizing the kingdom in this way and God would therefore spare his kingdom the threat of the Vikings and indeed in one sense that is what happened standing up his name [Music] one of the areas where there is an enormous difference between us our ancestors from over a thousand years ago is in the field of entertainment for a start there wasn't the time to entertain yourself as much as we have today there wasn't as much Leisure Time most hours of daylight for most people even the Rich Work were to be used productively to try and create clothing or food or organize something to help him lend life probably the one most important type of entertainment from that period and it's important for us and it was important to them is is talking and storytelling storytelling was essential to them because they weren't what we would call an educated Society they didn't have schools they didn't have access to libraries they didn't have access to videos or computers so the only way to transmit information was orally and the best way to transmit it was in the form of the story the story of Alfred the Great and tell how popular storytelling was in the Dark Ages he was able to trick his way into the Danes Camp by posing as a storyteller um the the impression to get there is that the Vikings who were encamped didn't actually care who Alfred was or what nationality he was he was posing as a Storyteller and therefore they willingly invited him into their Camp because they were bored and wanted entertaining [Music] traditionally of course the end of the Anglo-Saxon period comes at the Battle of Hastings that's when the Anglo-Saxon Kings come to an end you've got no Anglo-Saxon king after Harold godwinson and the government is taken over by Normans they have in recent years been some refinements of this picture people have tended to emphasize how much of early Norman government was Anglo-Saxon um doomsday couldn't have been compiled without Anglo-Saxon documentation you also find that the Anglo-Saxon age used to be thought of as coming to an end in religious terms with the conquest of England by the Normans and with the institution of Lan Frank as Archbishop of Canterbury and the emphasis there used to lie on the way in which Lan Frank excluded a whole set of anglo-saxon ecclesiastical Cults Cults of major Anglo-Saxon saints that again is being downplayed now and certainly by the end of the 11th century and the beginning of the 12th century Anglo-Saxon Saints are coming back into favor so although the age in one sense comes to an end very dramatically at Hastings there are all sorts of fragments of the Anglo-Saxon World which continue on into the future foreign [Applause] things [Music] that children and the public learn from a public to WAND around it as well and meet the people and brought to them we don't pretend to be real Dark Age people but they can learn a lot from seeing what people are doing and perhaps the most important impression that people go away with is is that our ancestors weren't the unsophisticated vulture of idiots being a lot of people trademarks now they're actually very clever people they were a society capable of withstanding amazing adversity and surviving it they lived without the modern technology that we have and when we look back now with our hindsight look at the world we live in and how comfortable it is today and how push button our world is the technology we have at our fingertips we look back at their life and and it's amazing it's amazing that people survived it's amazing that people could actually live in those conditions and circumstances but they did human beings have a natural habit of adapting to their lifestyle to their circumstances they find themselves in and and the evidence we have is that life wasn't considered Grim by them it may appear to be Grim from where we stand a lot of people go around our village and come up saying I don't know how people could live there I don't know how they could how they could have survived or I couldn't do without my hot water bottle or I couldn't do without my flask of coffee they survived they hadn't got the benefit of hindsight and therefore they survived and and all evidences that in the main they lived lives that were fairly happy shorter than it was and often ended more violently than ours but within that life framework they were happy they had a sense of Law and Order a strong sense of loyalty to the family and community and certainly a far greater understanding of their environment than we have they didn't DeForest large areas purely for profit and the sample evidence that if one person was starving in an Anglo-Saxon Community it's probably because everybody was starving um did everybody worked together they would have to they were bonded together by the necessity of staying alive [Music]

Channel: Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries

Views: 101,279

Keywords: Alfred the Great, Anglo-Saxon Britain, British history, Chronicle - Medieval History Documentaries, Dark Ages, Renaissance, ancient civilizations, ancient history, chronicles of history, documentary films, everyday life, expert commentary, historical documentaries, historical figures, innovative presentations, medieval architecture, medieval lifestyle, medieval technologies, medieval times, medieval villages, medieval world

Id: AyUTR3Gc-rg

Length: 54min 13sec (3253 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023