Chapter 1
The Times: before 600
Clans, headed by Kings, lived in huts on top of hills or other high places and fortified by circular or rectangular earth ditches and banks behind which they could gather with their herds for protection. At the entrances were several openings only one of which really allowed entry. The others went between banks into dead ends and served as traps in which to kill the enemy from above. Concentric circles of ditches around these fortified camps could reach to 14 acres. The people lived in circular huts with wood posts in a circle supporting a roof. The walls were made of saplings, and a mixture of mud and straw. Sometimes there were stalls for cattle. Cooking was in a clay oven inside or over an open fire on the outside. Forests abounded with wolves, bears, wild boars, and wild cattle.
People wore animal skins over their bodies for warmth and around their feet for protection when walking. They carried small items by hooking them onto their belts.
Pathways extended through this camp of huts and for many miles beyond. They were used for trade and transport with pack horses.
Men bought or captured women for wives and carried them over the thresholds of their huts. The first month of marriage was called the honeymoon because the couple was given mead, a drink with fermented honey and herbs, for the first month of their marriage. A wife wore a gold wedding band on the ring finger of her left hand to show that she was married. Women wore other jewelry too, which indicated their social rank.
Women usually stayed at home caring for children, preparing meals, and making baskets. They also made wool felt and spun and wove wool into cloth. Flax was grown and woven into linen cloth. The weaving was done on an upright or warp- weighted loom. People draped the cloth around their bodies and fastened it with a metal brooch inlayed with gold, gems, glass, and shell, which were glued on with glue that was obtained from melting animal hooves. They also had amber beads and pendants. They could tie things with rawhide strips or rope braids they made. They cut things with flint dug up from pits. On the coast, they made bone harpoons for deep sea fish.
The King, who was tall and strong, led his men in hunting groups to kill deer and other wild animals in the forests and to fish in the streams. Some men brought their hunting dogs on leashes to follow scent trails to the animal. The men attacked the animals with spears and threw stones. They used shields to protect their bodies. They watched the phases of the moon and learned to predict when it would be full and give the most light for night hunting. This began the concept of a month.
If hunting groups from two clans tried to follow the same deer, there might be a fight between the clans or a blood feud. After the battle, the clan would bring back its dead and wounded. A priest officiated over a funeral for a dead man. His wife would often also go on the funeral pyre with him. Memorial burial mounds would be erected over the corpses or cremated ashes of their great men. Later, these ashes were first placed in urns before burial in a mound of earth or the corpses were buried with a few personal items.
The priest also officiated over sacrifices of humans, who were usually offenders found guilty of transgressions. Sacrifices were usually made in time of war or pestilence, and usually before the winter made food scarce, at Halloween time. Humans were sometimes eaten.
The clan ate deer that had been cooked on a spit over a fire, and fruits and vegetables which had been gathered by the women. They drank water from springs. In the spring, food was plentiful. There were eggs of different colors in nests and many rabbits to eat. The goddess Easter was celebrated at this time.
After this hunting and gathering era, there was farming and domestication of animals such as horses, pigs, sheep, goats, chicken, and cattle. Of these, the pig was the most important meat supply, being killed and salted for winter use. Next in importance were the cattle. Sheep were kept primarily for their wool. Flocks and herds were taken to pastures. The male cattle, with wood yokes, pulled ploughs in the fields of barley and wheat. The female goat and cow provided milk, butter, and cheese. The chickens provided eggs. The hoe, spade, and grinding stone were used. Cloth was woven for clothes. Pottery was made from clay and used for food preparation and consumption. During the period of "lent" [from the word "lencten", which means spring], it was forbidden to eat any meat or fish. This was the season in which many animals were born and grew a lot. The people also made boats.
Circles of big stones like Stonehenge were built so that the sun's position with respect to the stones would indicate the day of longest sunlight and the day of shortest sunlight. Between these days there was an optimum time to harvest the crops before fall, when plants dried up and leaves fell from the trees. The winter solstice, when the days began to get longer was cause for celebration. In the next season, there was an optimum time to plant seeds so they could spring up from the ground as new growth. So farming gave rise to the concept of a year. Certain changes of the year were celebrated, such as Easter; the twelve days of Yuletide when candles were lit and houses decorated with evergreen; Plough Monday for resumption of work after Yuletide; May Day when greenery was gathered from the woods and people danced around a May pole; Whitsun when Morris dancers leapt through their villages with bells, hobby-horses, and waving scarves; Lammas when the first bread was celebrated; and Harvest Home when the effigy of a goddess was carried with reapers singing and piping behind.
There were settlements on high ground and near rivers. Each settlement had a meadow, for the mowing of hay, and a mill, with wooden huts, covered with branches or thatch, of families clustered nearby. Grain was stored in pits in the earth. Each hut had a garden for fruit and vegetables. A goat or cow might be tied out of reach of the garden. There was a fence or hedge surrounding and protecting the garden area and dwelling. Outside the fence were an acre or two of fields of wheat and barley, and sometimes oats and rye. Wheat and rye were sown in the fall, and oats and barley in the spring. They were all harvested in the summer. These fields were usually enclosed with a hedge to keep animals from eating the crop. Flax was grown and made into linen cloth. Beyond the fields were pastures for cattle and sheep grazing. There was often an area for beehives.
Crops were produced with the open field system. In this system, there were three large fields for the heavy and fertile land. Each field was divided into long and narrow strips. Each strip represented a day's work with the plough. One field had wheat, or perhaps rye, another had barley, oats, beans, or peas, and the third was fallow. These were rotated yearly. Each free man was allotted certain strips in each field to bear crops. His strips were far from each other, which insured some very fertile and some only fair soil, and some land near his village dwelling and some far away. These strips he cultivated, sowed with seed, and harvested for himself and his family. After the year, they reverted to common ownership for grazing.
The plough used was heavy and made first of wood and later of iron. It had a mould-board which caught the soil stirred by the plough blade and threw it into a ridge. Other farm implements were: coulters, which gave free passage to the plough by cutting weeds and turf, picks, spades and shovels, reaping hooks and scythes, and sledge-hammers and anvils. With iron axes, forests were cleared to provide more arable land.
The use of this open field system instead of compact enclosures worked by individuals was necessary in primitive communities which were farming only for their own subsistence. Each ox was owned by a different man as was the plough. Strips of land for agriculture were added from waste land as the community grew.
There were villages which had one or two market days in each week. Cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, calves, and rabbits were sold there.
Flint workers mined with deer antler picks and ox shoulder blade shovels for flint to grind into axes, spearheads, and arrowheads. People used bone and stone tools, such as stone hammers, and then bronze and iron tools, weapons, breast plates, and horse bits, which were formed from moulds and/or forged by bronze smiths and blacksmiths. Weapons included bows and arrows, flint and copper daggers, stone axes, and shields of wood with bronze mountings. The warriors fought with chariots drawn by two horses. The horse harnesses had bronze fittings. The chariots had wood wheels, later with iron rims. When bronze came into use, there was a demand for its constituent parts: copper and tin, which were traded by rafts on waterways and the sea. Lead was mined. Wrought iroin bars were used as currency.
Corpses were buried far away from any village in wood coffins, except for Kings, who were placed in stone coffins after being wrapped in linen. Possessions were buried with them.
With the ability to grow food and the acquisition of land by conquest, for instance by invading Angles and Saxons, the population grew. There were different classes of men such as eorls, ceorls [free farmers], and slaves. They dressed differently. Freemen had long hair and beards. Slaves' hair was shorn from their heads so that they were bald. Slaves were chained and often traded. Prisoners taken in battle, e.g. Britons, became slaves. Criminals became slaves of the person wronged or of the King. Sometimes a father pressed by need sold his children or his wife into bondage. Debtors, who increased in number during famine, which occurred regularly, became slaves by giving up the freeman's sword and spear, picking up a slave's mattock [pick ax for the soils], and placing their head within a master's hands. Children with a slave parent were slaves. The slaves lived in huts around the homes of big landholders, which were made of logs and consisted on one large room or hall. An open hearth was in the middle of the earthen floor, which was strewn with rushes. There was a hole in the roof to let out the smoke. Here the landholder and his men would eat meat, bread, salt, hot spiced ale, and mead while listening to minstrels sing about the heroic deeds of their ancestors. Physical strength and endurance in adversity were admired traits. Slaves often were used as grain-grinders, ploughmen, sowers, haywards, woodwards, shepherds, goatherds, swineherds, oxherds, cowherds, dairymaids, and barnmen. A lord could kill his slave at will.
The people were worshipping pagan gods when St. Augustine came to England in 596 A.D. to Christianize them. King AEthelbert of Kent and his wife, who had been raised Christian on the continent, met him when he arrived. The King gave him land where there were ruins of an old city. Augustine used stones from the ruins to build a church which was later called Canterbury. He also built the first St. Paul's church in what was later called London. Aethelbert and his men who fought with him and ate in his household [gesiths] became Christian.
Augustine knew how to write, but King AEthelbert did not. The King announced his laws at meetings of his people and his eorls would decide the punishments. There was a fine of 120s. for disregarding a command of the King. He and Augustine decided to write down some of these laws, which now included the King's new law concerning the church.
These laws concern personal injury, murder, theft, burglary, marriage, adultery, and inheritance. The blood feud's private revenge for killing had been replaced by payment of compensation to the dead man's kindred. One paid a man's "wergeld" [worth] to his kindred for causing his wrongful death. The wergeld [wer] of an aetheling was 1500s., of an eorl, 300s., of a ceorl, 100s., of a laet [agricultural serf in Kent], 40-80s., and of a slave nothing. At this time a shilling could buy a cow in Kent or a sheep elsewhere. If a ceorl killed an eorl, he paid three times as much as an eorl would have paid as murderer. The penalty for slander was tearing out of the tongue. If an aetheling were guilty of this offense, his tongue was worth five times that of a coerl, so he had to pay proportionately more to ransom it.
The Law
"THESE ARE THE DOOMS [DECREES] WHICH KING AETHELBERHT ESTABLISHED IN THE DAYS OF AUGUSTINE
1. [Theft of] the property of God and of the church [shall be compensated], twelve-fold; a bishop's property, eleven-fold; a priest's property, nine-fold; a deacon's property, six-fold; a cleric's property, three-fold; church-frith [breach of the peace of the church; right of sanctuary and protection given to those within its precincts], two-fold [that of ordinary breach of the peace]; m….frith [breach of the peace of a meeting place], two-fold.
2. If the King calls his leod to him, and any one there do them evil, [let him compensate with] a two-fold bot [damages for the injury], and 50 shillings to the King.
3. If the King drink at any one's home, and any one there do any lyswe [evil deed], let him make two-fold bot.
4. If a freeman steal from the King, let him repay nine-fold.
5. If a man slay another in the King's tun [enclosed premises], let him make bot with 50 shillings.
6. If any one slay a freeman, 50 shillings to the King, as drihtin-beah.
7. If the King's ambiht-smith [smith or carpenter] or laad-rine [man who walks before the King or guide or escort], slay a man, let him pay a half leod-geld.
8. [Offenses against anyone or anyplace under] the King's mund-byrd [protection], 50 shillings.
9. If a freeman steal from a freeman, let him make threefold bot; and let the King have the wite [fine] and all the chattels [necessary to pay the fine].
10. If a man lie with the King's maiden [female servant], let him pay a bot of 50 shillings.
11. If she be a grinding slave, let him pay a bot of 25 shillings. The third [class of servant] 12 shillings.
12. Let the King's fed-esl [woman who serves him food or nurse] be paid for with 20 shillings.
13. If a man slay another in an eorl's tun [premises], let [him] make bot with 12 shillings.
14. If a man lie with an eorl's birele [female cup-bearer], let him make bot with 12 shillings.
15. [Offenses against a person or place under] a ceorl's mund-byrd [protection], 6 shillings.