What was life like 1000 years ago

1000 years ago from the time of writing this would be the year 1020 AD, a time during the late Middle Ages and only 46 years from the start of the medieval period with the arrival of William the Conquer in 1066. For the average person, life during this time would be very difficult indeed and luck would play a huge part in your ability to survive. The Viking age is most commonly recognized as ending the same year William the Conquer arrived in England, as a large battle took place at Stamford Bridge where the Norwegian king Haraldr harðráði was killed and his army defeated. This was the last major Viking invasion that the country would suffer, with William the Conquer bringing in a new political system and changing the way the whole country functioned.

(A map of ancient Britain showing the different counties and kingdoms, most of which had their own rulers)

All these politics meant nothing to the regular person just trying to get by, and if you were someone who didn’t have money, which was the vast majority of the population, your life would be subject to hardship and in many cases could be compared to slavery. The other main factor to consider was that in the year 1020, the British Isles were split up into a number of independent kingdoms that would often go to war with one another, adding the risk of getting chopped to pieces to the already huge list of dangers in your life. Here are a few commonly asked questions about what life would be like 1000 years ago.

What was money like 1000 years ago?

The first thing to understand about money 1000 years ago in Britain is that most kingdoms didn’t have their own currency, and instead relied on the trading of goods and exchange of expensive metals like gold and silver. At the time the most universal denominations were the pound, shilling, and pence, with other coins becoming more common over the years but were all based on the value of the pound, like the Groat for example which was worth around 4 pence. The standard pay for a peasant would be around 1 groat per week depending on their working hours and job, which is a pitiful wage and would often not be able to cover basic living expenses.

What would your job be like 1000 years ago

For the majority of people, their lives would be spent working on a farm as everything had to be done by hand and would take a huge amount of time and labor. The person who owned the land you would be living on would charge taxes, which were normally too high for people to pay in actual money, and instead, they would owe labor to cover the cost. A peasant, or serf as they were called during the time, would be expected to work on their normal job during the day and then spend a few hours each evening or during the weekend to work on the landowner’s farm. The crops produced from the serf’s labor would be sold to create the money the taxes should have brought in, which meant that even if you had another job like woodcutter or builder, you’d still be spending a good number of hours working on a farm to pay your taxes. It was rare during the time that someone would have a well enough paying job that they wouldn’t have to work on a farm at some point, and even someone working a more skilled job like a blacksmith or shipbuilder wouldn’t be a rare sight on the crop field.

Homes 1000 years ago

Homes during this time hadn’t really changed much for the average person. The homes of lords would start to develop from their small palisade walled forts to the larger castles that are still standing to this day, but for the average person, it wouldn’t be as comfortable. The two most common types of homes for a peasant would be the roundhouse, a type of home used since the Bronze Age, and timber frame homes which would have walls made from either planks or wattle coated in plaster or daub. Log cabins took a huge amount of cutting and sawing to get the right shape for the logs, and stone was very expensive to buy and a huge amount of work to cut yourself, but roundhouses could be made with nothing more than an axe and could be built in a fraction of the time.

(The roundhouse was a great option for a smaller family with no herd animals as they were easy to build and the central fire provided maximum heat)

For a household that owned pigs or goats, it was common for a section of the interior to be separated from the main living space and used as a stable for their animals. A family would rely heavily on their animals and nothing was more valuable than cows or pigs. A cow could produce milk which could be made into butter and cheese, providing an income for most of the year, not to mention a huge amount of meat at the time of butchering, something a family may rely heavily on for their annual income. Pork was the easiest to preserve meat and having a pig meant food for the winter and additional income at the time of butchering, so your life may genuinely depend on the well-being of your animals.

What was food like 1000 years ago?

Basic would be the simple answer because not only would there be a limited number of crops in the country, but peasants would only grow things that would be preservable and provide the largest harvest. Trade with other nations was very limited during this age because there were still frequent Viking raids around the country and setting up trade routes with other nations was impossible, not to mention a peasant couldn’t afford imported goods anyway. The number one produced crop was grain, mostly wheat followed by barley, rye, and oats because dried grain was the only food they had available that would be safe to eat for several years if it was dried and stored properly. Large vegetables like cabbage, onions, and leeks would be a common sight on the dinner table, and fish was by far the most commonly eaten meat as beef and pork were normally too expensive for a peasant.

Fruit and nuts would be available seasonally, and vegetables would be around for most of the year, but nothing lasted as long as grain did. Grain was also the only crop many lords would use their free peasant labor to mass produce because everything else went off too quickly to ship around the country. One of the most common peasant dishes was something called pottage, a dish made by taking some whole grain and boiling it with whatever vegetables were available for at least an hour. The long boiling time was necessary as the fields often used human waste as fertilizer and the long boil was to ensure they wouldn’t get sick from eating it, but the resulting dish was just a thick slop.

(There is no standard recipe for pottage, you basically just boil the hell out of some grain and vegetables until it reaches a thick consistency)

To understand food 1000 years ago, it may be better to imagine what it would be like going without all the foods you are used to today. No potatoes, bananas, pineapples or tropical fruit of any kind, rice or sugar, and no foreign spices or flavorings. Food was very basic and peasants would be limited to eating a tiny variety for their whole lives. With the lack of produced sugar a person living 1000 years ago would eat as much sugar in their lifetime as the modern-day person would consume in a week.

What was clothing like 1000 years ago?

Linen, leather, and wool would be the only options for a peasant. Cotton didn’t grow in the country and wasn’t discovered until much later, and the same goes for silk, but linen could be produced from a plant called flax, a long grass-like plant that grows very well in Britain. Wool is useless against the rain and was mostly used to make linings for clothes of other materials, as well as smaller wool products like socks and hats. Leather was most commonly worn to provide warmth or protection, like a leather cloak to protect from the rain or a sleeveless leather jacket to go over a linen shirt.

(Linen was the most common material by far, and warmth would be provided by layers of thickly woven linen fabric)

Footwear was always made from leather simply because it had to be. It was the only thing strong enough to last for more than a few days and because rubber wasn’t being used in the country yet, it was also the only option. The leather would be tanned and boiled to make it as hard as possible before being folded into a sole and stitched together. A fabric or leather top covering would be stitched onto the sole to complete the piece, which most of the time was a pair of boots. Fieldwork can get messy and anything too low would mean you’d have mud around your toes all day, and these types of jobs aren’t exactly the thing you could risk being off sick from.

What were the dangers of living 1000 years ago?

Just about everything would be the simple answer. In an age when there’s no such thing as antibiotics or even what we would now consider “actual” medicine, getting any kind of sickness or injury could mean a death sentence. If you pulled your back and had to spend a week off work, there would be no welfare or holiday pay you could use to replace the lost money, and missing something as little as a week could mean getting thrown off the lord’s land or finding yourself agreeing to extend your working hours for the next couple of years.

The British Isles were also separated into over a dozen different kingdoms, each with their own rulers, laws, and political disputes. Wars were not uncommon but weren’t as big as many would think. Battles of only a few hundred men would be the extent of a major conflict between kingdoms, and men over the age of 16 would be expected to take up arms and fight for their lord. The Vikings who lived in and continued to raid the British Isles would also capture people to be sold as slaves, either in Britain or to be taken back to Scandinavia to live a life of hardship on a farm somewhere. If you were alive 1000 years ago you’d be absolutely fine as long as you didn’t get sick, or injured, had your crops fail, animals die and weren’t forced to fight and die for your lord or get captured as a slave. As long as none of these things happened to you, then your life would be lived in the same place working every day on a farm, right up until the point you died in your late 40s from dysentery.