I loved this book. If you love reading history that humanizes our ancestors then this book is for you. In just 200 pages, Lacey gives readers a series of compelling, hilarious, and endearing vignettes into life in Anglo-Saxon England. In popular culture, medieval Europe is often depicted as an inaccessible world of grandiose kings and stern bishops plotting in the light of candle-lit banquet halls or sunny stained-glass cathedrals. This book for the most part ignores the crowns and scepters, and instead gives readers a taste of the gritty every day life in “Engla-lond” on the eve of the Norman conquest of 1066. This was a world of famine, apocalyptic anxieties, brutal warfare, and harsh punishments. But it was also full of romance, weirdos, sex jokes, poetry, conspiracy theories, and many other quirky facets of every day life that are familiar to us a thousand years later.
In addition to being genuinely entertaining and well-paced, this book truly excels at painting a respectful portrait of Anglo-Saxon people, the challenges and uncertainties they had to overcome year after year just to survive, and their enduring legacy not only on England, but on our modern world. I loved that this book concludes with a reflection on what C.S. Lewis called the “snobbery of chronology,” which, as Lacey describes it, is the idea that “just because we happen to have lived after our ancestors and can read books which give us some account of what happened to them, we must also know better than them.”
Finally, I also want to note how much I appreciated this book’s organization and pacing. The use of the twelve months of the Julius Work Calendar to frame the twelve chapters of this book (each covering a month of the year 1000 and focusing on a particular theme) was among the most creative and effective ways of organizing a book I have ever seen. I personally would have added a few sub-chapter headings and scaled back some of the pop culture references from when this book was published back in 1999, but in such a tight volume that does not overstay its welcome, these issues are neither here nor there.
The Once and Future Lit 