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                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 

LOOKING BACK, Page 18

Life in 999: A Grim Struggle


BY HOWARD G. CHUA-EOAN


    Today's world is measured in light-years and Mach speed,
and sheathed in silicon and alloy. In the world of 999, on the
eve of the first millennium, time moved at the speed of an
oxcart or, more often, of a sturdy pair of legs, and the West
was built largely on wood. Europe was a collection of untamed
forests, countless mile upon mile of trees and brush and brier,
dark and inhospitable. Medieval chroniclers used the word desert
to describe their arboreal world, a place on the cusp of
civilization where werewolves and bogeymen still lunged out of
the shadows and bandits and marauders maintained their lairs.

    Yet the forests, deep and dangerous as they were, also
defined existence. Wood kindled forges and kept alive the
hearths of the mud-and-thatch huts of the serfs. Peasants
fattened their hogs on forest acorns (pork was crucial to basic
subsistence in the cold of winter), and wild berries helped
supplement the meager diet. In a world without sugar, honey
from forest swarms provided the only sweetness for food or
drink. The pleasures of the serfs were few and simple: earthy
lovemaking and occasional dances and fests.

    Feudal lords ruled over western Europe, taking their share
of the harvests of primitive agriculture and making the forests
their private hunting grounds. Poaching was not simply theft
(usually punishable by imprisonment) but a sin against the
social order. Without the indulgence of the nobility, the
peasants could not even acquire salt, the indispensable
ingredient for preserving meat and flavoring a culinary culture
that possessed few spices. Though a true money economy did not
exist, salt could be bought with poorly circulated coin, which
the lord hoarded in his castle and dispensed to the poor only as
alms.

    It was in the lord's castle too that peasants and their
flocks sought refuge from wolf packs and barbarian invaders. In
999, however, castles, like most other buildings in Europe, were
made of timber, far from the granite bastions that litter
today's imagined Middle Ages. The peasants, meanwhile, were
relegated to their simple huts, where everyone -- including the
animals -- slept around the hearth. Straw was scattered on the
floors to collect scraps as well as human and animal waste.
Housecleaning consisted of sweeping out the straw.

    Illness and disease remained in constant residence.
Tuberculosis was endemic, and so were scabrous skin diseases of
every kind: abscesses, cankers, scrofula, tumors, eczema and
erysipelas. In a throwback to biblical times, lepers
constituted a class of pariahs living on the outskirts of
villages and cities. Constant famine, rotten flour and vitamin
deficiencies afflicted huge segments of society with blindness,
goiter, paralysis and bone malformations that created hunchbacks
and cripples. A man was lucky to survive 30, and 50 was a ripe
old age. Most women, many of them succumbing to the ravages of
childbirth, lived less than 30 years. There was no time for
what is now considered childhood; children of every class had
to grow up immediately, and be useful as soon as possible.
Emperors were leading armies in their teens; John XI became Pope
at the age of 21.

    While the general population was growing faster than it had
in the previous five centuries, there was still a shortage of
people to cultivate the fields, clear the woodlands and work the
mills. Local taxes were levied on youths who did not marry upon
coming of age. Abortion was considered homicide, and a woman who
terminated a pregnancy was expelled from the church.

    The nobility spent its waking hours battling foes to
preserve its prerogatives, the clergy chanting prayers for the
salvation of souls, the serfs laboring to feed and clothe
everyone. Night, lit only by burning logs or the rare taper,
was always filled with danger and terror. The seasons came and
went, punctuated chiefly by the occurrence of plentiful church
holidays. The calendar year began at different times for
different regions; only later would Europe settle on the Feast
of Christ's Circumcision, Jan. 1, as the year's beginning.

    Thus there was little panic, not even much interest, as the
millennium approached in the final months of 999. For what
terrors could the apocalypse hold for a continent that was
already shrouded in darkness? Rather Europe -- illiterate,
diseased and hungry -- seemed grimly resigned to desperation
and impoverishment. It was one of the planet's most unpromising
corners, the Third World of its age.