I thought I'd like this book but I didn't. I knew it would be centered around England and that's fine given that, as an American, a huge part of my cultural inheritance is from there. What I didn't know was that about ninety-five percent of its 201 pages would be about the influence of the church and a complex telling of historical events around the year 1000.
 If you're a true Anglophile and already very versed in English history of this era, you may find The Year 1000 a pleasant refresher course. If you're not, you'll find it far too dense to follow, and disappointing in its lack of details that depict everyday life for a man or woman of that era. What was life like in cities? In towns? How did people prepare their food?
 Some of this lack is not the authors' fault. As they note, the Normans started to obliterate "evidence of the robust native culture that existed in England before their arrival in 1066" and the "chaos that followed Henry VIII's dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteen century ... led to the worst destruction of all."