Living in the Past

No, this is not a 3-volume set on Jethro Tull's seminal 1972 double-LP, but rather a very interesting trio of pull-back-the-historical-curtain, you-are-there glimpses of day-to-day life in Anglo-Saxon, medieval and Victorian times. Feeling a wee bit barbaric, I roasted up some mutton, drowned my bourgeois Western sensibilities in a tankard full of ale, and popped Life in Anglo-Saxon Times into the VCR. Ian Wood, University of Leeds, provides historical background on the period, a.k.a. the Dark Ages, which ran roughly from the 5th and 6th centuries when the Angles, Saxons and Jutes (who, somewhat unfairly, did not make the nomenclature cut) ruled Britannia until 1066, when William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings kicked the home team's butt, ushering in the Norman period of French British kings. Intercut with Wood's commentary is footage shot on location at Houlgate Village (near York), a working Anglo-Saxon settlement visited by thousands of schoolchildren. Houlgate's Dave Thirlwall fleshes out Wood's larger historical remarks with wonderful tidbits about village life in Anglo-Saxon times. I learned that the word "honeymoon," for instance, referred to the period of one moon's passing when the locals drank honey-flavored beer to celebrate a wedding, that the community had certain laws and rules (including the code of Ethelbert, which dictated, among other things, "what you had to pay when you cut off a neighbor's thumb"), and that the "vegetable stew" was "fairly tasteless because--before J.C. (Julia Child)--our ancestors boiled the bejeezus out of their food (hygienically sound, if gastronomically disastrous). Touching on a mind-boggling array of topics: food, shelter, law, religion, social customs, history, etc., this info-packed documentary is recommended. The other two titles in the series are Life in Medieval Times and Life in Victorian Times. Aud: H, C, P. (R. Pitman)