Dennis:
Listen. Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Arthur:
Be quiet!
Dennis:
Well you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just ’cause some watery tart threw a sword at you!
Arthur:
Shut up!
Dennis:
I mean, if I went around saying I was an emperor just because some moistened bint had lobbed a scimitar at me, they’d put me away!
Arthur:
Shut up! Will you shut up?!
The joke pivots on the unexpected knowledge of the mud-heaping peasant, but why should it be unexpected? What might seem at first glance to have been British “peasant” culture was rich with cumulative knowledge. Historian Peter Ackroyd argued that the Normans, occupying Britain after 1066, co-opted traditional Anglo-Saxon knowledge and landholding systems. Although the Normans introduced French words and built stone castles across Britain—the Tower of London, Chepstow Castle in Wales, Durham Cathedral, and scores of others that still stand—the Norman legal order, according to Ackroyd, was co-opted from the existing kinship-based land tenure system of Anglo-Saxon chiefdoms. Indeed, William the Conqueror made use of this system, ordering his staff to record his new landholdings in detail in the Domesday Book of 1086. The king sent personnel across England to find out how much plowland was in each shire, how many livestock and slaves were there, and their value. Hampstead, now one of London’s wealthiest boroughs and the home of celebrities such as Ricky Gervais and Helena Bonham Carter, was valued at merely £2.5 in 1086 (one villager, five smallholders, one slave, three plowlands, and a hundred pigs in the woodland). Over thirteen thousand places are mentioned in the Domesday Book, mostly rural, and Ackroyd maintained these records were too detailed for William’s French-speaking staff to have recorded solely on its own.
The Normans clearly understood that indigenous knowledge was crucial for colonists to survive. Besides, why reinvent the wheel? The Anglos and Saxons had colonized Britain centuries before, introduced Christianity, fought off Viking raids, and inherited some of the ways of the Iron Age tribes before them. At the most elite level, Anglo-Saxon women and men could inherit wealth, and the result was strong, interconnected webs of alliances in both material and spiritual wealth. Here is one example from southern England: in 968, Ælfheah, who was ealderman of Hampshire, donated Batcombe, which he’d received from King Edmund, to his wife, Ælfswyth, a relative of King Edmund, who gave it to their son, Ælfweard, who later gave it to Glastonbury Abbey to care for the souls of them and their ancestors. Ælfheah also gave estates to his brother and nephews, plus the wife of King Edgar and her children as well as Benedictine abbeys.
Follow all that? The point is, Ælfheah was adding value to his kinship ties over two generations. Kinship is one way that culture can hold a tight grip on change. Notice the limited choice of first names in Ælfheah’s family. Today, if he reserved a room for Ælfswith, Æfweard, and Ælfheah by phone, the hotel would probably assume there was one person with two nicknames, and a Python-esque conversation would ensue. In medieval Europe, complex genealogies traced elite families all the way back to a founding, often-mythical, male ancestor. Like an intricate knot, the Normans, who were small in number compared to the Anglo-Saxon population, had to work within it rather than replace it outright.
It’s not just kinship but also material technology that, to individuals of traditional societies, would have seemed timeless. If we go back in time to Neolithic Anatolia (modern Turkey), about eight thousand years ago, we might visit one of Europe’s earliest farming villages, Çatalhöyük. Here is where people lived in mud brick buildings, crammed on top of one another. They rebuilt their houses about once per century, literally on top of each other, and replastered the walls up to ten times a year. Family ancestors were buried under house floors, and living spaces were arranged virtually the same from one generation to the next.
A millennium later, Neolithic farmers rolled over thousands of square miles from Hungary all the way to France. Their material culture was so consistent that it is simply called Linearbandkeramik, which means pottery with lines on it. In the dense boreal forests, these early farmers built wattle-and-daub longhouses on large wooden pillars, usually with three sections, with trash pits outside the house walls. They cleared fields for the cultivation of wheat, lentils, and peas and built pens for domestic pigs, sheep, and goats, and took the cattle out to summer pastures. In cemeteries, everyone was usually buried so similarly—crouched on the left side, head pointing east—that skeletons actually crouched on the right side stand out in contrast.
Inundated as we are with videos, social media updates, and short bursts of novel information, we might well ask, “How would I not go nuts in the Neolithic?” Imagine the husband-wife conversation during the 180th replastering of their house at Çatalhöyük, composing thoughts about lentils and cattle. To a person with a Fitbit and an addiction to Minecraft, Neolithic life must seem unimaginably banal, but of course to a person in the Neolithic, celebrity gossip on TMZ.com would probably have seemed equally asinine.
Even for anthropologists trained to appreciate other cultures, the intensity of a kin-based subsistence society can sometimes be too much. In the 1930s, British anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, encamped among the Nuer pastoralists of Sudan, wrote that they “visited me from early morning till late at night, and hardly a movement of the day passed without men, women, or boys in my tent,” to the point at which the “constant badinage and interruption … imposed a severe strain” on the exhausted anthropologist. Certainly he understood the logic: at the center of all Nuer interests were cattle, the common currency of wealth, social relationships, religion, and daily activities. “Start on whatever subject I would,” Evans-Pritchard noted, “we would soon be speaking of cows.” The Nuer were “influenced by their love of cattle and their desire to acquire them,” held “profound contempt” for people without cattle, and therefore had many questions for him on this subject. Cattle and human ancestors had been intertwined for thousands of years.
Lack of perceptible change was not a problem in traditional life. The change, over thousands of years, from roundhouses to square houses is actually a big deal in Neolithic archaeology. For us, such a time scale can be baffling: thousands of years go by, with seemingly little or no innovation. Nowadays, entertainment and technology are in continual flux, but as Joseph Campbell described in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, the core themes remain the same. The classic story of Little Red Riding Hood, for example, is at least two thousand years old, and others are even older.
Folktales and agriculture are just two illustrations of the great antiquity of what we tend to think of as “modern.” Britain retains many features from the Roman occupation, including place-names (towns ending in “chester”), houses built like Roman villas, and roads directly laid onto Roman roads. Along Hadrian’s Wall in northern England in the first century AD, the families of Roman soldiers lived at forts such as Vindolanda, where certain well-preserved remains of daily life could easily pass for modern items. A preserved woman’s sandal in the Vindolanda Museum, for instance, with its leather upper and outer sole, nailing, and stitching, looks contemporary, sleek, and stylish. Citizens of Roman Britain played dice and board games similar to modern ones, including backgammon. Traces of writing on a preserved Vindolanda tablet reveal a woman’s invitation to “the celebration of my birthday,” and another tablet sends for more beer.
Elsewhere, the antiquity of contemporary culture runs even deeper. At Harappa, Pakistan, forty-five-hundred-year-old terracotta bangles resemble those for sale in the bazaars of the modern-day town as well as the bangles that are popular all over South Asia, some of which are still crafted out of clay. Also, wheel-thrown pottery from ancient Harrapa, dating to around 2300 BC, is just like the pottery that the local Pakistanis use today. That’s four thousand years of tradition in jewelry and pottery.