The Day the Universe Changed - James Burke [12]
The houses themselves were of gaudily painted wattle and daub, with thatched roofs. Behind them were gardens and orchards where people raised chickens, pigs and rabbits. In daytime birdsong combined with the constant sound of church bells to drown conversation. The nights were silent and dark.
Every building had a functional purpose. The church was used for dinners at festival times, there was a safe deposit behind the altar, and journeys began and ended at its door. Town halls had rooms in the upper storey for administration, and an arcaded market below for use in bad weather. Private houses were very small. Almshouses might have no more than ten inmates. A convent would take a dozen girls. Few towns were more than a mile across and everyone knew everyone else. The towns were divided into autonomous neighbourhood areas, centred on a tree or a fountain.
As the economy expanded, so did the churches - not necessarily in size, but in shape. With a growing population worshipping more saints on more saints’ days, more priests were needed to hear their confessions and more chapels to house their prayers. These extra chapels sprang up either along the walls of the aisles or, more often, behind the altar, which itself ceased to be a simple table and became more of a showpiece tabernacle housing the increasing number of holy relics brought back by Crusaders from the Middle East.
The abacus, an instrument which fascinated Europe after its introduction at the beginning of the eleventh century, gave a much needed boost to the secular business community. It had been brought to northern Europe from Spain by Gerbert of Aurillac, a teacher at the Reims cathedral school who was to become Pope Sylvester II in 999.
The abacus. The beads on the rods in the left frame are ones, those in the right, fives. Numbers are made by bringing beads to the central strut. The position of rods indicates the bead value. The beads on the bottom rod are units, the next up are tens, then hundreds, and so on. The number here is 7,230,189.
This new device took the form of a semicircular wooden board divided into thirty columns of vertical rods carrying beads. According to Gerbert the abacus made it possible to calculate up to 10,000 million. It made addition, subtraction, even multiplication easy by introducing the decimal system of units, tens, hundreds, and so on. Nonetheless its application was far from easy. Some abacus users wrote to Gerbert complaining ‘what a sweat’ it was. Judging by the correspondence between the Pope and the Emperor when Gerbert first arrived in Rome, expertise with the abacus was highly prized. The Pope wrote, ‘I have a good mathematician here,’ to which the Emperor replied, ‘Don’t let him out of the city!rsquo;
With all this urban growth, the population increase brought by economic improvement, and the secularisation of much social power through the effect of money, the earlier, apathetic view of the world began to change. The old ways were no longer adequate. This was most acutely felt with regard to the lack of good law and of people qualified to administer it.
As merchants travelled further they increasingly came upon unfamiliar practices and customs which complicated their activities. Trade could not be carried on under the archaic arbitrary decision-making of the feudal barons. The growing power of the centralised monarchies demanded an instrument of their will capable of uniform and universal application. Without the King’s Law there could be no central government. Towns needed local legislation to codify the freedoms they had taken for themselves in the early years. Merchants needed standard laws on tax, customs duties