The situation: For reasons above and beyond your comprehension the next door you walk through transports you into some point in time around 1000 years ago (it’d probably take you some time to ascertain this but let’s say you just “know”), somewhere English(-like)… probably England. You’re wearing a pair of jeans and a t-shirt, and have the footwear you had on. That’s it. You have no way of knowing how to get back, or if that’s even possible, so you’ve got to get on with living.
What knowledge would you try to impart? Would you aspire to use your history of war to rule the world? Would you see your early months there as a primarily teaching or learning period?
Me… I wouldn’t say nuttin to no one. At least until I’d gathered how stake-happy my local village was.
Head for a big town and teach math. I’m not mathmatically inclined, but I know addition, subtraction, multiplication and long division techniques that are faster than what they used. I hope they were using arabic numerals in 1008. Provided I could even speak the language. I don’t know enough about anything else they might find applicable to their lives. Maybe distilling and gunpowder.
Best of luck, since nobody a thousand years ago will understand a word you say. Everyone will be speaking Old English, a language that to you and I would be about as understandable as Russian. You would be FAR more useful to people in the year 3008 - where historians would pay you through the nose to get to talk to you for ten minutes - than you would in 1008, where you will be rightly regarded as a useless dunce.
Practically speaking, however, your best bet is to try to pretend you’re a lost foreigner and just learn from the locals, who may not know the future, but know more about how to survive in 1008 AD than you do. Knowing what’s going to happen in 1066 or 1492 is of no use when you’re going to be dead by Thursday if you have nothing to eat or get strung up for being a thief or just weird. You’d initially be utterly useless, since you won’t know how to farm or do any useful trade. An understanding of military history’s completely irrelevant; dunno about you, but I can use a gun but MAKE a gun. Armed force in 1008 AD is based on the possession of quality weapons and armor (expensive) and knowledge of how to use it, which hardly anyone alive in 2008 would possess.
Your problem will initially be in getting someone to just take you in and feed you. In 1008 AD, food is a more valuable commodity than today. You have to eat, so you don’t have time for teaching the locals much, and you’re going to have to get someone to not view you with suspicion despite the fact that you’re dressed weird and speak no language any other human on the planet understands. Teach? Why would anyone listen to you? Nobody will believe you’re educated because you don’t speak Latin, and you won’t possess any practical survival skills. Have fun!
If there’s anything useful you could teach anyone it would be cleanliness and hygeine. At least get them to stop shitting in their water supply.
My suggestion is to feign unconsciousness near a village and hope the locals carry you into the local church in hopes of reviving you.
Middle english would have been difficult to understand except in written form, and even then it would take some studying up, considering the characters weren’t exactly comic sans or arial 10 point, plus the structure, spelling and meaning of many words was way different.
SO that would be obstacle number 1. Next comes the problem of your attire. Sneakers, jeans and a shirt would look off and would draw attention to you. You don’t want attention being drawn to you if you cannot speak the language, and specially if you don’t look like the locals.
Staying alive would be very tough. You’d have to convince someone that your particular skills in either math, engineering, etc would be useful, and how do you do that if you can’t speak the language?
My guess would be that you end up on the wrong end of a spear, pitchfork or sword by end of day.
You have a thousand years of musical history to draw upon. Start singing.
Set yourself up as a wandering minstrel who got separated from a traveling troupe. The language barrier will work to your advantage here, because it won’t be apparent that the subject matter of most of your songs is anachronistic.
IMO, the only good option would be to actually convince someone educated and/or powerful that you are actually coming from the future. Because otherwise you’re going to live an extremely crappy life at best, and a very short live at worst.
Now, how would you convince someone that you’re telling the truth? I don’t know, since you probably will be unable to demonstrate it by providing/producing something useful and/or relevant. Maybe a hot air balloon? That might be quite low tech and pretty amazing at the same time. Once you have a protector who believes you, you probably could do OK, if only as a funny entertainer and story teller if you can’t be put to any other use.
You could probably show that you’re educated quite easily, though, even if you don’t know the language. That in itself would be a very good point. Having some good knowledge of an art educated people can understand (someone mentioned mathematics, but astronomy or music could do the trick) or that would be useful (land surveyor, surgeon) would help tremendously. If you’re an office drone, not so much.
Now, the mentality and expected behaviour being extremely different, and unpredictable (because you can’t assume you have the slightest clue of how people behaved 1000 years ago, even if you’re an avid reader of history books), it might be extremely problematic. I hope you have very good people skills. You would probably be better off lying about the future so as not to offend anybody, too (no funny stuff about human rights or the future evolution of religious doctrines).
I’m voting for dead within the month from stuff my immune system’s never had to cope with. That, or the pitchfork. As a woman in jeans, I’d already be in trouble (cf Joan of Arc).
If I survived long enough to establish myself and pick up the language I would try to introduce the printing press. I could make one if I had a patron.
I think I could make some improvements to the bottom paints of wooden boats. I might be able to improve sail lines. Especially for sloops and ketches. I could probably make a fair living as a boat carpenter and build some better tools along the way.
My physics and chemistry knowledge while not advanced might prove useful.
However as others have points out, without a Babel fish, the first few months would be tough to survives and getting established is the hard part.
Alternatively, instead of stating you’re coming from the future, you could state you were washed ashore, coming from a strange land beyond the seas (which would be quite true in the case of American posters). Not sure it would help much, but it could be credible and raise interest.
You could pretend not to know anything about Christianity (since you’re from this strange land) and then enthusiastically convert after having been taught about it. It might get you some interest and brownie points.
Oh! And make sure to pretend you’re someone important in the place whence you came.
I can play the flute and figure out how to get a tune out of practically any wind instrument with holes in it. I can dance.
As far as more useful tasks, I can knit. I can weave baskets.
I can make killer pie crust with just a couple of ingredients. But I don’t know how hard it would be to come by lard and a fairly fine flour.
I can do magic tricks. I can make coins disappear and reappear. This is assuming I could get someone to give me a coin in the first place.
But, basically, I figure if they didn’t stone me on the first day, I might be accepted as some sort of village idiot. I’m not sure how quickly I could pick up on the language. I could warn them to watch out for the Great Vowel Shift, and change history!
Considering the lack of all the comforts I take for granted, I might prefer being stoned.
Well, Judging from the Canterbury Tales that I have heard read aloud (though I know a lot of that is open to interpretation) I don’t think that understanding people would be as hard as all that. So I am going to hand wave and say that I would be able to understand people in pretty short order.
So, if I could pick one thing that I would try to pass on to the folks of that era I would say that it would be the notion of germ theory or at very least public sanitation.
The Canterbury Tales was written in the 14th century. The OP stated you were going back 1000 years, which in England puts you before the Norman conquest. Chaucer’s English you might pick up; the “English” of 1008 is a foreign language.
It doesn’t matter what you said, no one would believe you.
You say: “Wash your body often because there are these things you can’t see that will make you sick, and the real sickness is comming soon and it’ll be from fleas carried on rats. There are two whole continents to the west that are competely unknown to EuroAsians. Human beings have a birthright to be free of bondage and the ability to select their leaders. The Earth orbits the sun. There are many solar systems, and many more planets. The answers of the physical world can be obtained through observation and repeatable experiment and not the Bible and dead Greek men.”
They say: “BURN THE HERETIC!”
Me, I’d put down as much of my Math degree on paper as I could remember and build a printing press. Evolution and Political Theory would be a waste of time as would Botany.
Though in the end I might be best known for my fantastic poem called “The Raven”.
Being educated - able to read and write and do arithmetic - will count for a lot once you’ve got past the language barrier. I think I could just about make myself understood in Latin, but Anglo-Saxon is going to be tough.
Chaucer was hundreds of years later.
But initial survival will be hard. There wasn’t a lot of spare food in those days. I would hope to get hired by a merchant as a scribe or tutor. One I started teaching, I’d likely become known for my knowledge, if not my erudition. And the basic scientific idea I’d teach would be the scientific method, recast as ‘How can we better understand God’s creation?’
I don’t think language is as big of a problem as people are saying. Given that you’d be immersed with people speaking that language, you’d pick it up within several months, same as if you washed up in, say, modern day Japan and were forced to learn Japanese. Learning languages when immersed in that language is not difficult, it’s just a matter of time & effort. It’s when you can insulate yourself among native speakers that it gets tricky.
In fact, it might work in your favor. People would understand “foreigner” much better than they’d understand “time traveller” and they’d assume you were a foreigner unless you told them different.
My WAG is that even a passing knowledge of modern medicine would make you a very good doctor in the year 1000. The importance of hygiene was not really understood back then, and once you learned the language, you could probably make a pretty good living giving out health advice, cleaning wounds, etc. Sure, you don’t have modern drugs, but you could at least not hurt someone. You could figure out inoculations easily enough. And heck, with a few years of experimenting, you might be able to discover Penicillin. That’d be worth something.
Being able to read & write would also get you a job somewhere, once you learned the language of course. Most people were illiterate; scribes were in demand.
What else? You could invent the assembly line. A printing press wouldn’t be that hard to figure out. Steam engines and steam powered railways could be done, if you had a source of metal to make it with.
I think there’s dozens of things we see around us every day that could be viable “inventions” back in 1008.
Yes, but it isn’t as foreign as Russian. It would be more like learning Dutch–lots and lots of cognates, lots of words that are the same just pronounced weirdly, similar grammar, and so on.
As for convincing the local authorities that you aren’t a peasant, just show them your soft hands and mouth full of teeth and they’ll be certain that whatever you are, you aren’t a peasant.
I don’t think you’d be likely to be killed on sight at all. I think this image is just an extreme reaction to the old “medieval romance” myths. Pilgrims, traders and travelers have existed in all societies since the beginning of time, and you probably won’t be the first oddly dressed stranger who doesn’t speak the language to walk into town.
I bet you could even find a hot meal and a place to sleep without too many problems. Think about how many of our fairy tales begin with taking in a stranger. Life was probably pretty boring back then and having a new person in your house was probably worth giving up a bit of your gruel. And in my experience most poor societies are much more welcoming to strangers than our own.
It will take a few days to pick up the basics of language, but after a couple weeks you’d be able to get around on your own and within a couple months you could know enough to have basic conversations. After a year you would probably be pretty much fluent.
It’s true that you would have few useful skills. Even if you are a skilled baker or carpenter or whatever, you’ve probably got nothing on the guy who spent his childhood as an apprentice. And you are going to lack some basic “everyone knows that” skills, like spinning thread and farming. Hell, even cooking over fire has a learning curve. Most people made most things they consumed. This means stuff like making your own cooking oil, replacing your straw roofs, and lancing your own wounds. It would take years to get the basic education everyone else picked up when they were children.
But you could still have a decent life. People fall in love all the time and you could easily fall for someone, especially being so out of your element. You get married, have kids, work and live out your life. Creature comforts are nice, but they aren’t the real meat of life. And remember that high infant mortality accounts for a large amount of that low life expectancy. Plenty of people lived to a ripe old age. I think once you made it out of childhood you could expect to live at least into your sixties. Of course you’d miss home, but anyone who has ever gone on, say, a long camping trip, knows how quickly even the strangest places can feel like home .