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Learning a classical language before you went time-travelling would probably help. I have, because I am endlessly geeky, often fantasized about what would happen should I somehow end up 1000 years ago. It made me feel better once I mastered Hebrew and learned Latin, Middle English, Saxon, and picked up a little Greek and a little Old French. If I ended up back there, I could always pass myself off as a scholar. I also learned how to fight with a broadsword-- it's not the commonest hobby, I know, but it is fun-- and that might help, too. Plus, I can shoot (archery), though I'm not the greatest.
Will's ideas are actually not bad at all. People back then actually did not go around constantly burning everyone who spouted weird stuff, if for no other reason than they generally were too busy trying to survive. Mastering some basic herbology, pharmacology, and field medicine before one went jaunting back in time would probably be the best course of action: successful healers wrote their own tickets back then, and lords were willing to pay well for their services. Whether one could end up getting rich enough to marry royalty...that might be a different matter. But one could end up getting rich enough to live fairly well. Maybe even purchasing a title and lands. Also, if one were perhaps slightly more flexible in one's ethics, a little basic knowledge of chemistry, physics, and weapons design could earn one an excellent living as a provider of military technology to a lord or king.
Without pre-existing language skills, and some helpful knowledge with which to make a living, if you got tossed back 1000 years, it would be mighty difficult to survive long enough to learn the languages and figure out a trade.
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Dull sublunary lovers love,
Whose soul is sense, cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
That thing which elemented it.
(From "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne)
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