Philobiblon

p. 32 “… particulars had to be learned by human users, sometimes through processes of trial and error. Early Neolithic clearances of fields in upland Britain became moorland and peat bog under later wetter conditions. Bronze Age clearances for pasture in Denmark strained local wood supplies to the point that some pasture was left to grow back as trees.”

p. 34 Mediterranean Europe acquired its Neolithic agriculture complex from southwestern Asia during the sixth and fifth millennium BCE. At first this comprised cereal grasses, legumes, and ovicaprida… intensive hand labour by humans maintained the system until draught animals (oxen, donkey) and a simple plough arrived by the early Bronze Age…. Crops had to be adapted to the rainy cool winter and the hot dry summer: annual cereals seeded in autumn grow throughout the winter and spring to mature before the summer drought; perennial grasses, vines, olives and other plants go dormant or otherwise adapt to the heat. .. Grain, olives and vines have formed the ruling trinity of Med crops since pre-classical times, providing the ancient staple diet of bread, oil and wine. Less stereotyped legumes from field or garden could provide important supplements. Grain crops, wheat and barley, … were reared on ploughed fields (ager) on a two-year cycle, alternating crop and fallow. Resting the field one year in two and ploughing the weeds under hoarded two years of previous water for the grain. Bare fallow leaves the soil surface open during the winter rains, both absorbing water and risking erosion. … Olive trees, … sensitive to frost … on the north they tidily mark a natural boundary of Mediterranean agriculture, which mostly coincided with that of the Roman world. .. Wines and olives might be grown beside vegetables in gardens, but especially when raised for family subsistence were often interplanted in grain fields as cultura mixta. … Livestock played a secondary role … a major technical problem inhibited livestock rearing in the Med, as summer forage was sparse in agricultural areas long cleared of most woodlands and subject to summer drought. The typical response even before good written records was vertical transhumance; a semi-annual movement of livestock and their keepers … to summer pastures in the mountains. The practice moved the animals to forage at the price of depriving the arable land of their manure and the risk of overgrazing upland woodlands and turning them to grass, maquis or garrigue. Transhumance componmuded the problem of fertility maintenance in Med dry farming, an issue that much worried Roman agricultural writers.”

p. 52-54 During and after Roman fall “a long series of epidemics and losses of regional populations caused inhabitants of the western provinces to decline steadily in numbers from the 15-20 million range of the second century to 8-10 million about 600. The economy lost its urban focus… environmental forces of both natural and anthropogenic origins had some significance in this evolution, while even more can be attributed to the environmental impacts of the cultural changes themselves. … [the end of ] the relatively warm and dry Roman Optimum… by the third century, falling general sea levels reveal, and traces of volcanic activity in ice cores help explain, a general cooling that continued into the fourth century, although some regions then became drier. In the Alps, the glaciers were advancing and the tree line creeping downwards. In winter 406, the lower Rhine surprisingly froze solid, giving Germanic invaders easy passage to plunder in Gaul. The ensuing fifth century, in Europe at least, was cooler still, and in the north up to c.450 wetter, but aridity in the southern Med is blamed for abandoned North African farmland. If, as some writers now estimate, mean annual temperatures declined by 1-1.5C from the second century to the sixth, Europe outside the Med basin was becoming less amenable to the favoured crops of Med agrosystems….
Severe pandemics ravaged the Empire during the late second century and again in the mid-third, killing as much as a third of its inhabitants. Some may rather have succumbed to ensuing food shortages and famines… most modern authorities now think these were smallpox, measles or influenza rather than plague. .. most famous is the ‘Justinian plague’, named retrospectively for East Roman Emperor Justinian (527-65)… Most late 20th-century scholars accepted this as the first pandemic of bubonic plaque … less tendentious label for the entire episode is Late Medieval Pandemic. Whatever the pathogenic agent, it was new or long unfamiliar in the region, entered from Africa, probably by way of Egypt, and caused many deaths. … a possibly new endemic presence of malaria… whose several varieties had colonized the Med since at least the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. … the form most common in the western Med debilitated rather than immediately killed, leaving victims with weakened immune systems and life spans shortened by other diseases, and persuading survivors to abandon marshy areas. …

p. 55 “Failures of stewardship then appear to follow, rather than precede, population losses and socio-political breakdown. .. late classical agricultural pratices successful, even in the face of natural changes, only so long as the social fabric remained intact and secure farmers could enjoy the results of investment in maintaining their own lands. .. at some point cultural confidence in human action was itself broken and fatalistic attitudes to nature gained importance. Around 500 the Christian Eugippus wrote a Life of his religious hero, St Severinus, who had died in 482 in the still Roman society of Noricum, the prince between the Alps and the Danube approximating present-day Bavaria and Austria. The community’s dire experience of cold winters, famines, epidemics and destructive wars was, said the hagiographer, God’s punishment for human sin. A consistent, though not uniform, strand in early Christian thought despaired of the material world and welcomed the soon-anticipated Apocalypse.

p. 104 Both the abbeys established under the Benedictine rule in the Carolingian age and the new 12th-century Cistercian houses very quickly produced the requisite foundation legends. Many such foundation myths related how monks went out into the deserta, a wilderness not necessarily of sands and rocks but possibly dark and fearsome trees or oozing wetlands, to build their garden. But in a surprisingly large number of specific instances, modern historians and archaeologists have found the site on which a monastery was built had prior human settlement. At Lubiaz in Poland, late 12th-century charters have the white monks settling beside villages where they took on a religious role but those monks’ successors at the start of the 14th century composed verses portraying the desolate wilderness into which the founders had come. Indeed, in certain cases… Cistercians removed peasants and destroyed villages so that they could establish their monastery in a deserta, a place without human society.

p 114 “What people eat determines very importantly how they use land, but what people eat itself derives as much from cultural expectation as from physiological needs. In an agricultural society diet is the main driver of land use, but the intermediary between diet and land use is power, whether that power comes from a legal or coercive authority or from the sheer force of numbers of individuals who may be relatively powerless taken one at a time … a good first approach considers whether people eat bread and meat or not. Northern living called for more energy than living along the Med, and northern cultures were distinctly more carnivorous. But from the early to central middle ages, the choice of bread and meat was more a matter of wealth and status than simply where a person lived, what they could afford, and what was needed for nutritional purposes. Elites wanted meat and elites wanted white bread. Hence the French word ble (Latin bladum) means bread grain, not cereals in general … although in fact it commonly included rye, which also produces a dough that rises. Bread not porridge, bread was what civilised Romans ate. To early medieval elites bread was an essential sign of being civilised. Wheat or rye bread had been established in late antique Italy as the only suitable element for the Eucharist and thus essential for human life. So too was bread generally acknowledged as the best vegetable food for humans. … the prevailing theory of humours defined bread grain as the only cereal both warm and moist … Humoral theory held the human body to be warm and moist … bread and bread grains were actively promoted and explicitly demanded by Carolingian authorities already in the 8th century, long before any manifest subsistence needs called for large numbers of people to live on the relatively cheap calories that can only be produced by growing and eating cereals. Peasants ate cereals, too, and collectively in vast quantities, but not so much bread. Peasants are porridge (gruel) and peasants drank beer.. Peasant cereals went into these more fluid forms. Their cereals were more commonly barley, oats, millet, spelt and other such grains.

p. 116 By around 1200 inhabitants of central Europe were obtaining from grain twice the proportion of their calories as had their early medieval ancestors. The trend of late antiquity reversed as consumption and production had already moved away from meat, livestock and pastoralism by the late 8th century, continuing into the 13th and 14th. .. more land was put to the plough…. Pollen profiles from southern France show 400 years of ever-rising proportions of cereal pollens and those of weeds from grain fields. Similar trends are found in English Anglo-Saxon sites. .. Peasant farmers tended nevertheless to retain large pastures because they were obliged to provide so much grains to their lords that they lacked further supplies to feed livestock. As livestock energies and excrements provided essential inputs to the peasant production systems, peasant communities were desperate to keep land for their animals to graze… Elites .. maintained a gourmand’s delight in flesh from the tastiest, fattest, juiciest young animals. Distinctive elite eating habits are sharply displayed at what is now Olargues-le-vieux in Dep. Herault, where around the year 1000 a peasant community lived among the barely visible remains of a one-time Roman villa, while not 200 metres away a group of warrior knights lorded over them from atop a local hill. Animal remains recovered from village middens came largely from old goats and sheep, that is beasts kept for their milk and wool ntil the end of their productive lives. In so far as peasants consumed meat at all, they had stringy mutton. Up on the hill, however, the knights tossed on their rubbish heap bones of pig and lamb, having eaten the flesh of small, tender sheep that had never lived to become tough and the good juicy meat from hogs with no use except for food.”

p. 124 “the heavy moudboard plough … had technical, hence economic and environmental implications … the ploughman had to put more oxen to pulling it and therefore had to have a larger herd or pool his oxen with those of another … another way to obtain more draught power was to use a more powerful animal, the horse … a countervailing disadvantage, more expensive fuel. Oxen will work on a diet of grass, horses will not. Hardworking horses need specialised fodder, and that means cereal grains. Horses eat the same things as humans; the medieval farmer who employed them had to produce more grains for their feed and for his family and his lord. An additional drawback … Europeans did not eat horses, or at least ate very little horse meat after the 8th century when Christian authorities moved against behaviour they associated with the cult of Wotan (Odin), chief of the Germanic pagan gods and a favourite of warriors and princes.”

p. 125 “The need for additional fodder could be met through a third technical innovation with great power to shape the landscape. This was the practice of arable management best labelled the ‘three-course rotation’ … northern soils can grow grain two years out of three, carrying winter grain for a year, harvesting in early summer, leaving the stubble on the land to the following spring, then ploughing and planting spring grains which will be harvested later in summer or early autumn, and then resting the land for a year while ploughing the fallow to deal with weeds and leached nutrients… raising the output by a sixth by cultivating annually two-thirds rather than half the arable…. The spring grains were particularly oats and barley. .. can feed horses as well as humans, though neither made a genuine bread. .. People were adjusting more knowledgeably to the world in which they lived, gaining more grain while retaining pasture.”

p. 126 “But the new regime was a great deal for work. It required more work from the draught animals and more work from the humans… Why would peasants do this? The answer is that medieval peasants came under pressure. Pressure came from subsistence needs: growing families that embodied the rising European population had to have more calories to feed everyone. Pressure came because lords could coerce peasants, could demand crops or labour of them, and enforce those demands through the threat and exercise of violence. But peasants could also determine to work harder on positive grounds… particularly if some local markets might be available.. they could exchange the goods for other desired goods that were not easily produced on a subsistence farm.”

p. 163 “tillage (ploughing) counteracts weeds, soil pathogens, and leaching. Ploughing of the fallow and again before sowing keeps down the weeds, opens the soil to air and sunlight which kill the pathogens, and when a furrow is turned, restores soluble minerals to the soil surface. But tillage poses new risks: it opens up the soil surface, exposing it to erosion by wind and water. To some degree tillage inhibits soil biota… further tends to oxidise the humus, shrinking the matrix where mineral exchanges take place. Hence long-used arable soils, those that have been ploughed year after year, tend to become acidic…. Such soils also form plough horizons, discontinuities, between a surface repeatedly stirred by the plough and an undisturbed layer below. This too interrupts the movement of water and minerals in the soil. In effect, to sustain successful agricultural colonisation requires management of a whole soil ecosystem which preindustrial people could neither see nor imagine, but had rather to learn and negotiate by local trial, error and oral transmission of the results.”

p. 167 present day historical misunderstandings because of ‘overdependence on manorial sources that fixate on arable output because lords did. Cereal production mattered to lords but less so to a peasant girl gathering mushrooms for a family meal. SO many aspects of the larger peasant ecosystem are ignored in typical manorial sources as to leave a partial view of how the agroecosystem functioned.”

p. 178 “in 1280 appeared the first firm evidence of the Merino breed, special sheep that give wool of the highest qual;ity. Merino soon came to dominate the whole transhumance herd in Spain. By 1300 migratory sheep numbered 1.5 million in Castile where the human population was 4-5 milloin. In 1467 Castile had 2.7 million migratory sheep. Wool exports generated the largest foreignh exchange for the entire Castilian economy… Similar arrangements later appeared in parts of peninsular Italy.
Medieval Spain also provides one of the best examples of large-scale cattle-rearing on an open range. … the southwestern corner of Castile … thinly inhabited area with significant seasonal wetlands .. came under the control of large lordships owned by military religious orders and great magnates (including those who would later finance the Columbus voyages). On the savannah landscape … large herds of cattle could prosper with little human care. The large estates reared tens of thousands of head in an open-range environment to produce hides for both local and export production of leather. The pastoral system was clearly in place by some time in the early 1300s. .. Herdsmen were cowboys, they rode horses, used ropes to manage the animals, and had dogs to help out. In fact historians of the North American cattle industry argue that the Iberian vaquero was the direct antecedent of the American cowboy. English and Gaelic speakers did not handle their herds in that way. In England, Scotland and Ireland herders did not ride, but walked, and carried not ropes but a staff. Some of them worked in the company of dogs, some did not.”

p. 204 “From the 1280s rising complaints about coal smoke in London eventually provoked a royal prohibition in 1315 against its use there – which evidently failed. Real decline in English use of sea coal occurred only after 1350 as the population collapsed and with it medieval demand for the relatively difficult and unpleasant fuel. Coal fires would not again multiply in England until the mid-16th century, after the population had finally regained its early 14thcentury numbers.”

p. 205 “Beer-drinking cultures have different energy needs from those of wine-drinking cultures: the former require grain to make their beverages and fuel to prepare it, calling in total for much more biomass; the latter require no heat to process their wine, but it is typically moved from production to consumption sites with the water already in it, and so entails more weight, packaging and transport.”

p. 264 – environmental protection “ Italian city-states protected water quality by banning the processing of flax and hemp; an English parliamentary statute of 1388 promoted urban sanitation by prohibiting dung, filth and other corruption from the lanes and waterways throughout the realm; French ordinances prohibited the (silent) saw in woodlands and reserved certain tree species for use as timber; from the 1330s Florence ordered weirs and other structures removed from the Arno to reduce the damage from floods.”

p. 339 On the evidence of anecdotal narrative sources and statistical correlation of large chronological data sets, Wolfgang Behringer and Emily Oster have argued for a close, indeed causal, connection between severe and ‘unnatral’ weather and climatic stresses typical of the worse periods of the LIA and the temporally circumscribed fiercest local witchcraft persecutions in 16th and 17th-century Europe. After 1560 and again after 1680 local experiences of damaging storms and destructive cold and wet conditions across the continent brought crop failures, drove food prices up, and triggered local mortality crises. Seeking scapegoats, fearful communities demanded that higher authorities collaborate to root out the surely evil perpetrators. A severe and damaging hailstorm widespread across much of central Europe in August 1562 … was shortly followed by local witchhunts. Where governments lacked the strength or ideological grounds to resist – secular explanations of weather prevailed in humanist-governed towns like Nuremberg, where no witches were killed – the cultural tension exploded.”