Resource depletion and overpopulation:
The produce of English woodlands was mainly underwood for fuel and other uses, with small oaks used for domestic building. Typical medieval timber-framed houses were built mainly of oaks less than 18″ diameter. Large timbers were in short supply, and were reserved for the great ecclesiastical buildings. The builders of Ely Cathedral in the 13th century had to use smaller roof timbers than planned, and the pine poles for the scaffolding were imported from Norway. Thin oak boards or wainscot for domestic building were imported from Central Europe.
Even from its low proportion of 15% in 1086, woodland cover shrank further to 10% by 1350, due to population increase. The Black Death of 1349 brought this to a sudden stop, and any woods surviving in 1350 had a good chance of surviving the next 500 years.
Throughout history, nearly all clearance of woodland has been for agriculture. Industry tended to sustain woodland rather than destroy it. Up until the industrial revolution, industries relied on coppice woodland for fuel. To quote Rackham (1990), ‘the survival of almost any large tract of woodland suggests that there has been an industry to protect it against the claims of farmers’. Such areas included The Weald, the coastal fringes of the Lake District, the Forest of Dean and the Merthyr and Ebbw Valleys. It was the agricultural areas of East Anglia, the Midlands, lowland Scotland and elsewhere where woodlands almost completely disappeared.
http://islesproject.com/2008/08/05/12000bce-present-a-brief-history-of-british-woodlands/Extreme climate:
Evidence from ice cores suggests that the largest volcanic eruption of the last millennium occurred in 1258 somewhere in the tropics. Palaeoclimate models demonstrate that the stratospheric spread of a blanket of volcanic particles would have led to a significant summer cooling.
Contemporary writings from England note a long cool period from February to June 1258 and a very cold winter in 1260-1261. Severe summer and autumn rains caused crop failures throughout north-west Europe and in England this led to famine. A great pestilence struck the weakened London population in the spring of 1259.
Almost half (2323/5387: 43.1%) of the individuals studied as part of the Spitalfields project were buried within mass pits shown by a combination of stratigraphic analysis and radiocarbon dating to originate in the mid 13th century. Whilst famine and disease were no strangers to urban populations throughout the medieval period, it is highly probable that the suffering in the late 1250s was part of a global scenario brought about by volcanic activity.
http://www.museumoflondonarchaeology.org.uk/English/News/Archive/News07/MedClimate.htmRestraint of trade: being a serf is being a bit 'restrained' in trade, I think. The king either sold monopolies on the main export trade (wool), or just reserved it for himself.
The Church wasn't into wilful ignorance - it just banned the Bible being translated into anything apart from Latin, and
dug up and burnt the remains of anyone who produced a translation. No, they weren't ignorant at all. They just
burnt people at the stake for heresy.
I'm still not sure what the problems with 'rigid borders' are meant to be. But the English coastline is pretty rigid, and the movement of the border with Scotland was pretty inconsequential, by that stage. :shrug:
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
