As recently reported, 536AD is regarded by some as the worst year in human history. All of Europe, the Middle East and even parts of Asia and the Americas were plunged into sudden cold and darkness. The sun gave no warmth and didn’t even cast shadows at noon. Crops failed, people starved, and whole cities like Teotihuacan in Mexico collapsed.
But even in an ordinary year, the mediaeval winter was no easy ride. As much of Europe is re-discovering, winter without the modern necessities of artificial heating and lighting is a miserable, even a literally killer season. People in the Middle Ages didn’t have the luxury of heaters, blankies and hot drinks in front of the telly.
Stone or wood houses with no insulation, limited fabrics to make warm clothes from, and days of hard labor out in the elements.
Small wonder that 13th English monk Bartholomew recorded that “all things… fade and die by the hard cruelness of Winter”.
The majority of the population lived an agricultural life at the time, so in winter, their source of livelihood and sustenance ground to a halt. Surviving winter — literally — was a matter of long preparation, not to mention hoping for a good harvest to see them through the months ahead.
Most of the prep for surviving the winter started months in advance. One of the main concerns was food, as agriculture slowed down. It had come time to slaughter some of the farm animals so their meat could be preserved.
These animals, such as cows and pigs, would be fed and fattened in November before the chill set in. Only the ones that became sufficiently chubby would be chosen to feed the family.
Slaughtering the pigs was an activity usually carried out in December. This complex process took many hands to complete. Once the pig had been killed and every part of it sectioned off and saved, the main chunks of meat would be salted to preserve them. Cured meats like salted ham were a major part of the medieval diet.
Even the blood and entrails would be turned into food. Blood sausage, known in the UK as black pudding, is still a popular delicacy today and an essential part of the full English breakfast.
But just because so much of life had ground to a halt doesn’t mean that the work of the mediaeval peasant was done.
In addition to the butchering of livestock, the month before Christmas was also busy with the planting of winter crops. In Britain, the main crop was wheat, but some would also sow barley.
The seeds would be sown in early winter and would hopefully germinate through the cold months, bursting into healthy crops by the time spring came around.
It wasn’t until the very depths of winter, in January, that the workload eased. After all, you can’t do much agricultural work when everything is covered in snow and the very soil is frozen as hard as iron.
Then it was just a matter of trying to keep warm — and even that was an arduous, dangerous business. As Matt Ridley shows, in The Rational Optimist, the cost of things as simple as an hour’s heating or lighting had (prior to the onset of mass climate delusion) plummeted since mediaeval times. Simply put, humans today have to work far less hours to keep their homes lit and warm than mediaeval peasants.
Fire was the main source of heat in the medieval home. They would usually have enormous fireplaces, and some homes even had a fire pit set up in the center of the room to heat as much of the space as possible. The smoke would escape through a hole in the roof similar to a chimney.
Sometimes one fire wasn’t enough to heat the home. Small portable braziers would be filled with burning coals and placed around the house to provide extra warmth, but they were a major safety risk. House fires were commonplace during this period.
Since they didn’t have any such thing as a rubber hot water bottle at the time, they would heat bricks or large stones in the fireplace and then wrap them in fabric. They would be carefully placed at the bottom of the bed to heat it up.
Rock band Three Dog Night allegedly took their name from a supposed Aboriginal Australian tradition that on the coldest of nights, they would share their bed with three dogs to keep warm. For the mediaeval peasant, farm animals were handier, and more likely to survive winter hundled in the hovel with the humans.
Even so, most homes, even castles, were decidedly drafty. Window glass was a rare luxury, so windows were often covered completely during winter.
Warm clothing was essential, including woollen coats, scarves, mittens and hats. Animal pelts were used where available to line clothing.
Still, apart from more northern latitudes, most of Western Europe didn’t have to deal with really harsh, snowy winters for centuries. During the High Middle Ages, from 900-1300 AD, Western Europe was lucky enough to go through the Mediaeval Warm Period. During this period of natural warming, agriculture flourished and the population expanded.
Then it got cold. Really cold.
The Mediaeval Warm Period ended, not with a bang but a shiver: the Little Ice Age hit with a punishing cooling period from the mid-1300s (right in tandem with the arrival of the Black Death) until well into the 19th century.
Harsh winters that lasted much longer than normal left communities stranded as they ran out of provisions and had no way to travel to further-away towns.
In 1389, the Lozère region in southern France was hit with unprecedented snowfall. A local scribe described the fallout: “In January, February and March, the snowfalls in Lozère were so great that they destroyed many farmsteads and that many people died, because their houses fell down on them. Other people died of cold, others of hunger, because snowfalls had lasted so much longer than usual that people had run out of provisions” […]
In 1359, there were reports from Florence, Italy, that “the snow rose to an extraordinary height; so, to lighten up the roofs, the snow was thrown into the streets, and some of the towns were blocked so the inhabitants were trapped for several days in their homes.”
MSN
As sceptical Australian scientist Ian Plimer has written: “we must be the first generation of humans to be afraid of a warming climate”.
And possibly the first generation insane enough to willfully destroy the very means that have allowed so many humans to flourish.
