The next priority would be planting for the upcoming year; spring grain, and then the main planting season to follow in the autumn.
At this point, priorities had to be established. Over the winter of 1998-9 the Council defined the major problems as:
Shortage of labor—paradoxically, the die-off had been so complete that there were simply not enough hands to cultivate the available land, or even to harvest most of the several million acres of volunteer grain.
Shortage of skills—even though the refuge areas had been remote and rural by British standards, most of the survivors in absolute terms were former town-dwellers without any agricultural skills; for example, only around two thousand of the inhabitants of the Isle of Wight were farmers or farm-workers, although as many more had been brought in by the salvage-rescue parties. Even the farmers among the survivors were largely ignorant of the preindustrial farming methods which were ones now available. In terms of manufacturing, while wreckage of the only industrial and post-industrial Britain provided an abundance of raw materials, few were skilled in the handicraft methods which were now all that altered natural law allowed.
Shortage of tools, horses, and oxen.
Deterioration of the infrastructure. Large urban areas had without exception become impassable and dangerous wilderness due to fire, flooding and general destruction; repair or upkeep of even the most basic services was out of the question, since most labor would have to be directed to production of food and basic farming tools. Resettlement would have to be on the basis of farmsteads, villages and at most one or two small cities, preferably ones with a high proportion of older structures.
Loss of cultural continuity. The Council, even in the desperate days of the first Change Year, was determined that the survivors would not relapse into savagery. This implied that long-term projects would have to be undertaken, or at least that forward planning would be necessary. What sort of Britain—or more realistically, England—would emerge from the Change? Decisions made now would influence events for centuries.
The recolonization of the mainland:
1: the first priority was harvesting the volunteer grain crop; this would have to be done with the most basic of hand tools—improvised sickles—and the grain for the most part threshed with flails made from dowling and broom-handles. Some more advanced tools could be salvaged from museums, living-history exhibits and so forth, but for the most part ‘brute force and massive ignorance’ would be the only available method.
Since nearly 3,000,000 acres of volunteer grain were expected to be worth harvesting (albeit yields would be a small fraction of those of a regular planting, in the neighborhood of ten bushels the acre) the amount which could be reaped was a function of the available labor. If enough could be reaped, the food situation would be fully secure. Farms which had planted “heritage” varieties of grain rather than modern hybrids were targeted for special attention, as their strains would breed true.
2: The agriculturally bleak northern islands would be stripped of most of their population to assist and for long-term resettlement—few wanted to make a living farming in Orkney if they could do it in Kent or Hampshire instead—but this would not suffice to rescue more than a fraction of the harvest.
A number of sailing vessels of substantial size had been salvaged, for transport and deep-sea fishing, and crews trained under the direction of surviving hobbyists and yachtsmen.
Exploration showed that the mainland of Europe was mostly empty of human life, a collapse as complete as that of Britain apart from the island refuges. Some of the more remote parts of northern Scandinavia and some of the Baltic islands had survivors, but these were doing fairly well on their own and beginning to organize themselves to reoccupy the area between Stockholm and southern Jutland.
The Faeroe Islands and Iceland were in different circumstances. They had escaped total collapse in the first months, but by the winter of 1998-9 they were in desperate circumstances, with their resources of hand-caught fish and sheep simply not enough to sustain even a fraction of their populations. They faced collapse, less swift than that of Eurasia as a whole, but just as terrible.
Accordingly, in February of 1999, the Council began shipping in refugees from both areas as well as from the British refuge-islands, giving priority to the young and those with farming or fishing experience. After the first harvest began in August, there was enough spare grain to send some on the return voyages to keep people alive long enough to be evacuated. Besides immediate labor needs, the Council was worried that in the long term the empty British countryside might be vulnerable to infiltration by the now more numerous Irish; the Irish survival rate had been over 25%, as opposed to well under 1% in Britain. The Principality of Ulster remained loyal to the Crown, but had its hands full with the Provisional IRA-dominated territories to its immediate west and south.
Over the next two years approximately 250,000 Icelanders and Faeroese were evacuated to southern England; another 60,000 made their way to Scandinavia, where the nascent federation of “Norrland” (see below) was taking shape and resettling the southern death-zones. Only a few thousand were left in their homelands, which could support no more.
3: With arrangements made for the gathering of the first harvest, the Council faced the task of re-starting actual agriculture.
The aim was to establish a system resembling the mixed “High Farming” of the mid-19th century, before industrial inputs or industrial-era artificial fertilizers were widely used. This would provide a reasonable standard of living, but it was no easy matter to recreate it.
Only a few thousand individuals had any real agricultural skills; even fewer really knew how to handle the recreated horse-drawn equipment. Books were some help, but often lacked the crucial details, and many skills could only be learned ‘through the hands’. Often crude ‘labor brigade’ methods would have to be used, and productivity per labor hour would accordingly be rather low at first.
Furthermore, most of the survivors would have to be organized—for the first few years at least—as laborers working under direction, learning a whole new set of skills. In addition, the surviving mainland gangs—the Brushwood Men, as they came to be called—were still a problem and defense was a necessity. Raids by the gangs began almost as soon as permanent communities were reestablished.
The Commanderies: Rural settlement
All mainland territory was declared to be the property of the Crown until otherwise specified. Appraisal teams selected areas for immediate resettlement. The qualities they looked for were land with high soil fertility, reasonable infrastructure (fencing, housing, wells or surviving gravity-flow water systems), good natural drainage, and communications that would be likely to last through the coming seasons of flood and natural decay.
Initial settlement areas stretched from Devon in the west to Kent in the east, and north into the southern Midlands. In the following years the Severn Valley, the Cotswolds, and some areas north and east of the ruins of London were brought under control and a beginning made at reoccupation.
Each resettlement zone was centered on a “Commandery”, a military-civil unit with a small garrison, headed by one of the officers who had overseen the refuge program, assisted by various technical specialists; they tended to be about twice the size of a pre-change parish. Commanderies were loosely grouped by County; that level of administration was overseen by a Lord Lieutenant, assisted by a County Council.
The ‘commanders’—local governors—were in turn were allocated some of the precious farmers and others with relevant skills, and a share of the livestock. It was anticipated that as more individuals gained the necessary skills, and as equipment and stock became available, they could gradually establish farms of their own and that land would be privatized once more.
(In practice, Commanders also tended to favor their own troops when it came time to divide land; this was regarded with some embarrassment, but not seriously restricted.)
Most settlement was nucleated, with vi
llages surrounded by a fringe of farms; as population grew, new Commanderies would be ‘budded off’ on the fringes of the unsettled zone. The Council felt that a certain density of population was necessary to sustain services such as education, to make the upkeep of roads, rails and canals economic, and to make defense and policing easier.
Each Commandery operated under the Emergency Regulations (essentially a fairly strict form of martial law), with authority to levy supplies and labor necessary for defense, internal order, public works, and the implementation of the resettlement plan.
While land eventually became fairly cheap and easily available under a “homesteading” system, capital goods and skills were scarce for a long time, and horses and oxen only gradually became plentiful. Furthermore, bramble and thorn thickets overran most previously cultivated land with astonishing speed, and once established required years of backbreaking work to clear.
Landed property therefore tended to fall into the hands of the skilled, the energetic, the lucky, the well-to-do, and the well-connected—or those who had all these characteristics. Many surviving farmers ended up as modestly prosperous landowners; many former urbanites with no assets beyond a pair of hands ended up as cottagers working for others. However, with labor scarce wages remained reasonable, and rents rather low; the average village worker lived well and had a smallholding (5-8 acres) of their own to supplement their income.
Many Commanders were of pre-Change rural backgrounds themselves, and for that reason (and because while honest and conscientious men themselves for the most part they were after all only human) they also tended to acquire substantial landed property when privatization occurred. Grumbling about this was limited by the fact that the majority of Commanders were genuinely popular with the residents of their Commanderies.
“Commander” and “squire” came to mean much the same thing, and the latter gradually replaced the former in popular usage. In addition, in later years the Crown often granted unsettled land in large holdings to those it wished to reward, on condition that they oversee and finance its settlement.
Without entirely meaning to, the Council’s initial decisions tended to recreate the traditional ‘three-tier’ system of English rural settlement; village/farm/manor.
The villages were inhabited mostly by cottagers/laborers, with a fair sprinkling of craftworkers and service-providers (blacksmiths, weavers, tailors, innkeepers, wheelwrights, maltsters etc.); the farms were divided between yeoman-owners and tenants (themselves often prosperous and preferring to keep their capital in tools and stock rather than tying it up in land); and there was a modestly prosperous gentry, often involved in local government or military service.
Apprenticeship and the Skills Program:
Communication between Commanderies was by road and by animal-or hand-powered carts on the railways, and eventually by reconditioned canals. A program to maintain the essential routes was set in motion, involving labor-levies under the direction of a cadre of specialists.
Non-agricultural areas of the economy faced the same skills shortage as farming. For some time ordinary consumer goods—clothes, hand-tools, shoes—could be salvaged from urban stocks. Obviously this was a wasting resource, however, and some things—farming equipment, millwork, sailing vessels, wagons, and a thousand others—had to be manufactured and maintained as soon as possible.
Individuals with the relevant skills were identified, and volunteers (where possible) “assigned” to learn from them.
First priority was given to items simply not available, such as animal-drawn plows and reaping machines, and farrier-blacksmith training. However, a long-term program to reestablish the manufacture of basic consumer goods such as cloth and leatherwork was also put in hand, and to maintain skills such as thatching, bricklaying, masonry, boatbuilding, and so forth.
Education:
It was obvious that the elaborate formal educational hierarchies of pre-Change society were no longer sustainable. Once the first emergency was past, most people would learn their basic life-skills the way children and youth had from time immemorial—from their parents, by example, and through apprenticeship.
At the same time, the Council was determined that there would be no relapse into mass illiteracy.
From CY 2 on, village and town schools were established. A new Act mandated six months of classwork from ages six to fourteen for all children.
In CY3 Winchester College was reopened as a public (private secondary) school, the first since the Change, with emphasis on general education, including estate management, and a cadet program.
Various specialist schools (nursing, medical, engineering) were also established, leading up to the opening of Winchester University in CY7; a second center was established at Oxford in CY24. A naval/military academy was also opened at Portsmouth.
A salvage program for books and works of art, first in Britain and then (to a lesser degree) in Europe was instituted as early as CY3; it focused on getting the most important heirloom artifacts in places where they’d be sheltered from the weather and available as population and wealth grew once more.
Winchester:
When the resettlement began, London was already a sodden burnt-out mass of ruins, and rapidly became worse. Winchester had an excellent location, good communications, and historic associations. The 18th-century core of the old Saxon royal city was reoccupied in CY2, and became the center of administration, education, and much of such manufacturing as was possible.
Military:
Proclamations under the Emergency Powers acts in CY1 rendered all surviving adults liable for Territorial Militia service. During the first six months this was very much a reality, as thousands were required to turn out to defend the island refuges, mostly with improvised pikes, axes, sharpened shovels, and clubs.
Subsequently, all adults were required to keep and practice with a longbow, and to keep a sword, buckler, helmet, and jack (mail shirt or brigandine). Exemptions and entrance requirements made the militia in practice largely (though not entirely) a male preserve. The militia also provided an organized force subject to call-up for emergency duty; fire, flood, and other natural catastrophes.
(Archery became a favorite sport nearly everywhere, the more so as hunting for the pot assumed some importance in most rural areas.)
The regular military was based on the units which had established the refuges, and was from the beginning a volunteer force. It was also quite modest in size; until the first Moorish raids in CY6, only internal-security duties were necessary, and much of its time was taken up with public works.
The Regular army consisted of ‘light’ forces—mounted-infantry bowmen—and ‘heavy’. The latter were men-at-arms equipped roughly in 15th-century style, and capable of acting as shock cavalry or heavy infantry at need. There was a small cadre of engineers, capable of building and besieging fortifications, but for the most working on civil projects.
The Royal Navy was likewise modest in size and mostly part-time; RN ships were usually occupied with carrying freight, exploration and patrol work. As civilian merchant shippers reemerged towards the end of the first decade of the Change, RN vessels dropped out of the ordinary carrying trade.
Demography:
The population of Britain proper (see below for “Ireland”) was approximately 380,000 as of January of CY2.
The relocation program brought almost all the population of the ‘northern isles’ to southern England, leaving less than ten thousand behind—few wanted to risk the isolation that would follow when most had left Man, or Orkney, or Lewis or Skye.
The 250,000 English and 100,000 Scots and Welsh in the resettlement zones of southern England were soon joined by roughly 250,000 Icelanders and 40,000 Faeroese, for a total of 650,000.
Thereafter Britain’s population grew mainly by natural increase and secondarily by a steady trickle of immigration, at first from Ireland, and then from Ireland and the East Baltic area (Balts, Poles, and Finns). Some emigration to the mainland coloni
es (see below) began in the later part of the first decade.
After the first Change Year, with food abundant and good preventative medicine, death rates were only slightly higher than in pre-Change Britain; averages were in the 6-7 per 1000 per year range. Infant mortality in particular was largely unchanged. The main effect of the loss of high-tech medical care was that very old, very ill people died quickly rather than lingering for several years. Average lifespans remained in the 70’s for both sexes, after a fairly considerable ‘spike’ in mortality among the elderly in the first two Change Years.
Birth-rates were depressed for most of the first twelve months after the Change by the only barely adequate diet and very heavy burden of physical labor.
Contraception remained well-understood and available, if in varieties more clumsy and inconvenient than before—eg., intrauterine loops and barrier methods rather than the pill.
However, with children once more a long-term economic asset—and with competing satisfactions once more limited—birth-rates increased sharply in the post-Change era.
By CY 5-6, age at first marriage had stabilized around 23-24 for women and a year or two later for men.
Total Fertility Rates (median number of children per woman over her lifetime) rose to approximately 3.5 and thereafter fluctuated in the 3.3-4 range; allowing for the lower infant and overall mortality and the high degree of nuptiality this is roughly equivalent to what was common throughout most of the 18th century, or at the height of the post-WWII baby boom in the 1950’s. (For purposes of comparison the TFR for pre-Change Britain was 1.7 in 1998.)
Hence by the end of the first Change decade, the population was growing quite rapidly, usually at around 2% per annum. This growth accelerated as age distribution also reverted to an earlier pattern, with relatively fewer older people, and a large percentage of children and young adults in their primary reproductive years. By the end of the first generation—CY 25—a majority of the inhabitants of the Kingdom were those born after that fateful March 18th.
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