The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

by Brian Fagan

  Map of Huanyaputina area, Peru

  many areas. In China, the sun was red and dim, with large sunspots. Volcanic events produced at least four more major cold episodes dur-

  ing the seventeenth century, which is remarkable for having at least six climatically significant eruptions.6 None rivaled summer 1601, but 1641-43, 1666-69, 1675, and 1698-99 experienced major cold spikes connected with volcanic activity. The identity of these eruptions remains unknown except for that of January 4, 1641, when Mount Parker on Mindanao in the Philippines erupted with a noise "like musketry." Wrote an anonymous Spanish eyewitness: "By noon we saw a great darkness approaching from the south which gradually spread over the entire hemisphere. . . . By 1 pm we found ourselves in total night and at 2 pm in such profound darkness that we could not see our hands before our eyes."7 A nearby Spanish flotilla lit lanterns at midday and frantically shoveled ash off its decks, fearing in the darkness "the Judgement Day to be at hand." The dust from the eruption affected temperatures worldwide.

  Most European farmers still practiced subsistence agriculture familiar to their ancestors since long before medieval times. But change was afoot, stimulated by the growth of profitable markets in growing cities and by the increasing risks of subsistence farming. Slowly and steadily, as they battled unpredictable and more stormy climates, anonymous villagers experimented with new agricultural methods. They adapted to new climatic regimes where extremes of cold, heat, and rainfall were more commonplace and the danger of food shortages correspondingly greater.

  The English were not the first to innovate. A low technology agricultural revolution had begun in Flanders and the Netherlands as early as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Farmers everywhere still used scythes for cutting the heads of grain, also light plows pulled by animals wearing draught collars. They built simple windmills to drain and water their land. Illiterate, unaware of agricultural innovations elsewhere, but with a vast experience of their demanding environments, Flemish and Dutch farmers experimented with lay farming, the deliberate growing of animal forage and cultivated grass for cattle. Instead of letting valuable hectares lie fallow, they planted field peas, beans, and especially nitrogen-rich clover, all of which provided food for humans and beasts, as well as buckwheat, furze, and turnips for feeding animals. The amount of fallow land contracted drastically until it was virtually nonexistent.

  Late medieval Flanders developed these innovations at a time when the population was growing slowly, despite a high density of people on the land. With abundant forage, animal husbandry assumed ever greater importance. More manure, meat, wool, and leather came onto the market as the new agriculture broke the vicious cycle of overdependence on grain. At the same time, farmers now chose fields that had been in use for some time for cereals and sowed them with grass, or, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with clover. Cattle grazed on the meadow for five years or more. The now well-fertilized soil was then plowed and planted with cereals again. This self-perpetuating cycle led to much more productive land, especially when combined with the planting and rapid harvesting of turnips directly after harvesting rye or flax. In addition, the farmers diversified into purely industrial crops like flax, mustard, and hops, the last for brewing beer.

  The revolution in agricultural practice came at a time when massive grain imports from Baltic ports were undermining local grain production. Inevitably and profitably, the farmers specialized away from subsistence farming. Adjustment to cycles of cold and higher rainfall were easy enough in a diversified agricultural economy with ready access to grain from Baltic ports and the waterways to transport it. The greatest problem was rising sea levels. In the lowest lying coastal areas, villages made systematic efforts to protect their communities with earthen dikes that closed off natural inlets and guarded against high tides and storm surges. The invention of water-pumping windmills that could be turned into the wind made it possible to pump enclosed fields dry, then dig out the resulting peat and sell it for fuel.

  The enduring Dutch achievement was land reclamation that transformed an entire country. As professional sea wall engineering in the hands of experts gradually replaced the haphazard local efforts, Holland's farmland grew by a third-roughly 100,000 hectares-between the late sixteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Most of this land was reclaimed between 1600 and 1650. The Dutch possessed sufficient technological expertise and a sufficiently flexible social organization to diffuse the worst effects of short-term climatic change. The Little Ice Age may have imposed more benefits than costs on the Dutch. Extensive land reclamation turned liabilities into assets so powerful that they helped forge the first modern economy in Europe.8

  The farming revolution in the Low Countries was accompanied by a rapid diminution of individual landholdings at a time of greater crop yields and rising farmer's income per hectare. These factors made small holdings reasonably efficient for farm owners living close to a market town. The competence and competitiveness of Dutch and Flemish farmers was unique in Europe. Their methods did not spread into England until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and into France still later. The custom and prejudice of generations kept innovation at bay.

  By 1600, the influence of Holland and Flanders was already felt around London, where market gardens grew "cabbages, colleflours, turnips, carrots, parsnips and peas."9 Through the century, agricultural specialization increased and markets became larger and more attuned to more narrowly focused commercial agriculture. But specialization and purely commercial farming were held in check by the needs of small landowners and tenants, and those living on communal lands, who continued to practice subsistence agriculture. A steady stream of farming writers urged landowners to improve their methods, most famous among them Walter Blith, who advocated the use of water meadows, drainage of wet soils, enclosure to intensify production, and manures. He inveighed against the subsistence farmer: "He will toyle all his days himselfe and Family for nothing, in and upon his common arable fielde land; up early and downe late, drudge and moyle and ware out himself and family.""' Blith and his contemporaries kept a close eye on agricultural developments across the North Sea, but just how influential their writings were is debatable. In most cases, farmers probably copied their neighbors or landlords in adopting new practices.

  The changes and experiments paid off. A century after Queen Elizabeth, England's population was nearly 7 million, with enough grain for everyone, far above the 4 million figure at the time of the Black Death. The country was self-sufficient in all cereals except oats, which came from Ireland. Food prices moved over less extreme ranges. Britain was exporting grain "of all sorts to Africa, the Canaries, Denmark and Norway, Ireland, Italy, Madeira, Newfoundland, Portugal, Russia, Scotland, Sweden, Venice, Guernsey and the English plantations."I I The amounts exported were tiny by modern standards, but the stimulus to domestic production was significant. In Daniel Defoe's words, Britain became "a corn country" where widespread famine was unknown. Intensive production and crop diversification guarded against poor grain harvests.

  The changes came, above all, from self-improvement, from individual landowners adapting to cooler weather, more difficult farming conditions, and opportunities in the marketplace. By 1660, Dutch immigrants had introduced the more cold-resistant turnip to eastern England, where it was planted in September after the harvest on what would have been fallow land, then fed to milking cows and fattening bullocks for the London market. Farmers turned to turnips with alacrity because of the cooler, often dry weather, for spring droughts often led to poor hay crops. Green turnip tops were an excellent fodder substitute for hay. In 1661, the churchwarden of Hingham in Norfolk complained of drought and little hay for the following winter. Fortunately, it rained in July and "the want of hay was supplied by the growing of turnips." 12 In Wiltshire, farmers raised sheep on water meadows and used them to manure arable higher ground. A thousand sheep would manure half a hectare overnight. The most spectacular changes came in eastern England, where the low-lying fe
nlands were a watery land inhabited by cattle herders, fowlers, and fisherfolk with a deep distrust of outsiders. Over the century, the Dutch engineer Cornelius Vermuyden, working with large landowners and the Crown, reclaimed over 155,000 hectares of fenland, creating some of the richest arable land in Britain. Sown mainly in oats and coleseed for animal fodder (the latter another Dutch import), the fens soon became a highly productive center of specialized farming for both food and industrial crops. Coastal marshes along the Lincolnshire coast were drained and used as sheep pasturage. English farmers were slowly breaking free of the tyranny of cereals that would beset France for two more centuries.

  New crops, new farming methods, extensive manuring, and improved drainage: the major advances came first in eastern and western areas outside the confines of the old open-field regions. The ancient open-field village system still flourished in the fertile Midlands, where farmers cultivated arable land in narrow strips. Such communal agriculture was not conducive to experimentation and individual initiative. But even in the heart of subsistence farming country, change was afoot as communities took up hitherto waste land and farmed it as separate, hedged fields. Much of this land was carefully drained with the latest methods, manured, and often planted with turnips and other root crops. Many farmers wedded to the old ways saw the advantages of the new. But the full benefits of the new agriculture could not be realized without the enclosure of larger parcels of land.

  In general terms, enclosure meant the extinction of common rights over farmlands and parish hectarage.13 Scattered holdings in open fields were consolidated into compact blocks, usually fenced or hedged off, then held "in severalty," in other words reserved for the sole use of individual owners or their tenants. Enclosure had begun in medieval times with the creation of large monastic estates and the gradual enclosure of strip fields and common land into bigger, more productive units, especially to increase wool production. Much such activity was a process of informal negotiation between families and individuals, freeholders and tenants with the simple objective of achieving more rational layout of farming land. By 1650, most peasants understood that enclosure was the only way they could break out of the subsistence farmer's vicious circle of living from harvest to harvest and continually risking hunger. Communal agriculture was not the answer, because the land could yield little more without proper drainage and manuring. Manure required more livestock, which in turn compelled more fodder for cold weather feed, in an era of numerous severe winters. Enclosure allowed farmers to combine grain cultivation with stock raising, to grow new fodder crops instead of fallowing land. Clover and other animal feeds added nitrogen to the soil and renewed it for cereals. The new circle of drainage, soil preparation, stock, and crops could double productivity.

  From 1660 onward, enclosure proceeded briskly, much of it by communal agreement and negotiation. There were sporadic protests by small landowners and the dispossessed against the engrossing of farms. New dikes were thrown down, Dutch engineers in the fens thrown into the water and prodded with poles. But the inexorable forces of economic progress, increasingly colder climate, and history were against the small landowner with little capital and farmers with ill-defined rights to their land. A new age of landlord and tenant farming was dawning, where individual peasant rights were of little importance. In the short term, there were serious individual hardships at a time of increasing social tensions. In the long term, the enormous material benefits freed Britain from the constant subsistence crises that enveloped their neighbors across the Channel.

  Seventeenth-century British farmers scorned an American import, the potato, whose tubers they regarded as barely suitable for animals. In the end, however, the wealth generated by the potato would exceed all the gold and silver exported from the Americas. A single year's global potato harvest today is worth more than $100 billion.

  A Spaniard returning home from South America brought the first potato to Europe in about 1570.14 The unspectacular, lumpy tuber may have been an afterthought, a curio stuffed into a traveler's baggage to impress relatives back home. Not that the potato was new to the conquistadors. Indian farmers throughout the Andes cultivated many varieties of this important staple, often high on exposed hillsides. The tubers were misshapen and often downright ugly, but they could be freeze-dried, were rich in essential nutrients, and were easily stored.

  Potatoes prevent scurvy, provide quick and cheap meals for farm laborers and their families, and require but the simplest of implements to plant and harvest. Combined with milk or other dairy products, they made up a diet that was far more complete nutritionally than the bread- and cereal-based diets of sixteenth-century Europe. You would think that Europeans would have embraced such a crop with immediate enthusiasm, but they did not.

  Conquistadors regarded potatoes and the Andean Indians who grew them with contempt. The potato was poor people's food, vastly inferior to bread. Inevitably, strong social prejudice accompanied the few tubers that came to Europe. After beginning their European career feeding patients in a Seville hospital for the poor in 1573, potatoes soon became a botanical curiosity, even a luxury food, not a food for the indigent.

  The new plant spread from garden to garden in the hands of ardent botanists and their wealthy patrons. Potatoes appeared in the pages of herbals, where readers learned that the Italians ate them "in a similar fashion to truffles."15 In 1620, the English physician Tobias Venner praised them in his Via Recta ad Vitam Longam ("The Right Road to a Long Life") as "though somewhat windie, verie substantiall, good and restorative." He recommended roasting them in embers, then dunking them in wine. However cooked, "they are very pleasant to the taste and doe wonderfully comfort, nourish and strengthen the bodie." Venner prescribed them for the aged and remarked that the potato "incites to Venus." 16 Despite these good reviews, many people thought them exotic and poisonous. Potatoes were a root crop, not the kind of leafy plant that could flavor or garnish roast meat. They occasionally appeared on royal menus as a seasonal food and were an expensive luxury. The English, not yet meat and potatoes folk, considered the potato an almost indelicate plant that did not belong in the diet of a seventeenth-century gentleman.

  In 1662, a Mr. Buckland, a Somersetshire landowner, wrote to the Royal Society of London arguing that potatoes might help protect the country against famine. The Agriculture Committee of the Society promptly agreed and urged its landowning Fellows to plant such a crop. John Evelyn, the Society's gardening expert, wrote that potatoes would be good insurance against a bad harvest year, if for nothing else than to feed one's servants. In 1664, a pamphleteer named John Forster argued in a book entitled England's Happiness Increased: A Sure and Easie Remedy against the Succeeding Dearth Years that the potato was a sure remedy for food shortages, especially when mixed with wheat flour. Deep-rooted social prejudices among the political and scientific elite prevented them from setting an example and eating potato dishes. As for the poor, many of them preferred to go hungry than to give up their bread.

  French peasants resisted potatoes for generations. In bad years, they made do with inferior or slightly moldy grain, suffered under ever higher prices, became hungry, and often joined bread riots. The potato was still an exotic food in France as late as 1750 and even then shunned by most gourmands. Burgundy farmers were forbidden to plant potatoes, as they were said to cause leprosy, the white nodular tubers resembling the deformed hands and feet of lepers. Denis Diderot wrote in his great Encyclopaedie (1751-76): "This root, however one cooks it, is insipid and starchy. ... One blames, and with reason, the potato for its windiness; but what is a question of wind to the virile organs of the peasant and the worker."17

  In England, the potato was grown as animal fodder, then as food for the poor, with flourishing potato markets in towns like Wigan in the north by 1700. Across the Irish Sea, the Irish rapidly embraced the potato as far more than a supplement. It was a potential solution to their food shortages. Quite apart from other considerations, potatoes were far more productive than oats
, especially for poor people without money to pay a miller to grind their grain. Soon the Irish poor depended on potatoes to the virtual exclusion of anything else, a reliance that laid the foundations for catastrophe.

  The sun is only one of a multitude-a single star among millions-thousands of which, most likely, exceed him in brilliance. He is only a private in the host of heaven. But he alone ... is near enough to affect terrestrial affairs in any sensible degree, and his influence on them ... is more than mere control and dominance.

  -Charles Young, Old Farmers Almanac, 1766

  etween 1680 and 1730, the coldest cycle of the Little Ice Age, temperatures plummeted, the growing season in England was about five weeks shorter than it was during the twentieth century's warmest decades. The number of days each winter with snow on the ground in Britain and the Netherlands rose to between twenty and thirty, as opposed to two to ten days through most of the twentieth century.' The winter of 1683/84 was so cold that the ground froze to a depth of more than a meter in parts of southwestern England and belts of sea ice appeared along the coasts of southeastern England and northern France. The ice lay thirty to forty kilometers offshore along parts of the Dutch coast. Many harbors were so choked with ice that shipping halted throughout the North Sea.

  Conditions around Iceland were now exceptionally severe. Sea ice often blocked the Denmark Strait throughout the summer. In 1695, ice surrounded the entire coast of Iceland for much of the year, halting all ship traffic. The inshore cod fishery failed completely, partly because the fish may have moved offshore into slightly warmer water, but also because of the islanders' primitive fishing technology and open boats. On several occasions between 1695 and 1728, inhabitants of the Orkney Islands off northern Scotland were startled to see an Inuit in his kayak paddling off their coasts. On one memorable occasion, a kayaker came as far south as the River Don near Aberdeen. These solitary Arctic hunters had probably spent weeks marooned on large ice floes. As late as 1756, sea ice surrounded much of Iceland for as many as thirty weeks a year.