I read a fascinating old history article the other day about the collapse of the English economy in the 14th century. A nice dose of historical context, my paternal ancestors probably lived through this.
In the 1310s and 1320s England suffered famine, typhoid, livestock dieoff, inflation, economic decline, and an oppressive aristocracy that literally stole food from the poor and gave it to the rich ("To seek silver for the king, I sold my seed" goes one song from the period). A series of crop failures due to bad weather led to famine. Many of the poorest, who were subsisting on 1 or 2 acres, were pushed off their marginal lands. Oxen (the main “tractor” of the day) and sheep died in droves in various disease outbreaks. Food shortages were widespread, and the poorest simply dropped dead.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', ' ')THE EXPANSION OF THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES IS A commonplace of economic history. Substantial population growth brought rising land values, rising corn prices, and falling real wages. Pressure on the land led to a considerable extension of the area of cultivation as woodland, fen and waste were reclaimed for the plough. With a population of possibly more than five millions by the turn of the fourteenth century, the countryside of England may have been as full as at any time before the eighteenth century. Equally commonplace is the contraction of the later middle ages as these trends were all reversed. In an era of falling population, wages rose as corn prices and land values dwindled. Arable dropped out of use, much of it never again to be tilled, tenements fell vacant, villages were deserted, and encroaching woodlands in some areas took partial revenge for the earlier victory of the plough…
It once seemed obvious: the Black Death of 1348-9 was the clear divider between expansion and contraction, a freak epidemic which cut the population by at least a third. But since the last war economic historians in Western Europe, notably in England Professor M. M. Postan, have come to argue that the seeds of the population decline and agrarian contraction are to be found in the very period of expansion, that this expansion had the makings of its own nemesis. The plough was forced to take over poor, marginal soils which after a while brought diminishing returns; and as the very limits of cultivation were reached, the colonization of new land more or less petered out. Yet all this while population had been growing and the poverty-stricken rural proletariat of landless and near-landless increasing its numbers. By the early fourteenth century population had outgrown resources…”
PeakOil is You
You think we have it bad now? – the 1316 English famine
You think we have it bad now? – the 1316 English famine
by Loki » Wed 18 May 2011, 21:58:52
The result? Famine and mass suffering. The author writes that in “some areas Malthusian causes seem to have been in operation. The drying-up of all available sources of colonizable land, falling crop yields from exhausted soils, proliferation of smallholders on the verge of starvation, and declining opportunities resulting in a drop in marriage- and birth-rates could all have played their part in some places....”
Poor people ate what they could find, and if they couldn't find anything resembling food, they died in the streets:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')rokelowe claimed that even horse-meat was too expensive, and he and other writers referred to the poor being forced to eat dogs, cats and other "unclean things". Rumours of cannibalism - of people stealing children to eat them - may have been exaggerated but they testify to the stark horror which this period of extreme famine impressed upon the memories of contemporaries….The bodies of paupers, dead of starvation, littered city streets.
Things were really bad for a decade or so, got sort of better for a while, then the Black Death hit in the 1340s, killing off a third or so of the population. Bring out your dead!
Makes our challenges 700 years later look a little less formidable, at least in the developed world. Imagine being the poor bastard born an English peasant in 1300. A lifetime of repression, famine, and pestilence to look forward to. Cue Monte Python skit.
SOURCE: The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England 1315-1322 Author(s): Ian Kershaw Source: Past & Present, No. 59 (May, 1973), pp. 3-50
A garden will make your rations go further.
-
Loki - Expert
- Posts: 3509
- Joined: Sat 08 Apr 2006, 03:00:00
- Location: Oregon
Re: You think we have it bad now? – the 1316 English famine
by Sixstrings » Wed 18 May 2011, 22:08:22
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Loki', '[')b]Makes our challenges 700 years later look a little less formidable, at least in the developed world. Imagine being the poor bastard born an English peasant in 1300. A lifetime of repression, famine, and pestilence to look forward to. Cue Monte Python skit.
I was just watching a show on the little ice age earlier.. I forget if that had started up as of 1316.. but yes there was a period there where the West was just devastated from overpopulation then climate change ice age, that forced people to huddle inside more to keep warm and the rats sought shelter too and they had fleas with plague that had come over on rats aboard Asia trade ships and voila malthusian apocalyptic horror ensued.
The church officially blamed "witches" for the ice age catastrophe.. in one Swiss canton alone, a thousand people were burned at the stake for witchcraft in one year. And then you had the "flagellant" movement, bands of fanatics roaming from town to town moaning and whiping themselves bloody. Yup Loki, we don't know nothin' about real doom.
On the other hand they didn't have to worry about nuclear war or nuke plant meltdowns.The most grim reality of all is that die-off is good.. after all the plagues, suddenly there was plenty of land and resources to go around and the economy boomed and the Renaissance was born.
(incidentally there were earlier plagues from centuries before.. I think it was around 900 that the Byzantines nearly managed to conquer the fallen western roman empire. It was a horrifically bloody war and then the black death hit and just wiped everybody out. If not for that Byzantium could have held on to the conquests. Even the emperor got plague; he survived but was a bit brain addled thereafter).
-
Sixstrings - Fusion
- Posts: 15160
- Joined: Tue 08 Jul 2008, 03:00:00
Re: You think we have it bad now? – the 1316 English famine
by Pops » Thu 19 May 2011, 14:39:59
I think two of the biggest threats are speculation and monocropping and both are setting up to happen pretty much as they did in Ireland in the 1800s - except this time on a global scale.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')y the 1820s, 80 percent of all Ireland's land was owned by British and Scottish landlords, and 25 percent of all land was completely unused for any purpose except real estate speculation. Some 75 percent of what was used, was in grain or horse/cattle pasture, most of this for export by merchants under London's domination.
Link$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')y the 1820s, 80 percent of all Ireland's land was owned by British and Scottish landlords, and 25 percent of all land was completely unused for any purpose except real estate speculation. Some 75 percent of what was used, was in grain or horse/cattle pasture, most of this for export by merchants under London's domination.
We've all heard that speculators like George Soros are buying up farmland:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')decoagro SA, the South American farmland venture backed by billionaire investor George Soros, raised $314 million from its U.S. initial public offering after pricing the shares at the bottom of the range....
Investing in Adecoagro is “a way to play the potential global shortage of food, especially in emerging markets,” Francis Gaskins, president of Marina del Rey, California-based IPOdesktop.com, said in a note today.
It's the "In" thing to do...
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'B')ut on a recent afternoon, The Observer had a conversation of a different sort about agricultural pursuits with a hedge fund manager he'd met at one of the many dark-paneled private clubs in midtown a few weeks prior. "A friend of mine is actually the largest owner of agricultural land in Uruguay," said the hedge fund manager. "He's a year older than I am. We're somewhere [around] the 15th-largest farmers in America right now."
"We," as in, his hedge fund.
---
And just like the Irish peasants we're dependent on just one variety of potato:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n the 1800s, the Irish solved their problem of feeding a growing population by planting potatoes. Specifically, they planted the "lumper" potato variety. And since potatoes can be propagated vegetatively, all of these lumpers were clones, genetically identical to one another.
The lumper fed Ireland for a time, but it also set the stage for human and economic ruin. Evolutionary theory suggests that populations with low genetic variation are more vulnerable to changing environmental conditions than are diverse populations. The Irish potato clones were certainly low on genetic variation, so when the environment changed and a potato disease swept through the country in the 1840s, the potatoes (and the people who depended upon them) were devastated.
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evolibrar ... culture_02
Maybe surprising maybe not, today half the potatoes grown in the world are "Burbank Russets" and you know why right? Because that's the potato Ronald Mcdonald prefers! I've read there are over 5,000 varieties of potato described, each Peruvian farmer is said to have had several different varieties to be used in specific spots on his plot, maybe shady or sunny side, wetter or droughty parts of his hillside.
Here are some other examples, this is worldwide:
- Six varieties of corn -> 46 percent of the crop
Nine varieties of wheat -> half of the wheat crop
Two types of peas -> 96 percent of the pea crop.
There are a lot of other problems but I think they will be mostly "solved" simply because we'll all come in even in the race-to-the-bottom and so eat much lower on the hog in the future and that will make what we do grow go much farther. It's even cheaper to eat the food we feed our food than buying a value meal if you can believe it.
So the logical solution is to help that process along and quit feeding our food (corn and beans) to the competition (hogs and chickens).
So quit buying meat/milk/eggs from the grain speculators and start buying grass based dairy & beef and raise a few hens on table scraps.
Quit buying industrial produce from chain stores and buy as much in season as possible from local guys at the farmers market or independent grocer if there are any left and maybe some funny sounding stuff in our own gardens.
http://soil.gsfc.nasa.gov/soilfert/npk.htm
http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2 ... new-report
http://www.geol.umd.edu/sgc/lectures/biosphere.html
