The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (21 page)

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 fenlands 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.