The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (40 page)

2. Both quotes in this paragraph from Jean Grove, The Little Ice Age (London:
Routledge, 1988), 21-22. Grove's monograph is one of the few book-length studies
of the Little Ice Age and is seminal, if, inevitably, outdated in places. Hermann Flohn and Roberto Fantechi, The Climate of Europe: Past, Present, and Future (Dordrecht, Germany: D. Reidel, 1984) offers another technical analysis.

3. Magnusson and Palsson, The Vinland Sagas, 78.

4. Kirsten A. Seaver, The Frozen Echo: Greenland and the Exploration of North
America, ca. A.D. 1000-1500 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 46. This
work is an authoritative study of the early settlement of the north during the warmer
centuries. For the Vikings generally, see the lavishly illustrated volume: William W.
Fitzhugh and Elisabeth A. Ward, eds., Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga (Washington,
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000).

5. The term "Gothic" was coined by Renaissance scholars, who considered the
style the epitome of grotesque savagery. Subsequently, contempt has turned to admiration and near adoration.

6. Until the eighteenth century, farmers were described with a variety of terms
that denoted their status in the community rather than their occupation. In the sixteenth century, for example, most people were engaged in some form of farming as
well as other occupations at the same time. For instance, almost all country clergymen were farmers, since much of their living came in the form of land. Craftspeople,
miners, and many other combined these occupations with seasonal work on the
land. For the purposes of this book, I use the term farmer generically, as the context
of its use is usually obvious.

7. Norman Davies, Europe: A History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996),
356. John Mundy, Europe in the High Middle Ages, 1150-1309, 2nd ed. (New York
and London: Longman, 1991) is another useful source.

CHAPTER 2

The excerpt from Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, is translated
by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1996), 1-2.

1. Quote from the Annals of London from M. L. Parry, Climatic Change, Agriculture, and Settlement, 34. The literature on the North Atlantic Oscillation is enormous and hard to track. Here are some useful references with bibliographies: Edward R. Cook et al., "A Reconstruction of the North Atlantic Oscillation using
tree-ring chronologies from North America and Europe," The Holocene 8(1) (1998):
9-17; Jurg Luterbacher et al., "Reconstruction of monthly NAO and EU indices
back to A.D. 1675," Geophysical Research Letter, September 1, 1999: 2745-2748;
M. J. Rodwell and others, "Oceanic forcing of the wintertime North Atlantic Oscillation and European climate," Nature 398: 320-323.

2. Cooling in the Arctic and the subsequent unpredictable conditions are well
covered by Hubert Lamb, Climate, History and the Modern World. The best source
on the famine of 1316 is William Chester Jordan's The Great Famine (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1996), which offers a comprehensive analysis and an im pressive bibliography. I have relied on this important work extensively in this chapter. Barbara W. Tuchman's A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1978) is a sweeping account of the century, which I also drew
on here.The quotes in this paragraph are as follows:"E Floribus chronicum, etc., auctore Bernardo Guidonia," Martin Bouquet, et al., eds., Recuil des Historians des
Gaules et de la France, 24 vols. (Paris, 1738-1904). 21:725."Excerpta e memoriali
historiarum Johannis a sancto Victore," Bouquet et al., eds., Recuil des Historians,
21, 661."Extraits de la chronique attribuee a jean Desnouelles," Bouquet et al., eds.,
Recuil des Historians, 21, 197. I am deeply grateful to Professor William Jordan of
Princeton University for kindly researching and translating these quotes for me.

3. Isaiah 5:25.

4. Henry S. Lucas, "The Great European Famine of 1315, 1316, and 1317,"
Speculum 5(4) (1930): 357.

5. Salzburg chronicler quoted from Jordan, The Great Famine, 18.
6. Ibid., 24.

7. Quotes from J. Z. Titow, "Evidence of weather in the account rolls of the Bishopric of Winchester," Economic History Review 12 (1960): 368.

8. The Neustadt vineyard research was the work of nineteenth-century German
antiquarian Friedrich Dochnal. Quoted and discussed by Jordan, The Great Famine,
34-35.

9. Lucas, op. cit. (1930), 359.

10. Both quotes in this paragraph from Jordan, The Great Famine, 147. Abbott
Gilles le Muisit: Henri Lemaitre, ed., Chronique etAnnales de Gilles le Muisit, abbe de
Saint-Martin de Tournai (1272-1352) (Paris: Ancon, 1912).

11. Guillaume de Nangis quoted from Henry S. Lucas, "The Great European
Famine," 359.

PART Two COOLING BEGINS

The excerpt from the Second Towneley Shepherd's Play is from John Spiers, Medieval English Poetry: The Neo-Chaucerian Tradition (London: Faber and Faber,
1957), 337. For the construction of the cycle itself, see John Gardner, The Construction of the Wakefield Cycle (Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press,
1974).

The quote by Jan de Vries is from his "Measuring the Impact of Climate on History: The Search for Appropriate Methodologies," in Robert I. Rotberg and
Theodore K. Rabb, Climate and History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1981), 22.

CHAPTER 3

The quote by Francois Matthes is from his "Report of Committee on Glaciers,"
Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 21 (1940): 396-406.

1. Francois Matthes, "Report of Committee on Glaciers," Transactions of the
American Geophysical Union 20 (1939): 518-523. For a general essay on climate
change, the interested reader can do no better than George Philander's Is the Temperature Rising? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). See also Hubert Lamb's
monumental Climate Present, Past, and Future, 2 vols. (London: Methuen, 1977).

2. Quotes in this paragraph from Hubert Lamb and Knud Frydendahl, Historic
Storms of the North Sea, British Isles and Northwestern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 93. I. B. Gram-Jenson, Sea Floods (Copenhagen:
Danish Meteorological Institute, 1985) is a short, more technical work on the subject from the Danish perspective. See also A. M. J. De Kraker, "A Method to Assess
the Impact of High Tides, Storms and Sea Surges as Vital Elements in Climatic History," Climatic Change 43(1) (1999): 287-302.

3. Quoted from Jordan, The Great Famine, 24.

4. Christian Pfister, "The Little Ice Age: Thermal and Wetness Indices, in Rotberg and Rabb, Climate and History, 85-116.

5. A brief summary of tree-ring curves can be found in Keith R. Briffa and Timothy J. Osborn, "Seeing the Wood from the Trees," Science 284 (1999): 926-927.

6. Wallace S. Broecker, "Chaotic Climate," Scientific American, January 1990:
59-56, discusses the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt.

7. For deep water production theories, see Wallace S. Broecker, Stewart Sutherland, and Tsung-Hung Peng, "A Possible 20th-Century Slowdown of Southern
Ocean Deep Water Formation," Science 286 (1999): 1132-1135.

CHAPTER 4

The excerpt from Kongugs Skuggsjd (The King's Mirror) is from Kirsten Seaver,
The Frozen Echo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 112.

1. See ibid., also Fitzhugh and Ward, eds., Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga. The
lavishly illustrated Fitzhugh and Ward volume, published to coincide with a major
museum exhibit, is a superb compilation of essays on all aspects of Viking and Norse
archaeology and history for the general reader. There are excellent articles on recent
archaeological finds at both Norse settlements.

2. Seaver, The Frozen Echo, 237.

3. This passage draws on Lamb and Frydendahl, Historic Storms.
4. Seaver, The Frozen Echo, 104.

5. A seminal, multidisciplinary paper on Norse abandonment of the Western Settlement and Nipaatsoq can be found in L. K. Barlow et al., "Interdisciplinary Investigations of the end of the Norse Western Settlement in Greenland," The Holocene
7(4) (1997): 489-500.

6. Joel Berglund, "The Farm Beneath the Sand," in Fitzhugh and Ward, Vikings:
The North Atlantic Saga, 295-303.

7. The literature on cod is enormous. Mark Kurlansky, Cod: A Biography of the
Fish that Changed the World (New York: Walker, 1998). Harold A. Innis, The Cod
Fisheries: The History of an International Economy (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1954) is still authoritative.

8. Discussion in Grove, op. cit. (1988), Chapter 12.

9. Mark Kurlansky's The Basque History of the World (New York: Walker, 1999)
discusses the Basque expansion.

10. E. M. Carus Wilson, "The Iceland Trade," in Eileen Power and M. M.
Postan, eds., Studies in English Trade in the Fifteenth Century (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1933), 180.

11. Herring fisheries are discussed by Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude's definitive The First Modern Economy: Success, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy 1500-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

12. Doggers: see Wilson, "The Iceland Trade," also Sean McGrail, Ancient Boats
in N. W. Europe: The archaeology of water transport to A.D. 1500 (New York: Longmans, 1987), a useful summary of early seafaring. For medieval shipping, see
Richard W. Unger, The Ship in the Medieval Economy (Montreal: McGill-Queens
University Press, 1980), and the same author's Ships and Shipping in the North Sea
and Atlantic, 1400-1800 (Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate Variorum, 1997). I am grateful
to Professor Unger for background information on Dutch doggers.

13. Wilson, "The Iceland Trade," 180.
14. Ibid.

15. Albert C. Jensen, The Cod (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1972), 87.
16. Ibid., 89.

CHAPTER 5

The quote by Fernand Braudel is from his The Structures of Everyday Life (New
York: Harper and Row, 1981), 49.

1. For this chapter, I have drawn extensively on Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's classic Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000, translated by Barbara Bray (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971). The Semur-en-Auxois
window is described there and is well worth a visit.

2. My account of French peasant life is derived from Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie,
The French Peasantry 1450-1600, translated by Alan Sheridan (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1987).

3. Analyses of the Black Death abound. A good account used here: Robert S.
Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New
York: Free Press, 1983). See also William H. McNeill, Plagues and People (New York:
Anchor Books-Doubleday, 1977); Graham Twigg, The Black Death: A Biological
Reappraisal (London: Batsford Academic and Educational, 1984) argues that the Black Death that hit England may in fact have been the first, and lethal, appearance
of anthrax and not bubonic plague. Contributors to Robert I. Rotberg and Theodore
K. Rabb, eds., History and Hunger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)
discuss the complex relationship between food production, population, and disease.
The graphical presentations between pages 305 and 308 are especially valuable.

4. Gottfried, The Black Death, 58-59.

5. Ibid., 67.

6. Ibid., 70. Such processions were already commonplace in earlier centuries.

7. Lamb, Climate Present, Past, and Future, 479.

8. Ladurie, The French Peasantry 1450-1600, 48.

9. Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine, discusses wine harvests in depth.

10. Ibid., 66-67.

11. Gilles de Gouberville is well portrayed by Ladurie, using primary sources in
his The French Peasantry 1450-1600, 199-230. The brief quotes in this section
come from this work.

12. Quoted by Ladurie, The French Peasantry 1450-1600, 229.

13. The discussion of glacial history which follows is drawn from Ladurie, Times
of Feast, Times of Famine, which is based primarily on historical sources, and on
Grove, op. cit. (1988).

14. Ladurie was unable to establish the modern equivalent for journaux of land.

15. Christian Pfister et al., "Documentary Evidence on Climate in SixteenthCentury Central Europe," Climatic Change 43(1) (1999): 55-110.

16. Behringer, Wolfgang, "Climatic Change and Witch-Hunting: The Impact of
the Little Ice Age on Mentalities," Climatic Change 43(1) (1999): 335-351.

17. Quotes and analysis from Lamb and Frydendahl, Historic Storms, 38-41.

18. Lamb, op. cit. (1977), 478.

19. W. G. Hoskins, "Harvest fluctuations and English economic history
1620-1759," Agricultural History Review 68 (1968): 15-31.

20. Proverbs 11:26.

21. David W. Stahle et al., "The Lost Colony and Jamestown Droughts," Science
280 (1998): 564-567. I am grateful to Dr. David Anderson for letting me read his
unpublished paper "Climate and Culture Change in Prehistoric and Early Historical
Eastern North America" (1999), from which the comment about English and Spanish is taken.

PART THREE THE END OF THE "FULL WORLD"

The quote by Francois Matthes is from his "Report of Committee on Glaciers"
(1939): 520.

CHAPTER 6

The French government official at Limousin is quoted in Ladurie, Times of Feast,
Times of Famine, 177.

1. Ladurie raises this point in his Times of Feast, Times of Famine, whereas Lamb's
thesis is closely argued in his Climate, History and the Modern World.

2. The best general source on the agricultural revolution in Britain is Mark Overton's Agricultural Revolution in England: The Transformation of the Agrarian Economy
1500-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). For references on
France and Ireland, see Chapters 9 and 11.

3. Quoted from Richard Verstegan's A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence
(Antwerp: 1605) in Lamb, Climate Present, Past, and Future, 463.

4. I am grateful to Professor Prudence Rice for the opportunity to consult her unpublished paper "Volcanoes, earthquakes, and the Spanish colonial wine industry of
southern Peru" (1999), upon which this passage is based. For ancient volcanoes generally, see G. Heiken and F. McCoy, eds., Volcanic Disasters in Human Antiquity
(Washington, D.C.: Geological Society of America Special Paper, 2000), also T.
Simkin, and K. Fiske, Krakatau: the Volcanic Eruption and its Effects (Washington
D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1993).