Free The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 by Brian Fagan

increased twofold owing to the increased level of devotions. The monks resorted to cost-cutting
measures reminiscent of modern times. They curtailed pensions, delayed
essential maintenance on buildings, and postponed costly lawsuits.

    The priory's problems were compounded by increased royal taxation to
pay for wars with the Scots. King Edward I had conquered Wales between
1277 and 1301 and secured it with a line of castles from Harlech to Conway. He had also invaded Scotland unsuccessfully to intervene in a succession dispute. Edward's poorly timed intervention provoked a Scottish bid
for total independence. He was succeeded by Edward II in 1307, whose
army was defeated by Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in
1314. Warfare continued until 1328, when the Scots prevailed. The cost
for the English was enormous, at a time of great suffering. Royal taxation
fell heavily on a hungry populace and on Canterbury priory. The monks
still managed to produce plenty of high-priced oats, but most of their carefully thought out savings were eaten up not by pilgrims but by the new
taxation for Scottish wars. However, the priory's refusal to cut relief soon
rebounded in its favor. When the harvest improved in 1319, offerings
promptly skyrocketed to a record £577. The monks received so many sacred relics for a cathedral already well endowed with such artifacts that
they sold them off for over £426. It was well they had plenty of money in
hand, for cattle disease struck in 1320, with devastating effects on the surrounding area. Fortunately, offerings reached over £670, as people prayed
for relief, and the priory weathered the crisis.

    The suffering lasted for seven years before more normal harvests brought a
measure of relief. Horrendous weather continued through 1318, with extensive flooding in the Low Countries in 1320 and 1322. The cycle ended
in 1322 with a reversal of the NAO, which brought a bone-chilling winter that immobilized shipping over a wide area while thousands more perished from hunger and disease. The settled climate of earlier years gave
way to unpredictable, often wild weather, marked by warm and very dry
summers in the late 1320s and 1330s and by a notable increase in storminess and wind strengths in the English Channel and North Sea. The
moist, mild westerlies that had nourished Europe throughout the Medieval Warm Period turned rapidly on and off as the NAO oscillated from
one extreme to the other. The Little Ice Age had begun.

     

    COOLING BEGINS

    -Second shepherd, Second Towneley Shepherd's Play,
part of the Wakefield Cycle, c. 1450
    Through climatic history, economic history, or at least agrarian
history, is reduced to being `one damn thing after another.'
    -Jan de Vries
    "Measuring the Impact of Climate on History, " 1981

     

Glacier oscillations of the last few centuries have been among
the greatest that have occurred during the last 4,000 years perhaps ... the greatest since the end of the Pleistocene ice age.
    -Francois Matthes
    "Report of Committee on Glaciers, " 1940
    ifteen thousand years have passed since the end of the last glacial
episode of the Great Ice Age. Since then, through the Holocene (Greek:
recent) era, the world has experienced global warming on a massive
scale-a rapid warming at first, then an equally dramatic, thousand-year
cold snap some 12,000 years ago, and since then warmer conditions, culminating in a period of somewhat higher temperatures than today, about
6,000 years before present. The past 6,000 years have seen near-modern
climatic conditions on earth.
    Like the Ice Age that preceded it, the Holocene has been an endless
seesaw of short-term climate change caused by little-understood interactions between the atmosphere and the oceans. The last 6,000 years have
been no exception. In Roman times, European weather was somewhat
cooler than today, whereas the height of the Medieval Warm Period saw
long successions of warm, settled summers.