Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

ing land in pasture restored soil fertility, but impatience and economics
made the required investments unattractive to folks perpetually focused on
maximizing this year’s harvest.
After centuries when post-Roman agricultural methods and practices
limited crop yields, population growth accelerated when an extended run
of good weather increased crop yields during medieval times. As the population
grew, the clearing of Europe’s remaining forests began again in
earnest as new heavy plows allowed farmers to work root-clogged lowlands
and dense river valley clays. From the eleventh to the thirteenth century,
the amount of cultivated land more than doubled throughout western
Europe. Agricultural expansion fueled the growth of towns and cities that
gradually replaced feudal estates and monasteries as the cornerstone of
Western civilization. Europe’s best soils had been cleared of forest by about
ad 1200. By the close of the thirteenth century, new settlements began
plowing marginal lands with poor soils and steep terrain. Expansion of the
area of planted fields allowed the population to keep growing. Doubling
over a couple of centuries, by ad 1300 Europe’s population reached eighty
million.
Powerful city-states arose where the most land was plowed under, particularly
in and near the fertile lowlands of Belgium and Holland. By the
middle of the fourteenth century, farmers were plowing most of western
Europe’s loess to feed burgeoning societies and their new middle class.
Already hemmed in by powerful neighbors, Flemish and Dutch farmers
adopted crop rotations similar to those still used today.
The catastrophic European famine of 1315–17 provides a dramatic example
of the effect of bad weather on a population near the limit of what its
agricultural system could support. Every season of 1315 was wet. Waterlogged
fields ruined the spring sowing. Crop yields were half of normal and
what little hay grew was harvested wet and rotted in barns. Widespread
food shortages in early 1316 compelled people to eat the next year’s seed
crop. When wet weather continued through the summer, the crops failed
again, and wheat prices tripled. The poor could not afford food and those
with money—even kings—could not always find it to buy. Bands of starving
peasants turned to robbery. Some even reportedly resorted to cannibalism
in famine-stricken areas.
Malnutrition and starvation began to haunt western Europe. The population
of England and Wales had grown slowly but steadily after the Norman
invasion until the Black Death of 1348. Major famines added to the
toll. The population of England and Wales fell from about four million in
let them eat colonies 91