Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations - Kootenay Local Agricultural Society

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the early 1300s to about two million by the early 1400s. Europe’s population
dropped by a quarter.
After the Black Death depopulated the countryside, landlords competed
to retain tenant farmers by granting them lifelong or inheritable rights to
the land they worked in exchange for modest rents. As the population
rebounded, a final push of agricultural expansion filled out the landscape
with farms in the early sixteenth century. Starting in the late 1500s landlords
motivated by the promise of getting higher rents from leasing land at
inflated rates began enclosing lands formerly grazed in common. Already
out of land and surrounded by powerful neighbors, the Dutch started their
ambitious campaign to take land from the sea.
John Fitzherbert’s 1523 Book of Surveying, the first work on agriculture
published in English, held that the way to increase the value of a township
was to consolidate rights to common fields and pasture into single enclosed
tracts next to each farmer’s house. Over the next several centuries this idea
of reorganizing the commons to give every farmer three acres and a cow
evolved into transforming the English countryside into large estates, portions
of which could be rented out profitably to tenant farmers. Except for
the peasants working the land, most thought that privatizing the commons
would injure none, and benefit all by increasing agricultural production.
In the tumultuous sixteenth and seventeenth centuries much of England’s
agricultural land changed hands in Henry VIII’s war against the
Catholic Church, the wars of succession, and the English Civil War. The
insecurity of land tenure discouraged investing in land improvement. By
the second half of the seventeenth century, some argued that England
should adopt the Flemish custom of agricultural leases under which the
owner would pay a specified sum to the tenant if four impartial persons,
two selected by the landlord and two by the tenant, agreed that the soil had
been improved at the end of the lease.
As Europe’s climate slid from the medieval warm period into the Little
Ice Age (which lasted from about ad 1430 to 1850), extended cold periods
meant shorter growing seasons, reduced crop yields, and less arable land.
Perennially living on the edge, the lower classes were vulnerable to severe
food shortages after bad harvests. Governments monitored the price of
bread to gauge the potential for social instability.
Desire for land reform among the peasantry, fueled by instability and
shortages, would help trigger the Reformation. Land held by the Church
had grown over the centuries far beyond the fields cleared by monks,
let them eat colonies