Approaching the Medieval Optimum, 212 to 1000 AD

Abstract

Most of those who have written sometime this century about the historical impact of climate change have been geographers or climatologists: C.E.P. Brooks, Ellsworth Huntington, Hubert Lamb.... Historians have tended thus far to be either blankly indifferent or somewhat scornful. Some notable exceptions are to be found among the community of French historians associated with Annales, a journal founded in 1929 and committed to forging links with other subjects though especially geography. Fernand Braudel was a doyen in this respect. Le Roy Ladurie, ‘by common consent the most brilliant of Braudel’s pupils’ (Burke, 1990:61) produced what may still be the most widely cited of all the climate-and-history studies. In Times of Feast, Times of Famine, he stressed how complex is the challenge of assessing the effect on crop yield of secular changes of mean air temperature that may well not exceed a degree Celsius. Also he discerned a disposition to want things both ways on the question of folk migrations, ‘The Teutons of the first millennium before Christ are supposed to have left their countries of origin because of the cold. The Scandinavians of the period before AD 1000 are supposed to have done the same thing for exactly the opposite reason—the mildness of the climate, stimulating agriculture and thus also population growth, is said to have led to the departure of surplus male warriors’ (Le Roy Ladurie, 1972).