Chapter 2: “The Mantle of the Poor”

The scale of deforestation during the warm centuries is mind-boggling.(9) In A.D. 500, perhaps four-fifths of temperate western and central Europe lay under forests and swamps. Half or even less of that coverage remained by 1200, most of it cleared during the Medieval Warm Period in a massive onslaught on the environment. In the Netherlands, farmers reclaimed land from the North Sea by what has been called “offensive dyking” that turned small islands in the coastal archipelagos into larger ones.(10) Huge areas of peat moor behind the coast were drained with ditches, then reclaimed laboriously in a cat-and-mouse battle with the water as the peat subsided. At first the reclaimers depended on ever-deeper ditches, but later relied on pumps and wind-watermills. The labor involved was enormous and endured for many generations, but, in the end, the moors became pastureland for sheep and cattle and arable for crops.

         Stripping Europe of its primordial forest was an act thwart with cultural, economic, and political overtones. The farmers who cleared the forest deprived themselves of a safety net that a Scandinavian proverb once “the mantle of the poor.”(11) Forests provided building materials, timber, firewood and game, medicinal plants and food, also browse and grazing for farm animals. The medieval farmer used more iron than ever before for axes, plows, and weapons--the metal smelted with charcoal from the forest. Great trees provided timber for cathedrals and palaces, for ships and humble structures like mills. Water mills were the new machinery of the age, as were windmills constructed almost entirely of wood. There was so much demand for timber for windmill vanes in Northamptonshire, England, in 1322 that complaints arose about deforestation. By the twelfth century, forest use was subject to intricate regulations that covered everything from grazing rights to firewood collection. Many different stakeholders, including the Crown and the nobility, also humble folk, had rights in the forest, such as the right to hunt, graze animals, and to use clearings. For example, many English peasants had the right to acquire construction timber, and firewood, deadwood that was knocked or pulled off trees, “by hook or by crook.” The dense trees and undergrowth were a means for survival. Increasingly complex regulations surrounded the forest and the right to use and clear it, which involved balancing royal privileges and landowner’s rights against the long-established economic needs of peasants.

         Dark forests were a complex presence in medieval life, with many uses and powerful symbolic importance, places where powerful forces lurked and great animals like the fierce aurochs, the long-horned wild ox, thrived. The forest was also the place of the royal and noble hunt, an activity reserved for the aristocracy that was far more than merely the acquisition of meat. The hunt was a ritual display of courtly ceremony and power, even an enactment of the conquest of wilderness by the taming of wild beasts. The Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts in New York owns seven medieval tapestries, ”the Hunt of the Unicorn”, woven between 1495 and 1505, that commemorate centuries of hunting ritual. They show a symbolic medieval hunt: the hounds unleashed, the finding of the unicorn in its hiding place, the pursuit, the mythic beast at bay, and then the kill with the huntsman’s sword. The unicorn is an imaginary creature, and the tapestries show an idealized image of the hunt, but they convey its elaborate, ceremonial nature. The link between the royal presence and the overcoming of nature was irresistible, so inevitable conflicts arose between the nobility, who wanted to preserve the forests for hunting, and the rest of society that valued the products of forested land. In the end, agriculture prevailed. The primordial forest shrank rapidly during the warm centuries in the face of ferment of change and experimentation, and because of an intensification of agriculture created by growing urban centers, higher population densities, and more mouths to feed.

         With the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west in A.D. 476, Germanic tribes such as the Burgundians and Vandals from east of the Rhine overran most of what had been Gaul. The invaders arrived, perhaps 80,000 of them, at a time when western Europe’s population had declined by some 40% from about 26 million as a result of plague and famine during the sixth century. The newcomers simply filled out the existing cleared land, much of which had been abandoned. To the Germanic tribes, the forest, a sacred entity to be left alone, was impassable and protected. So the period of serious deforestation did not begin until the tenth century, when there was economic expansion and population growth in western Europe, compounded by migration from Scandinavia and central Europe.

         The surge in forest clearance came during the Medieval Warm Period, at a time when there was as much as 10% less rainfall and temperatures rose between 0.9 and 1.8 deg. F (0.5 and 1 deg. C). As local populations rose, so people took up abandoned or neglected lands. It is possible that the availability of new tracts that merely required clearing led to earlier marriages, an increase in the birthrate, and perhaps larger families. A mushrooming rural population and growing towns required more food. Constant warfare involving hungry armies, and rising demands from a now more powerful church compounded the food supply problem. Confronted with potential shortages, growing families had two choices. They could shorten the number of years they allowed some of their fields to lie fallow (a dangerous practice in the long run because of catastrophically lower crop yields from more readily exhausted land); or they could clear new fields. Fortunately, there was plenty of land to go round, so they often carved new acreage from the margins of the forest, a process known as assarting. (Assart comes from the French word essarter, “to clear.” It also implies uprooting stumps from the ground, an essential part of such clearing.)

         Day after day, men with axes would climb high in the trees, lopping off branches that crashed to the ground, where they were piled up and burned. Sometimes a young man would lose his balance and fall, landing with a thud on the hard ground. Perhaps he would be lucky and escape with bruises. More often, he would break and arm or leg and perhaps be crippled for life, one more mouth to feed until he could fend for himself again. Once the lopping was over, the tall trunks would stand bare and stark at the edge of the receding forest, to be chopped down by strong men working in unison, pausing frequently to sharpen their axes. Back at the nearby village, a blacksmith would be hard at work, hammering bent blades and forging new axes to keep up with demand. Slowly a new field would emerge from the forest, studded with large stumps. Once the trees were gone and the branches burnt to fertilize the land with the ash, the villagers would move in and laboriously cut and pull the stumps from the ground, using oxen or horses to help them with stout ropes and iron chains.(12)
Assarting was laborious and labor-intensive, usually a prolonged process that began with periodic burning to clear brush, and heavier grazing of surrounding woodland. Eventually the forest deteriorated, at which point the assarters moved in, cleared the stumps, and founded new villages. Completely new settlements often rose in remote clearings in the forest, especially those of monastic houses that sought seclusion in the wilderness.

          The warm centuries saw thousands of new settlements rise throughout western Europe. In France’s Middle Yonne valley, southeast of Paris, lords encouraged settlement and clearance by giving granting freedom of self-government and reducing or abolishing customary taxes to those who cleared new land. Payments in labor were waived: peasantswere allowed by their controlling lords to marry outside their own community. As the French historian Marc Bloch once remarked, a kind of “megalomaniac intoxication” gripped many proprietors with grandiose visions of new landscapes where wastelands had become profitable acreage that would yield more wealth in kind and ease population pressure on farming land . In the east, German lords, both lay and ecclesiastical, encouraged colonizers to take up forested and swampy lands east of Berlin where small bands of elusive hunters lived. In the words of one appeal for recruits: “These pagans are the worst of men but their land is the best, with meat, honey, and flour. If it is cultivated the produce of the land will be such that none other can compare with it.”(13)

         One can argue for a direct connection between medieval warming, population growth and farming innovation, but there were underlying social and religious factors as well. In earlier times, manor owners tried to keep peasants confined to their lands so they could control them and accumulate more rent. As the warming came, local rulers and church leaders in an increasingly pious age made constant efforts to consolidate political control for political gain and also to accumulate wealth. They gradually assumed the right to dispose of uncleared, unused lands as if they were rulers, granting wilderness to groups of colonists to clear and farm, and “bring it into the realm of human affairs.”(14) People and their labor became a source of wealth for lords. These colonizers soon became free farmers, who owned land and could earn money for their crops. There was emancipation of the commoner, and, with the widespread adoption of primogeniture as means of inheritance, younger sons needed outlets—new land. Forest clearance was to them what the Crusades and wars of conquest were to the nobility.

         The religious played a huge role in forest clearance and the agricultural revolution. The Benedictines, in particular, considered manual labor as important as reading or prayer. Work had spiritual rewards. St. Bernard wrote: “A wild spot, not hallowed by prayer and asceticism and which is not the scene of any spiritual life is, as it were, in a state of original sin. But once it has become fertile and purposeful, it takes on the utmost significance.”(15) Benedictine communities did much to dispel the ancient dread of primordial forest among medieval peasants. The historian Michael Williams calls religious orders the “shock troops” of forest clearance. Numbers tell the story. Between 1098 and 1675, the Cistercians alone founded 742 communities, 95% of which were in existence by 1351. Each house engaged in intensive farming and forest clearance. Wrote Gerald of Barri: “Give these monks a naked moor or a wild wood, then let a few years pass away and you will find not only beautiful churches, but dwellings of men built around them.”(16)