Bruce M. S. Campbell - The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World

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Bruce M. S. Campbell 2016

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First published 2016

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For Anthony ,

committed post-medievalist ,

who in Berlin, Belfast and Mulroy kept company

with this book throughout its long gestation

In retrospect I can see that this book marks the final stage of an academic journey which began when, aged 16 and on the recommendation of Mr Stow, deputy headmaster and head of geography at Rickmansworth Grammar School, I opted to study Geography, Economics, and Pure Mathematics with Statistics at Advanced Level. From that decision, so lightly taken, springs this book's focus upon economic progress or the want of it across a wide geographical area, the attention paid to climate and disease as agents of socio-ecological change, and the reliance upon the quantification and graphical representation of key variables and developments. In the 1960s regional geography was a core component of the geography curriculum and always began with a study of the physical environment before proceeding to a consideration of the relevant country or region's human geography. This was because, self-evidently, temperature, rainfall, terrain, geology, vegetation and ecology shape where people live, the natural resources available to them, how they make a living, their methods and routes of transport, and the kinds of physical and biological hazards to which they are exposed. Environmental history shares the same premises.

Including nature among the protagonists of historical change risks incurring the stigma of environmental determinism. As a geography undergraduate at Liverpool University I was taught about the environmental determinism of Elsworth Huntington and warned that this was something to avoid. Instead, I learned that, because people have choices and create institutions and technology, environmental conditions powerfully influence but rarely determine human outcomes. The existence of important interactions, both direct and indirect and either positive or negative, between nature and society was taken as axiomatic, as was the idea that natural processes operate in parallel with human processes and are equally worthy of study. The then comparatively young subject of ecology was introduced to us as, perhaps, the most effective and comprehensive theoretical framework for analysing, explaining and understanding environmental and human interactions at a hierarchy of nested scales from a single field to the entire world. The appeal of this holistic approach, with its capacity to accommodate and explain a wider range of variables and inter-relationships than neoclassical, institutional or Marxist economics, has stayed with me ever since. Moreover, without the requirement at this formative stage of my education to read extensively across the sub-disciplines of physical geography, I could not have engaged with the fast-growing modern scientific literatures on palaeoclimatology and the biology of plague upon which this book draws so extensively. What often seemed a chore and was certainly a challenge at the time has many years later stood me in good stead. So, in a very real sense, in this book I have returned to my academic roots.

It was in the early 1970s, as a postgraduate student at Cambridge undertaking detailed case studies of three late-medieval Norfolk manors under the wise supervision of Alan Baker, that the massive economic and demographic impacts of the Great European Famine of 131522 and Black Death of 13489 were first brought home to me. So far as I could see, neither catastrophe could be convincingly accommodated within the rival, but economically equally deterministic, Malthusian and Marxist interpretations of medieval economic history then in vogue. Nor, given my earlier training, was it satisfying to dismiss these catastrophes as providential exogenous shocks and enquire little further about why two once-in-half-a-millennium events should have occurred within the narrow space of a single generation. At that time, however, it was difficult to explore the environmental dimensions and contexts of these disasters in more detail for the relevant palaeoecological research had scarcely begun. Notwithstanding the compelling advocacy of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's pioneering Times of feast and times of famine , historians could safely disregard historical climate change because so little was known about it. Would that it had existed when I was researching and writing my doctoral thesis.