← Not Just the Tudors
Not Just the Tudors
Little Ice Age
00:46:19
How resilient were the people of England in the face of prolonged climate adversity?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit With a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn Brilliant Rivals and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.
- [00:28]
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- [01:23]
Madeleine Bassnett
A show that we rec.
- [01:27]
Laurie Johnson
Hey everybody, I'm Jen.
- [01:28]
Madeleine Bassnett
I'm Jess and we're Fat Mascara, the only beauty podcast you need in your life. We're beauty editors by day and podcasters by night, and we've got all the.
- [01:37]
Laurie Johnson
Industry gossip for you, like insider product.
- [01:39]
Madeleine Bassnett
Reviews and advice you're not going to find online.
- [01:41]
Laurie Johnson
And the best part is interviews with.
- [01:43]
Madeleine Bassnett
The most sought after experts in the beauty biz, Charlotte Tilbury, Jen Atkin, and.
- [01:47]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Makeup artist Sir John.
- [01:49]
Madeleine Bassnett
That's just a taste of what you're going to get on the Fat Mascara podcast, so come hang with us. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday.
- [01:59]
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- [02:10]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. Flash floods, low yields and failed crop harvests, Frozen riverways and the isolation of rural communities. Famine. Drought. These are just some of the debilitating events of the Little Ice Age, which can be defined as a time of dramatic cooling across parts of the Northern hemisphere from the 15th to the early 19th centuries, the little Ice Age saw Iceland's population fall by up to half, while Norse colonies in Greenland faced complete collapse. Along coastlines, rising water levels saw dramatic shifts for coastal communities and landscapes, while periods of extreme famine across Norway, Sweden, France and Estonia led their populations into severe decline. Across continental Europe, broken supply lines and the incapacitation of naval fleets engendered an increase in territorial disputes and war. Today I'm joined by Professors Madeleine Bassnet, professor of English and Writing Studies at Western University in Canada, and Laurie Johnson, professor of English and Cultural Studies at the University of Southern Queensland. Madeleine Bassnet's previous work in the fields of climate studies, ecocriticism, early modern women's writings and food studies includes the wonderful book Women, Food Exchange and Governance in Early Modern England. Laurie Johnson, past President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare association, is a theatre historian whose groundbreaking work includes Leicester's Men and Their Plays, an early Elizabethan playing company and its Legacy. Together they have a joint research project which focuses on the effect of the Little Ice Age on England. It's called Weather Extremes in England's Ice Age 1500-1700. Charting severe weather events through contemporary pamphlets, chronicles, letters and diaries, the project reveals an era of incredible adaptability, innovation and resilience and serves as a reminder of humanity's innate desire to understand the natural world. Welcome both of you to the podcast.
- [04:58]
Madeleine Bassnett
Thank you.
- [04:58]
Laurie Johnson
Thank you.
- [04:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Susanna, how did your research project looking into weather extremes in England's Little Ice Age come about? What are its aims?
- [05:08]
Madeleine Bassnett
They really came about because of climate change today and I knew that there was a Little Ice Age and I thought, you know, one way to begin to grapple with today's climate change is perhaps to go back to the period that I study and to think about it through history. And at some point while I was at the British Library, I realized that there was a tremendous amount of weather records in the historical Chronicles, Olinshed's Chronicles, John Stowe's Annals, for example. And I thought to myself, you know, nobody is going to read through the Chronicles to find these weather records, but they could be very valuable. And so I started thinking about how I might be able to gather these records so that they could be accessible and in some sort of open access way for the database. I fortunately have a lot of support through Western libraries at my university here in London, Ontario, and they essentially helped me to imagine and build the database. The RRCGIS specialist Liz Sutherland, has been amazing and at some point a colleague sort of connected Me and Laurie and said, you two are kind of doing the same research.
- [06:16]
Laurie Johnson
Yeah. I've got to admit, I'm a late comer to Madeleine's project, but have been interested in the climate question for quite some time as well. As a Veda historian, one of the things that has often puzzled me is that the more I was reading about the Little Ice Age and these reports that the great innovation, the open air amphitheater playhouses, emerged during that period, I thought, why would an open air amphitheater be the logical solution to how to stage a play during an ice age? And so I wanted to dig into the weather records more and have been working on a project for some time around that with a few collaborators on a separate project elsewhere. But at the end of the day, one of our goals was to eventually develop a database that could house all the data that we were working on. And then, of course, I was pointed in the direction of Madeline's database. Are you aware that Madeline's got this database? And I said I was not. And when I saw it, I went, wow. Yes, that's exactly what I would have been expecting to be able to produce. This is fantastic. And so I'm so glad that the data sets that I've been developing have been able to be part of the program for updating, for getting the database more and more populated.
- [07:25]
Madeleine Bassnett
Yeah. And I should say that, I mean, part of this is about funding, and I was able to get funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council here in Canada, and that has helped to fund the initial stages of the database and has been a wonderful help funding my ra, Daryl Wackernick, and pulling this together and making it what it is so far.
- [07:46]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So this data that you're producing is utterly fascinating. It's going to be so useful. And I'm going to ask you lots of questions about it. But I want to ask something that perhaps isn't directly what you're working on, but important, I think. Is there a consensus on the main causes of the cooling climate in the early modern period?
- [08:07]
Laurie Johnson
No. No. A lot of the scientists confident that there are volcanic eruptions that are involved. And yet one of the big puzzles is that one of the earliest periods of the cooling, known as the Grindelwald fluctuation, which is, of course, when glaciation spread further south than it ever had in parts of continental Europe. The dates don't quite line the earliest known volcanic activity around then. So something else was at work. And the science is still a bit out on that, but there's no doubt of course, that there was cooling. What the data is showing, of course, with the British Isles is that the cooling didn't quite match, and I've been writing about this recently, the cooling didn't quite match in Britain, what was going on elsewhere in continental Europe. And there's sort of a discrepancy there.
- [08:52]
Madeleine Bassnett
There's been other suggestions in terms of there might have been changes in the earth's tilts, sun flare, sunspot activity. Sine and Lew and Mark Maslin have suggested, and other people as well that they've been working with have suggested that part of the cooling was heightened by colonialism in the Americas and genocide, meaning that agricultural lands grew back and there was deforestation and a larger carbon sink. So there's a kind of a lot of speculation and I expect it was a large combination of a number of different things.
- [09:27]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
How did you go about sourcing documentary evidence of the climate patterns at a time before weather mapping and formal records? Tell us a bit more about those chroniclers and other sources.
- [09:40]
Laurie Johnson
Well, this is where actually there's been. There's a fair history of climate, history of historians who have been. Hubert Lamb is one of the great British ones from the mid 20th century who just understood that if you go back and read what people were saying, take them at their word. If they said it's cold, it's probably cold. Even if you didn't have a clear sense of exactly what the temperature was, you'd have a clear sense, however, by what they were describing in terms of the level of snowfall or the level of rain activity. One of my favorites, of course, is a period when, during the 1590s, when there should have been increased cold. In fact, you had a period of such intense heat in Britain that the Thames dried up for three days rather than freezing over, as many people picture it doing in those periods. But nevertheless, even if we don't know exactly what the temperature was, we know it had to have been very hot for a substantial period of time to have completely dried up the Thames.
- [10:36]
Madeleine Bassnett
I mean, the Chronicles are interesting because they're traditionally sort of history and sort of great political events. You know, the rise and fall of kings and monarchs and wars and other sort of large scale political impacts. But in between all of this stuff are these weather disasters, which I think kind of points to the sort of providential idea that, you know, these are on the level of these political events because they are signals from God about disapproval and anger and so on and so forth. But it also caused on the ground havoc and distress and disaster, which had their own political effects. So I think that's maybe one of the reasons they got into the historical chronicles. And then there are the popular pamphlets that recount these large disasters. The 1607 floods, for example, there's several on that. The 1684 Thames river freeze, there's a whole bunch on that. So there's a whole collection of those. And those have been people like Catherine park and Lorraine Daston and their work on wonder pamphlets have done some work on those, as well as Vladimir here, Jankovic, who's done some work more on 18th century weather, but he's done a lot of work with the weather pamphlets, too. And then, you know, as I sort of realized, and I think Laurie realized as well as you start to look at diaries, John Evelyn's diaries, Anthony Wood's diaries, I mean, Evelyn talks about the weather all the time. He becomes obsessed with the weather. And so there's a tremendous amount of material out there. You know, we haven't done Pepys diaries yet, but that's going to be an undertaking.
- [12:21]
Laurie Johnson
I was just going to mention on the political front and the providential side, there's one of the things I discovered when I was reading the Trevelyan miscellany. There's a section in there where they have the history of the mayors of London, and every one of them gets a picture and a description on the page. And in the description of so many of those mayors, you'll have an observation about either a poor crop or some kind of significant weather event, as if it's somehow a marker of that man's mayoralty and the value of their reign? So there's this link they're making at that moment. Absolutely. Between whether a person is a good leader and whether there is providential backlash, if you like, for bad leadership.
- [13:05]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So do you get a sense that extreme weather events were viewed as divine.
- [13:11]
Laurie Johnson
Punishment and in some cases divine favor, as with the routing of the Spanish Armada, thanks to the serious weather events that were hitting the Channel at just the moment they were making their way towards England. But certainly you get quite a number of instances of poor weather, either not being reported and instead being reported by people from elsewhere as strange news from afar, because the people didn't want to say, look at this bad thing that's happened to us, because it would in fact, usually be seen, therefore, as in some way a comment on their failure to be sufficiently righteous.
- [13:50]
Madeleine Bassnett
Yeah, I think there is also sort of other things going on at the same time. There's this very kind of providential presence and often in the pamphlets, you'll sort of have this kind of like, you know, God is angry at us, blah, blah, blah. And then they go, they kind of shift and they say, well, you know, everybody who died in this was like, they were all really nice people. It seems that there's evidence of them trying to figure this out within the kind of larger religious context. And of course, you know, scientific knowledge and meteorological knowledge and that sort of thing is also kind of riding alongside the kind of providentialism of the pamphlets. And I think that I hadn't fully thought about this, but I think that it probably does shift even more towards the end of the kind of 17th century. That's my suspicion.
- [14:49]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Madeleine, some of the work that you've done has been looking at the language of religious piety and resilience that comes through in those pamphlets, particularly in terms of female behavior. Can you tell us a bit more about that?
- [15:02]
Madeleine Bassnett
I looked a little bit at women in terms of the 1607 floods and how they were impacted. 1607 floods happened when storm surge combined with a high tide that came up the Bristol Channel. And I think it's actually quite interesting because I was looking at the flooding that's happening in the UK right now, and I think Newport in Wales was one of the flooded areas. And I thought, oh, that's exactly the area where that flooded in 1607. So it's sort of interesting, those types of historical pattern, potentially. Yeah. I mean, I think women, women, like everybody in the. In the towns, were. Were involved and are affected by the flooding. And often the pamphlets seem to focus on women, as in the role of caregivers. In particular, there's a wonderful story about a woman saving her child by lifting her into the rafters just before her entire house gets swept away. And the child, she survives as the house floats away and she's joined by a hen who protects her and keeps her warm during this terrible adventure. Other instances of. Of women putting their children in red troughs in order to help them survive. Gentlewomen, or a particular gentlewoman bringing her village into her house so that they can survive within the walls, away from the bloods. I think there is a certain amount of association of women with religious piety, even as I think many of their reactions are about their relationships and their connections with their children, their families and the people who they feel responsible for.
- [16:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And do you get a sense in your reading of these sources that for contemporaries, extreme weather events were seen as unique, dramatic occurrences, or are they forming a larger pattern of cause and effect?
- [17:18]
Madeleine Bassnett
I Think, certainly when I think about records like John Evelyn's records, diaries in kind of mid to late 17th century, his recollections are so meticulous, and you get a really large, significant sense of the patterns. So he too, must be getting a significant sense of the patterns, because he's recording whether all the time his editor at the Oxford Clarendon edition actually has a note. This editor, EJ De Beer, I think your es de Beer, actually says, indexes the weather, which is fantastic. But then about 1691, he says, I'm going to stop indexing the weather. Because Evelyn talks about the weather on every single page. You get patterns. You get these continual. This sense of the way in which the weather is rising and falling, the way in which, you know, cold moves into drought, moves into storms, moves into cold again. And even though Edlin goes and says, this is unprecedented, you know, every single time this happens, and you're like, it's not quite unprecedented anymore, you also get a sense of him looking back to times that were more temperate and saying, this has not happened. You know, our nice weather has not happened since, you know, 1660, when Charles II came back to the throne.
- [18:39]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I guess what I mean also, though, is did they have a sense that they were living in a little ice age? Did they have a sense that this was in some way abnormal or aberrant?
- [18:50]
Laurie Johnson
See, this is where I think the patterns that I've been picking up through the 16th century are fairly significant, because I think my sense is that the weather went weird for them in the 16th century in Britain, but not in the way that we might imagine in relation to a little ice age, that what was going on in the continental mainland with freezing conditions there, the Dutch Republic being relatively constantly white and frozen over and so on, whereas on the other side of the Channel, we get, instead, through most of the 16th century, fairly irregular, rather than patterned coming and going of severe storm weather, drought, storm surges through the riverways and on the coasts, and only a couple of really strong cold spells. 15 64, 65 was the big one that hit that century. So I don't know if they were aware that they were in the middle of an ice age as such, certainly what was going on. And Dagmar de Groot has a fantastic book on the frigid Dutch Golden Age, about how clearly the people in the Dutch Republic were absolutely aware that things had shifted for them and they were adapting and innovating accordingly. Whereas in the British mainland, I think what's going on there is they're aware that Something's going on. And they're tracing those unprecedented moments when there's a storm here or a surge there or a double ebb tide in the Thames, for example, on some occasions that strike everyone as bizarre and they can't quite explain it, they know that something's going on. And then of course, afterwards in the 17th century, then once you start getting far more recent big freezes and you start getting the Thames frost fares and so on, that clearly at that moment the climate has snapped into place as far as joining Britain to the continental mainland in terms of being in that freeze. For some reason, Britain was relatively immune to it for some time. But not completely static. It went through a, a significant period of disruption in terms of what its weather was doing for the better part of 80 to 100 years. People are aware of that, but they're not yet aware that it's an ice age as such for them.
- [21:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes. Okay, that makes sense. I mean, you reminded me in your early comments of Shakespeare talking about the icicles on a Dutchman's beard. So they know that it's cold in the Netherlands, but they've had instances like in 1540 where the rain stops or in 1542 where there's widespread flooding. So they know stuff is going on, but as you say, it's not clear. It's a flow stage at that point in time. And these dramatic weather events, I mean, today when we talk about the effects of global warming, we point to the fact that they're often borne by the poorest, the most vulnerable. Would they have particularly affected rural communities and the poor in the 16th and 17th centuries as well?
- [21:40]
Laurie Johnson
Absolutely. And you get that const questions of the crop production rates and so on, with most communities having specific crops or specific agricultural industries they're involved with where you get a bad harvest or you get great death that comes through a cattle, for example. Those communities then are absolutely hit by that. And of course each community, each township, has the poor for which it's responsible. And if they can't support the citizenry as such, they certainly can't provide for the poor. And it has that trickle down effect in a negative way. Yeah.
- [22:13]
Madeleine Bassnett
And even the sort of celebrations at the frost fairs, Thomas Dekker's the Great Frost, for example, which records the 1608 fair. There's a whole passage where he talks about the poor and the watermen losing their income and the way in which the poor, they don't have any food, they don't have any fuel, they're freezing to death. There is parish charity being raised for them. So there's definitely an awareness amid all the kind of novelty and celebration of something like a Frost Fair even that this is inequitably affecting the poorest.
- [23:01]
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- [23:57]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And this is something to be said also for the way in which extreme or unusual weather occurrences have often coincided or do often coincide in this period with moments of civil uncertainty or political disruption.
- [24:11]
Laurie Johnson
Yes. Put not too fine a point on it. Yes. I'm just trying to think of examples straight off the top of my head there. Just a moment ago I was drawn to 1555, the flood in the southern Thames floodplain where the inhabitants of Southwark flocked to what they perceived to be high ground in the Church. But then reports arriving of the water starting to inundate the church and them having to find people to get boats to help them evacuate from that space as well. This worry, of course, the sense that the Church has abandoned them. But this of course is right smack bang in the Catholic regime of Mary, where we have this suspicion for so many people that they did the wrong thing by abandoning the Protestantism that they had enjoyed under the earlier tutors. In comes Mary, shifts them back to Catholic and suddenly, oh my Lord, we're getting these massive floods that even our churches aren't safe, our Catholic churches aren't safe. Something's wrong. And I think we do get a sense of unrest when you get moments like that and they can start to put those two things together in their mind. Yeah, yeah.
- [25:19]
Madeleine Bassnett
Geoffrey Parker has done a lot of work around war and unrest in the 17th century and connects it to the climate change patterns that he sees happening globally. Really. But I think, you know, coming back to England and the British Isles, I think another thing that's very present in terms of that question is famine and Food shortages. And as we know, you know, that is a surefire way to create social unrest. And so I think that was something that they were dealing with in a kind of frequent way as well. When you have the weather patterns being so unreliable and volatile, then you have situations where, you know, you have a great flood, the community's wiped away, they're just trying to rebuild, and then you have drought or rains that wipe out the crops, or you have another freeze at the end of the year, or you have another flood because the ice is all melted and down comes the water to the community and wipes them all out again. So you have these recurring things happening.
- [26:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, Laurie, you mentioned your work into looking at the theatres and the creation of amphitheaters. And we know in the 17th century, for example, theaters were shut in times of plague and disease. How was play going, affected by extreme weather events?
- [26:39]
Laurie Johnson
That's one of the things I'm still working at. I mean, there's a great resource, of course, with Philip Henslow's diary, as it's called, the Ledger of the Performances, which often people have been trying to understand the economics and connect Henslow's record of how much money each play took on each date with questions of the popularity of those plays. But one of the things I'm interested in doing, once we have enough data point to make a really solid matching map of what was the weather like in London to what was going on in terms of which plays were drawing what kind of customers. I suspect we'll find a fairly strong match. Null hypothesis here between plays that otherwise might have been deemed popular. Having a low run one day, with, of course, a day just where the weather's just not conducive to play going. But there's another thing that I'm going to be working on this for the Renaissance Society of America. Madeleine and I and a couple of others are presenting a panel there on disastrous weather, where I think I've got enough evidence to track the Earl of Pembroke's Men, not in the theaters in London, but when they're on this tour in 1593, which is considered by many people to be the year that Pembroke's Men failed, they had this tour that forced them to break early, and many people read that as the company actually breaking up altogether, dissolving. But whether they broke up altogether, whether it's simply that they broke the tour early, nevertheless, they certainly had a bad tour, that's indisputable. But no one's ever really been able to track why. I think there's Enough evidence out in the provincial locations of each of the locations that we know they visited having a significant severe weather event around about the time that they visit. And I think it's a weather related disaster that they experience at that moment. So I'm trying to map that together as part of this paper. I think what we do get is enough evidence at the moment, at least I'm sensing that the evidence will be there when I go looking to say that clearly weather played a part in whether or not there were people at the theaters, particularly the open air ones. But even in the provinces, whether people simply had the wherewithal to be able to get out from their homes to go and visit the Guildhall to view the mayoralty command performance of a visiting company, you know, if it's bucketing down, you don't want to leave your home, you'll just say, okay, I'll just let them perform for the mayor and I'll see the next company that comes through. So I think it plays a part, whether it's a big or a small part, that's to be debated, but it's certainly a part. Whereas I do think some of the work that I have published, I think establishes fairly successfully that where you have significant flooding events, it does affect a company's touring patterns, or it determines whether or not a company can get back to London in time to be able to stage at Court, for example. So I think it does play a part in that respect.
- [29:26]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And might we conclude that the construction of some of the first London playhouses have come from a desire to abandon tours when there is extreme weather?
- [29:39]
Laurie Johnson
I've got to confess, even for me, the jury's still out on that one. Certainly, for a start, I can say that there's enough evidence to say that the companies that we know as the primary touring companies were also the companies that were primary companies that inhabited significant playhouses. So I think the idea that they abandoned touring to set up which was one of the old standard narratives of theatre history, I think there's enough evidence now to say that that needs to be at least queried. And a more nuanced understanding needs to be developed of what are the economic pressures that drive a company to be both touring and performing in a major playhouse. Are they in some way mutually beneficial business models rather than being competing business models or one that's supplanted by the other? And then, of course, in terms of the climate project, the question has to be to some extent, does that business model respond to some of the events that are happening out in the big wide world in terms of serious weather patterns changing and shifting.
- [30:44]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And Laurie, one last question to do with theatre, because I've mentioned that line from Twelfth Night and of course, extreme weather events are famously the background of some of Shakespeare's plays, obviously the Tempest amongst them. What does this make you feel or think about the way in which humanity is trying to understand the natural world in this period? Is there something timeless about it? Really? Isn't there?
- [31:10]
Laurie Johnson
Well, there's something timeless. And this is the thing, of course, that there's this big strong desire at the moment, not just with an eco criticism, more precisely, but in a kind of climate history sense. When we're looking for more proxy evidence, our cultural products, our paintings, our plays, our stories, our poems become one of the artifacts that people try and connect to evidence for what the weather was doing at a given moment or what the climate was doing at a given moment. And so a lot of people are reading Shakespeare in that way as evidence for. And I think that doesn't have enough nuance to say that artistic production also imagines a world or a possibility that doesn't have to always just be about commenting on the here and now. So it does become, I think, in that sense, important to think of art as in some way at least, timeless. Absolutely. And yet each artistic product, if it does reference some kind of weather pattern or condition or even event, if we just deal in terms of historical events, then I think that's important, to not lose sight of that as a flag that one has put in the ground and say, no, that was responding to that quite directly. And so it is important to understand, for example, in Shakespeare, in Midsummer, Night's Dream refers to the weather patterns going all akimbo as a result of Oberon and Titania having a stouch that, that actually maps really well with what we know was going on with the volatile weather patterns that caused crop failures in the 1590s. I think Shakespeare is clearly responding to something in that play at that moment.
- [32:42]
Madeleine Bassnett
Yeah, and I think it's also true. I mean, if we think about the sort of the growth of climate fiction today, if people wanting to write about climate and thinking about climate in liter as well as in all kinds of media, I think we have a sim, you know, a potentially similar type of situation where people are, you know, living through something that they are experiencing and trying to understand. And of course, you know, they're living in a much more vulnerable time and a time that's much more susceptible to and close to the weather and the environment. They don't have central heating, you know. So I think that heightens that awareness as well.
- [33:23]
Laurie Johnson
In midsummer, in the moment when Oberon and Titania are arguing about the weather, Titania at one point says these mortals want their winter. And this is supposedly, according to some climate historians, the coldest decade of the 16th century. And yet I think what we have at that moment, the same decade that gave us the Thames drying up due to extreme drought and this volatile weather pattern around heavy rains for three years straight that lead to crop failures. What we get there though, is this observation from Titania, written by Shakespeare, that there wasn't in fact a serious weather winter during the 1590s. What they were observing is the want of a winter. There was a moment just before the big freeze does hit in the early 17th century when in fact the winters were disappearing for a moment.
- [34:25]
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- [35:24]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And Madeline, you've looked at evidence of recipe books and household manuals. How did they adapt their advice in response to extreme events like the frost of 1607?
- [35:36]
Madeleine Bassnett
It's not always easy to see how they're adapting specifically, but I think my work is trying to think about how recipes enable adaptation. So for example, need to stick with the 1690s for a minute. Hugh Platz Sundry New and Artificial Remedies Against Famine, which was published in 1596, is a famine manual published right in the middle of this great famine and crop failure. And so he's very interested in experiment and adaptation and has a number of recipes about how to make bread and beer in particular with other things. So using chestnut flour and acorn flour and beech flour, how to make sweet and delicate cakes out of parsnips, how to use root vegetables and other types of ways to create bread. So he's thinking all the time about these sorts of potential adaptations in a very specific way. I looked at a number of women manuscripts compiled by women in the period, including John Evelyn's wife, Mary Brown Evelyn, and I've been thinking a lot about how sort of fruit preserving recipes, for example, might give us a glimpse into how they were thinking about adaptation. And I think what's really interesting about those recipes is that the women are collecting recipes for ripe fruit, but they're also collecting recipes for green fruit. And they're also collecting recipes for, for fruit that can be picked at different times, like almost ripe fruit or fruit of a certain bigness, but not ripe. So they're clearly thinking about different stages of fruit ripening. And it seems to me that that ability to discern and think about those types of things enables a great range of adaptation and resilience. Because, of course, if the fruit ripening season doesn't happen till later, then you may be picking a lot more green fruit than you would be if it happened at the sort of normal and expected time.
- [37:54]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And we have to remind people of the obvious fact that modern supply chains now ensure continually stocked supermarket shelves. But this is not what we've got in the 16th and 17th centuries. And so knowing how you're going to be able to store and use fruit, or whatever it is that your crop is, is absolutely vital to ensuring you've got something to eat in the autumn and winter. I mean, do we see also an increase in, like the cultivation of small kitchen gardens? Do we see, I don't know, skills like pickling and preserving coming into their own?
- [38:26]
Madeleine Bassnett
Yes, and I think one of the things that's really interesting about preserving is that there seems to be a growing interest in preserving not just fruit, which was, I feel like, is somewhat different because it was a sort of a luxury type of process because it involved lots of sugar, although you could of course, preserve with honey. But the, the people collecting these recipes are elite women and they've got, you know, access to their orchards and potentially purchasing large amounts of fruit from other people. So. So that's slightly different from people who might be foraging fruit from, you know, hedgerows and in the wild and maybe having a very small kitchen garden at the back. The recipe books clearly indicate that an interest in preserving savory foods, meat and fish and vegetables, become much more apparent in the sort of later part of the 17th century when they've been going through a longer period of extreme and extremely cold weather. And so it does seem to me that that growing interest in pickling and preserving matches some of the weather trends in the period, Laurie.
- [39:34]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mean, it seems to tie in with similar ideas of crisis management by early playing companies. And I wonder if you think it's fair to say that climate events as early as the 16th century can be the catalyst for great innovation.
- [39:50]
Laurie Johnson
Absolutely. I'm thoroughly convinced. And this is one of the things that DeGroote argues with respect to the Dutch Republic as well, is that that ice crisis in the Dutch Republic was actually the catalyst for significant changes in what made the Republic so great in terms of improved trade, the development of governance systems that accommodated far more centralized patterns of control, and so on. I think you see something similar happening with respect to the speed with which we go from a fairly ad hoc amateur playing environment in the 15th into early 16th centuries to the professional theaters that the industry that Shakespeare walks into when he comes into London, the speed with which that happens. I don't think it's just economic. I think there is some sort of adaptation going on and significant innovation, not just around the playhouses themselves, but around company economics, around company sizes, around prop management. What you could take on the road, what you had to store in your playhouses, the fact that you needed a playhouse to store stuff in those innovations, each of those little changes, they're an innovation. And I think many of them can be traced to some sort of climate pattern, or at least maybe not a pattern, maybe an extreme event. However, I do suggest in this most recent paper that I've written that will be in Early Modern Studies Journal at Madeleine's, the special editor for that there is probably also a sense that sometimes cultural innovation requires things to be relatively static in order to have the confidence to make a change. And I need to be prepared to also recognize when those moments pop out. And I say, actually, I can't seem to identify any kind of climate factor that's responsible here. Quite possibly this is absolutely an economic or absolutely a political decision that's being made here, or a social one in terms of family politics or the relationships within a parish and so on.
- [41:53]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, we're complex creatures. How do you see the database being put into practice?
- [41:59]
Madeleine Bassnett
My hope is that it can be, I mean, be used for research and teaching on various levels. I mean, part of me wonders whether it can be useful to climatologists now in terms of thinking about flooding and weather patterns and storm impacts on the uk, we're focusing at the moment particularly on England and not the entire British Isles, just because of current, what's the word, a way to just kind of constrain the information, but it does seem to me that some of the flooding patterns must be matching some of the things that are happening right now. So I think it's still finding its place in the world, but I am hopeful that it can become very useful to a wide range of people.
- [42:47]
Laurie Johnson
And I've got to say, as a theatre historian, it absolutely fits the brief of what I pictured was necessary for theater historians at least to be able to say what's happening in the environment at this moment, to trace that alongside what they know is going on with the theatre history records, to start to identify if there's a potential CL based factor in what was going on there. That's for me, always been before. I see its immediate use, just because that's what I want to do with it. But in terms of its wider use, absolutely, any climate historian, anyone who needs climate history or is exploring in some way the relationship between the natural environment and the human world, anthropologists, sociologists, et cetera, it's going to be absolutely, I think, invaluable as a tool.
- [43:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, finally then, for both of you, how do you think the research to date has caused you to rethink some of the wider prevailing assumptions that continue about the Little Ice Age?
- [43:47]
Madeleine Bassnett
I think one of the biggest ones comes back to what Laurie's been saying about the 16th century, but I think this continues into the 17th century as well. Even though there's more of the cold, is just the unpredictability of the weather and the way in which the weather is startlingly similar to what we're dealing with now in terms of its volatility, its unpredictability and the extremes. I'm just thinking back to John Evelyn's comment on the Great Fire of London in 1666, and he says that it was so dry that the air was igniting. And I, as somebody in Canada, and I'm sure Laurie can think about this in Australia as well. You know, when we hear about the forest fires that are happening, that's exactly what's happening. Because it is so dry, the air ignites. And I've just very struck by that similarity.
- [44:47]
Laurie Johnson
I'm also struck by from the database and some of the discrepancies I find between what the broad scale climate science tells us when we talk about a little ice age. Sorry, a little ice age as a global phenomenon. Initially it was understood as a northern hemispheric phenomenon. Now we're imagining it as a global phenomenon. Nevertheless, that's always based on mapping multiple data points and assuming it applies across the board. And yet there's always variations, local variations, even within the database. I'm absolutely certain we'll be finding that there'll be moments when there is a significant weather event in one part of England that is absolutely unfelt elsewhere. There was earthquakes in 1575, for example, felt from York all the way down to the southwest, and yet no hint of it in any way being felt in London or in the East Anglia. And so we get that clear sense, I think, from the database, the more we drill into not just time, but the differences in space and geography. We understand that while climate level thinking has to be large scale, we need to be mindful that there are significant variations within that. And that's true as well. When we talk about global warming and people say, oh, but it was so cold today, surely global warming is a myth. Well, no, no, no. The globe is warming, but that plays out differently in very small locations, in microclimates and so on. And we need to be very mindful of that, that the climate science is still accurate, even if the indicators locally tell us that it just plays out differently in different locations.
- [46:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Yes, which is why we're now so often saying climate change. One final thought from what you've just said. We talked earlier about the ways in which this is seen as divine punishment or divine favor at the time. And I wonder if there's a way in which some of the pamphlets you've looked at, Madeleine, for example, where they're talking about resilience in the face of hardship, are serving a similar purpose to concepts like collective social responsibility that we see today relating to the current climate crisis. We can map perhaps the science, we can map the data. Is there anything also that we can learn from the way that they responded to their crisis?
- [47:04]
Madeleine Bassnett
I think so. I mean, a lot of my work is trying to think about relationality and the way in which which they might have thought or perceived their relationships to each other and the natural world and the sort of larger non human world and creatures around them. And I do think that this attention to weather and the ways in which weather are affecting not only themselves, but their larger communities, including the animals that they live with. In one of the flood, panthers, for example, there's a very striking passage where, and this is, I think, flooding in Norfolk, which is oddly connected to this other flooding at the Bristol Channel. Some cows get stranded on a small hill to get away from the flooding and they basically eat all the grass and they're stranded there and people come out with boats to try and save them. And what happens is the cows are so desperate that they start jumping in the water and they're they drown because they can't get any more cows into the boat. But what they say is they write about the cows like shipwrecked people trying to save themselves. So there's this immense amount of empathy that happens in this moment that I think really speaks to that kind of collective social care and resilience that I think is something that is very contemporary concern.
- [48:33]
Laurie Johnson
Yeah, I have to say I've just recently finished some some work for a book on care and caregiving as well, where I happen to notice that there's a shift in the language in the 16th century from care being something that's very individual to communal. And that caregiving, the idea of caregiving comes through at that moment and it wouldn't surprise me at all to find that it in some ways linked to a kind of social mindset that develops around managing disaster as opposed to when things are fairly steady and reliable and predictable in respect to the weather. Then your cares can be fairly contained as an individual responsibility. But once you get lots of people in need, then you also get lots of people needing to work together to solve that problem.
- [49:22]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, Professor Madeleine Bassnett, Professor Laurie Johnson, thank you so much for joining me to tell us about this research which seems so very important and revelatory. Thank you.
- [49:34]
Laurie Johnson
Thank you. Zazana, thank you so much.
- [49:37]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thanks for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit and also thanks to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. Remember, you can also listen to all of these podcasts on YouTube and watch hundreds of documentaries when you subscribe@historyhit.com subscribe it's one well worth it. And if you would be so good as to follow Not Just the Tudors on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts, you'll get each new episode as soon as it's released.
- [50:18]
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- [51:12]
Madeleine Bassnett
Here's a show that we recommend.
- [51:17]
Laurie Johnson
Hey folks, it's Mark Marin from wtf. I've been talking to all kinds of famous people in my garage since 2009, including a sitting president. You know, I. I don't imagine you were flying in here on the chopper thinking like, you know, I am nervous about Mark.
- [51:32]
Madeleine Bassnett
No, I wasn't.
- [51:33]
Laurie Johnson
Okay, well, that's good. That would be a problem. It would be a problem if the president was feeling stressed about Come into my garage.
- [51:39]
Madeleine Bassnett
Come into your garage.
- [51:40]
Laurie Johnson
And now there's even more WTF when you subscribe to the full Marin to get weekly bonus content and all WTF episodes ad free. Listen to WTF wherever you get podcasts and subscribe to the full marin@go.acast.com WTF.
- [52:00]
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