[A more nuanced look at the period that was described in our history books as the Dark Ages. SB SM]
Today’s selection– from Power and Progress by Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson. The Dark Ages weren’t so dark, but all the increased wealth was soaked up by a massive religious hierarchy:
“Italian scholar Francesco Petrarca (better known as Petrarch) famously argued that the era following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the year 476 was a time ‘surrounded by darkness and dense gloom.’ Petrarch was referring to the paucity of advances in poetry and art, but his pronouncements came to define how generations of historians and social commentators thought of the eight centuries that followed the glory of the Roman Empire. Conventional wisdom long held there was essentially no progress of any kind, including technological breakthroughs, until the Renaissance began to turn things around starting in the 1300s.
“We now know that this view was wrong. There was significant technological change and improvement in economic productivity in Europe during the Middle Ages. Practical innovations included:
“- better rotation of crops across different fields
– greater use of legumes to feed animals and add nitrogen to the soil
– the heavy wheeled plow, pulled by six or eight oxen
– increased use of horses for plowing and transportation
– better harnesses, stirrups, saddles, and horseshoes
– more use of animal manure as fertilizer
– widespread adoption of the wheelbarrow
– early fireplaces and chimneys, which greatly improved indoor air quality
– mechanical clocks
– the basket wine press
– good mirrors
– the spinning wheel
– improved looms
– improved use of iron and steel
– expanded access to coal
– scaled-up mining of all sorts
– better barges and sailing ships
– advances in stained-glass windows
– the very first eyeglasses
“Yet there was also something quite dark about this era. The lives of people working the soil remained hard, and peasants’ standard of living may even have declined in parts of Europe.
“The technology and the economy progressed in a way that proved harmful to most of the population.
“Perhaps the most defining technology of the Middle Ages was the mill, whose rising importance is well illustrated by the English experience after the Norman Conquest of 1066. At the end of the eleventh century, there were about 6,000 water-powered mills in England, which worked out to just about one mill per 350 people. Over the next 200 years, the number of waterwheels doubled, and their productivity increased significantly.
“The earliest water mills involved a small wheel that rotated in the horizontal plane below a grindstone, to which it was connected by a vertical axle. Later, more-efficient designs introduced a larger vertical wheel, mounted outside the mill and connected by gears to the grinding mechanism. The improvements were striking. Even a small vertical waterwheel, operated by five to ten people, could generate two or three horsepower, the equivalent of thirty to sixty workers doing the work by hand—more than a threefold increase in productivity. The larger vertical mills of the later medieval period boosted output per worker to as much as twenty times the level that hand milling could achieve.
“Waterwheels could not be adopted everywhere: they needed a sufficient flow of water running down a steep enough gradient. Starting in the 1100s, windmills extended the reach of mechanical power, greatly expanding milling grain for bread and ale and fulling (preparing) cloth for wool processing. Windmills boosted economic activity in flat parts of the country with rich soils, such as East Anglia.
“From 1000 to 1300, water mills and windmills and other advances in agricultural technology roughly doubled yields per hectare. These innovations also helped kick-start English woolen cloth textiles, which later played a pivotal role in industrialization. Although it is difficult to determine exact numbers, agricultural productivity per person is estimated to have increased by 15 percent between 1100 and 1300.
“You might think that these technical and productivity advances would lead to higher real incomes. Alas, the productivity bandwagon—productivity increases that lift wages and workers’ living standards—did not materialize in the medieval economy. Except for those belonging to a small elite, there were no sustained improvements in living standards and some episodes of deterioration. For most people, better agricultural technology during the Middle Ages deepened their poverty.
“The rural population of England did not have a comfortable existence in the early eleventh century. Peasants worked hard and achieved little more consumption than the bare minimum necessary for survival. The available evidence suggests that these people were squeezed even further over the next two centuries. The Normans reorganized agriculture, strengthened the feudal system, and intensified implicit and explicit taxation. Farmers had to hand over more of their agricultural output to their social superiors. Over time, feudal lords imposed more-onerous labor requirements as well. In some parts of the country, peasants spent twice as many hours per year in the lord’s field as had been the norm before the conquest.