Coal mining

We don't think about coal and the Middle Ages together, but coal was certainly used for fuel then at least in some places and at least occasionally.  In fact, the Romans had used British coal when the legions were stationed there.

Now they did not have the deep tunnels and underground mines we now associate with coal mining.  Instead most of the coal that the Romans and medieval people used was what was usually called "sea coal."  They figured out that some of the black rocks that got washed up on shore would burn very hot (after being dried out, of course).  These would be pieces broken off from underwater coal deposits by the action of the waves, or perhaps pieces that fell from a deposit in an eroding cliff face.

Both Romans and medieval people would gather sea coal and, if they found an outcropping, dig out chunks, creating a pit.  Open pit mining is of course less dangerous than tunneling, which is why Britain closed its last coal mining tunnels around 2015, leaving only a few open pits.  Medieval people would have approved.

Coal had (and has) the distinct advantage that it will burn far hotter than wood.   A high temperature is needed if one is going to work iron or burn lime to make cement.  Coal was sparse throughout the Middle Ages, which is why they mostly used charcoal when high temperatures were needed.  But making charcoal, which requires burning a lot of wood very slowly, is a more complicated process than digging some shiny black rocks out of the ground, and it also uses up an awful lot of wood.

This meant that once coal mining became viable, enormous resources were poured into it.  Some of the first tunnels to be dug, following a seam of coal deep underground, were in Scotland.  Enough sea coal washed up on the shores of the Firth of Forth that a seventeenth-century entrepreneur in Culross started digging tunnels right under the firth, having figured out how to prop them so that they didn't collapse (or hardly at all).

Below is a view of the village of Culross today, on the edge of the firth. (The mines are long gone.)

 

In eighteenth-century Britain,  serious coal mining fueled the Industrial Revolution.  Britain, with its large supply of coal, was able to industrialize faster than any other region, which helped support its establishment of an Empire that extended from Canada to Africa to India to Hong Kong, with plenty of stops in between.

By the nineteenth century, Britain was fairly black with coal soot (the reason London had its famous "fogs," actually just really polluted air), and slag from the mines turned many rivers black.  Since World War II, however, Britain has really pushed toward improving its environment, phasing out coal and cleaning up the countryside.  Parts of the countryside look so verdant and pastoral that one can imagine they haven't changed since the Middle Ages.  Well, they have, but they've been restored to something closer to what they would have been like 800 years ago.

In the US, we are still mining coal, although with sustainable energy sources like wind, solar, and hydro now cheaper, coal is clearly on the way out.  A concern of course is for the coal miners, many of whom have destroyed their lungs by years in the mines.  None of them love coal mining for its own sake, but it pays very well, and it allows them to live in the mountains that they love, much of which is still beautiful territory in spite of the mines.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval social history, see my ebook Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.  Also available in paperback.

 

Peasants in the Winter

 Winter was a tough period for medieval peasants.  For one thing, they would have had a difficult time keeping warm.  We probably do not appreciate our furnaces enough—turn up the thermostat, and heat appears!  Medieval people of all sorts, not just peasants but the rich and powerful, would have killed for a furnace (well, maybe not literally).

They had firepits, but peasants would not have had fireplaces, a thirteenth-century invention.  A fireplace, while not filling the room with smoke the way a firepit can, also sends a lot of its heat up the chimney, so it's inefficient, and if fuel is hard to get or expensive you don't want to be inefficient.  Building a fireplace was also a skill that most peasants didn't have, and they wouldn't have had the money to hire a mason.  So fancy medieval fireplaces might be found in castles (as seen below), but not peasant houses.

 

The best way to stay warm was to stay in bed, snuggled up against other people.  Fortunately there was very little work to be done in the winter, other than taking care of the animals, so there was plenty of time to stay in bed.

 Animals in fact could be advantageous to have.  They wouldn't actually live with the humans, but a medieval farm house would generally have the barn or stables attached, or perhaps on a lower floor with the humans living above.  Some of their body heat would thus help keep the structure from becoming too frigid.

But a farm would still have been a brutal place in the winter (and remember, probably 90% of the medieval population lived on a farm).  The water that both humans and animals needed might well have frozen.  The courtyard and the dung heap, where both human and animal waste was deposited, would have been a muddy mess, or a frozen muddy mess, scarcely better.  Worst of all, the food might be running out.  Everybody tried to stash away plenty for winter, but there was no doubt that it could be a close run between when the root vegetables, stored grain, and smoked meat gave out and when the first dandelion greens appeared.

Appreciate your furnace and the grocery store.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval peasants, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages. Also available in paperback.

November in the Middle Ages

 It's November, a month that seems stuck somewhere between fall and winter, can't figure out which one it wants to be.  It's a month of major storms on the Great Lakes, as warm Gulf air comes up and meets Arctic air coming south, the "witch of November" as the weather pattern is called (referred to in the Gordon Lightfoot song, "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald").

The weather in November in the Middle Ages was moving toward what we would consider December weather, because they were on the Julian calendar, which had leap years every four years but didn't take account into the need to skip leap year on the century mark, so from our point of view they were 10 or 12 days further into winter weather than we are.

November was an important month for medieval people, even if they didn't celebrate Thanksgiving (which, in spite of all the talk about 1621, really only took the form we now take for granted at the end of the American Civil War).  Saint Martin's day (November 11) celebrated the saint, who had first introduced monasticism to the West at the end of fourth century and who had divided his cloak with a beggar (Christ in disguise), and also marked the day that a lot of rents came due.  Below is a famous El Greco (well post-medieval) picture of Martin (on the horse) and the beggar.

November was also the month to finish bringing in the crops and to round up the pigs, who had been running more or less wild all summer and fall.  We eat turkey for our big harvest-festival meal, a bird unknown in Europe before Columbus, but for medieval people, pork was the thing.  They ate as much fresh pork as they could at November hog-butcher time and salted and smoked the rest.  Europe's small Jewish and Muslim populations wouldn't eat pork, which everybody else thought just showed they didn't know a good thing.

November's other chore was getting ready for winter.  There were going to be some long months where not that much was going on other than trying to keep warm.  Firewood had to be gathered, cut and stacked.  A fireplace in a big castle or manor house (from the thirteenth century on) could burn its way through an awful lot of wood, though a peasant house would have a firepit, where the heat and smoke would not go up the chimney--more efficient though a lot smokier.

 And of course enough grain had to be carefully stored away, where (one hoped) mice and rats wouldn't find it, to make bread to last until spring (along with the occasional piece of ham or bacon with a side of lentils or turnip).  It was five months until the dandelion greens would be ready to eat.

© C. Dale Brittain 2020

For more on the medieval round of the seasons, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Winter Wonderland

To the modern person in the West, winter is both a difficult time and a delight.  Snow can be beautiful as it coats the trees.

(This is actually a color picture, although you might not know it.)

Snuggling inside where it's warm, or engaging in vigorous outdoor activities like skiing, sledding, skating, or building a snowman are happy events.  But they are happy because we have a warm place to go (plus hot chocolate).  We would think of them differently if inside were as cold as outside.

Medieval people certainly saw the beauty in snow-bedecked branches and appreciated being inside where it was warm, but when open fires and animal heat were the only sources of heat (as discussed more here), it was hard to keep the temperature up.

But they had advantages we do not have.  In the modern world, you are expected to get to work, almost certainly by driving.  A snowstorm has to be pretty severe to shut everything down.  So drivers have to make their way along slippery roads, hoping they don't end up in a pileup or in a ditch, assuming they don't just get mired in a drift.  Snowplow drivers have to keep plowing and salting to try to keep businesses open and cars moving.  (Thought to ponder:  How do the snowplow drivers get to work, given that no one will have plowed?)

Medieval people would have traveled by foot or horseback in snowy weather, or, more sensibly, just stayed home.  In Scandinavia, people would ski to get places (cross-country, not downhill).  For much of the population, winter was a time when there was little work to do, other than taking care of the animals, so it actually was possible to stay in bed when modern people would be out scraping ice off their cars and hoping they had enough tire tread.

A real concern for people in the Middle Ages was that the food not run out.  In the modern world fresh vegetables and meat are available year round.  In the medieval world, even for the aristocracy, there was always a question whether the grain for flour (for bread) would last until the next harvest.  Dried beans or lentils, onions, and the occasional piece of sausage might lose their appeal but they were better than not eating.  One could always look forward to the first dandelion greens.

Modern "snowbirds" who go south to avoid winter weather miss the beauty of snow.  Many medieval people would have liked to join them.

A final thought.  In the song "Winter Wonderland," there's a line, "Later on, we'll conspire, as we dream by the fire."  Would perspire make more sense?

© C. Dale Brittain 2016 

For more on medieval life, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.