Live locally, live sustainably

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2:00Ian Mortimer:John Stamos here in partnership with Cologuard, and I've got to say, so you're 45 or older and at average risk. So what? That doesn't mean your life comes to a halt. No way. You can still do all the fun things you've been doing, but it's time to take your health a little more seriously. Colon cancer screening needs to be on your docket, And it's as simple as the Kologar test. Don't worry, you got this. We know we should all be living sustainably if we can. Best-selling historian Ian Mortimer asks us to look back to the medieval period to seek inspiration for sustainable living in this episode of Life Lessons from History.

2:39Welcome to Life Lessons from History with me, Dave Musgrove. The concept is simple. I find a great historian and I ask them to propose a life lesson from history. Some learning from the past that will help us today to live better, happier, healthier or more productive lives.

3:00Ian, how are you? I'm very well. Thank you very much for asking me to chat about things that matter. Well, good. And that's exactly what we're going to do because we're going to try and take some lessons from the Middle Ages as to ways that we might live. And we're going to talk specifically about sustainability and think about what we might learn from how people lived in the medieval period in terms of sustainability. So top line it for us, Ian. What's the main sort of thing that we ought to think about when we're considering sustainability in the Middle Ages? Right. Well, we need to start off with a couple of definitions, I think.

3:34I mean, what do we actually mean by sustainability would be a pretty obvious one. And it's even more obvious if you're a historian, because they'll say it meant different things in the Middle Ages from now. What I'm thinking of, and the reason that when you asked me for a theme, I thought sustainability was a good one-word way of encapsulating what we can learn, is because we tend to think in terms of sustainability being the ability of a community to nourish and make its citizens prosper without depleting its resources, the resources that allow them to flourish and prosper and without taking away from anybody else.

4:10Now, straight away, that last bit is going to clash with our ideas of medieval violence and all that and taking away. So I'm not saying we return to the Middle Ages. What I'm saying is there are important messages about real sustainability that come out of the Middle Ages, which can have benefits the way we think moving forward. Medieval people, of course, would also differ from our identity of sustainability in that they would think about encouraging a community to prosper and flourish, regardless of any impact on anybody else, and with a prior note that it had to be sustainable in terms of prayer in God's eyes.

4:47And they would be thinking of sustainability. Can you pay the priests who are going to get you into heaven through their prayers? Can you pay the knights who are going to defend you against the people who are going to be attacking you to try and take away what you think is yours? So there is a fundamental discontinuity between medieval ideas of sustainability had they had such a concept and what ours are now. But we can learn from them because their lives were immeasurably more sustainable than ours are. Yeah, so there's spiritual and sort of seigneurial sustainability. In terms of definitions, one of them we should clarify, when we say Middle Ages, what are you thinking about in terms of that?

5:26Well, of course, there is a huge arc here. I mean, the Middle Ages technically are from the fall of Rome right the way through to the 16th century. And in medieval horizons, I used a convenient cutoff of 1600, which is probably later than most people would. I've got so much flack for that book from having the end of the Middle Ages of 1600, you wouldn't believe it. But whether you choose 1453, 1485, 1500, 1540, whenever, we're talking about the period which relies on a manuscript culture rather than a printed one, one in which handguns had not yet become the most important agents of victory on a battlefield, one in which the Catholic Church is still more or less united.

6:07So that's a thousand years. What I'm thinking of, because I'm an English historian, I rely very heavily on written sources. I'm an archivist originally by qualification before I did my PhD. So I think of the period where there is documentation sufficient to be confident knowing what you're talking about. I'm not an archaeologist. So I think from the 11th century through to the 16th, in terms of understanding medieval change, the way the medieval society develops. There's also another reason for that, which is, of course, we go from the period, the medieval warm period, through to the beginning of the Little Ice Age.

6:45So you're looking at an arc of 500 to 600 years when the environment is allowing so much change to happen, underpinning so much change. Okay, good. That's brilliant. That's a really helpful assessment of what's going on. So we're covering quite a lot of time here. Big chunks of time. So we'll have to be brief and to the point. Okay, let's put your time travellers hat on for a second. If we could go back to the 11th century, let's go back to 1065 before us all really kicked off. I went back and we went to, I don't know, went to London and said, hey, are you living sustainably? Would people have any idea about what that meant?

7:25They wouldn't have any idea except for this, that if we think in terms of having societies prosper and flourish, well, London in those days was about 10 ,000 people. It was by far the largest town, apart from Winchester, probably the only large town in England. But they would not think they were flourishing, A, because 11th century is a bloody miserable time. I mean, go through the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle year by year, and it works out that famine affects, or is said to affect, at least one in four years of the 11th century. Every fourth year being defined by food shortages. remember in the 11th century people were still selling their children into slavery not because they didn't want to have children or this was some sort of cruel version of birth control it's because that was a child's best chance of survival so you do not have a sustainable society in that they are completely dependent on the weather life is so precarious and then on top of that in the early 11th century you've got the norse invasions let's face it 1065 you'd be silly to think you were safe from any conflict with Duke William about to come across the channel.

8:32And right across Northern Europe, the violence in society is quite extraordinary because people are quite often desperate. Their assets aren't there. So what I'm interested in, in the sustainability angle, is not that they're not damaging their horizons, they're damaging their assets, their environment. What interests me is that they go from this precariousness within 200 years to actually probably the most sustainable society that Europe's ever known. Okay. Before we move on to that, let's just pause a bit more on 1065. I'm not going to have a conversation with you about whether they did in fact know the Norman Conquered is coming, but it sounds like at that point, if they were living sustainably in our concept, they were because of a lack of resources, of the fact that they had to.

9:19They didn't have any choice. They had to be very mindful of the resources they were marshalling. Absolutely. I mean, we think in terms of medieval markets and medieval fairs, there were very few markets. I mean, where I live in Devon, which is one and a half million acre county, a very large county, there were four markets possibly. Probably one of those actually wasn't functioning yet. Cornwall, similar. Somerset, not much better. Whereas in the later Middle Ages, you can think in terms of getting to a market. Everyone was within six miles of a market by the late 14th century. In the early to mid 11th century, you might well have to travel 30 miles to go to a market.

9:58That's 30 miles. It's probably a day and a half traveling, leaving your possessions unguarded perhaps. You simply didn't do it unless you had to. You're not going to do it. So the idea of traveling for exchanging surpluses doesn't really take off. You'd be concerned to exchange your surpluses with your neighbors, perhaps. You'd have to work within the community. And as we know, across the whole of Northern Europe, the manorial system encouraged very strong cohesive bonds between the members of a community. but that community, each manor was very heavily dependent on its own assets, its own productivity, its own ingenuity.

10:40It had to be pretty much self-sufficient. Okay, so let's wind up then a couple of centuries afterwards. So you said that by that point, we've got a really sustainable society. Describe it. What are the elements of it? The great thing about a medieval society in terms of its sustainability is it doesn't damage the environment they are not burning fossil fuels they are not actually using many things that are chemically made or manufactured so things like glue comes from animals doesn't it so the hooves of cattle every part of an animal is used so that is the underpinning the downside of that is of course that you you are dependent on the weather and the bad year people will die from starvation the disease of the fourth child as they sometimes call it now if you have an economy that is no longer a subsistence economy, which is a market economy, and is developed, those surpluses can move around much more easily.

11:34So where need arises, prices go up, the supplies go in to meet the demand. So at that level, in a late medieval society, sees a lot of goods moving around. Fish, for example, were taken inland 20 or 30 miles in the late medieval markets to supply the need. There was a call for fish because of fish days within the Catholic church so the merchants from the coast supplied the fish and likewise you have development of areas which are very strong in wool production was a demand for wool going across to the continent because Britain Britain England in particular produced so much wool so therefore the areas of specialization develop the market flows creating wealth where the necessities of life circulate much more easily now to then take that to an absurdum level in modern times we see the The opposite of sustainability because we end up with areas which specialise so much they can't actually produce anything.

12:28They only produce one thing, so they're not sustainable. Where I live on Dartmoor, 7 ,500 acres of agricultural land only produces beef and mutton, lamb. It doesn't produce any milk even. That's ridiculous. It's no longer sustainable even though it's a food-producing area. So I see that the ideal sustainability is where you have everything produced within a relatively small time. Everything can be taken to your local markets or major cities, and there is no damage to the environment while facilitating the maximum amount of trade exchange and nurturing the population. So you're arguing for localism there versus globalism, I suppose.

13:12Of necessities, yes. That's a thing that people do think about these days, don't they? We do have farmers markets. We do have people actively trying to access resources. But we do it on such a narrow choice-based basis, if you know what I mean, that we should be doing this as a matter of course. And we should not be listening to the politicians that says, if we get out of this agreement, whatever, we have an agreement with the states, we can have cheap food coming in from the states and it will make your meal so much cheaper. We shouldn't be listening to that because that is unsustainable. and we are seeing the level of food we produce for our own use in this country declining rapidly.

13:50I mean, it was very low in the 1930s. We were importing most of our food then and it went back up to a height under the European Union in the 1970s, 1980s and now it's in rapid decline again. We should be thinking in terms of localism, but not as a matter of wouldn't it be nice if we bought locally, not a matter of choice for everybody. It should be a matter of insistence that this is the best way to manage this entire country sustainably. Is that something which people in the Middle Ages would have understood the concept of it being beneficial to have products coming from a local area rather than being shipped from a long way away, even if that were possible?

14:30No, they wouldn't have seen it because they had no concept of environmental damage. They had no concept of transport damaging the environment or being unsustainable because it wasn't. It was quite sustainable. And from the late 13th century onwards, you have food shortages in the southeast, especially in London, being met from merchants coming, well, from the Hanseatic merchants bringing in grain from Eastern Europe. And in later centuries, as we know, corn coming from nearer in Europe, hence all the corn laws, et cetera, trying to preserve the local corn industry or grain and wheat or whatever for the benefit of the owners.

15:07Their idea of sustainability was to keep the owners rich. Hence, the corn laws were protecting the income here. So their sense of sustainability was income sustainability. They had no idea of the environmental benefits of keeping everything local. But it's also if everything is grown locally, it is that much more accessible. Whereas you can have problems in long-term distribution of grain, etc., which even if it was done with a wooden ship that's not going to have any impact on the environment, it's still not necessarily sustainable if it can't get through the ice or it can't get through the bad weather or it sinks.

15:42So there are other issues as well. Localism is a very positive way of looking at the production of the necessities of life. And what we do know about the Middle Ages, whether or not they had a concept of environmental protection they certainly knew how to marshal their local resources they knew how to manage woodland for instance i mean i um uh you don't know this but i have recently started making uh hazel hurdle um fences i'm very excited about it been practicing um uh i've been in my local wood with permission doing a bit of a coppicing of the hazel position problematic gorilla hurdle making uh and it's it's very therapeutic it's a beautiful thing to do it's like it's like knitting with wood.

16:25But that's, of course, that's the sort of thing that they were doing. Absolutely. They managed their resources in a way that they knew they could get continuing crops off, because if you pollard or coppice a tree, then it'll grow back stronger and you'll get more resources. So they knew about all that sort of thing, didn't they? Oh, and not just with trees. I mean, you look through the manorial customs of quite a lot of manners, and they'll be saying when the peasants can go take their pigs into the woods to go and get the beach mast from the ground and feed them, when they're allowed to go and pick up the fallen sticks for their firewood, how much timber they're allowed to take for their houses.

17:01And that's just the way that you manage the woodland in relation to the peasantry that's normally farming the land. But then you think about how you divide up on an open field system, which we had most of the central England, how they divide all the strips of land into areas where no one's going to have all their land blighted by a frost pocket because it's all divided up and scattered. So there's an average sort of production level across all the fields. The ways that they use every part of an animal always really impresses me. There's no real wastage. Even things like what you're going to use for toilet paper is normally being used for some of the purpose first.

17:36It's repurposing everything, getting the maximum usage out of everything. Even at quite a cynical level, if somebody is left unmarried and they're jointly responsible for some land, well, in certain manners, the mural reef can insist that they marry. And if they choose a husband for themselves or choose a wife for themselves who can manage the land, it will be done for you. It's to create maximum production because all the land needs to be turned to good use in order to feed everybody. Otherwise, you're back to where you were in the 11th century, and every fourth year, you're starving to death.

18:07So just as in wartime, you need to club together to be stronger to meet the attack of an adversary. So when you're up against the weather and a bad environment, you've got to club together. So that sustainability is there in all these manorial records. We just need to look for it and realise it's there. Yeah. Just thinking about the concept of the manor, I'm wondering how far the peasantry had agency in living sustainability or whether they were actually just being told what to do by the manorial lords, whether they would have, from a community neighbourliness sort of basis, they would have lived that way anyway because that was what was the best way to do it or whether they were kind of being forced into it so that the lords maximise their revenues.

18:53It's a really good question. I mean, what is the manna really doing? I see the manna, I come at this from why does the manna exist in the first place? You've got to give up all these rights. If you live on a medieval manna in the 11th century, you do not have the right to leave the manna without permission. Why would anybody do that? Why would anybody accept that if you're a woman not allowed to marry somebody from outside the manor? I mean, there are so many rights you're given up. Why would you do that? It's only because the hardship of life forces everybody to get together and use their collective patterns of behavior, patterns of farming, their collective knowledge to the communal benefit.

19:32That's the only way I can explain it. And if that's the case, and remember the reeve is the person telling what to do, not the lord of the manor. Most lords are lords of loads and loads of manners. They haven't got the time to go around. They're off somewhere else. Exactly. Now, going between their manners, expecting a food rent in Saxon times. Obviously, that fails. The food rent is no longer paid in a more monetized economy. But initially, 11th century, you've still got your Saxon thanes, lords, going between their manners, expecting to be fed wherever they go, expecting a food rent of a certain amount from each manor.

20:05but the people producing it are primarily producing it for their own communities. They've got to pay their food rent but they want to make as much as possible. They all have their allotted tasks. They all really are responding to the reeve who's telling them what to do. There's a really good document. I think it's an early 12th century document about how to run a manor. It's all based about what the reeve needs to know, all the tools he needs to provide, all the buildings he needs to keep in shape And that shows that there is this one person who is coordinating the entire community's efforts. And I think that, to answer your question, the community has its head and it has its mouthpiece in him, but he's the person who coordinates all these assets and puts them to communal benefit.

20:54I think in later years, then the idea of memorial profit does enter. and I think this is especially when the markets are forming. If you think you've got a – let's say you've got one manor just to make things easy. You're the lord of the manor. And let's say this manor is about 5 ,000 acres and it's got about 1 ,000 acres of scrub land in it. And your peasants are quite happily going forth and multiplying. And you manage to cultivate as the population expands in the medieval warm period of the 12th, 13th centuries, you manage to cultivate that extra 1 ,000 acres. Once that's all used up and the population still carries on expanding, what are you going to do with the excess people?

21:34You can either allow them to go off to another town somewhere else outside your control and you've lost their services, or you establish a market in your own manor and say, well, you're not free to leave my manor, but you are free to have a burgage plot in my new town in the middle of this manor and you can become a cobbler. You don't have to have 15 acres or whatever it is to keep your family going. You can work as a cobbler. So there is that profit incentive that comes in as the markets become a strategy for dealing with overpopulation. But at the same time, it does benefit communities themselves.

22:09It's not all about lords' financial exploitation of their peasantry. You've just described like a brilliant medieval strategy computer game there. It probably already exists, doesn't it? Oh, yeah, I'm sure it does. Civilization manner. Zootopia 2 has come home to Disney+. Let's go! Get ready for a new case. We're the greatest partners of all time! New friends. Gary the Snake. And your last name? The Snake. Dream Team. Get new habitats. Zootopia has a secret reptile population. You can watch the record-breaking phenomenon at home. Zootopia 2, now available on Disney Plus Rated PG. And right now you can get Disney Plus and Hulu for just$4.99 a month for three months with a special limited time offer ends March 24th.

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23:47So just thinking about sustainability, when we think about it today, there's probably like the three R's we might think about, recycling, reuse and reduction. Yeah. Recycling. They were pretty good on recycling. They were. And you think in terms of everything produced off the land, everything is going to be, whether it's the leather from the cows, the meat from the cows, the milk from the cows. You don't eat young animals. You get every bit of use out of an animal you possibly can. So if you're very wealthy, yes, you might eat a lamb, but most people are going to be eating old sheep because they want to get the milk out of the sheep.

24:20They want to get the fleece off the sheep. And the more sheep you have, obviously, the more milk and the wool you're going to get and finally get the meat as well. So it's using everything to its maximum. In terms of recycling, I mean, whether it be the dung in the fields or whatever, you're looking at everything that has a potential, that potential being exploited in some way or another. because you have relatively few assets in a local system, you have to make the most of everything you've got. And as I mentioned earlier, if you have, by the late Middle Ages, paper, you use it for one purpose, then you use it for toilet paper.

24:56Old rags, when people are excavating monastic latrines, they're always finding ripped up pieces of old cloth, which people have used as the end of their life when there's nothing else to use it for, use it as a toilet paper. so yeah there is a constant reuse of everything that can be reused so they're good at recycling and moss i believe and moss yes um i've been i've been reading up about uh human uh excrement actually just it's a fascinating subject fun kind of thing for that i like to do um and it's i'm i was trying to understand how far um that was used as as dung and manure and it sounds like there is a bit it's not entirely clear yeah exactly i'm totally with you on that because i've been trying and find that out too.