Back After a Long Spring Hiatus; Noah Smith & Brad DeLong Record the Podcast We, at Least, Would Like to Listen to!; Aspirationally Bi-Weekly (Meaning Every Other Week; Aspirationally an hour...
The Long Morning of Medieval Europe has a good section on agricultural labor in Western Europe in the late Roman era and early Dark Ages. Serfs were slaves, and usually did their fieldwork in iron shackles. Archeologists have found lots of iron shackles along with iron tools from that era. Rural slavery was always uglier than urban slavery, but no one wants to do farm work. It's grueling. It's remarkably unrewarding even for freeholders. According to the book, there was a lot of discussion in Roman circles about how to get farm workers to be more productive. There are echos today if you've been following the return-to-office debate.
""Only from Italy west": that's "only" England, France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Austria (*), Spain, Italy and parts of the Netherlands, Germany and North Africa.
(*) the areas covered by Hungary and Romania aren't part of the Eastern empire either so I I guess that the faced the same loss of civilisation
Some 15 years ago I read The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins (but I can't find it back). In his telling, the end of the Roman empire is more dramatic than the gradual event that DeLong speaks of. In a generation or two, amphoras became a luxury article available only to princes and bishops (before it had been such a standard product that you'd throw it away when you'd emptied it of wine or olive oil), only monks could read (an estimated half the male population could read before the fall) and several similar developments in a short period of time.
20. Literacy is a good thing, not a neutral thing.
21. People who claim that valuing literacy is “frankly, kind of racist” should delete their accounts and go away.
When you say that literacy is a good thing, perhaps such people automatically assume you're saying that illiteracy is a bad thing. People can do good, even good practical, things without being literate. Across the world, there is a lot of oral history and oral tradition that has helped pass knowledge from one generation to another. Without records of some kind, it isn't verifiable of course -- in the sense that one can't discern what was said originally and how much was added on the way to the present.
When I was in college I used to ask history professors if it was possible to quantify the dark ages. This was in the days before ExconoBros started infringing on history professors' turf. The profs would dismissively tell me there was no "dark age," and the proper term was "Early Middle Ages." So obviously I loved your podcase and the blog that goes with it.
Once the Internet arrived I was able to do my own research. I discovered that during the Counter Reformation the catholic historian Cardinal Caesar Baronius wrote "Annales Ecclesiastici." In this work he compared the number of volumes in Migne's Patrologia Latina containing the work of Latin writers from the 10th century with the number containing the work of writers from the preceding and succeeding centuries. Here's what he found:
Volumes of Patrologia Latina per century
Century # of volumes
7th 9
8th 8
9th 34
10th 8
11th 13
12th 40
13th 26
So you can see that there was less writing before the Carolingian Rennisance. In other words, a "dark age." Of course the chart is not perfect. It's not clear why there was a drop in Latin writing in the 10th century.
I can't remember whether it was Chris Wickham or Peter Heather, but IIRC one of them said that it was likely that Rome was entirely depopulated around 410.
The Long Morning of Medieval Europe has a good section on agricultural labor in Western Europe in the late Roman era and early Dark Ages. Serfs were slaves, and usually did their fieldwork in iron shackles. Archeologists have found lots of iron shackles along with iron tools from that era. Rural slavery was always uglier than urban slavery, but no one wants to do farm work. It's grueling. It's remarkably unrewarding even for freeholders. According to the book, there was a lot of discussion in Roman circles about how to get farm workers to be more productive. There are echos today if you've been following the return-to-office debate.
""Only from Italy west": that's "only" England, France, Belgium, Luxemburg, Switzerland, Austria (*), Spain, Italy and parts of the Netherlands, Germany and North Africa.
(*) the areas covered by Hungary and Romania aren't part of the Eastern empire either so I I guess that the faced the same loss of civilisation
Some 15 years ago I read The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization by Bryan Ward-Perkins (but I can't find it back). In his telling, the end of the Roman empire is more dramatic than the gradual event that DeLong speaks of. In a generation or two, amphoras became a luxury article available only to princes and bishops (before it had been such a standard product that you'd throw it away when you'd emptied it of wine or olive oil), only monks could read (an estimated half the male population could read before the fall) and several similar developments in a short period of time.
20. Literacy is a good thing, not a neutral thing.
21. People who claim that valuing literacy is “frankly, kind of racist” should delete their accounts and go away.
When you say that literacy is a good thing, perhaps such people automatically assume you're saying that illiteracy is a bad thing. People can do good, even good practical, things without being literate. Across the world, there is a lot of oral history and oral tradition that has helped pass knowledge from one generation to another. Without records of some kind, it isn't verifiable of course -- in the sense that one can't discern what was said originally and how much was added on the way to the present.
When I was in college I used to ask history professors if it was possible to quantify the dark ages. This was in the days before ExconoBros started infringing on history professors' turf. The profs would dismissively tell me there was no "dark age," and the proper term was "Early Middle Ages." So obviously I loved your podcase and the blog that goes with it.
Once the Internet arrived I was able to do my own research. I discovered that during the Counter Reformation the catholic historian Cardinal Caesar Baronius wrote "Annales Ecclesiastici." In this work he compared the number of volumes in Migne's Patrologia Latina containing the work of Latin writers from the 10th century with the number containing the work of writers from the preceding and succeeding centuries. Here's what he found:
Volumes of Patrologia Latina per century
Century # of volumes
7th 9
8th 8
9th 34
10th 8
11th 13
12th 40
13th 26
So you can see that there was less writing before the Carolingian Rennisance. In other words, a "dark age." Of course the chart is not perfect. It's not clear why there was a drop in Latin writing in the 10th century.
“MGMT - Little Dark Age Cover in Classical Latin. Bardcore/Medieval style” goes well with this episode, IMHO. https://youtu.be/hEsxc_jmArU
I can't remember whether it was Chris Wickham or Peter Heather, but IIRC one of them said that it was likely that Rome was entirely depopulated around 410.