Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age, Scotland 1400-1850

Citation

Oram RD (2024) Where Men No More May Reap or Sow: The Little Ice Age, Scotland 1400-1850 [An Environmental History of Scotland]. Edinburgh: John Donald.

Abstract
The second volume in a three-part series covering the environmental history of Scotland from the Romans to COP26. This volume spans 450 years that saw profound transformation in Scotland's environment. It begins in the fifteenth century, when the 'Golden Age' of the early 1200s was but a fading folk memory in a land gripped in the gathering grimness of a 'little ice age'. Colder, wetter, stormier weather became the new normal, interspersed with brief episodes of warmer but still moist conditions, all of which brought huge challenges to a society on the knife edge of subsistence. Viewing the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries against the cycles of disease and dearth that were ever present into the later 1700s, the book explores the slow adoption and application of the ideas of 'Improvement' and the radical disruption of Scotland's environment that ensued. Reformation, revolution and rebellion were the background noise to efforts to subsist and succeed through a hostile age, in which Scotland's environment was an adversary to be tamed, mastered and made 'polite'. As the last, bitter decades of the 'little ice age' were ground out in foreign wars, forced clearances and potato famines, Scotland prepared itself to embrace the Industrial Age.

Keywords
Scotland; environment; 'little ice age'; environmental history; disease; energy; Improvement; land-use; farming; woodland; climate; weather