tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post558314235707809819..comments2024-03-26T14:19:33.332-07:00Comments on Bench Grass: Old Europe: Heathen RushErik Lundhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-68613381396492485712013-06-21T14:33:23.421-07:002013-06-21T14:33:23.421-07:00I think we can discount that possibility. Buckwhea...I think we can discount that possibility. Buckwheat was a Neolithic domesticate in East Asia, and is known today as a high altitude crop because of its short summer growing season. If it mutated, it did so in the Himalayas, and here is a historical linguistics paper showing that buckwheat was grown in the Himalayas at a point contemporaneous with the spread of Sino-Tibetan --certainly earlier than 1380AD.<br /><br />http://www.rogerblench.info/Language/Sino-Tibetan/Blench%20ICSTLL42%20Chiang%20Mai%20paper.pdf Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-4508673287648541062013-06-20T20:19:18.611-07:002013-06-20T20:19:18.611-07:00Or there could have been a viral event where a buc...Or there could have been a viral event where a buckwheat variety that was cold/drought/wet/wind resistant enough to make a dependable crop, and thus a community.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-85555965173763990102013-06-20T11:32:57.085-07:002013-06-20T11:32:57.085-07:00But then we go in another direction --accept that ...But then we go in another direction --accept that in some cases the heath is the heath because there's not much else that you can do with it. Poor people go there because landlords don't want it, not because it has a special relationship with the Crown. What happens in the 1380s? What changes the fat land's relationship with the heath?<br /><br />The most obvious explanation is more demand for what the heath can provide. Dr. Leenders, intriguingly, is currently working on peat-cutting for salt-making in the late medieval Netherlands, whereas I'm just getting around to reading Henry Cleere's work on the connection between the Roman Channel Fleet and the iron industry of the Weald. Traditional marine industry depends a great deal more heavily on naval stores than the ships themselves. By this the modern understanding means mast timber and pine tar from the Baltic, but in an earlier setting means canvas and nails. Both are "wealden" products. Flax is best grown in boggy country, while iron, being a very commonly found ore, used to be made by migratory workers who followed charcoal rather than ore bodies. <br /><br />So if labour is flocking to the periphery, away from the fat lands to the margins to engage in industrial activities such as canvas and nail making, how do you feed them? Buckwheat groats? The line that Dr. Leenders' investigation might have followed, and perhaps did, would be the link between his "innovators" and the establishment of the parish itself. The supposed first man to plant buckwheat in a parish might not be the reason for the parish to exist, but he might well have created a context where a pioneering parish church could survive, nucleating a local government that could itself form a kernel of growth in a previously under-inhabited area. After all, many parish establishments either failed due to a lack of population to support them or were scandals of neglect at the time of the Reformation. Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-40723516688773009542013-06-20T11:21:56.710-07:002013-06-20T11:21:56.710-07:00If I wanted to bring many other threads into this ...If I wanted to bring many other threads into this discussion, I would talk about the "Weald," "Wallonia," and "salis."<br /><br />"Waelsch" is German for "wildling," and a highly derogatory term for "Italian," or southern European in general, of the kind that a certain breed of insensitive grandparent might use, a bit too-loudly, at the supermarket. <br /><br />It is also the root of "Walloon," "Welsh," and "Vlach." In any case, it is attached to the idea of someone who lives on the waste, and some recent work on forest law that I didn't cite because I would have to track down the citation first, notes that the Roman connection is more than accidental. People who live on settled land are subject to the common law; but the waste, precisely because it is outside the community, is still subject to the emperor's (Roman) law, and by extension the "barbarian" crown as successor to the imperial regalia. (Or the good old Kaiser of the Heilige Roemisches Reich.) <br /><br />This at least raises the possibility of defining "waste" as something more than the obvious connotation of an area with poor soil, under forest for browsing and for charcoal making because that is the only possible use for it. A Royal Forest can also exist because of the legal advantage (to the crown) of maintaining it as such. Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-77583699497585053602013-06-20T11:14:01.170-07:002013-06-20T11:14:01.170-07:00Yeah, skipped right ahead to the part where I went...Yeah, skipped right ahead to the part where I went to go get dinner....<br /><br />This is what video game addiction does for you.<br /><br />I originally wrote rather more on the Harmar expedition before reminding myself that I'm introducing an idea above the fold.<br /><br />Briefly, as an early modern military historian, I'm in the habit of critiquing campaign correspondence. <br /><br />So if I were to work through the campaign from Smith's apologia rather than the canned history in Wikipedia, I would start with the observation that Harmar and St. Clair were directed to the same place (Fort Wayne, at the head of navigation of the St. Joseph), but that it is only in St. Clair's expedition that it is given a name. The omission, it seems to me, <i>may</i> signal a change in the political objective between campaigns. The location, and its strategic implications, remain constant, but it only enters Washington's consciousness as a political objective in 1791.<br /><br />Second, the canned narrative makes Harmar's catastrophe a one-off event. In fact, it repeatedly suffered extremely one-sided casualties in skirmishing at the head of the column. <br /><br />It strikes me that this pattern is better explained by attrition-through-desertion than through painfully inept tactical performance. But then I thought to myself, "that's a point that only needs to be made once," and I cut, and there you go. Erik Lundhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05728486209757153685noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-65426136666385666182013-06-20T08:40:39.929-07:002013-06-20T08:40:39.929-07:00So the link here, which constantly trips off the t...<em> So the link here, which constantly trips off the tongue of old Europe, links poverty, difference and bad religion with the deserted lands, the forests, the heath, but also, curiously, the residual Romans (the Waelsch) left in a Germanised landscape, and also iron production through charcoal burning.</em><br /><br />Did you leave out a paragraph about residual Romans or charcoal?Alexhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17153530634675543954noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6568915967186844196.post-75283191596111619802013-06-20T03:14:01.134-07:002013-06-20T03:14:01.134-07:00Interesting thesis, makes sense even if much is st...Interesting thesis, makes sense even if much is still unclear. However, I noticed a couple of missing words in the first paragraphs e.g., "in the first act, Josiah Harmar out 1453 men from Fort Washington".Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com