Moving up the Hill? Peasant Strategies in Times of Plague and Climate Change

Abstract

The Late Medieval Agrarian Crisis is associated with a desertion of rural settlements. Farmsteads in agriculturally-marginal locations are presumed to have been among the first to be deserted. In recent decades, interdisciplinary research has instead shown several examples of increased agrarian activity, including cereal cultivation, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in forested upland areas of boreal inland Scandinavia. Farmsteads and hamlets established in forested upland areas in the fourteenth century have also been discovered. The recent excavation of one such farmstead, Ivarsbråten, shows that both settlement and agrarian production at the site had been adapted to the new climatic conditions of the Little Ice Age, which involved colder and wetter weather. It is here suggested that micro-mobility, moving out of a hamlet to an upland position, was a climate adaptation strategy pursued by a small number of peasants.