[MR] At last - an interesting discussion on Vikings!

[David Chessler]

At 06:20 AM 3/4/2008, ldmolly at md.metrocast.net wrote:
>There were not households with hundreds of servants standing
>around in the parlor...your typical household (IIRC) might have 3-5
>servants (being typically middle class). Keep in mind that much of the
>Norse lifestyle (especially anything involving women) was an agricultural
>one, heavily dependant on subsistance farming. When you are farming in
>that method, you and your family are ALWAYS battling to keep the wolf from
>your door. There is scant little "down time" for a subsistance farm. Even
>in the winter, the is butter and cheese to be made (if you're fortunate
>enough to be able to keep some livestock fed through the winter). Textile
>production was an ongoing process throughout the seasons. Then there are
>repairs to the home/land, ensuring enough meat is added to the vegetables
>you've stored away at harvest. There is grain to be processed and cooked.
>With poor harvests, farmers often could not support a big household...and
>a poor harvest also would impact the ability of conceiving & carrying a
>child to term (often with tragic results for the mother). Nursing takes a
>lot out of a woman, and poor health & nutrition would certainly play a
>factor in being able to nurse your child through infancy (wether you're a
>slave or freeborn woman).


Take a look at Jeremy Diamond's book Collapse. He has a section on 
the collapse of the Greenland colony, which had survived from about 
1000 to about 1400, when it collapsed (effectively, they had to eat 
the seed due to crop failures), but some of the "problem" was their 
insistence on remaining European, rather than becoming "hunter 
gatherers", learning from the Eskimos. There were two colony 
settlements, and the southern/eastern one survived longer and was 
more successful for most of its existence. Still, the problems were 
many: they had no iron (and not much of any other metal), they had to 
store food for themselves and their herds, not all European animals 
could adapt to Greenland.

Iceland had a lot of trouble because, while it looks a lot like the 
rest of Scandinavia, it has more fragile soils, so a new type of 
agriculture had to be invented. Thus, until the last century, it was 
much poorer than the seemingly similarly situated colonies at the 
Faeros and Orkneys. They also had trouble with crops and animals that 
could not adapt.



--

Davitt il Bigollo da Pisa
Goldsmith's Agent in Livorno
Factor in the lands of the Mughuls
Coral and Emeralds from Inde and Serendip

Checky argent and azure, two chess rooks or in chief, a chess knight 
or, a three-turret tower or in base