CLIMATE AND WRITTEN SOURCES

As early as 3000 BC, historical documents recorded information about climate, either by direct reference or by inference.  By looking directly to the written word, many different aspects of past environments can be extracted from temperature to sunspot activity.  The question is what elements of climate did the authors of these historical documents find important enough to record?

            Various historical records “hide” climate data, not only in agricultural accounts, but in seemingly climate-irrelevant accounts as well.  Tucked into letters from the Czarina, Catherine the Great, to the peasant, Menetra, are casual comments concerning food production or snowfall and the like that can be compiled into relatively detailed climate reconstructions (Catherine et al., 1961, Ménétra and Roche, 1986) .  An accountant’s record book from a Kentish Estate contains proxy data concerning crop prices, flood damages, or times of famine, not just a ledger of expenditures of a large English estate (Toke and Lodge, 1927) .  Ancient texts yield information in the form of poetry, as with Ovid’s Metamophoses, or military stratagem may provide insight about drought in Thucydides’ Peloponnesian War.

Agriculture records are valuable for their reflection on production, flora variety, and associated changes over time.  This is evident in the book, Times of Feast, Times of Famine; the various French winery records mirror times of drought and times of prosperity (Le Roy Ladurie, 1988) .  These long continuous records of French agricultural productivity show the direct relationship between vineyard yields and climate variability.

A good example of a broad-based, comprehensive listing of production in England is a document entitled, Agricultural Records.  It was initially compiled by Thomas H. Baker in 1883, updated by John Stratton in 1969, with the latest version compiled by Ralph Whitlock in 1978 (Stratton and Brown, 1978) .  The purpose of the book is to provide a running record of the agricultural and climate changes in England from as many sources as possible.  The authors used everything from meteorological records to ancient legend and anecdotal sources.  Agricultural Records is an amalgamation of many sources from AD 220 to 1977 attempting to form an accurate agricultural and climatic history of England.

            Agricultural Records provides excellent insight into the past climates of England.  Granted there is some climatological correlation between the United Kingdom and central Europe, but the reason this document is evaluated here is that it is one of the few comprehensive accounts of agriculture in Europe that stretch to the late Iron Age.  There is a relationship between the technological stages of England and central Europe, so this document might yield insight into the schema of documenting weather before meteorological data in Europe.  But do these records document all the environmental characteristics of the region or just some of them?  What did the authors consider worthy of documenting?  How can these documents be analyzed for content so long after the were written?  This is directly related to the validity of historical documents as climate proxy indicators.  The only means to approach these types of quandaries is through a methodology found in rhetorical communication called “Content Analysis”.