Looking at the entire scope of the first 1500 years of Agricultural Records, negative reports clearly dominate over
positive weather reports.
This is not to say that the climate was poor the majority of the time,
but the mind-set of the English people throughout this 1500 year period were
more concerned with times of famine or poor weather than with times of
prosperity.
This, as with other historical documents, reveals a slant to the negative
side of climate records.
Granted the climate of England can be reconstructed and certainly
verified using just historical documents such as the Agricultural
Reports, but the potential bias must be understood.
Humans tend to write about poor climatic times over favorable times.
Further research on different historical documents provides an insight into the psyche of the recorders through content analysis. The systematic deconstruction of large texts for climate information may show how climate information may be slanted or skewed to the cultures’ biases. A cultures’ dialectic may help to understand the origin point of communication, which could help in turn with understanding why and how cultures write about and are concerned about climate and weather (Reinard, 1998) .
The
relationship between agriculture and climate change was surely understood in the
past. The records of climate events
that have found their way into the documentation suggests those poor climate
times were felt deeply. However,
any general analysis of weather effects on agriculture is necessarily
coarse-grained since each farming activity has its own particular environmental
requirements. The weather which
favors one crop at a particular stage of its growth may hinder the development
of another (Flohn and
Fantechi, 1984)
. This is definitely
problematic when dealing with ancient cultures, where the documentation is
usually incomplete. This is
definitively the situation with the Germanic Tribes of the third century AD.