Rice rice baby

I never really thought about why rice fields always look flooded. I used to assume that the farms were just in flood areas and the farmers were making the best of a bad situation. As it turns out rice farming is purposefully undertaken in flooded fields and this directly benefits both the plant and the farmer.

Rice farming in Japan

 

Farming Rice

Rice is different from pretty much any other food crop in that it is grown in a flooded field. That’s not to say that rice can’t grow on a dry field, rice can grow practically anywhere, but rice yield and quality are significantly higher when grown under water.

The first reason for this is that rice really likes water. It’s a greedy, greedy crop and the more water it has the better it grows. To give you an idea of just how greedy rice is, rice farmers use almost a third of Earth’s fresh water. That sounds like a lot but most people really underestimate just how much water we use daily and especially how much of that water goes into producing food.

 

Eating water

Consider a normal household, the water you use is easy to estimate because you typically see it like when you’re in the shower or flushing the toilet or doing the dishes for example. I invite you then to have a guess at how much water your household uses in a day. Finished? Ok. Now I’m going to tell you that the average household uses about 137 litres. If you’re thinking that sounds like quite a big number I might have bad news… Rice by comparison takes approximately 250 litres of water to produce one serving (100 g).

You’re probably reading that thinking 250 litres of water is a whole lot of water to make just 100 g of rice. And that’s perfectly correct based on how we typically think about water but the real truth is that rice is one of the most water efficient foods you can eat. In fact, our basic cereals and grains are all fairly water efficient foods with maize needing 122 litres per 100 g, barley needing 142 litres per 100 g and wheat needing 183 litres per 100 g. Considering that we ‘eat’ about 3500 litres of water per day, 250 litres for one serving isn’t that bad really.

Still, that’s a pretty crazy amount of water to think about. I mean, assuming the average 8 minute shower uses 65 litres of water, you would have to stop showering for 4 days to repay the water debt of one serving of rice.

But if you really want to feel bad, meat takes water usage to the next level. To get a cow to the right age to produce meat costs about 1540 litres of water per 100 g of steak. That means a typical 8 oz (225 g) steak at a restaurant needed about 3465 litres of water to get it there (that’s about 53 showers). And don’t think you’re being let off the hook for that early morning coffee either. Coffee has to grow too and that one regular coffee cost about 189 litres of water to get to you – more than a single households daily water use.

It may be no surprise to learn then that 92% of all the water we use is used in food production.

 

Drowning rice

So back to our underwater rice. Now, you might say that every crop grows better the more water it has and that’s broadly true. So why don’t we grow every crop underwater? Well, as anyone with a garden or even a houseplant knows, too much water will drown them. This is because the roots of the plant need oxygen and the amount of oxygen available in water is not that much.

Now hold on you might say, plants produce oxygen so why do they have a problem getting oxygen to the roots? And an intelligent point that is. Those of you who remember photosynthesis from school can tell me that plants take in carbon dioxide and light to make energy (food) which releases oxygen for us all to breathe. The thing about plants is that they also need oxygen but ironically don’t have any way of directing the oxygen they produce back into themselves.

You see, although plants have very efficient tubes inside their stems and leaves to move water and nutrients about, they can’t use them to move air about. This isn’t usually a problem because they are surrounded by air which they can just take in whenever and wherever they need it. Even in the soil there’s enough space around for the roots to get some air. If the roots get flooded though, they suddenly lose their air supply.

This must be a horrible feeling for a drowning plant surrounded by a bountiful oxygen supply above ground but completely unable to funnel that oxygen down into the roots. All the time the plant knows that if the roots die it will lose access to water and nutrients which will result in the eventual death of the plant as a whole. It’s quite sad to think about.

So how does rice avoid this problem? Well, rice isn’t like a normal land growing plant, it’s actually more like a hybrid with some features of an aquatic plant. In particular it has air tunnels in its leaves and stem which do allow the plant to funnel air down into the roots. As long as one third of the plant stays above water it can easily provide air for the whole plant.

This unique feature allows rice to be grown in a consistent amount of water meaning it will never be in a state where water availability limits its growth. This is fantastic for farmers because they then have a plant that never needs to be watered and yet they can be sure that it’s always getting the exact amount of water it needs for maximum growth. This frees up their time to focus on the other things that might prevent its growth which, interestingly, water helps them with again…

 

Weeds and pests

One of the biggest problems for farmers is the continual threat of weeds and pests. Weeds directly reduce crop yields by taking away nutrients and space in the soil whereas pests simply eat the crop. The most common way of dealing with these problems is the use of herbicides and pesticides which are basically just chemicals that specifically target the weeds and pests.

Rice presents us with an interesting problem here because some of the weeds in rice fields are grasses. I won’t go into too much detail about what makes a plant a grass specifically but grasses are more than just the type that makes green lawns and sports stadiums. Some other useful grasses you’ll probably know are our edible cereals such as maize, wheat, oats and, importantly for us, rice.

So, our problem should be a bit clearer now. Some weeds in rice fields are grasses but rice itself is a grass. That means any herbicides that kill the unwanted grasses will also kill our rice.

 

Water protection

Thankfully, water comes to our rescue again. Rice, as I said, is pretty unique in its ability to grow despite it having flooded roots – unique even among other grasses. This means that the flooded conditions can drown other grasses whereas rice will remain unaffected. It goes without saying then that any ground level pests and vermin would also drown trying to reach the rice roots.

Some weeds are still able to survive in the flooded fields however so farmers have another little trick they can use as a further defence against these weeds. This trick is to allow a little floating plant called Azolla to grow on top of the water. Azolla is a super interesting plant in itself which I wrote about in a previous blog post. It was basically responsible for developing the atmosphere necessary to support human life following the cataclysmic meteor strike that wiped out the dinosaurs.

In its slightly lesser role in rice fields though, it prevents light from piercing the water. All plants need light to grow so this stops weeds growing below the water’s surface by depriving them of light. As an added bonus, Azolla is extremely good at taking nitrogen out of the air which it then passes down to the rice when it dies. Nitrogen is quite important for plant growth too and is, in fact, the single most limiting factor in rice production. So Azolla is essentially providing free fertilizer as well as controlling weed growth.

Considering the role that Azolla played in developing our atmosphere and that rice is one of the most widely eaten foods in the world, Azolla may well be be one of the most influential plants in all of human history.

Azolla covering a rice field

Despite all the advantages of growing rice in a flooded field, some herbicides and pesticides are still necessary to produce maximum yields. The important thing for farmers though, especially in countries like China, India and Southeast Asia where the majority of worldwide rice production occurs, is that the less herbicides and pesticides they use, the cheaper it is to produce the rice.

These natural methods for increasing rice yields therefore represent a rare example of pre-industrial technology not being replaced by modern technology. The reason for this is simply because there really isn’t anything better we can do. These methods are good for everyone involved; the quality of the rice is not compromised by unnecessary chemicals and the livelihood of the farmers is improved by less labour and lowered expenses.

 

Modern rice farming

Although many aspects of rice farming haven’t changed in the thousands of years we’ve been growing it, there are some things we’ve been able to improve with modern technology.

Most rice is actually still grown the old fashioned way – by hand. This is because rice farming isn’t too accessible to heavy machinery due to the flooded fields making the soil far too soft. But in many developed countries we’ve been able to significantly reduce human workload by employing a certain amount of light machinery. I won’t spend too long talking about these methods but they’re worth mentioning because some of the things we can do are downright crazy.

 

Rice planting machines

To the right is a rice planting machine, in particular one that uses a small diesel powered engine but there are versions that use animals and even a bicycle. If you can imagine this job without the machine we would have to manually plant each of those rice plants one at a time leaving the perfect amount of space between each plant for optimal growth. It would quite literally take weeks to do a single field. This machine plants four rows simultaneously and at a consistent speed which ensures an even distribution of rice plants down the row. It’s a whole lot quicker and also strangely hypnotic.

 

Laser farming

Rice fields have an optimal depth of water which can’t vary more than 1 inch across the entire field. To ensure that the field is perfectly level we use lasers.

A laser transmitter (above right) is set up in the centre of the field and set to send a perfectly level signal across the whole field. A laser receiver attached to a tractor receives this signal. As the tractor moves over the field and over a bump for example, the laser receiver will move up with it.

Laser farming

The tractor then compensates for this by moving the orange levelling bucket (below right) down to flatten the ground.

If the tractor goes into a dip, the orange levelling bucket releases soil to fill in the hole and bring it up to the correct level. In this way, the whole field can be made exactly the same level.

Pretty cool stuff.

 

Satellite guided planting

Finally, some farms go without rice planting machines altogether, preferring to use agricultural airplanes to do the job. When the rice plant is ready to be planted in the flooded field, they are loaded into an agricultural airplane ready to be dropped into position.

To ensure orderly planting like we saw with the rice planting machine, the airplanes use satellite guidance systems to drop the plants into the perfect positions.

This sounds pretty cool and it definitely is. But pilots during planting time will often work fifteen-hour days, seven days per week. They also need to dive as low as 30 feet (9 metres) above ground which can be incredibly dangerous. Still, satellite guided planting is pretty futuristic.

 

The important thing to take away from this whole post though is that despite the modern improvements we’ve made to rice farming, the basic method of planting in flooded fields hasn’t changed in thousands of years. That, I think, is testament to the ingenuity of past farmers who, despite having none of our modern scientific knowledge, managed to work out the most efficient way of growing one of the most important foods in human history. Without this method, who knows if we would even be at the level of civilisation that we are now.

The end of helium balloons?

You probably know helium, it’s that gas that gives you a squeaky voice and makes party balloons float. Aside from that we don’t really think about helium which is a shame because it’s actually a super interesting element. Unfortunately, one thing you probably don’t know about helium is that it’s non-renewable. Just like coal, oil and natural gas there’s only a certain amount of it on Earth and we’re just beginning to realise that we’re kind of wasting it.

 

Why does helium float?

Before we get into that, let’s talk about what makes helium a pretty interesting element. I mean, the first and most obvious thing is that it’s lighter than air which is why helium balloons float. This is because, without going too much into the science of air, a litre of normal air weighs about 1.25 grams whereas a litre of pure helium weighs about 0.18 grams. We know that lighter things float above heavy things so as long as the helium + balloon weighs less than the same amount of air, it’ll float. It’s the same reason that a balloon filled with air would float to the top of a swimming pool, air is lighter than water.

Following on from this idea, an interesting question I often hear about helium is whether you can ship a package filled with helium to make it weigh less and therefore cost less to ship. We can work this out pretty easily using only the two numbers I just gave you. So a litre of air (1.25 g) is about 1 g heavier than a litre of helium (0.18 g). This means we could ship a 1 L package of air for the same price as a 1 L package of helium + an item weighing about 1 g for the same price!

So you could realistically cheat the system by sending something that weighs about 1 g, like a pen for example, across the country in a 1 L package and the pen would have been sent effectively for free (you still paid to ship the 1 L box). The issue with this is that you need to also buy the helium as well as balloons or bubble wrap to trap the helium in the package. Let’s also not forget that we don’t really need a 1 L package to hold a pen and most postage is based on size as well as weight. Overall, I’m sorry to say, it would probably be more expensive to ship something with helium than just using air…

 

Why does helium make your voice squeaky?

This effect is actually nothing to do with your vocal cords or your biology at all. Again, without going too much into the physics of it, sound moves faster or slower depending on what it’s travelling through and because helium is lighter than air sound travels faster through helium. That squeaky sound is your voice travelling faster which amplifies the higher resonant frequencies and makes you sound like a chipmunk.

So the next question you might ask is if there’s a heavy gas you can breathe to make your voice seem deeper. Well, you’re in luck! You can breathe something like xenon or sulphur hexafluoride which makes your voice travel slower amplifying the lower resonant frequencies turning you into Barry White.

Keep in mind though that breathing other gases isn’t all that healthy and that buzz you feel after a suck of helium is your brain complaining of a lack of oxygen. And please don’t suck helium straight from the pressurised canister because that’s a sure fire way to blow your lungs out. Otherwise, go nuts.

 

Aside from having fun at parties, helium actually has a lot of important industrial and medical uses which take advantage of it’s lesser known properties.

 

Helium is inert

The first one of these, and one you might be familiar with, is in airships and by airships I mean things like blimps, zeppelins and dirigibles. The logic is pretty simple, if a small balloon will float then a large enough balloon with enough buoyancy will be able to lift people as well.

Incidentally, there is one element lighter than helium and that is hydrogen which used to be the gas used in airships until the infamous Hindenburg disaster (pictured right). You see, although hydrogen is lighter and therefore gives better lift, it’s really flammable and even if every safety precaution is taken it only needs a spark…

So these days airships are almost exclusively filled with helium which has the great advantage of being inert. That means it won’t react with anything and most importantly won’t spontaneously combust.

 

Liquid helium is really cold

Helium is an excellent coolant because it becomes a liquid at -269 °C. That is just 4 degrees warmer than absolute zero (-273 °C), the coldest temperature possible, and this has found excellent usage in MRI scanners. You might already know that MRI scanners use magnets, superconducting magnets to be specific, to create a powerful magnetic field that allows us to see inside the human body. The problem is that the magnets lose their magnetic potential unless kept at absolute zero. By immersing these magnets in liquid helium they can be kept at this temperature indefinitely.

The interesting thing is that helium is practically our only answer to this cooling issue. For many cases we would use liquid nitrogen as a coolant which becomes a liquid at -196 °C but it has the unfortunate property of then changing to a solid at -210 °C. A solid is pretty useless for immersing things in.

 

Helium is non-narcotic and non-toxic

Divers have to be very careful about the type of air they bring with them in their scuba tanks. 100% oxygen is out of the question because pure oxygen is toxic so they typically use a combination of oxygen and nitrogen just like the air we breathe on the surface: 21% oxygen, 78% nitrogen, 1% other gases.

The issue is that as we dive deeper the pressure causes oxygen to become toxic even at these ratios. Deep sea divers have a further thing to worry about as this amount of nitrogen also starts to become toxic at greater depths. We therefore need to reduce the amount of oxygen and nitrogen even more and for this we need a gas to replace them that is inert, non-toxic and non-narcotic even at high pressure. Thankfully, helium is the answer. With the right combination of oxygen, nitrogen and helium we’ve been able to make dives of over 300 m without a vehicle.

As a side effect, when deep sea divers speak under the effects of this gas mixture their voices take on that squeaky quality we’re already familiar with.

 

Helium is released by radioactive elements

I already dedicated an article to the science of carbon dating and how we can use radioactive elements to calculate the age of dinosaur bones and such things so I won’t go into too much detail. All we need to know for now is that the great thing about radioactive elements is that they produce helium when they decay.

If something is capable of containing helium we can then calculate the amount of helium present in it. Using our knowledge of how long it takes a radioactive element to produce helium we can effectively judge how old it is based on how much helium has been produced.

This point moves us nicely onto exactly why helium is non-renewable…

 

Helium is non-renewable

As I just mentioned, helium is created when radioactive elements decay. The problem is that that is the only way we can get helium. We can’t make helium artificially and any helium we do use escapes immediately into the atmosphere where it cannot be reclaimed or recycled. Despite being the second most abundant element in the universe it’s extremely rare on Earth.

You might think, well if it comes from radioactive elements then it’s not like we can’t produce more. And you would be right, to an extent. If we take the decay of uranium for example, the two types of uranium that produce helium are uranium-235 and uranium-238 which have half lives of 700 million years and 4.5 billion years respectively. So you could get more helium if you’re prepared to wait a little bit.

What this all means is that all the helium we have took the entire history of the Earth, 4.5 billion years, to create and once we use it all, it’s gone.

 

How much we have left

The largest supply of helium we have is the US National Helium Reserve which has space for one billion cubic metres of it, that’s about half the worlds supply. The problem is that in 1996 the US government decided that maintaining the reserve was no longer a priority as the reserve was already heavily in debt. So they made plans to sell it off. The problem was that they decided to sell it off in a terrible way.

Rather than selling the helium at market rates, they wanted the same amount of helium to be sold off each year regardless of global demand. They couldn’t sell it fast enough any other way because the goal was set to deplete the National Reserve by the end of 2015. The result was that the market became flooded with cheap helium.

This had a number of negative effects. Firstly consumption went way up as people found new and interesting ways to use this gas that’s lighter than air. This made us all believe that helium isn’t a precious resource. I mean, we use it for party balloons, is there another precious resource that people think of as a toy? Experts have suggested that to make party balloons representative of the actual cost of helium they should cost about $100 each. Secondly, the price of helium was so cheap and we had so much of it that no company saw any need, or profit, in extracting more of it. The result of which is that when the National Reserve is empty there’s nothing to replace it.

Thankfully the lifetime of the National Helium Reserve was extended in 2013 where it was agreed that they should keep selling helium until 2021 and at market rates. It’s now expected that the National Reserve will be empty by 2020 and by then we really will need a new plan. At current rates of consumption it’s estimated that we will deplete the world’s supply within 100 years.

 

The future of helium production

Just because the US is giving up on helium it doesn’t mean the rest of the world has. It’s estimated that by 2020 we will start getting the majority of our helium from other countries instead. There are already 7 other extraction plants active around the world and countries like Algeria and Qatar are stepping up production to rival current US rates.

China is even getting in on the game by considering plans to mine the moon for helium.

 

But regardless of our future production of helium we will most likely never see helium prices like the past 20 years ever again. This is going to have massive detrimental effects for many scientific and technological fields as well as the extra financial pressure felt on our hospitals. There really is no alternative for helium cooling when temperatures of absolute zero are required.

The impact you’ll likely see is that helium balloons are going to go from everyday item to luxury item similar in status to real ivory piano keys. There may even come a time in the future where we look back on our frivolous use of helium with embarrassment and contempt. Who knows, one day pretentious film students will be analysing Disney Pixars Up as an example of mankinds hubris. Or maybe not.

 

The Black Death and social upheaval

The Black Death  (1346-53) was one of the worst pandemics in human history. It resulted in the deaths of an estimated 75-200 million people in Europe which at the time represented 30-60% of Europe’s entire population. To put that in perspective, the world population at the time was only around 450 million. Epidemics and pandemics are not uncommon throughout history but what’s significant about the Black Death is that the consequences of it are still felt today.

 

The cause of the Black Death

Rats actually get a bad reputation for spreading the plague that caused the Black Death, the real culprit is the flea.

Plague is caused by a bacteria called Yersinia pestis which gets into fleas when they feed on the blood of an animal already suffering from plague. When the flea unknowingly ingests the plague bacteria it causes a blockage in the ‘throat’ of the flea which prevents the flea from feeding. In a rather disgusting biological mechanism, the hungry flea desperately tries to feed on an animal which dislodges the blockage of bacteria and the flea literally pukes this bacteria back into the animal it’s feeding on. Delightful.

Some rats, however, are what’s called a reservoir for plague bacteria. This means they can be infected by plague bacteria but suffer no consequences. Unfortunately for us this means that the flea simply has to feed on an infected rat and it will transfer the plague bacteria to the next thing it feeds on. In the case of the Black Death, it is believed that the next thing the flea fed on was another type of rat that had no resistance to the plague. Fleas, you see, are normally specific to one type of animal and rat fleas will tend to only feed on rats. The problem occurred when the newly infected rats started dying of plague because suddenly there were a lot of fleas around with nothing to eat. When there were no rats left, humans started looking pretty appetising…

 

Human infection

Once an infected flea bites someone the plague bacteria travels to the lymph nodes which, in humans, are in the groin, armpits and neck. The bacteria causes a swelling of the lymph nodes which then turn black due to an accumulation of dead blood and pus and without treatment the swellings will start travelling all over the body. If the swellings are left alone the victim will die from the build up of dead blood but if the swellings are popped the victim may die from toxic shock. Add to this a fever and vomiting blood and it’s no surprise that as much as 80% of all victims died within 4 days of showing symptoms. Nowadays, with antibiotics, the likelihood of death is only around 15%.

So how did the Black Death actually end? Well, one important reason why is that plague doesn’t spread very easily from human to human. Unless, of course, you go around poking the infected – the blood contained in the swellings were full of bacteria. But luckily the plague bacteria doesn’t exist in large amounts elsewhere in human blood so human fleas rarely consumed enough bacteria to pass it onto someone else. That meant that once enough infected rats and humans had died, the rat fleas quickly died out too due to starvation. It also helped that by that time people had learned to stay away from those already infected.

The population of reservoir rats didn’t change though which meant that plague was still around and further outbreaks did happen throughout the following centuries. There was no further outbreak in Europe however that matched the devastation of the Black Death.

 

Arrival and spread

So where did it come from? Well, plague is actually quite common among many rodents in Asia and there is strong evidence to suggest that there had been plague outbreaks in China occurring around 15 years before it arrived in Europe. Then, thanks to the burgeoning trade routes of the silk road, it was easy for rats harbouring plague bacteria to stow away on transport vessels of Mongol traders.

A more macabre story of the arrival of plague in Europe however was during the Mongol siege of the trading city of Caffa in the Crimea in 1347. The siege had already been quite drawn-out and the Mongol army were suffering from the plague. So, in one of the first recorded examples of biological warfare, the Mongols catapulted infected corpses over the walls of Caffa. Traders from the city fled in fear of the plague, unknowingly carrying it with them to the port of Sicily in the south of Italy. From there it spread north through Europe by trade and also by people trying to run away from the infected regions thereby carrying it with them. The rest, as they say, is history.

Importantly, however, not everyone was slow to realise how fast the plague was spreading. For the first of our consequences of the Black Death that we still feel today, the port of Dubrovnik in Croatia made ships and people wait 40 days before entering to be sure that they wouldn’t bring plague into the city. They called this period of time quaranta giorni which simply means forty days in the Venetian dialect of Italian. This phrase gave us the English word quarantine.

 

Medicine in times of plague

It would be an understatement to say that doctors at the time were not prepared for the plague.

You see, medicine in the middle ages was strongly influenced by alchemy which was a belief system that combined religion and spirituality with magic and mythology. You might be familiar with alchemists as those guys who tried to turn lead into gold and you’d be right. Alchemists believed that everything had a perfect form and the perfect form for metals was gold because gold was believed to be the most perfect form any metal could take. Perfection didn’t just apply to metals though, it applied to all things, even people. Alchemists believed that if a person became pure enough through spiritual means they could achieve longevity, immortality and then redemption.

This translates into medicine because herbs or minerals would be blended to change them into a better form, one that could fight disease. It was all about harnessing the hidden powers of normal objects. It may sound silly now but sometimes they hit upon something worthwhile which gave the theory some credit. St. Johns wort for example is a herb that’s been used for centuries for its anti-inflammatory properties. Alchemists would have made a preparation of St. John’s wort and say they had unlocked its hidden power but we know now that it’s due to the large amounts of the compound hyperforin, a potent anti-inflammatory compound, found in the plant.

So how effective was alchemy against the plague? Simply, it wasn’t. One suggested treatment was to swallow gold as they believed the perfection of gold would counteract the corruption of plague. It didn’t work. Another remedy they used was distilled spirit which just means strong alcohol. That didn’t work either. Although, if I knew I was going to die in a matter of days then I can’t imagine I would turn down a little distilled spirit. Consequently, the demand for distilled spirit rose considerably after the plague.

Many of the doctors of the time realised that their remedies were doing nothing and rather than contract plague themselves, promptly fled – they may not have known about modern medicine but they were not stupid.

 

The plague doctor

The lack of real doctors gave rise to a group of mostly volunteers who produced one of the most iconic images of the time, the plague doctor.

The job of the plague doctor was to verify whether people had been infected or not and record deaths in the public record. They also attempted to treat people, typically with alchemical preparations and blood letting. They had power and respect beyond many other public servants and were paid extremely well.

The costume of the plague doctor really highlighted the medical beliefs of the time. Keep in mind that in the middle ages they had no idea how diseases came about and spread. They didn’t know about bacteria and germs or the importance of cleanliness and hygiene. The dominant theory of the cause of disease was the miasma theory whereby disease came from ‘bad air’. In this theory, a bad area of air would contain poisonous materials that caused disease and could be located by its terrible smell. It was believed that people (or animals) couldn’t pass disease to each other, rather people in the same area got infected because they were in the same area of bad air. This theory is really well exemplified by the disease malaria which is spread by mosquitos living typically around smelly swampland. Malaria in medieval Italian literally means mala aria – bad air.

For this reason, the iconic beak-like mask of the plague doctor would be filled with nice smelling herbs and spices that would overpower the ‘bad air’. The long coat and hat were then worn to further prevent the body from coming into contact with the bad air. And although this did protect the wearer from the real danger, flea bites, it is very likely that the plague doctor helped carry fleas around from infected areas to non-infected areas on the clothing unknowingly spreading the disease even more…

So how does this affect us today? Well, once it became clear that the medicine of the time was completely ineffective against the plague people began to think that maybe they were wrong about the causes of disease and how to treat it. This started a period where doctors looked more at the human body in sickness and in health to study the process of disease. Surgery became an important part of medicine as more doctors stopped thinking of medicine as a spiritual or magical treatment and more as something that needs direct involvement. The truth is that we may have the Black Death to thank for the advances made in medicine that lead to our current level of understanding of disease prevention and cure.

 

Social change

You might expect medicine to undergo changes following such a pandemic but the loss of 30-60% of the population of a continent also effected serious social change.

 

The end of feudalism

Following the end of the Black Death there were not that many people around. England, for example, lost 70% of its population which left them with just 2 million people in 1400. Between 1350-1500 more than 1300 villages were just deserted.

At this time they were deep into feudalism which, broadly speaking, meant that all the land was owned by lords who employed peasants to work the land. There was almost no social mobility, you were born a lord or a peasant and you accepted your role in life. After the Black Death though, there was the same amount of land but a whole lot less people to work it. What this meant for the peasants was that the lords needed them.

Now think about this from the peasants perspective, any peasant who survived the Black Death in England witnessed many of their friends and family die. They now believe that they are special, saved by God, they believe they have a greater purpose. At the same time they have the freedom to move anywhere they want in the country because the lords everywhere need peasants to work the land. And because peasants are so scarce the lords have no choice but to entice the peasants with higher wages and better working conditions. For some, they can even buy their own land.

The price of land fell dramatically because it was desperately needed to grow crops and raise livestock. This lead to a new class of peasants, yeomen, who were farmers that owned the land they worked on – often up to 100 acres. The immediate effect of this was a weakening of the lordship as some minor lords were almost indistinguishable from wealthy yeomen.

Of course, all this had to end eventually. The government of England passed laws to restrict peasant earnings to their pre-Black Death values and to force peasants to stay on the land they had served before. Furthermore, they had to work church lands for free. Admittedly, both peasants and lords broke these laws but contempt for the government over the laws and new taxes ultimately resulted in the peasant revolt of 1381.

And this wasn’t just in England, similar laws and exploitation of the peasants fueled revolts all over Europe. The Jacquerie was a peasant revolt in northern France in 1358 and the revolt of the Ciompi occured in Florence in 1378. Feudalism never recovered.

 

Improving efficiency

With less farmers around, maintaining previous levels of crop production was impossible. Grain farming in particular was incredibly hard work and so it is no surprise that people turned to other methods of farming. One of the more popular changes was an increase in animal husbandry which is the rearing of animals by, usually, a single shepherd on grassland. The selective breeding of animals since then for more meat, more milk and more eggs has lead to the farm animals we have today.

It wasn’t just peasant jobs that were made more efficient, previously a scribe had to painstakingly copy manuscripts and books by hand for wider circulation. Experiments with improving this job after the Black Death eventually lead to the development of Gutenberg’s printing press. Gutenberg finished development of his first press in Germany in 1450, just under a century after the Black Death.

 

Opportunities for women

It was the job of the parish priest to give the final sacraments to those dying of plague. The problem with this was that many priests then caught the plague which resulted in a shortage of priests. Fortunately, the churches often had many laywomen who voluntarily gave their time to the church. It was these women who took over many of the roles that the priests had fulfilled.

Inheritance law was also changed in the wake of the huge death toll. Previously, property and land was inherited by the eldest son but after the Black Death property could be inherited by sons and daughters equally.

 

English language

In 1066 England was conquered by William the Conqueror who came from Normandy in France. Naturally, he didn’t speak Old English like the natives, he spoke Anglo-Norman. Since then Anglo-Norman was used as the spoken language of the courts where it became known as Law French. Incidentally, court documents were written in Latin.

After the Black Death the amount of French Law speakers (mostly educated clerks) was drastically reduced which caused problems for the courts. Furthermore, the peasants and yeomen were gaining power and more laws were being passed that affected them. The problem was that peasants didn’t speak Law French, in fact many lords didn’t speak Law French either, so they complained that they didn’t understand what was being said for them or against them in court. This lead to the Pleading in English Act 1362 which stated that all pleas in courts must be in the common tongue of the land – English. This act practically designated English as the official language of England. The Black Death is directly responsible for the popularisation of the English language.

 

Conclusion

As a final word, I don’t want to give the impression that the Black Death was the cause of all this change, it was always a catalyst. All the things I’ve talked about here – medical changes, peasant revolts, the rise of the yeomen and the growth of the English language – had all been developing throughout the century. What the Black Death did was pull the trigger on social change that had been rising in the chamber for a long time.

And let us not forget that the people living in the time of the Black Death experienced the closest thing to a true apocalypse that any of us will ever know. Let us hope that we never have to witness something the same again.