We like to think of the Middle Ages as a period in which people and nature still had a “healthy” relationship. Were resources really used much better back then than today, though?

If we look back, then the production of commodities proves to have always ushered in environmental changes and pollution as well. The medieval metals sector, for instance, was accompanied by deforestation to produce charcoal. Smelters produced emissions that even forced the relocation of a large plant in the Cologne copper trade around 1460 after protests.

People complained about the textile industry’s negative impacts from time to time too. Dyeworks cased problems in Zurich, Antwerp and Amsterdam in the 15th and 16th century. In a dispute in Chemnitz in 1470, people complained because of the reputedly harmful wastewater of the dyworks in the city moat. The clothmakers, however, merely replied that the people in Zwickau had more than 100 dye vats and “nevertheless just as good fish in their moat or even better than we have” – the fish were thus still good to eat despite the contaminated water.

The regulation of watercourses that operated fulling mills and other mills also had potential impacts on residents and nature, as did the intensified farming of dye plants driven by consumption, which came at the expense of grain farming – with ramifications for the supply situation. In Speyer, the excessive farming of rubia tinctorum (madder) was restricted in 1356. The woad needed for blue dyeing particularly polluted the soil heavily, and reservations about its cultivation are reflected in various medieval written sources from the Lower Rhine. Martin Luther claimed that woad farming near Erfurt had made the fertile farmland barren and had thus become a curse. A strong intensification of sheep farming also led to losses of arable land. This even prompted Lord High Chancellor of England Thomas More to observe in the 16th century that sheep were eating men.

Rudolf Holbach