I am writing this as we here in Europe, in my case in Britain, experience the first week of proper winter weather with temperatures cold enough to need heating in the home to remain comfortable - and healthy. Hardly a day goes by when the effects of the current engineered energy crisis are not in the news. Or at least the effects of an avoidable, artificial crisis, if 'engineered' is too conspiratorial for the reader.
In the same way that every winter, regardless of which respiratory virus is circulating, the National Health Service is close to collapse in the main due to mis-management, bed cutting and the mushrooming of admin folk over actual medical staff, the lack of affordable heating hits many people here with seasonal regularity. Since the austerity drive afflicting Britain kicked in around 2012, people on lower earnings have struggled, every winter, and this situation has not really improved. It is not helped by the £37 billion hole in budget left from the misguided covid measure I call 'Track'n'Trace'. If we are Bankrupt Britain then arguably it is through our own policies' fault.
So, people who were suffering before are now suffering even more, as they are hit by not just by a double but triple or even quadruple whammy: loss of real earnings due to inflation, energy shortage with sky-high prices, colder than normal weather (ah yes, that global warming, obviously), and lack of a decent level of health due to pandemic measures.
Despite the alarmist news this summer that a handful of hot days were going to kill lots of vulnerable folk, the greatest killer has always been and is likely to remain cold rather than warmth. The weather in Britain is a notorious topic for conversation, and I shall make no exception here. But weather is not equal. Obviously, as a look at the statistics provided by Trust the Evidence makes clear, death through heat by house fires is an issue at any time of year. But if your heating system is old, faulty and you can't afford to repair it, death by heat in midwinter is paradoxically more likely. The common denominator is poverty. Both death by heat (as in fires in the home) and cold (as in not being able to afford heating) are linked to poverty.
To quote a few numbers in the aid of perspective: in 2014/15 there were 40,800 excess winter deaths in people aged over 65 from cold-related illnesses. That's before anyone had even heard of the word 'pandemic', yet no one in politics battered an eyelid.
Trust the Evidence make it quite clear:
The government's answer is to ask, ‘the public will be urged to turn down their thermostats by two degrees this winter.’ Yet, no one is interested in the effects on the most vulnerable; those out of sight are out of mind. Many won't be able to turn their heating on in the first place, let alone turn it down.
After years and years where excess winter deaths due to cold-related illnesses have been regarded as part and parcel of life in Britain, now there is a feeble admission that cold homes kill as much as any virus. The NHS has launched a pilot scheme with, wait for it, the grand total of 28 low-income patients who will receive heating 'on prescription' by their doctors, paid for by the NHS, because some clever bod has realised that it is cheaper to pay for heating than for the cost of hospital care if vulnerable people become more ill. Once again science lagging behind common sense.
If you have spent any time in Britain in the colder seasons, you will have an idea of what the main problem is, besides poverty: the state of the national housing stock. Many houses up and down the country are old, cold and draughty. To conserve that expensive heat, various insulation methods have been employed over the years. Some of these only make matters worse by causing damp and the associated mould growth. A classic example is the situation where double glazing has been retro-fitted to an old house to improve energy conservation. Great in theory, if you open windows frequently in short bursts to exchange the damp air from inside (especially from kitchens and bathrooms) but in practice it traps the moisture, because in an effort to keep the bills down people keep the windows hermetically sealed shut. British houses literally 'sweat' if they are too sealed and not heated enough - great for respiratory diseases of all sorts. It took the widely reported, sad but avoidable death of a toddler to once again draw attention to this issue of mould due to bad housing conditions.
So what about the Middle Ages? Surely people lived in appalling conditions, dying in their droves every winter? Not quite. For starters, we would do well to remember that medieval warm period, or the 'medieval optimum' as climate historians prefer to call it. Average temperatures were several degrees warmer than they are now, even with so-called global warming taken into account. After all, to name just one example, there were flourishing vineyards recorded for thirteenth-century England! Winters were warmer, therefore less heating needed to keep those hearth-fires burning. I mentioned that poverty is a big confounding factor today in health - and heat - inequalities. Was there 'fuel poverty' in medieval Britain? Certainly in some measure. For the (urban) poor who had to buy in their fuel it would have been an issue.
But here we get to the crux of the differences between medieval and modern times: heating and housing. Medieval houses, a handful of episcopal and royal palaces aside, were in the main much smaller and therefore easier to heat than modern multi-(bed)roomed houses. Furthermore, people and animals were housed in winter under one roof in many rural areas, with the extra body warmth provided by cattle adding to the overall heating of the dwelling. Some years ago I visited the medieval hospital of Lauf an der Pegnitz in northern Bavaria, Germany, where the ground floor housed the pig sties and the floor above (remember, heat rises!) held the beds of the infirmary. Even without cohabiting with their animals, lots of people were sharing space anyway, what with larger families than today, which included servants, all adding human body heat to the space.
Actual deliberate heating in medieval times was primarily in the form of open fires and a hearth using wood - or anything flammable that could be gleaned - and to a far, far lesser extent by the later middle ages the use of coal in a few north-western European towns ('carrying coals to Newcastle' is an English proverb, like 'owls to Athens', that means taking something to a place that already has lots of the thing, and here specifically refers to the sea coal that was collected from the shores of the North Sea; proper underground mining for coal was practically unheard of in the medieval period).
And here we have another key aspect of the matter: wood was a fuel from local sources, down to what could be scavenged by even the poorest and most destitute peasant, for example by picking up fallen branches. Collecting wood for fuel was hard work, but the source of fuel was available to all and hence it was independent of those large, corporate organisations that blight our modern world. Medieval heating of the home was the diametrical opposite of our situation today, where most of our energy is controlled by those same large corporations, and the (already exorbitant and rising) prices set by them too. The remotely produced and controlled energy is epitomised by the concept of what in German is called Fernwärme, that is district heating, now heavily plugged as the answer to a carbon-reduced economy of warmth. But district heating, even more so than individual gas, electricity or oil supplies to homes, can be reduced, turned down or altogether shut off at the click of a button. The scope for leverage exerted over the inhabitants dependant on district heating and the threats of reduced heating in, say, cases of non-compliance with rules and regulations is a distinct possibility.
Such (potential) control over access to keeping warm was really only evident in one area of medieval life: in a monastic setting. Monks (and nuns) lived under the regula, that is the rule of their monastic order, such as Benedictines, Carthusians and so on. Most monasteries had one single warming room (called a calefactory in Latin) in the often large complex of buildings that made up north-western European monasteries. The use of the warming room was strictly controlled and reglemented, so that it was not down to the individual monk when he wished to warm up, but instead he had to take his turn, or special permission was required, for instance in the case of elderly or sick monks. The influence of monastic rules and regulations on wider European culture, and especially the history of control and dominance, is for another post, suffice it here to draw attention to the connection between communal rules and control of access to heating.
Yes, in the Middle Ages it was the individual responsibility of each household to keep warm, and if the household failed to do so because members of the family were too old, too lazy, or lacked neighbours and friends to help, they would shiver with cold, but equally medieval households could not be cut off by an energy provider for late payment or non-payment of bills - the household was the energy provider.
The hearth is the heart of the home, the quintessential symbol of the home. It has been so from antiquity, when the Greek goddess Hestia protected the hearth and with that the oikumene, that is the household. It was made obvious to government when the various medieval and early modern hearth taxes, most notably English taxes of the 17th century, used hearths as a proxy for overall wealth, thus reinforcing the power of the hearth as symbol of home. And it is still so today, since for all our praise of the comforts, cleanliness and convenience of central heating there is nothing like the aspect of an open fire to evoke nostalgic feelings of warmth, security and cosiness, especially around the Christmas traditions.
Happy festive season!