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and rebuilding, a key concern was to prevent large-scale
movements of people away from the affected area such that,
in the immediate aftermath, survivors were moved to a local
place of greater safety. Today’s relief coordinators would find
much that is familiar.
According to Gerrard, ‘After a large earthquake at Vera in
Almeria (Spain) in 1518, not one of the 200 houses in the
region was left standing. Vera was hit by two shocks at night
while people were inside their houses. There was no warning
and many people were killed and wounded. Yet there was
coordinated action including an immediate assessment of the
structural damage to housing and the potential for rebuilding
by the civic authorities. Great emphasis was placed on finding
new sources of fresh water, survivors stressed the loss of their
stored oil, wheat, and animals, financial aid was requested for
reconstruction and the military were deployed to keep order.
Within a few years, an entire new town was built nearby’.
Fire too was recognised as one of the greatest risks, not
surprisingly given the use of flammable materials in
construction and the close proximity of houses in medieval
towns and cities. In 1158 many houses in Pisa (Italy) were
destroyed. In the aftermath the city authorities ordered
wooden porches and balconies to be demolished because they
had contributed to the fire spreading. Across Europe, different
precautionary measures were developed to reduce the risks:
building chimneys in brick, replacing thatched roofs with
tiles, and forbidding the stockpiling of wood. ‘What you see
through this period is civic authorities evolving to try to reduce
fire risk, implementing the same things we’re trying to do with
earthquakes now, such as planning regulations to try to reduce
the spread of fire, or prevent it’, says Petley.
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In hindsight it should come as no surprise that the means and
methods by which European medieval societies handled risk,
while absent of any sophisticated scientific understanding
of hazard and risk, are in many cases historical parallels
with how people manage risk and disaster today. Their
understanding of risk is surely deserving of further attention
and perhaps there are even lessons to be learned from
Europe’s medieval ancestors, especially in the case of floods,
landslides, earthquakes, and other environmental hazards.
SHARING RISK
A ‘MODERN’ WAY of handling risk is to distribute it across
society. Rather than having one group or area extremely
exposed to a certain risk it is spread throughout an entire
organisation or network, so it is more likely to absorb the
impact if in the event the worst happens. The sharing of
risk is a cornerstone of the insurance and reinsurance
industries today which provide a mechanism for society to
pool resources to hedge. But this kind of risk sharing is not a
modern invention.
‘I think we’ve become very single priority focused in the
management of the landscape. We need to think about how
we work with the environment to manage the hazard. I suspect
people in medieval times may have been much better at that
than we are today’, says Petley.
‘What the prudent peasant tried to do in the
later Middle Ages was to share risk as much
as possible within their communities’,
says Gerrard.
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Living with risk is not strictly a modern
phenomenon as people were managing risk
in the Middle Ages. In some cases Medieval
society was as much of a ‘risk society’ as the
one experienced today, and risk seems inherent
to all populations regardless of what period they
lived in.
- the Middle Ages there were early examples of
In
humanitarian aid and charity along with activities
that bear resemblance to modern business
models of the reinsurance industry.
In the case of earthquake recovery in Italy, Petley was
surprised to find that in archaeological excavations of areas
affected by seismic hazards ‘very rarely did they find bodies’.
Witnesses talk of pulling bodies from the rubble and he thinks
it likely that they were well organised in locating people killed
by collapsed buildings, which is actually in contrast to many
countries that have had large-scale earthquakes in the recent
past. In the absence of a Christian confession before death,
every effort was made to recover the medieval dead and to
provide an appropriate burial.
The repercussions of disaster could be long lasting but
European economies were surprisingly resilient; there are
very few cases across Europe in which settlements were
permanently abandoned as a consequence. While it is true the
port of Syracuse, Sicily was left uninhabited for 20 years after
an earthquake in 1542, there were other economic reasons
for this. Unless the landscape was dramatically altered, as
capital less sensitive to famine. Gerrard and Petley find
this to be little different from famine relief activities today,
where grain is shifted from one area to another.
it might be after a landslide, subsistence agriculture was
usually able to continue, and people stayed where they were.
Even when medieval Sicilians living on the flanks of Mount
Etna were repeatedly threatened by volcanic eruptions and
earthquakes, their ruined settlements were invariably rebuilt
on the same site or close by.
Scene of agricultural life in the Middle Ages from the 15th century
illuminated manuscript ‘Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry’.
The Leadenhall in London had a dual purpose as a market and for storing
grain that was provisioned to Londoners in times of crisis.
To confront the risk of poor harvests and famine, common
field systems around villages in north west Europe shared
the poorer and waterlogged soils between neighbours,
each member of the community taking their share of the
good and the bad. While farmers were less likely to profit
individually from large harvests and to some extent their
opportunity for improvement was restricted, the community
as a whole was more likely to be resilient during hard
times. Another example of reducing the severity of loss
by sharing was to store grain reserves to ride out a crisis.
Monastic estates, which had the facilities to store supplies,
coul d distribute them during times of famine and London’s
Leadenhall granary, built in the 1440s, was designed to
hold permanent stockpiles of grain precisely to make the
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People would share risk by pooling resources.
The modern equivalent of famine relief was also
in place.
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During the aftermath of a disaster there are
numerous examples of medieval communities
coordinating actions on multiple levels to
reconstruct better than before, and mitigate
future risks.
Professor Chris Gerrard is Head of Department in the Department of
Archaeology. Contact: [email protected].
Professor Dave Petley is the Wilson Chair in Hazard and Risk in the
Department of Geography. Contact: [email protected]