Earlier Hay

DominusNovus

In the cliche thread, Othniel mentioned a civlization forming in Belgium. That got me thinking.

Hay basically allowed civilization to really expand in northern regions, where grass to feed animals couldn't grow in the winter. Nobody in the Roman Empire heard of it, but it was common by the middle ages. So, what if someone came up with the idea in ancient times?

Just off the top of my head, the various celtic tribes would be better off, so Gaul and Brittania could easily stay independent.
 

JHPier

DominusNovus said:
Just off the top of my head, the various celtic tribes would be better off, so Gaul and Brittania could easily stay independent.
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More likely they become even more interesting for the Romans to conquer. In OTL they conquered every bit of Europe that practised intensive farming and stopped where that ceased (e.g. Germania, Caledonia, Hibernia).
 

President Ledyard

Fascinating. I always thought that hay had been around, well, more or less since the dawn of agriculture. Does anyone have any links describing the history of hay? I tried google but didn't have much luck.
 

DominusNovus

President Ledyard said:
Fascinating. I always thought that hay had been around, well, more or less since the dawn of agriculture. Does anyone have any links describing the history of hay? I tried google but didn't have much luck.
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A whole bunch of sites have this quote from Freeman Dyson:
"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.* A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay.* Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grassin the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter.* All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe.* Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages.* According the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the
Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe.* The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze.* North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay.* So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe.* Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."

I've yet to find anything else, really.
 

Gladi

DominusNovus said:
A whole bunch of sites have this quote from Freeman Dyson:
"The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple.* A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay.* Nobody knows who invented hay, the idea of cutting grassin the autumn and storing it in large enough quantities to keep horses and cows alive through the winter.* All we know is that the technology of hay was unknown to the Roman Empire but was known to every village of medieval Europe.* Like many other crucially important technologies, hay emerged anonymously during the so-called Dark Ages.* According the Hay Theory of History, the invention of hay was the decisive event which moved the center of gravity of urban civilization from the
Mediterranean basin to Northern and Western Europe.* The Roman Empire did not need hay because in a Mediterranean climate the grass grows well enough in winter for animals to graze.* North of the Alps, great cities dependent on horses and oxen for motive power could not exist without hay.* So it was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe.* Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York."

I've yet to find anything else, really.
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Bright day
I heard the same from my teacher and with non-mediterrean pre-modern Europe her speciality I have no reason to distrust her.
 

sunsurf

The Romans might just steal the idea from the Celts, conquer them and...
well, the empire might fall anyway, for other reasons. But the Celtics might still be stronger and prevent the rise of the HRE.
 

rewster

How do we know the romans didn't have hay? What did they feed their horses when they went into northern areas in the winter? Or did they just avoid those areas during the winter?
Hay seems stupidly obvious to me, especially since they had the concept of storing grain for human consumption... it's the same thing only for animal consumption.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
Hay might be a result, rather than a cause. I've always heard that the reason the Romans didn't move into the Northern forests was basically because they were naturally more...uh...forested. ie the soils were different, thinner and less rich on top, altho very good if one plowed deeper. The Romans didn't have the moldboard or the horse collar, (yet more dark age innovations) however, and so couldn't deal with that.

But again, is that cause, or rather invention following necessity? Roman agriculture was based on wheat, grapes and olives. You didn't need deep plowed soils for that.

I dunno, although there is one thing that the Med has that is duplicated nowhere else in the world except one place, and that is a Meditterenean climate, which is generally warm temperate with wet winters rather than summers. The one place, by the way, is most of California.
 

NapoleonXIV

Banned
rewster said:
How do we know the romans didn't have hay? What did they feed their horses when they went into northern areas in the winter? Or did they just avoid those areas during the winter?
Hay seems stupidly obvious to me, especially since they had the concept of storing grain for human consumption... it's the same thing only for animal consumption.
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But just storing hay isn't enough. You have to know that hay must be brought in before it is rained on after it is cut and kept dry after that, or it will rot. That wouldn't be all that apparent if you didn't know the reason and you might just assume that hay wouldn't keep at all.
 

rewster

I would assume they knew how to handle straw already, since they had thatch (and I doubt that came along in the middle ages... traditional cultures around the world use thatch). So most likely they would know the best way to store it... besides, even if they didn't, they'd learn quick and this is a problem of people who already have hay, not something that prevents you from getting it. Besides, hay is similar enough to grain that it would occur to anyone who has stored grain that you need a dry place to store it.
 

wkwillis

The biggest Mediterranean area is the Mediterranean, followed by California, followed by Australia, followed by South Africa, followed by Chile. Western sides of continents, in the right latitudes north and south. Chile is smallest because it is cooped in by a mountain range. Australian Mediterranean climate areas would be larger if it were more southern and moist, ditto South Africa.
 

rewster

I wonder if perhaps the Romans did not have hay but the precursors to medieval Northern and Western European nations already did. It wasn't that lack of settled areas that kept Rome out of the cold north, it was mainly the cold north itself. Like was said earlier, they couldn't grow their crops there, it was cold, they didn't have hay, there were too many forests... it was foreign climate to them. I'm pretty sure the people that were there though did have settled farms, most likely with thatched rooves and yes... very likely even stacks of hay. Which would explain Freeman Dyson's quote, since Romans didn't need or have hay but the people who settled north of them did need and have it.
 

DominusNovus

rewster said:
I wonder if perhaps the Romans did not have hay but the precursors to medieval Northern and Western European nations already did. It wasn't that lack of settled areas that kept Rome out of the cold north, it was mainly the cold north itself. Like was said earlier, they couldn't grow their crops there, it was cold, they didn't have hay, there were too many forests... it was foreign climate to them. I'm pretty sure the people that were there though did have settled farms, most likely with thatched rooves and yes... very likely even stacks of hay. Which would explain Freeman Dyson's quote, since Romans didn't need or have hay but the people who settled north of them did need and have it.
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But then those regions wouldn't have been so sparsely settled, by Dyson's reasoning.
 

MarkA

The domestication of the horse and of cattle would require a winter feed to keep the penned animals alive. What else could have been used other than hay? Therefore, humans were aware of hay since neolithic times.

I agree with the comment that the Romans must have had hay to feed their cavalry mounts and pack animals during the winter in camps and fortresses all along the frontier. They did not send their animals south for the winter!
 

Tyr

The reason northern regions weren't inhabited densly is cultural, not technilogical. They were fully capable of supporting large populations ala the mediteranian its just the people living there were far more based around family and living in small villages.
 

DominusNovus

MarkA said:
The domestication of the horse and of cattle would require a winter feed to keep the penned animals alive. What else could have been used other than hay? Therefore, humans were aware of hay since neolithic times.
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Uhhh, they usually killed most of the animals in the fall for this very reason. Autumn is still the peak season for selling (read: slaughtering) animals. They just kept the minimum around.

But you're right, what else could they eat? Animals are totally incapable of eating wheat, oats, etc. :rolleyes:
 
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