Once I was a clever boy learning the arts of Oxford... is a quotation from the verses written by Bishop Richard Fleming (c.1385-1431) for his tomb in Lincoln Cathedral. Fleming, the founder of Lincoln College in Oxford, is the subject of my research for a D. Phil., and, like me, a son of the West Riding. I have remarked in the past that I have a deeply meaningful on-going relationship with a dead fifteenth century bishop... it was Fleming who, in effect, enabled me to come to Oxford and to learn its arts, and for that I am immensely grateful.


Sunday 3 April 2022

More about the decline of Medieval Greenland


Further to my post about The fate of medieval Greenland I now see that Live Science also has an article about the new theory that drought led to the abandonment of the two settlements in Greenland around or soon after 1400. 

In it several commentators raise significant points about the activities of the two communities as well as suggesting or restating alternative explanations for what happened. What this does is to bring out the interconnection of various pieces of evidence to explain the abandonment by the settlers of their farms. The differing eventualities, none of which may in themselves account for that event, do at very least indicate the subtleties, and extremities, of life for Europeans in medieval Greenland.



No comments: