The recent very hotspell - by British standards - has been a reminder not just of ‘global warming’ but of how we all live lives conditioned by the changing seasons and by the climate. That was in many ways all the more true for people in past centuries, with fewer devices to ameliorate the extremes of heat and cold.
This has to be set against longer term trends of differences in average temperatures over centuries, and, with climate variation, the experience of extremes of hot and cold, of drought and deluge over individual years or over a decade. Medieval people saw dramatic climatic shifts that we do not - central Italian cities buried in snow for weeks on end or the summer of 1540 when it was claimed it was possible to drive a wagon across the virtually dry riverbed of the Rhine….
Medievalists.net has an article that serves as an introduction to living, working in and surviving the warmth and the heat of medieval summers which can be seen at What Summer Was Like in the Middle Ages
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