Surviving in a heatwave

As we swelter and shelter from the current temperatures  here in the UK and across western Europe I came upon a video from Medieval Way which looks at how people managed to keep themselves and their food supplies cool in past centuries. 

It is normally thought the earlier middle ages were warmer and followed from about 1300 by the beginnings of the ‘Little Ice Age’ which deepened into the seventeenth century before working itself out in the early nineteenth century. That does not mean that exceptionally hot summers, such as that of 1540, or hot spells, did not occur.

I am no scientist but even I can understand and recall these pre air-conditioning features of daily life. I can still recall, after seventy years, the coolness of the cellar, and indeed the hall,  in my grandmother’s mid-Victorian house, the sun-blinds over traditional large shop windows, photographs of Edwardian country houses bedecked in similar blinds - their casings still survive at the Oxford Union’s building, the curious earth ware device to keep the extra pint of milk in cold water before refrigerators became normal, the slightly sinister looking meat safe with its fine mesh….

Most of those are much more recent than the medieval centuries but the sense of a cool interior even in really hot weather when entering a centuries old building with thick walls, be it a cottage or a church, is both palpable and so refreshing.  

 

The video can be watched at Medieval Peasant Knew Something About Cooling We Forgot