History - Century of Woe (American mature male, storytelling)
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (US General American - GenAM)Transcript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
Chapter two. Born to woe the century. When the last of the kiss was born, his country was supreme but his century was already in trouble. A physical chill settled on the 14th century at its very start initiating the miseries to come. The Baltic Sea froze over twice in 13 03 and 13 06 to seven years followed of unseasonable cold storms and rains and a rise in the level of the Caspian sea. Contemporaries could not know it was the onset of what has since been recognized as the little ice age caused by an advance of polar and alpine glaciers and lasting until about 1700. Nor were they yet aware that owing to the climatic change, communication with Greenland was gradually being lost that the north settlements there were being extinguished, that cultivation of grain was disappearing from Iceland and being severely reduced in Scandinavia. But they could feel the colder weather and mark with fear. Its result, a shorter growing season. This meant disaster for population increase in the last century had already reached a delicate balance with agricultural techniques. Given the tools and methods of the time, the clearing of productive land had already been pushed to its limits without adequate irrigation and fertilizers. Crop yield could not be raised nor poor soils be made productive. Commerce was not equipped to transport grain in bulk from surplus producing areas except by water. Inland towns and cities lived on local resources and when these dwindled, the inhabitants starved in 13 15 after rains. So incessant that they were compared to the biblical flood, crops failed all over Europe and famine. The dark horsemen of the apocalypse became familiar to all. The previous rise in population had already exceeded agricultural production, leaving people undernourished and more vulnerable to hunger and disease. Reports spread of people eating their own Children of the poor in Poland, feeding on hanged bodies taken down from the gibbet. A contagion of dysentery prevailed in the same years. Local famines recurred intermittently after the great sweep of 13, 15 to 16.