Gateway Essay: Colonial America and Medieval Technology

I. Medieval America

European settlement of North America began in the Middle Ages and continued sporadically for centuries. Leaving aside legendary figures such as St. Brendan the Navigator, the Irish saint whose story claims that he visited the Western Hemisphere, there is no doubt about the settlement by the Vikings. They settled in Greenland circa 970 and from there made a colony at what is now southeast Canada/northeast United States, circa 1000 A.D. A Viking named Lief "the Lucky" set up camp at a place now called L'Anse aux Meadows, in what is now Newfoundland. The settlement was within a territory the Vikings named Vinland. Six hundred years later, later colonists/adventurers set up their own settlements in what they called Massachusetts and Virginia. Whether at Vinland or Virginia, all aspects of life--home organization, family roles, farming, manufacturing, and culture--were continuations from medieval society.

Emigration to North America was one aspect of the movement of peoples around the Atlantic Ocean that had led the Vikings to Greenland and Canada or the English to New England and Virginia. Whether in the eleventh or seventeenth centuries and regardless of motive--desire for religious freedom, escape from persecution or a search for economic opportunity--the basic problems of food and shelter remained for everyone. When moving westwards, eleventh-century Vikings or seventeenth-century farmers brought with them the only technology that they knew, the processes and techniques of their homelands.

The farmstead at L'Anse aux Meadows reveals a typically medieval configuration with homes, barns, livestock pens, and, significantly, iron working at a smithy. This settlement was active into the twelfth century, when a bishop for Greenland and Vinland was lost at sea as he attempted to sail to his parishioners. The Viking settlement at Greenland continued into the fifteenth century, and recent scholarship suggests that knowledge of its routes was one of the reasons why Europeans turned their attention once again to North America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

At both the Vinland and Greenland settlements there were contacts between the Europeans and the native inhabitants: trade, conflict, and cultural borrowing. A coin illustrates this contact, the so-called Maine penny. In 1957, among a collection of Native American artifacts was a penny minted during the reign of the Norwegian King Olaf II ("The Peaceful") Haraldsson (reigned 1061-1093). Current scholarly opinion believes that this coin passed because of trade, possibly with the Vinland colony.

Once again, let us go forward six centuries. In order to supply the necessities for life, two industries dominated early American society: milling and forging. Both these manufactures had undergone tremendous changes during the Middle Ages, especially by the twelfth century, often known as the industrial revolution of early Europe. Their developments demonstrate that change can be rapid and frequently relies on many factors, as seen in the following example. There is no evidence of freestanding mills at L'Anse aux Meadows. The colonists apparently used a hand mill or "quern." A century the post windmill (see below) appeared in Germany and became a common sight throughout Europe. Six centuries later, the mill building is a standard feature of the colonial landscape.

Like the post windmill, widespread use of large mills came a century after the Viking settlement, when renewable energy sources such as wind and a steady water flow from millponds began to drive milling machinery. Gears made that transformation possible as they more efficiently converted the speed of the wheel into mechanical energy and directed more power to the grinding axles. This was a great improvement on the gearless mechanisms of an earlier age. European knowledge of gear ratios expanded during the eleventh and twelfth centuries with the rediscovery of Greek mathematical texts that flowed into medieval Europe via the Jewish schools in Muslim Iberia (modern Spain). Jewish merchants brought those texts north to the great commercial fairs, such as the famous one at Champagne. These fairs had come into existence during the economic prosperity begun in the tenth century when the Vikings turned their attention from raids to trade using water routes rather than the slower and more expensive land routes. The Vikings brought their idea of commercial gatherings to North America. A famous passage in the Vinland Sagas describes how the Vikings and the Native Americans traded. The Vikings took the goods they had to trade to the seashore, where they left them overnight. In the morning, they returned and found Native American goods in return. Perhaps the Maine penny was among a later collection of trade goods.