Is Game of Thrones realistic: food supplies during extended winters in medieval England

In Lyman Stone's fantastic blog post about George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series, Stone mentions that the seasonal cycle of Westeros is very unrealistic.

Here's the truth: Medieval societies probably could not survive 6 winters in a row. Even modern societies would be hard-pressed to survive that. It's not clear that any large-scale civilized life with organized polities could withstand a decade without a growing season.

Yet Westeros does it a lot. We don't know how. We don't see any of the things we would expect to see in such a society. Cities and castles should have incredibly vast storage facilities, on a scale unthought-of in Medieval Europe. But that's not what happens. Cross-Sea trade connections should be spectacularly robust. They don't seem to be. I mean to ship the cereals needed to feed the winter-hit areas for decades on end would require almost a post-modern level of globalized trade flows.

Is he right? Let's do an experiment. Let's take medieval England (or a similar region) and change one thing -- we'll make the winters last for two years and the summers last for three years. Would humans be able to survive? What technological and societal changes would be needed?

There's a lot of factors to consider, but to make things simple, let's just focus on food (i.e. how much additional food would need to be stored during the winter, etc.). Let's ignore questions like whether houses need to be constructed differently do keep people warm, etc.

NOTE: This question is tagged as hard-science. This means that answers should be based on evidence, not conjecture. At a minimum, answers should contain the following:

1. It should cite reputable sources that explain how medieval England (or a similar region) obtained food during the winter.

2. It should perform some sort of calculation to determine how much additional food would needed to survive the extended two-year winter.

3. It should then propose realistic solutions to the challenge of storing food during the winter. The answer should use some sort of calculation to determine how much food each solution would contribute (e.g. increased trade could supply x tons of grain).

An additional note. Although I begin this question by talking about Westeros, I am only interested in answers that focus on medieval England (or a similar region). I'm not interested in answers that talk about Westerosi technology. This is a hard science question, and therefore I'm interested in how the real world would be effected by extended winters.

posted almost 8 years ago

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