Barbara Hanawalt

A good harvest meant a manageable winter, a poor one meant a frightening one, and the winters themselves were changing.

For much of the high Middle Ages, roughly from the 10th century into the 13th, Europe enjoyed a relatively mild spell that historians and climate scientists often call the medieval climate anomaly or the medieval warm period.

Harvests were generally good, the population grew, and new land was brought under the plough.

Then, from around the end of the 13th century, conditions began to turn.

The family huddle in one corner, shivering.

It makes for a good story, and there were certainly poor and wretched dwellings in the Middle Ages.

But the evidence that archaeologists and building historians have gathered over the last 50 years paints a rather different picture.

For a long time, scholars did believe that peasant houses were flimsy and short-lived.