Medieval: economy

Showing posts with label economy. Show all posts

Artisans - Hand Crafted

Black, White, Brown, Red - Smiths ..

Blacksmith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1B9zd0kVKU

Metalworking - Viking Blacksmith Shop

Viking - making blacksmith shop - basic and temporary setup > .

Black, White, Brown, Red - Smiths ..

Momentum Stick Potter's Wheel

Momentum Stick Wheel > .

Saxon Potter > .

"While I would agree that industrialization would be unnecessary in tiny communities, potters would still have needed to dry and fire their posts. Forget efficient economies of scale at the firing stage. I would have assumed that the impediment was more the mental leap from the concept of building pots from coils to the notion of shaping a rotating lump by pulling upward."

Response:

"If this was the case why, after the Roman abandonment of Britain, do potters give up the potters' wheel as a making method? Pottery production still continues although on a much smaller scale. The issue is more one of training and space, vs returns. Fast wheel pottery takes several years to master, it's a serious piece of kit to construct, maintain and store and generally demands much more finely prepared clay. Clay that does not lend itself so well to open or clamp firing, both of which are better achieved with a coarser clay. Fine wheel thrown clay is far easier to fire in a kiln, another piece of equipment that needs to be built and maintained. Again, open firing can be achieved with almost any fuel, kilns on the other hand demand carefully prepared wood, gorse or brash. All time consuming and simply not worth it for domestic scale production."

Occupations - Dark Age jobs - Romans, Anglo-Saxons

Dark Ages = Romans & Anglo-Saxons

Medieval Professions - KoHi >> .

Battles - Lewes 1264, Evesham 1265 CE

Henry III, Simon de Montfort (6th Earl of Leicester) - Second Barons' War

Battle of Lewes 1264 CE > .

Battle of Evesham 1265 CE > .

Lewes: Provision of Oxford, Edward Longshanks, Henry III captured, Mise of Lewes
Evesham: De Montfort's Parliament, Earl Gilbert de Clare, Simon the Younger, Llewelyn ap Gruffudd, de Montfort killed, Dictum of Kenilworth

The Battle of Lewes was one of two main battles of the conflict known as the Second Barons' War. It took place at Lewes in Sussex, on 14 May 1264. It marked the high point of the career of Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, and made him the "uncrowned King of England". Henry III left the safety of Lewes Castle and St. Pancras Priory to engage the Barons in battle and was initially successful, his son Prince Edward routing part of the baronial army with a cavalry charge. However Edward pursued his quarry off the battlefield and left Henry's men exposed. Henry was forced to launch an infantry attack up Offham Hill where he was defeated by the barons' men defending the hilltop. The royalists fled back to the castle and priory and the King was forced to sign the Mise of Lewes, ceding many of his powers to Montfort.

The Battle of Evesham (4 August 1265) was one of the two main battles of 13th century England's Second Barons' War. With the Battle of Lewes, de Montfort had won control of royal government, but after the defection of several close allies and the escape from captivity of Prince Edward, he found himself on the defensive. Forced to engage the royalists at Evesham, he faced an army twice the size of his own. The battle took place on 4 August 1265, near the town of Evesham, Worcestershire.

The battle soon turned into a massacre; Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, was killed and his body mutilated. This marked the defeat of and the rebellious barons by the future King Edward I, who led the forces of his father, King Henry III. Though the battle effectively restored royal authority, scattered resistance remained until the Dictum of Kenilworth was signed in 1267.

Ж Medieval Warfare Ж

System of Raising Armies and Campaigning: Medieval Warfare by Professor Michael Prestwich
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXXjmy0pYf4

Western Warfare in the Age of the Crusades 1 > .
Castle guard
https://youtu.be/BXXjmy0pYf4?t=26m20s
Castle-guard was an arrangement under the feudal system, by which the duty of finding knights to guard royal castles was imposed on certain manors, knight's fees or baronies. The greater barons provided for the guard of their castles by exacting a similar duty from their sub-enfeoffed knights. The obligation was commuted very early for a fixed money payment, a form of scutage known as "castle-guard rent", which lasted into modern times. Castle-guard was a common form of feudal tenure, almost ubiquitous, on the Isle of Wight where all manors were held from the Lord of the Isle of Wight, seated at Carisbrook Castle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle-guard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knight%27s_fee
Medieval source material on the internet: Land taxes and feudal surveys
http://www.medievalgenealogy.org.uk/sources/feudal.shtml
http://home.olemiss.edu/~tjray/medieval/feudal.htm .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzq6MC4YzCQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU06Yr5ZzRc

Viking Woodsman Kit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYV4FndGF0M

Irish & Viking Medieval Weapons & Armour On Display At Gallow's Hill, Dungarvan
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ZqFj4HczRA

How to make fire with flint and steel - Viking Style Fire Lighting
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7D-0Af4Ve6o

Journeys Through Time 1 - The Vikings
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmwI55c1qXg

You Had to Be Strong Just to Wear the Armor as a Viking
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h4Uw1g5MU_U

The Wilderness and Bushcraft Series - Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0sQ3n0iQgQJHffqgEGIgdZcJakZ0ae4v

Logistics in Medieval Warfare played a key role, although for a long time there was a view that there were no proper logistical system in the "Dark Ages", this has been largely debunked. Since large army operated for extended periods in enemy territory and we also have quite a paper trail in some cases. This video also covers the benefits and drawbacks of pack animals, carts and wagons. The difference between stall-feeding and grazing. The importance of militias and magnates. As well, as the basic differences to the Roman Empire and food requirements for men and beast.

▲ Warfare ➧

Ancient Warfare ➧
Anglo-Saxon vs Viking weaponry ➧
Bowmen ➧

Castles - medieval ➧
Cavalry ➧
Crossbows - medieval ➧

English Military Decline, 14th C? ➧
Medieval Warfare ➧
Siege Engines ➧
Siege Tower ➧ (11thC BCE ancient Near East, 4thC BCE Europe )

Great Famine of 1315-1317

Hell on Earth: The Great Famine of 1315-1317 - Craft > .

History of Pandemics

A History of Pandemics, Part 1 > .
A History of Pandemics, Part 2 > .
History of Pandemics mapped > .

Pandemic, Epidemic, Endemic - Tar >> .

Pestilence, Pandemics, Pox - TThu >> .

Pandemics Economically Worse than War - First Pandemic - Pandemic Hx 1 - tgh > .
How did Medieval People respond to the Black Death? - same > .

Life After the Black Death Ended - Weird > .
Black Death Explained in 8 Minutes - CaHi > .

The Worst Pandemics in History > .
The Most Destructive Pandemics and Epidemics In Human History > .

How Pandemics Spread > .

Pandemics & the Economy | The Lasting Effects of the Black Death > .
History of the Black Death - 1 - fph > .

History of the Black Death - 2 - fph > .
History of the Black Death - 3 - fph > .

A Day In the Life Living With the Plague > .
Why (17thC+) Plague Doctors Wore Strange Masks > .

How Eyam in Derbyshire 'self-isolated' during Bubonic Plague > .
Plague in the Ancient and Medieval World - same > .

The Great Pestilence - The Black Death - arch >> .

The Peasants' Revolt (The Great Revolt) - HiHu >> .

Plague writers who "predicted" coronavirus pandemic .

In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, some plague doctors and physicians wore a beak-like mask which was filled with aromatic items. The masks were designed to protect them from putrid air, which (according to the miasmatic theory of disease) was seen as the cause of infection. The design of these clothes has been attributed to Charles de Lorme, the chief physician to Louis XIII.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plague_doctor .

Adam Smith, 1723-90

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ruiUOQERnw

Although Keynesian Nobel laureate Paul Krugman praised Friedman as a "great economist and a great man" after Friedman's death in 2006, and acknowledged his many, widely accepted contributions to empirical economics, Krugman had been, and remains, a prominent critic of Friedman. Krugman has written that "he slipped all too easily into claiming both that markets always work and that only markets work. It's extremely hard to find cases in which Friedman acknowledged the possibility that markets could go wrong, or that government intervention could serve a useful purpose."

In her book The Shock Doctrine, author and social activist Naomi Klein criticized Friedman's economic liberalism, identifying it with the principles that guided the economic restructuring that followed the military coups in countries such as Chile and Argentina. Based on their assessments of the extent to which what she describes as neoliberal policies contributed to income disparities and inequality, both Klein and Noam Chomsky have suggested that the primary role of what they describe as neoliberalism was as an ideological cover for capital accumulation by multinational corporations.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milton_Friedman

English Economy 14th century

English Economy 14th century

Economics of Medieval English Agriculture ..

Economics of Medieval English Brewing ..
Trade and Economics in the Middle Ages
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=67Wfw_DbNVc
Early Medieval Trade | World History | Khan Academy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyW7CUl9KDc
11th-14th centuries: Rise of Towns & Europe's Economy in the Late Middle Ages
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhnyQjRjxY4
Changes in the Middle Ages 3 Economy and Trade
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvbegSLqMGc

Anglo-Saxon, Norman taxation > .

Medieval Economics
http://www.petesqbsite.com/sections/tutorials/tuts/m_econ.htm
http://www.thefinertimes.com/Middle-Ages/economy-in-the-middle-ages.html
http://www.thefinertimes.com/Middle-Ages/the-black-death.html

Medieval Coinage
14th century: farthing, half penny, penny, half groat, groat, noble
https://plus.google.com/103755316640704343614/posts/V86JZuKvRAS

The loss of life in the Great Famine of 1315–17 shook the English economy severely and population growth ceased; the first outbreak of the Black Death in 1348 then killed around half the English population, with major implications for the post-plague economy. The agricultural sector shrank, with higher wages, lower prices and shrinking profits leading to the final demise of the old demesne system and the advent of the modern farming system of cash rents for lands. The Peasants Revolt of 1381 shook the older feudal order and limited the levels of royal taxation considerably for a century to come. The 15th century saw the growth of the English cloth industry and the establishment of a new class of international English merchant, increasingly based in London and the South-West, prospering at the expense of the older, shrinking economy of the eastern towns. These new trading systems brought about the end of many of the international fairs and the rise of the chartered company. Together with improvements in metalworking and shipbuilding, this represents the end of the medieval economy, and the beginnings of the early modern period in English economics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_England_in_the_Middle_Ages

The putting-out system (cottage industry) is a means of subcontracting work. Historically, it was also known as the workshop system and the domestic system. In putting-out, work is contracted by a central agent to subcontractors who complete the work in off-site facilities, either in their own homes or in workshops with multiple craftsmen.

It was used in the English and American textile industries, in shoemaking, lock-making trades, and making parts for small firearms from the Industrial Revolution until the mid-19th century.

The domestic system was suited to pre-urban times because workers did not have to travel from home to work, which was quite impracticable due to the state of roads and footpaths, and members of the household spent many hours in farm or household tasks.

A cottage industry is a small-scale industry, where the creation of products and services is home-based, rather than factory-based. While products and services created by cottage industries are often unique and distinctive, given the fact that they are usually not mass-produced, producers in this sector often face numerous disadvantages when trying to compete with much larger factory-based companies.

A cottage industry is an industry—primarily manufacturing—which includes many producers, working from their homes, typically part time. The term originally referred to home workers who were engaged in a task such as sewing, lace-making, wall hangings, or household manufacturing. Some industries which are usually operated from large, centralized factories were cottage industries before the Industrial Revolution. Business operators would travel around the world, buying raw materials, delivering them to people who would work on them, and then collecting the finished goods to sell, or typically to ship to another market. One of the factors which allowed the Industrial Revolution to take place in Western Europe was the presence of these business people who had the ability to expand the scale of their operations. Cottage industries were very common in the time when a large proportion of the population was engaged in agriculture, because the farmers (and their families) often had both the time and the desire to earn additional income during the part of the year (winter) when there was little work to do farming or selling produce by the farm's roadside.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Putting-out_system

By late Roman times, domestic wool was already being used to produce textiles (“cloth”) in the Low Countries. The marshes along the coast, which had not yet been enclosed by dikes, provided grazing for large flocks of sheep which yielded sufficient wool to satisfy domestic demand. In the 12th century a fundamental change occurred. Production was transferred from the countryside to the fast-growing cities (Ypres, Ghent, Bruges, and later also Brussels and Antwerp), and weavers began using English wool as their raw material instead of home-produced wool. The result was a high quality, luxury product intended for export. Sheep reared on the type of grass produced by the very damp English pastureland with its poor soil yielded a particularly fine and springy woollen fleece. For that reason, demand for English wool was virtually inelastic: neither home-produced wool nor the wool occasionally imported from Spain offered a real alternative.

English wool was now being imported into the Low Countries in unprecedented quantities, in sacks or as fleeces still attached to the skin. Flemish and Brabant merchants and weavers were very active in this trade. They went to England in person, to the grounds of the sometimes remote Cistercian abbeys where the sheep were predominantly reared. On the local wool markets they often paid in advance for future deliveries, so that they also already had a stake in the actual production of the wool. Flemish vessels shipped the wool from London and other ports such as Great Yarmouth, King’s Lynn, Dover, Sandwich and Boston.

The Southern Netherlands merchants needed English coins to buy their wool; they became good customers of the English coin workshops, where they exchanged the lightweight pennies from the Netherlands or bars of silver for English sterling. Thus, the accounting records of the London Mint list the names of merchants from Ypres and Brussels, side by side with the names of English customers. On their return from England, they did not always take their surplus English money for melting down into local pennies again, but sometimes preferred to set the foreign currency aside ready for their next trip. It is therefore not surprising that the 13th century coin treasure discovered in 1908 during the demolition of a cellar wall in the house at no. 32 Rue d’assaut in Brussels contained no less than 80,927 English sterling coins.

Gradually, the rulers and merchants on the Continent came to realise that they could make considerable savings by minting sterling coins themselves in their own country, rather than buying them from English coin workshops. From around 1270, coins worth one or two sterling pennies were therefore minted in the Low Countries, alongside the ordinary lightweight pennies. The sterling copies had the same weight and alloy as the foreign originals. The images on the face of the coins varied greatly: some depicted a crowned head, just like the English coins, while others displayed a totally distinctive image. In contrast, the reverse of virtually all the coins depicted the cross with three bullets between the arms, copied from the English model. From about the mid 14th century, owing to the rising demand for high value currency, the sterling penny became less important, giving way to the silver groat – worth three sterlings – and gold coins.

https://www.nbbmuseum.be/en/2009/12/sterling.htm

The importance of London for craft and industry in medieval England
http://www.theposthole.org/sites/theposthole.org/files/downloads/posthole_47_360.pdf

1100-1290

Mining did not make up a large part of the English medieval economy, but the 12th and 13th centuries saw an increased demand for metals in England, thanks to the considerable population growth and building construction, including the great cathedrals and churches. Four metals were mined commercially in England during the period: iron, tin, lead and silver using a variety of refining techniques. Coal was also mined from the 13th century onwards.

Iron mining occurred in several locations including the main English centre in the Forest of Dean, as well as in Durham and the Weald. Some iron to meet English demand was also imported from the continent, especially by the late 13th century. By end of the 12th century, the older method of acquiring iron ore through strip mining was being supplemented by more advanced techniques, including tunnels, trenches and bell-pits. Iron ore was usually locally processed at a bloomery and by the 14th century the first water-powered iron forge in England was built at Chingley. As a result of the diminishing woodlands and consequent increases in the cost of both wood and charcoal, demand for coal increased in the 12th century and began to be commercially produced from bell-pits and strip mining.

A silver boom occurred in England after the discovery of silver near Carlisle in 1133. Huge quantities of silver were produced from a semicircle of mines reaching across Cumberland, Durham and Northumberland - up to three to four tonnes of silver were mined each year, more than ten times the previous annual production across the whole of Europe. The result was a local economic boom and a major uplift to 12th century royal finances. Tin mining was centred in Cornwall and Devon, exploiting alluvial deposits and governed by the special Stannary Courts and Parliaments - tin formed a valuable export good, initially to Germany and then later in the 14th century to the Low Countries. Lead was usually mined as a by-product of mining for silver, with mines in Yorkshire, Durham and the north, as well as in Devon. Economically fragile, the lead mines usually survived as a result of being subsidised by silver production.

England's economy was fundamentally agricultural throughout the period, but the mining of iron, tin, lead and silver, and later coal, played an important part within the English medieval economy.

The Black Death epidemic first arrived in England in 1348, re-occurring in waves during 1360-2, 1368-9, 1375 and more sporadically thereafter. The most immediate economic impact of this disaster was the widespread loss of life, between around 27% mortality amongst the upper classes, to 40-70% amongst the peasantry. Despite the very high loss of life, few settlements were abandoned during the epidemic itself, but many were badly affected or nearly eliminated altogether. The medieval authorities did their best to respond in an organised fashion, but the economic disruption was immense. Building work ceased and many mining operations paused. In the short term, efforts were taken by the authorities to control wages and enforce pre-epidemic working conditions. Coming on top of the previous years of famine, however, the longer term economic implications were profound. In contrast to the previous centuries of rapid growth, the English population would not begin to recover for over a century, despite the many positive reasons for a resurgence. The crisis would affect English mining for the remainder of the medieval period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_English_Mining_in_the_Middle_Ages

Medieval technology
After the Renaissance of the 12th century, medieval Europe saw a radical change in the rate of new inventions, innovations in the ways of managing traditional means of production, and economic growth. The period saw major technological advances, including the adoption of gunpowder, the invention of vertical windmills, spectacles, mechanical clocks, and greatly improved water mills, building techniques (Gothic architecture, medieval castles), and agriculture in general (three-field crop rotation).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_technology

Search google book: "English Medieval Industries: Craftsmen, Techniques, Products" edited by John Blair, Nigel Ramsay

‘Good Parliament’ of 1376 ..

Economy of England in the Middle Ages - Wikipedia

Lucrative Fear-mongering

How the Medieval Church Frightened People Into Obedience > .

The medieval Catholic church was a mixed bag of corruption, persuasion, and fear-mongering. There are a number of scary historical facts about the Catholic church, many involving the use of intimidation and coercion against the faithful in an effort to - oddly enough - keep them faithful. Plus, this was a time when the majority of people were illiterate and highly superstitious, making it that much easier for the church to manipulate the population and make them ever dependent upon the church.

Peasant, Serf, Villein // Lord

Five Myths about Medieval Peasants > .

Danièle takes on five common myths about medieval peasants.

Were medieval peasants slaves? Servile vs Free Legal Status - Modern History > .

How Europe Transitioned from Slavery to Serfdom - Middle Ages - K&G > .

Introduction to the Slavic Slave Trade - Laser > .

Serfdom was the status of many peasants under feudalism, specifically relating to manorialism, and similar systems. It was a condition of debt bondage and indentured servitude with similarities to and differences from slavery, which developed during the Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages in Europe and lasted in some countries until the mid-19th century.

Unlike slaves, serfs could not be bought, sold, or traded individually though they could, depending on the area, be sold together with land. The kholops in Russia and villeins in gross in England, in contrast, could be traded like regular slaves, could be abused with no rights over their own bodies, could not leave the land they were bound to, and could marry only with their lord's permission. Serfs who occupied a plot of land were required to work for the lord of the manor who owned that land. In return, they were entitled to protection, justice, and the right to cultivate certain fields within the manor to maintain their own subsistence. Serfs were often required not only to work on the lord's fields, but also in his mines and forests and to labour to maintain roads. The manor formed the basic unit of feudal society, and the lord of the manor and the villeins, and to a certain extent the serfs, were bound legally: by taxation in the case of the former, and economically and socially in the latter.

The decline of serfdom in Western Europe has sometimes been attributed to the widespread plague epidemic of the Black Death, which reached Europe in 1347 and caused massive fatalities, disrupting society. The decline, however, had begun before that date. Serfdom became increasingly rare in most of Western Europe after the medieval renaissance at the outset of the High Middle Ages. But, conversely, it grew stronger in Central and Eastern Europe, where it had previously been less common (this phenomenon was known as "later serfdom").

In Eastern Europe, the institution persisted until the mid-19th century. In the Austrian Empire, serfdom was abolished by the 1781 Serfdom Patent; corvée continued to exist until 1848. Serfdom was abolished in Russia in 1861. Prussia declared serfdom unacceptable in its General State Laws for the Prussian States in 1792 and finally abolished it in October 1807, in the wake of the Prussian Reform Movement. In Finland, Norway, and Sweden, feudalism was never fully established, and serfdom did not exist; however, serfdom-like institutions did exist in both stavns (the stavnsbånd, from 1733 to 1788) and its vassal Iceland (the more restrictive vistarband, from 1490 until 1894).

According to medievalist historian Joseph R. Strayer, the concept of feudalism can also be applied to the societies of ancient Persia, ancient Mesopotamia, Egypt (Sixth to Twelfth dynasty), Islamic-ruled Northern and Central India, China (Zhou dynasty and end of Han dynasty) and Japan during the Shogunate. However, Wu Ta-k'un argued that the Shang-Zhou fengjian were kinship estates, quite distinct from feudalism. James Lee and Cameron Campbell describe the Chinese Qing dynasty (1644–1912) as also maintaining a form of serfdom.

Melvyn Goldstein described Tibet as having had serfdom until 1959, but whether or not the Tibetan form of peasant tenancy that qualified as serfdom was widespread is contested by other scholars. Bhutan is described by Tashi Wangchuk, a Bhutanese civil servant, as having officially abolished serfdom by 1959, but he believes that less than or about 10% of poor peasants were in copyhold situations.

The United Nations 1956 Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery also prohibits serfdom as a practice similar to slavery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serfdom .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_serfdom .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_slavery .

Serfs

How Much It Sucked to Be a Medieval Serf - WeHi > .

Ice Houses, Yakhchāl, Ice Merchants

.How people kept stuff cold before refrigerators > .

skip ad > .

An Ice house, or icehouse, is a building used to store ice throughout the year, commonly used prior to the invention of the refrigerator. Some were underground chambers, usually man-made, close to natural sources of winter ice such as freshwater lakes, but many were buildings with various types of insulation.

During the winter, ice and snow would be cut from lakes or rivers, taken into the ice house, and packed with insulation (often straw or sawdust). It would remain frozen for many months, often until the following winter, and could be used as a source of ice during the summer months. The main application of the ice was the storage of foods, but it could also be used simply to cool drinks, or in the preparation of ice-cream and sorbet desserts. During the heyday of the ice trade, a typical commercial ice house would store 2,700 tonnes (3,000 short tons) of ice in a 30-by-100-foot (9 by 30 m) and 14-metre-high (45 ft) building.

Yakhchāl (Persian: یخچال‎ "ice pit"; yakh meaning "ice" and chāl meaning "pit") is an ancient type of ice house that functions as an evaporative cooler. Above ground, the structure had a domed shape, but had a subterranean storage space. It was often used to store ice, but sometimes was used to store food as well. The subterranean space coupled with the thick heat-resistant construction material insulated the storage space year round. These structures were mainly built and used in Persia. Many that were built hundreds of years ago remain standing.

The ice trade, also known as the frozen water trade, was a 19th-century and early-20th-century industry, centring on the east coast of the United States and Norway, involving the large-scale harvesting, transport and sale of natural ice, and later the making and sale of artificial ice, for domestic consumption and commercial purposes. Ice was cut from the surface of ponds and streams, then stored in ice houses, before being sent on by ship, barge or railroad to its final destination around the world. Networks of ice wagons were typically used to distribute the product to the final domestic and smaller commercial customers. The ice trade revolutionised the U.S. meat, vegetable and fruit industries, enabled significant growth in the fishing industry, and encouraged the introduction of a range of new drinks and foods.

The trade was started by the New England businessman Frederic Tudor in 1806. Tudor shipped ice to the Caribbean island of Martinique, hoping to sell it to wealthy members of the European elite there, using an ice house he had built specially for the purpose. Over the coming years the trade widened to Cuba and Southern United States, with other merchants joining Tudor in harvesting and shipping ice from New England. During the 1830s and 1840s the ice trade expanded further, with shipments reaching England, India, South America, China and Australia. Tudor made a fortune from the India trade, while brand names such as Wenham Ice became famous in London.

Increasingly, however, the ice trade began to focus on supplying the growing cities on the east coast of the U.S. and the needs of businesses across the Midwest. The citizens of New York City and Philadelphia became huge consumers of ice during their long, hot summers, and additional ice was harvested from the Hudson River and Maine to fulfil the demand. Ice began to be used in refrigerator cars by the railroad industry, allowing the meat packing industry around Chicago and Cincinnati to slaughter cattle locally, sending dressed meat east for either the internal or overseas markets. Chilled refrigerator cars and ships created a national industry in vegetables and fruit that could previously only have been consumed locally. U.S. and British fishermen began to preserve their catches in ice, allowing longer voyages and bigger catches, and the brewing industry became operational all-year around. As U.S. ice exports diminished after 1870, Norway became a major player in the international market, shipping large quantities of ice to England and Germany.

At its peak at the end of the 19th century, the U.S. ice trade employed an estimated 90,000 people in an industry capitalised at $28 million ($660 million in 2010 terms), using ice houses capable of storing up to 250,000 tons (220 million kg) each; Norway exported a million tons (910 million kg) of ice a year, drawing on a network of artificial lakes. Competition had slowly been growing, however, in the form of artificially produced plant ice and mechanically chilled facilities. Unreliable and expensive at first, plant ice began to successfully compete with natural ice in Australia and India during the 1850s and 1870s respectively, until, by the outbreak of WW1 in 1914, more plant ice was being produced in the U.S. each year than naturally harvested ice. Despite a temporary increase in production in the U.S. during the war, the inter-war years saw the total collapse of the ice trade around the world. Today, ice is occasionally harvested for ice carving and ice festivals, but little remains of the 19th-century industrial network of ice houses and transport facilities. At least one New Hampshire campground still harvests ice to keep cabins cool during the summer.

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