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Medieval plague and the Thirty Years鈥� War fought in 17th century Europe both had devastating effects on building and development on the continent. That鈥檚 the conclusion of a massive new analysis of the timber used in historical European buildings, dated using tree ring methods.

Wood from archaeological sites is routinely collected, analysed and dated using dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating. Researchers scoured through earlier studies to compile data on nearly 50,000 such pieces of wood used for constructing buildings from 1250 to 1699. All of the wood came from Central and Western Europe, mostly the German and French speaking parts of the former Holy Roman Empire.

Compiling the dates of all this wood allowed the researchers to establish a broader history of development over the 450-year period and compare it to the record of major historical events during that time.

鈥淭he felling dates are basically a new and not hitherto used historical source material for studying demographic, social and economic history,鈥� says Fredrik Charpentier Ljungqvist, an historian from Stockholm University in Sweden, adding that this method can also fill in some of the gaps during periods when written evidence is limited.

Medieval crisis

The tree ring dates show building activity dropped off sharply during a period known as the Late Medieval Crisis in the 14th and 15th centuries, and again during the Thirty Years鈥� War that was fought between 1618 and 1648.

Many researchers previously believed the Late Medieval Crisis started with the Great Famine in 1315, but the tree ring dates show that construction had already slowed down by around 1300. Charpentier Ljungqvist says this shows that bad harvests and other hardships had probably already set the ball rolling on this crisis period, which lasted until 1415 and included the Black Death 鈥� a plague outbreak from 1346 to 1351.

In 1349 in the middle of this outbreak which may have killed about 25 million people across Europe, the researchers found the lowest number of felled trees from the whole dataset. Other plague outbreaks also negatively affected construction.

The researchers found more trends in the data. For example, building work tended to slow down when grain prices were high due to bad harvest years, which Charpentier Ljungqvist says 鈥渢ended to reduce the population growth due to malnourishment and thus decrease the demand for new buildings鈥�.