At first glance, the chapters of this book might appear to be a chronological sequence determined by the various authors’ interests. In the first chapter (4000–800 BC), mentalities, rites, and myths feature large; in the second (800 BC–AD 1000), landscape and implements; themes that continue in the third chapter (1000–1700), seen in terms of waves of growth and decline; but then comes the fourth chapter (1700–1870), which while it continues with production, is equally about overcoming the obstacles of nature and climate to establish a successful expansion; more production in the fifth chapter (1870–1945), but now against the background of the integration of industry and agriculture; and finally a chapter (1945–2000) that is at heart about mentalities, just like the first chapter, but now in terms of official policy and new human needs. The book begins with ideologies, proceeds to a long struggle between humans and nature, and concludes with ideologies.
We the authors have known one another for more than twenty years, and have discussed history and agriculture ceaselessly. We have reached the stage when we know one another’s arguments well, and cannot but be influenced by them, even if all of us gathered in this project are of independent mind, if not to say downright obstinate. The long discussions in which we have shaped our arguments–and one another–have at times echoed the course of Swedish agrarian history. Ideology and a new way of thinking were the first appeal, to be superseded by a long but productive slog to a land of plenty, and now, as we enjoy the fruits of our labours, ideology can again play a role. What I offer here are my own views on that process, and even though the other authors have read and commented on my conclusions, in keeping with the moving spirit of the book, in this chapter I speak for myself, even as I rely on all the others.
My concern here is to consider the main question of the book: why farm in Sweden? Given how favourable the conditions are in southern Europe, it may seem positively perverse to grow cereals so far north. Yet we can turn this question on its head by pointing out that farming on the fringes of Europe has prospered, and this relative success makes European agriculture as a whole more understandable. The widespread notion that Sweden is cursed by its climate is matched by an equally strong belief that since time immemorial Sweden was a society of free peasants. There is of course more than a grain of truth in both views, but there is nothing to be lost in challenging them.
And of course, the question remains whether ‘Sweden’ has evolved from a society in which ideologies and mentalities played a determining role, through a long period defined by the determined struggle to increase production, only to come full circle to an era in which ideologies and mentalities are again the deciding factors. The reader may already be bridling at this–surely the Middle Ages are usually characterized as the age of religion, not production? But more of this later.
Europe has a patch of cultivation that protrudes northwards to 60° N, edged by a string of capital cities, from Oslo in the west to Stockholm and Helsinki, and on to St Petersburg in the east. If we were to continue east along the same latitude, we would cross the northern Urals, the Siberian tundra, northern Canada, and southern Greenland; yet, unlike these regions, cultivation is possible around the entire Baltic area and on the Norwegian coast right up to the polar circle –which makes this area of the northern hemisphere unique. Iceland, Ireland, the British Isles, and other western European countries must also be included because, for their latitudes, they enjoy relatively warm and damp climates.
North-western Europe has a climate governed by the oceans. The northern extension of the Gulf Stream runs past the British Isles up to the Norwegian Sea, and the prevailing winds are westerly, which produces Europe’s temperate, damp climate. Winters are generally mild, particularly along the Atlantic coast. Temperature differences between the seasons are quite small. Scanning the continent, the typical Eurasian inland climate, with its extremely cold winters, only begins in central Russia.1 Looking south to the Mediterranean, we find a different, hotter climate marked by summer droughts, which has resulted in its own particular systems of agriculture.
Agricultural research on northernmost Sweden has been much exercised by the possible benefits of farming these northern latitudes, with the short growing season and almost continuous sunshine in the summer. Perennial plants such as grasses are at a distinct advantage, since they can make the most of the rapid increase in daylight before midsummer .2 That grasses have an advantage has also been the reason for the strong focus on animal husbandry so evident in Scandinavia and the other countries in the western and northern European climate zone.
However, arable farming, with its more intensive use of the land, has almost everywhere proved the better source of calories. Spring crops are often sown as late as early May, thus missing a sizeable portion of the growing season. It is for good reason that six-row barley (Hordeum vulgare) has always been the most important crop in the far north, and for a long time in most of Sweden. (Two-row barley (Hordeum distichum) was introduced in the seventeenth century, but did not spread generally in central and southern Sweden until the agricultural revolution in the nineteenth century.) Other than in northern Sweden, autumn-sown rye can survive the winter, and would come to play an important role.3
Even if the climate favoured agriculture more than in other parts of the world on the same latitude, it remains true that the conditions for agriculture grow worse the further north we go, especially as agriculture as such was developed far to the south. In their history of world agriculture, Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart describe how agriculture gradually conquered new geographical zones, and provide an illustrative diagram that shows how it spread across the world.4 It began in the ‘Mediterranean forest’ and slowly fanned out northwards towards the Pole, and southwards to the equator. In the north, agriculture first began in the ‘temperate forest’ in about 3000 BC, when it was still a matter of ‘slash and burn cultivation systems’. It was only later, in about AD 1000, that the ‘mixed forest’ was brought into cultivation during the medieval agrarian revolution. ‘Conifer forest (taiga)’ remained unaffected, and to the north was ‘a pastoral system based on reindeer’.
The first obvious objection is that in Mazoyer and Laurence’s grand sweep, ‘conifer forest’ is not included as agriculture, though it was in Sweden (and Finland and Norway). The second is that the conquest of the northern frontier (including the mixed forest region) did not roll forward steadily, but rather repeatedly with the advent of each new agricultural system. It is not even safe to say that the first introduction of agriculture was the most decisive. Later movements to the north may have been just as important, especially bearing in mind the waves of expansion described in this present volume.
Agriculture first arrived from West Asia as a job lot, with barley and several varieties of wheat, and the most important livestock–cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs. Between 7000 and 5000 BC, it spread to much of central Europe, but not as far as the Baltic or North Sea. For more than a thousand years there were people in the north who gathered, fished, and hunted, and certainly knew about agriculture but did not adopt it.
Then in about 3900 BC, agriculture spread up through central Scandinavia, where after a period of reverses and advances it was established as the dominant livelihood for the majority of the inhabitants. The introduction of agriculture was a complex process (as described in chapter 1). In terms of agricultural systems, it was at this stage that agriculture altered to become more intensive. Ploughing implements were introduced in Scandinavia by 3000 BC at the latest. Agriculture was no longer gardening (as was the case on its first arrival in Sweden); it became the working of larger fields. Other innovations followed, so that a new technological system based on the intensive use of livestock arose, with milk, wool, and draught power as the key elements. This first establishment of agriculture as dominant in much of southern and central Sweden was only the first in a series of expansions at the northern tip of the great temperate zone.
In Sweden, animal husbandry was an outdoor affair, much as arable farming was extensive with peripatetic fields. However early an addition byres may have been, they were definitely a central element in the agricultural system in the centuries running up to the first century AD (see chapter 2). This was the next great phase of expansion, for with better methods of using manure came the gradual intensification of agriculture, while the period also saw the advent of iron as the most important material besides wood for making tools. It was with iron that the pattern was set for all tools and implements until the Industrial Revolution. Hand-tools such as borers and axes had existed before, made from bronze or stone, but iron brought new forms that almost from the start are instantly recognizable from the peasants’ tool-bags of our millennium.
The change, when it came, may appear slow to the modern eye, but it took a relatively short time. The introduction of iron set northern and central Europe on a slightly different course from the Mediterranean regions (where spades and ploughshares were made of iron from an early date). It was at this time a large agricultural system began to emerge in northern Europe, where iron brought the scythe, and its corollary, large-scale haymaking, which in turn was essential if animals were to be stalled in byres for longer periods. In the Mediterranean area it was at this point the agricultural system emerged that would later dominate, with autumn-sown wheat, wine, olives, and the transhumance of small livestock. It has been said that agriculture around the Mediterranean had already peaked in antiquity, and that it was only with the transformations in the nineteenth century that major new advances were made.5 That being so, it may go some way to explain the subsequent shift in economic focus northwards during the Middle Ages and early modern period, and it is certainly true that in Sweden the following two millennia, from the Iron Age to the agricultural revolution in the nineteenth century, were a dynamic period.
The introduction of byres also meant that permanent agriculture could spread on a larger scale north of the Mälaren valley–to the areas where aurochs had never been found because they could not survive the winters, and neither could cattle without stalling. Human intervention now made it possible for the aurochs’ domesticated cousins to survive the long winter months, eating the grasses collected for hay in the short summers. It should be noted that this agricultural system, centred on the cycle of pasture–byre, developed rather early in Scandinavia. Byres existed even earlier along the southern North Sea coast in what is now the Netherlands, but in Scandinavia, with its long winters, the dictates of climate meant they became essential.
In the discussion on ‘the agrarian revolution of the High Middle Ages’, economic historians often highlight the conjunction of heavy wheeled ploughs, harrows, and three-course rotations on the great European plains. In this volume it is instead specific technological change in northern Europe that is emphasized, though it occurred under influence from the south (chapter 3). But there could have been a flow of influence in the other direction. The byre as a central element spread to the British Isles and northern France during this period. With their milder climate, the more intensive animal husbandry that byres made possible was an ‘option’, not a necessity, in these regions; and it seems that keeping cattle indoors in separate byres or in long-houses (where one section of the house was for cattle, the other for humans) was normal during periods of labour-intensive agriculture such as the High Middle Ages, whereas keeping them in yards was commoner during periods of more extensive farming, as was the case in the Late Middle Ages.6 Stalled cattle meant there was more manure available, and thus balanced the more intensive farming of the High Middle Ages, making it an important element in the new technological complex; yet in Scandinavia (and the Netherlands) it had long been customary, and thus this important element in the new way of farming in the British Isles and northern France could have spread from the north.
Influences flowed in the other direction, as the north adopted the rich iron-implement culture, a far-reaching change that can be seen as the consummation of the European system, with a combination of crops and livestock, and at the same time a focus on implements in agriculture. With the increased use of iron, an early symbiosis between agriculture and non-agrarian activities began to evolve, and the increased use of iron would be a constant in further changes.
Like the early transformations, the agrarian revolution of the High Middle Ages led to the further spread of agriculture in Sweden. The vast wooded areas in the southern and central parts of the country were settled, and in the north, the coast and some inland areas were more involved in agriculture. In the sixteenth century came an expansion that, while important, in effect merely put the finishing touches to the technological changes of the High Middle Ages.
The next major leap, the Agrarian Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, was the result of a new approach to dealing with the realities of Sweden’s climate and nature (see chapter 4 and its accompanying thematic text). The use of iron ploughs came at about the same time in Britain, the Netherlands, and Sweden (in Dalarna). With such ploughs came techniques that meant that less draught power was needed, and which saved agriculture from the trap of increased land clearance at the expense of meadows and grazing (resulting in a shortage of draught power). Another effect was that agriculture gradually centred on green manure, and ultimately on convertible husbandry. The result was a situation in which Sweden was able to export food, primarily oats to Britain. The northern fringes had become an asset to European agriculture.
The Industrial Revolution, with its new symbioses, brought changes in which the particular conditions that prevailed in the north were even more of an advantage (chapter 5). For example, it was possible to breed varieties of wheat that thrived in Sweden. The intimate association between agriculture and industry evolved to the point where a new industry emerged in which raw materials were processed under organized forms for a mass market. The country made a rapid transition to the export of processed agricultural products such as butter, and at the same time supported a fast-growing class of industrial workers. In the next major change–agriculture’s subsumption into the mass production of the post-war period–selective breeding and the use of inorganic chemicals left their mark on developments, in part by putting the whole of Swedish agriculture on a scientific footing (chapter 6). The fact that agriculture, despite this, continues to be a governed by the fundamental laws of biology in its handling of animals and crops is in fact part and parcel of this process.
The continued, swift increases in productivity–as much true of the post-war period as before–meant that agriculture became so effective that the least profitable farms and areas could be abandoned. Even if land clearance continued well into the twentieth century in the far north, it was these areas that would soon be deserted in the great wave of farm closures. Should this be interpreted as a sign that Sweden’s position as a frontier in the north is now gone? No, but it does reflect a new kind of frontier in which Nature plays a large part. Forestry in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth amounted to a frontier business that gradually conquered most of Sweden, including the great forests of the north–but that is another story.
Another ‘production’ for the countryside as a whole in the second half of the twentieth century was a set of new goals, with environmental considerations, nature conservancy, and tourism to the fore. Sweden was once again a frontier, but of a very different kind, for in its thinly populated areas many of the products and benefits so prized today can be found–and then not only for Swedes, but also for Danes, Germans, and others living in densely populated regions.
The northern European climate zone also supports a form of agriculture that has its equivalents across the whole of inclement northern Eurasia–reindeer herding. An important advance, and intensification, was the establishment of more ambitious reindeer herding during the early modern period. The adverse conditions of the Little Ice Age gave the Sami a comparative advantage in the north of Sweden, and although the same period also saw the first moves in an extended battle for resources as southern settlers began to clear land, the two parallel systems did feed off each other, with an exchange of methods and tools between the pastoralists and the farmers. Neither did the innovations only come from the settlers.
In the post-war period, Sami reindeer herding has been drawn into the modern project, one in which food with cultural values (such as reindeer meat) and non-food products are supplied by the rural areas. It may well turn out to be the case that Sami production will once again enjoy a comparative advantage.
Is it correct to speak of global agricultural systems? True, there is enormous variation between the different regions of Europe, but there are still some shared traits. In a historical overview of modern global agricultural systems, David Grigg has written that Europeans generally do not recognize their own system because they take it for granted, and therefore only emphasize the differences. Grigg, however, claims that farming in Europe north of the Alps ‘has considerable homogeneity’.7 The academic study of agricultural systems began in agronomy, and was generally limited to recent centuries. Greatest attention was initially paid to climactic conditions, but gradually the realization dawned that agricultural systems are also created historically. The first major summary was published in 1936, and has remained the guide for subsequent surveys.8
Criticism of the habit of dividing the world into a series of global systems says much about the classifiers’ inability to agree where the boundaries run, or which systems are relevant, while rather than adhering to strict theoretical principles, the classification is often ad hoc. Yet whenever they discuss agriculture worldwide, even the sternest critics of the very idea of global agricultural systems, such as Giovanni Federico in his overview of recent agrarian history, are forced to compare the likes of an ‘African-style system’ with ‘European-style agriculture’.9
Agriculture in other global systems has been organized differently than in Europe: witness Eastern Asia, with its intensive wet rice cultivation and very little livestock, or Central Asia, with its pastoralists and intensive cultivation of oases or river valleys, where livestock and arable farming are for the most part kept separate. The fundamental characteristic of the European system of agriculture is mixed farming –the combination on each farm of arable and livestock farming. Each farm had fields and pastures. Livestock were over-wintered in byres, fed on hay. The fields were fertilized with the manure collected from the byres. The damp climate made grass an important resource, while it encouraged each farm to incorporate a mixture of extensive farming and intensive farming in its methods.
There were a number of other characteristics associated with this system. The nitrogen balance in the fields was achieved not only by manuring but also by letting them lie fallow in different cropping systems (two- or three-course rotations). Fallow required extensive tillage with good implements. Draught animals were found on nearly every farm, and the range of implements used was considerable. The fields were worked with ploughs and ards with iron shares, harrows, and other drawn implements. For haymaking, there were scythes and rakes, for the grain harvest sickles and, later, scythes. The emergence of European mixed farming is a typical example of path dependence. Every step was based on the previous one. The early development of extensive cultivation opened the way for a structure based on mixed farming; the technology-based methods required in mixed farming, with its tillage and haymaking, were in turn the basis for the next step; and the subsequent, technology-oriented Agrarian Revolution of course found its logical conclusion in modern industrial agriculture.
In order to throw the European system’s characteristics into greater relief it is worth revisiting one of the classic comparisons between Europe and China. Indeed, it could reasonably be expanded to a comparison of other agricultural systems–for each system demands its own particular skills–but for our purposes here a single example will suffice. One of the distinguishing features of the European agricultural system is its focus on implements and tool technology. The sinologist and agrarian historian Francesca Bray has argued in detail for the existence of the difference primarily in comparison with Asian rice cultivation. The European transformation in the High Middle Ages to fully realized mixed farming had its equivalent in the transformation of rice cultivation in China in AD 1000. New varieties of rice were introduced at the same time as China’s economic centre moved south to the Yangtze River, to the rice-growing areas.
Wet rice cultivation is labour-intensive since the plants have to be propagated and then replanted under water in paddy fields. This kind of rice cultivation can be used to push up productivity per unit area using increased investment in labour, the reason for the rice-growing areas’ high population density, while European mixed farming has a built-in limitation–the fields are constantly threatened by depletion if the balance is not maintained with manure. Before the advent of fodder crops every farm needed an area of meadows and pastures. As a biological solution, the fallow system that developed in Europe was much simpler than the one adopted by the peasants in China, where it was abandoned, and where they used a considerable range of other fertilizing techniques, including green manure, safely processed human excreta, and the like.
Bray goes on to suggest that developments in China were thus more dependent on individual workers’ skills, that it became ‘skill-orientated’. This was a result of rice cultivation’s dependence not only on a large work-force, but also the correct amount of water being let in to the paddy fields at the correct moment, and the rice seedlings being transplanted skilfully. The importance of skill was also evident from the sheer number of varieties of rice, each suited to different conditions, even down to local varieties. This Bray compares with the European case, where the tendency was–and is–to see tool development as the main form of technological development. Plant breeding was minor in comparison, as were the other biological skills.10 Sweden, as a typical representative of European mixed farming, shows clear evidence of this focus on tool technology. After all, the various implements used in planning, farming, and harvesting mark the technological advances outlined in the chapters of the present book.
European agriculture took what to begin with was a less effective path, but it left the way open for increasingly close links between agriculture and iron-working and handicrafts, and ultimately industrial manufacture. Here again, Sweden, with its wealth of iron, is an almost exaggerated example of European development. The blossoming of the symbiosis of industry and agriculture in around 1900 was the ultimate expression of an engineering industry that first came into existence to supply agriculture, and only later other industries and other countries.
Looking at the epochs of agricultural history, it is obvious that we are not dealing with a story of constant progress, but rather of long phases of expansion relieved by stagnation or crisis. At least three major waves can be identified. The first began in the first century AD, and was followed by a crisis that reached its nadir in the middle of the first millennium, in the sixth and seventh centuries. Another expansion followed –with population increases and new settlements–that resolved into the great agrarian changes of 1000–1300. This was followed by a century of deep crisis and population collapse from the middle of the fourteenth century. The third expansion, though large, was not as strongly associated with changes in agricultural technology, and lasted the whole of the sixteenth century and into the seventeenth century. By the middle of the seventeenth century, agricultural production had begun to stagnate. A new revival followed in the eighteenth century, yet in a new departure this was not to be followed by a major crisis. Instead, at the start of the nineteenth century, Swedish agriculture entered a culmination phase, distinguished first by its exports, and later by its incorporation with industry, so that agriculture was able to support a greater proportion of the population who were employed in other industries. For each of the major crises, there were evident external factors, such as climate catastrophes or major epidemics. It seems likely that this was the case even in the middle of the first millennium. In the middle of the fourteenth century, Sweden was hit by plague epidemics; in the seventeenth century, it was the turn of the Little Ice Age. Yet these long waves of change were governed by the inner dynamic of technological development.
When a technological system is in the process of being established, it draws on other appropriate technologies. Once it is established, it will reject technology that is not suitable. Moreover, much of the old, preceding system will have to be abandoned in the course of time; something as true of knowledge as it is of material investment in buildings and implements. One clear example of this was the transition from hunter-gathering to agriculture, with the attendant loss of a vast store of plant and animal lore. The fact that a new system had to be put in place and the old system had to be abandoned explains why transitions often had to wait until the opportunity presented itself.
It was during these periods of technological stagnation that the crises struck. When technology no longer developed quickly enough, the negative consequences of external catastrophes went unchecked. However, in every one of Sweden’s crises there were social factors at work that worsened–and marked out–the course it took: in the Late Middle Ages it was the feudal reaction (see p. 97); in the seventeenth century, the war economy; and much later in the 1930s, the collapse of trade, soaring unemployment, and the drop in consumption conspired to devastating effect. The question is whether such fluctuations are now a thing of the past, or whether they merely take different forms today. The debate over the role of agriculture in the heavy environmental costs of modern society should perhaps be seen as an expression of crisis and, one hopes, adaptation.
Just as there is resistance to system change in technology, there is resistance to system change in society at large. Terms such as tribal society, slavery, feudalism, and capitalism, and their subdivisions such as state feudalism or state capitalism, are the source of historical debate. Each, moreover, exists in a wide variety of different definitions, which however will not be discussed further here (see chapter 3 on feudalism). Instead, another enduring notion in Swedish agricultural history will be called into question. There is a long-lived belief that Scandinavia, and particularly Sweden, was distinguished from the rest of Europe by its free, landowning peasantry and greater proportion of peasant landownership. The argument goes that Sweden was on the periphery, and the upper class, such as it was, was relatively weak; the upshot was the Swedish welfare state, which had grown out of the strong position enjoyed by the peasants, and which in the twentieth century was the cynosure of all eyes. These notions are only partially correct. That there was no connection between peripherality and peasant freedom is evident from the simplest comparisons. Think only of other peripheral areas such as Russia, where the repression of the peasantry was extreme and lasted for centuries. By the same token, there were also areas in the core of northern Europe, such as parts of the Netherlands, where the peasantry were politically and economically strong.
Swedish peasant society of the more recent variety was the result of a long historical process. There is little to indicate that there was greater freedom or equality in Sweden than in other parts of Europe in the first millennia of Swedish agrarian history. Indeed, the archaeological finds speak of hierarchy. That the Scandinavian elite was less wealthy than its central European peers in the Bronze Age says nothing about its repression of those beneath them. Modern archaeological research has found increasing evidence of slavery, and looking at its earliest manifestations it was nothing if not brutal. The repression in patriarchal families and tribes may well have been extreme. For many, the feudal transformation may well have come as a liberation.
It seems likely that it was only with the foundation of the Swedish state that we can properly speak of a free peasant class. That the peasants in Norrland owned their own land had little to do with the previous lack of an elite there, and rather more to do with the obliteration of the local elite when the state took shape. If we trace the history of the Swedish peasantry, it is revealed as centuries of struggle that only gradually led to the independent peasant who is so often conjured up. In practice, it was really only in the eighteenth century that this fully realized ideal appeared, but then as the peasant-farmer, only later to divide immediately into poor and wealthy farmers. The agrarian transformation increased class divisions and spurred on the growth of a landless class.
It is possible to problematize the welfare state in a similar manner. Its victory in Sweden, and indeed in Scandinavia, was a consequence of social struggles at the start of the twentieth century, in part the result of a collaboration between the farmers’ and the workers’ organizations, with its echoes of old ties further back in time. Yet the great dream of modernization was not only a catalogue of successes, and it was to have consequences for Sweden’s rural areas, as we have seen (chapter 6).
And so to a final question. Can we see the broad course of events in the detail we have chosen to analyse in this book? For as long as it has existed in Sweden, agriculture has been a hard struggle for existence, and in general it has been a successful project that has increased the population and production: this much is certain. But what of recent decades? Again, there can be no doubt that there has been a radical departure. The more effective agricultural production becomes and the more demanding people become, the more other ‘products’ than food will be delivered by the countryside: recreation, environmental stewardship, and so on. It is at this point the question of agriculture becomes a political issue. What will people pay for, and how will they pay? Casting our minds back to the first days of agriculture, why did rites and myths play such an important role then? Did people not fight for existence as hard as the peasants of later centuries? I suspect the answers lie in what happens to people when methods of production change.
The domestication of animals and plants also meant the domestication of humankind, with the more regulated lifestyle agriculture inevitably brings in its wake. This process was never rapid, and proceeded stepwise. For example, when it became more common for cattle to be stalled in byres, humans found themselves involved in a more intensive interaction with cows and oxen, and also in a never-ending cycle of daily care. The process of disciplining did not stop there. An increasing diversification of production also leads to a diversification of consumption–in a dialectical process in which new wishes were often the driving force. This demanded self-discipline through harder work in order to obtain the riches the new goods promised.11 Another element in this process was the educational system, as was industrial manufacturing’s exacting demands for precision in all respects. That agriculture, thanks to its symbiosis with industry, could not evade this harder discipline is clear. It is not too much to say that farmers, by owning their own land, were the victims of self-exploitation.
In a long perspective it is thus not merely an issue of goods going to market, but of production increases as such, and not least in the non-agrarian products that are so much in demand. Even in a society based on redistribution rather than a market, this tendency to increased self-discipline can transform existence. In terms of production, we can speak of humankind’s continuous self-domestication from the moment of agriculture’s introduction to its industrialization. Perhaps we should see it as a vast project, one that now seems complete–as far as material goods go. There is food. Fewer children are needed to secure parents a comfortable old age. It is not that dreams, play, and religion played any smaller role in previous ages, for on the contrary their influence has been incalculable, yet for thousands of years they were up against the harsh conditions faced in the conquest of nature in northern climes. Now that humans have set about attaining new goals, the countryside has acquired a ‘new role’ that goes beyond producing food and fibre.