IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 270

According to the medieval Icelandic sagas, the first European to settle in Greenland was a Norwegian-born farmer named Erik the Red, who had been outlawed from Iceland after a series of killings. Sailing west in about 982, he spent three winters exploring a land that had been sighted by earlier sailors, and then returned to Iceland to recruit settlers. The Landnámabók, or Book of Settlements, states that twenty-five ships set out for Greenland in about 985 and that fourteen reached it, the rest being lost or turning back.

The colonists came from a society of farmers and seafarers, and they brought with them cattle, sheep, goats and horses, together with the equipment of a Scandinavian farm. They settled in the fjords of the south-west, where sheltered valleys offered pasture and where the sea was rich in fish, seals and walrus. Two main clusters of farms developed: the Eastern Settlement, near what is now Narsarsuaq and Qaqortoq, and the Western Settlement, several hundred kilometres further north near the present capital, Nuuk. A smaller group of farms, sometimes called the Middle Settlement, lay between them.

Estimates of the Norse population are uncertain, since they are based on the number of known farm sites and on the size of the churches. Most historians suggest a peak of perhaps two thousand to three thousand people at the height of the settlement, spread across several hundred farms. The Greenlanders were never independent of Europe: they needed iron, timber and grain, and they paid for these with goods from the north, above all walrus ivory and walrus hide, which were used in Europe for carving, for ropes and for the decoration of churches.

The colony's economy rested on a balance between farming and hunting. Because the growing season was short and pasture limited, cattle were kept mainly for milk and were few in number, while sheep and goats were more numerous. In good years the farms produced enough hay to see the animals through the winter; in bad years the settlers relied more heavily on the sea. Studies of the chemical composition of bones from Norse graveyards suggest that the diet shifted gradually towards marine food, a change that historians once read as clear evidence of decline.

The climate was not stable. The first centuries of settlement coincided with relatively mild conditions in the North Atlantic, though the term 'Medieval Warm Period' is used cautiously by climatologists today. From about the thirteenth century conditions became colder and more variable, a shift associated with the beginning of the Little Ice Age. Drift ice began to block the sea routes linking Greenland with Iceland and Norway, making the crossing longer and more dangerous.

The Norse also had neighbours. From around the thirteenth century the Thule Inuit, ancestors of the modern Greenlanders, spread southward through the country from the north-west. The sagas describe hostile encounters between the Norse and the people they called skrælingjar. Archaeological evidence for what actually happened between the two peoples is limited, however, and scholars disagree about how much contact there was. The Norse had iron tools, which the Inuit lacked, and there are signs of some exchange, but the nature of the relationship remains disputed.

In 1261 the Greenlanders agreed to submit to the King of Norway and to pay him a tax. This bound the colony more tightly to a distant ruler who could, in principle, send ships to supply it. In practice Norwegian interest was fitful, and from 1380 Norway shared a crown with Denmark, whose kings were preoccupied with events nearer home. Trade with Greenland was declared a royal monopoly, and the colony came to depend on the arrival of a single royal ship every year or two.

The Western Settlement disappeared first. A cleric named Ivar Bardarson, whose account of Greenland survives, reported in the fourteenth century that the northern farms had been abandoned. The only animals found there, he said, were untended cattle and sheep. Most archaeologists now place the end of the Western Settlement around 1350, though the reason is debated. Climate, exhausted pasture and attacks by Inuit have all been proposed, and the most recent research tends to stress a combination of factors.

The Eastern Settlement lasted longer. Its last certain documentary trace is a marriage recorded at the church of Hvalsey in 1408, after which no reliable written record of the Greenlanders survives. Excavation of the churchyard at Herjolfsnes in 1921 uncovered clothing preserved in the frozen ground, and showed that the colonists had continued to dress in the fashion of medieval Europe. By the end of the fifteenth century the farms had been deserted.

When the Danish-Norwegian missionary Hans Egede reached Greenland in 1721, he hoped to find the descendants of the Norse and to bring them back to the Protestant faith. He found only Inuit, who told him that the Norse had long since gone. The fate of the colony has fascinated writers ever since. Explanations have included climate change, overgrazing and soil erosion, the loss of the walrus-ivory trade to other suppliers, and the departure of ships. Modern historians generally reject single causes, pointing out that the two settlements did not end at the same time and that the settlers' own choices mattered.

When the clerks who compiled the Domesday Book surveyed England in 1086, they recorded some six thousand watermills. That figure almost certainly understates the true number, since many small mills were probably left out. Milling was the first industry in northern Europe to be powered by something other than human or animal muscle. It remained the most widespread use of mechanical power until the coming of the steam engine. A mill was a valuable piece of property, worth a substantial sum and capable of generating a steady income for its owner.

Every watermill depends on the same simple idea. A wheel turned by falling or flowing water is fixed to a shaft, and that shaft drives the machinery inside the mill. In the simplest design, the wheel is mounted on a vertical shaft that passes directly up through the lower stone and turns the upper one. The whole machine then has only one moving part. Mills of this kind, often called horizontal mills, were common in Ireland and Scandinavia. Where more power was needed, the wheel was mounted vertically, and a set of wooden gears, their teeth cut by hand, transferred the motion through a right angle to a second, upright shaft.

The commonest arrangement in England was the undershot wheel, which dips into a river and is pushed round by the current, demanding a good flow of water but no great fall. The overshot wheel works differently. Water is carried in a channel to the top of the wheel and dropped into buckets around its rim, so that the weight of the water, as much as its speed, turns it. Overshot wheels are considerably more efficient, but they need a head of water, which is normally created by damming the stream. Behind the dam lies a pool known as the millpond, and the depth of water there supplies the pressure. A gate, or sluice, in the dam controls how much water is released. Once the water has passed the wheel it flows away down a channel called the tailrace.

Inside the mill, the grinding is done by two circular stones. The lower one, the bed stone, is fixed and slightly convex; the upper one, called the runner, rests on it and is turned by the shaft. Above the stones sits a wooden hopper, a funnel open at the bottom, from which grain trickles down a short chute, the shoe, into a hole in the centre of the runner. As the stone turns, centrifugal force carries the grain outwards between the two surfaces. There it is cut and crushed by grooves carved into the stone, and the flour is thrown out at the rim, to be swept up and bagged.

Watermills were not a medieval invention. The Romans built them, and one of the largest known complexes stood at Barbegal in southern France, where a series of wheels stepped down a hillside. After the western empire collapsed, the technique survived, and simple horizontal mills were widely used in early medieval Ireland. From the tenth century onwards, however, the number of mills in England and northern France grew rapidly, and monastic houses were among the most active builders, installing mills on their estates and leasing them out.

Because a mill was expensive to build and maintain, it usually belonged to the lord of the manor, and the lord expected a return. Tenants were commonly obliged to bring their grain to his mill and to leave a proportion of it behind as payment, a due known as multure. This monopoly, sometimes called the suit of mill, was deeply unpopular. Court records contain complaints about millers who took too much, about mills that broke down, and about tenants who ground their own grain at home in defiance of the custom. The miller himself occupies an uneasy place in medieval literature, suspected of dishonesty in a trade where he handled his customers' property.

Grain was not the only product of medieval water power. A wheel could be geared to lift a hammer, and this principle was used to thicken newly woven cloth in a fulling mill, where the cloth was pounded in a trough of water and clay. The same machinery drove the bellows of forges, sawed timber, ground bark for the tanner and, from the thirteenth century, turned the rags and pulp of the first European paper mills. In the cloth-making districts of England, fulling mills multiplied so quickly in the later Middle Ages that they changed the landscape of valleys, leaving the long artificial channels, or leats, that can still be traced.

Historians know about mills from three kinds of evidence. Documents are the richest: Domesday Book, manorial accounts, leases and court rolls record who owned a mill, what it earned and how it was repaired. Place names preserve the memory of others that have vanished, and a few timber foundations, mill races and sluices survive in waterlogged ground. Dendrochronology, the dating of timbers by their tree rings, has allowed some of these structures to be dated precisely. The evidence nevertheless has limits, since almost all the machinery was wood and has rotted, and because documents tell us more about rents and disputes than about technique. Some historians have argued that mills amounted to an industrial revolution of the Middle Ages; others reply that the economy remained overwhelmingly agricultural and that change was slow.

Historians have traditionally been suspicious of fiction. The discipline established itself in the nineteenth century on the promise that it dealt in documents and verifiable fact. Its patron is often said to be Leopold von Ranke, who wanted to show the past as it had actually been. A novel, by contrast, is made up, and a historian who quotes one risks confusing a good story with evidence. Yet almost every historian I know reads novels, and many admit that fiction has shaped their sense of how people in the past thought and felt. The question is whether that sense can be defended as knowledge.

The strongest argument for using novels is that they preserve what other sources leave out. A tax roll records what a household paid; a novel can show what it was like to sit in its kitchen in winter, what the family ate and what they feared. For the history of ordinary life — work, food, dress, courtship, the sound of a street — fiction is often richer than any archive. The difficulty is that this richness is exactly where invention is densest. A novelist who describes a room is choosing details to create an effect, and the details may be accurate without being typical.

A more defensible use of fiction is as evidence of the age that produced it. A historical novel tells us less about the Middle Ages than about what nineteenth-century readers believed them to have been. When Walter Scott published Waverley in 1814, he invented a form in which fictional characters live through real events, and its success reveals much about the romantic nationalism of the period. The Hungarian critic Georg Lukács argued that Scott's novels were shaped by the social changes of his own lifetime, not by medieval sources. The same logic applies to a novel about the First World War published in 1929: it tells us more about how the war was remembered than about conditions in the trenches.

Novels do not merely reflect opinion; they can help to form it. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, published in 1852, sold in enormous numbers and is widely credited with strengthening abolitionist feeling in Britain and the northern United States. Historians nevertheless disagree about how much influence it actually had. Dickens's Hard Times drew attention to the schooling of working-class children, and Bleak House to the delays of the Court of Chancery. But to claim that such novels changed anything, a historian must show who read them. The history of the book, with its studies of serial publication, cheap reprints and lending libraries, supplies evidence that critics rarely consider.

The dangers are real, and they are of two kinds. The first is selection: a novelist compresses years into a chapter, invents characters who stand for whole classes, and arranges events into a shape that makes sense. All of this is legitimate art and poor evidence. The second is the reader's willingness to believe what is vividly described. A vivid scene lodges in the mind more firmly than a table of figures, and historians are not immune; the temptation is to use a striking passage as an illustration and then to treat it as proof. The remedy is the same as with any other source: corroboration, by checking the novel against letters, diaries, newspapers and the material evidence of buildings.

Literary theorists have pressed a harder question. If historians select, arrange and narrate, are they not doing something rather similar to novelists? The American critic Hayden White argued in the 1970s that historical writing takes its shape from literary forms, and that the same events can be emplotted as tragedy, comedy or romance. The point is serious, and it has made historians more modest about the neutrality of their own prose. But it does not follow that history and fiction are the same kind of thing. The novelist may invent a character who never existed; the historian may not. However elegantly it is written, historical work remains answerable to evidence that others can check, and that constraint is what distinguishes it.

What, then, should a historian actually do with a novel? The first step is to establish its date, its author, its intended readers and its genre, since a sensation novel and a temperance tract make different claims on our attention. The second is to read it against other sources of the same period, not in place of them. The third is to ask what kind of testimony it offers. A novel is good evidence of what people expected, feared and took for granted, and poor evidence of what they did. Used in that way, a novel can be more illuminating than a dozen administrative documents, because it records assumptions that nobody thought worth writing down.

My own answer is therefore a qualified yes. Novels can be used as historical evidence, but only if historians stop asking them to do things they cannot do. A novel will not tell us what happened at a particular place on a particular day, and it should never be cited as though it would. It can tell us how people imagined their world, and what they found admirable, shameful or funny, and in that it is not merely illustrative but evidential. The condition is that we read it as a literary work, aware of its conventions and its audience, and that we test what it says against everything else we know.