Hacker News Reader

it was economical in the middle ages for hundreds of years! But, having decent steel for your knights' armaments was also an existential concern for most power centers, a more peaceful society might deal with different economics.

View on HN

For the demand of middle ages. Which wouldn't be nearly enough to even low level of industrialisation. For weapons and individual components and tools yes. But we can forget railways, ships, complex concrete structures. Basically most things large scale.

Large areas were also deforested to provide the charcoal. Roughly 100kg wood to produce 1kg iron.

The Ruhr valley area was denuded already in Roman times due to this.

Yup. It's pretty interesting the places that managed their woodlands responsibly over a long time - Japan and England both had pretty sophisticated approaches to not running out of this resource over the long term.

Still in the UK, the moorlands you generally see were once woodlands - apparently that's why they have the distinctive terrain you now see. That's not in the era of written history mind and was for farming rather than iron.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dartmoor#Pre-history

Reply on news.ycombinator.com