by John Kelly
In Broughton, John’s future surrounded him like a death foretold. It was there in his father’s lame leg and in his uncle’s deformed back (spinal deformations, arthritis, and osteoarthritis were rife among the medieval peasantry), and it was there, too, in the worn faces of the village’s thirty-year-olds. John would work hard, die young—probably before forty—and, as sure as the sun rose into the cozy English sky above Broughton each morning, the day after his death an abbey official would be at the door to claim his best horse or cow from his widow as a heriot, or death tax.
Thus it had always been. But at least in the boom years of the thirteenth century, a peasant had a reasonable chance of being rewarded for his hard labor. Good weather—and good soil—made it relatively easy to grow surplus crops, and the booming towns provided an eager market, not only for the extra wheat and barley, but also for peasant handicrafts. If a man owned a little land, as peasants increasingly did in the thirteenth century, he could also count on its value rising. By John Gylbert’s time, all these compensations were vanishing.
Between 1250 and 1270 the long medieval boom sputtered to an end. One of the great ironies of the Black Death is that it occurred just as the medieval global economy, the vehicle of
Y. pestis’s liberation, was nearing collapse. However, in Europe, it was the implosion of the vastly larger domestic economy, particularly the agricultural economy, that people felt most keenly. The implosion was continentwide, but in England, a nation of meticulous record keepers, it was documented with great diligence. Around 1300 the acreage under plow decreased, while the land still in use either declined in productivity or stagnated. After centuries of heady advancement, the medieval peasant’s mistakes had caught up with him. Some of the good land brought into service during the Great Clearances of the twelfth century had been overfarmed, and some of the more marginal land, which never should have been cleared in the first place, was giving out entirely.
Paradoxically, the decline in productivity was accompanied by a long-term decline in the price of staples like wheat and barley. As the economy faltered, living standards fell and large pockets of grinding poverty began to appear. Many despairing peasants simply gave up. First individual farms were abandoned, then whole villages. In 1322 officials in west Derbyshire reported that six thousand acres and 167 cottages and houses lay empty. Urban trade and commerce also declined. In the early fourteenth century, rents in central London were cheaper than they had been in decades, and the serpentine London lanes were full of gaunt-faced beggars and panhandlers. In the postboom collapse, even imports of claret, that staple of the English well-to-do, fell. In the villages and towns of France, Flanders, and Italy, the story was much the same. By 1314 millions of people were living in abject poverty, and millions more were only a step away from it.
Europe’s abrupt descent into semidestitution invites a Malthusian interpretation of the Black Death. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, population expanded faster than resources, and as sure as night follows day, in the fourteenth century the continent paid for its heedless growth with economic ruin and demographic disaster. However, the facts tell a more nuanced story. In a traditional Malthusian scenario—say, a tarabagan community in a surge year—population continues to grow recklessly until disaster slips up on it like a mugger in the night. In Europe that did not happen; the baby boom and economic boom both ended around the same time—somewhere between 1250 and 1270. After the stall, living standards fell in many regions and stagnated in others, indicating that the balance between resources and people had become very tight, but since demographic disaster was averted for nearly a century before the plague, a Malthusian reckoning may not have been inevitable. “Many . . . went hungry and many were undoubtedly malnourished,” says historian David Herlihy, “but somehow people managed to survive. . . . Circa 1300, the community was successfully holding its numbers.”
Rather than a reckoning, the image of postboom Europe that comes to mind is that of a man standing up to his neck in water. Drowning may not be inevitable, but the man’s position is so fraught, even a very slight rise in the next tide could kill him. As Dr. Herlihy asserts, a crowded Europe may well have been able to hang on for “the indefinite future,” but, like the man in the water, after the land gave out and the economy collapsed, the continent had no margin for error. Just to continue keeping its head above water, everything else had to go right, and in the early fourteenth century, a great many things began to go terribly wrong, beginning with the climate.
The Swiss farmers in the Saaser Visp Valley may have been the first people in Europe to notice that the weather was changing. Sometime around 1250 the resurgent Allalin glacier began to reclaim the farmers’ traditional pasturelands. Or the Greenlanders may have been the first to notice the change, alerted by the sudden chill in the August nights and the appearance of ice in places it had never been seen before. “The ice now comes . . . so close to the reefs none can sail the old route without risking his life,” wrote the Norwegian priest Ivar Baardson. Or the first Europeans to realize that the Little Optimum was over may have been the fishermen on the Caspian Sea, where torrential rains produced a rise in the water level at the end of the thirteenth century.
In the European heartland, the Little Optimum gave way to the Little Ice Age around 1300.* People noticed that the winters were growing colder, but it was the summers, suddenly cool and very wet, that alarmed them. By 1314 a string of poor and mediocre harvests had sent food prices skyrocketing. That fall, every peasant in every sodden field knew: one more cold, wet summer, and people would be reduced to eating dogs, cats, refuse—anything they could get their hands on. As the summer of 1315 approached, prayers were offered up for the return of the sun, but, like a truculent child, the cold and wet persisted. March was so chilly, some wondered if spring would ever return to the meadows of Europe. Then, in April, the gray skies turned a wicked black, and the rain came down in a manner no one had ever seen before: it was cold, hard, and pelting; it stung the skin, hurt the eyes, reddened the face, and tore at the soft, wet ground with the force of a plow blade. In parts of southern Yorkshire, torrential downpours washed away the topsoil, exposing underlying rock. In other areas, fields turned into raging rivers. Everywhere in Europe in the bitter spring of 1315, men and animals stood shivering under trees, their heads and backs turned against the fierce wind and rain. “There was such an inundation of waters, it seemed as though it was the Flood,” wrote the chronicler of Salzburg.
Flanders experienced some of the worst downpours. Day after day, the crackle and boom of thunder echoed above Antwerp and Bruges like a rolling artillery barrage. Occasionally a bolt of lightning would strike, illuminating the network of cascading urban rivers below. Along the riverbanks, rows of soot-stained rectangular houses leaned into the narrow Flemish streets like drunks in blackface. Everywhere, ceilings and floors leaked, fires refused to light, bread molded, children shivered, and adults prayed. Occasionally the rain would stop and people would point to a golden tear in the gray sky and say, “Thank God, it’s over!” Then the next day, or the day after that, the sky would mend itself and the rain would begin all over again.
All through the terrible summer of 1315, angry walls of rain swept off the turbulent Atlantic: bursting dikes, washing away villages, and igniting flash floods that killed thousands. In Yorkshire and Nottingham, great inland seas developed over the lowlands. Near the English village of Milton, a torrential rain inundated the royal manor. In some areas, farmland was ruined for years to come; in other places, it was ruined forever.
Poorer peasants, who had been pushed onto the most marginal farmland during the Great Clearances of the twelfth century, suffered the greatest devastation. In three English counties alone, sixteen thousand acres of plow land were abandoned. “Six tenants are begging,” wrote a resident of one Shopshire village. By the end of summer, the six would become hundreds of thousands. Everywhere in Europe in the early autumn of 1315, the poor huddled under trees and bowers,
listening to the rain beat a tattoo against leaf and mud. They walked the fields, “grazing like cattle”; stood along the roads, begging; searched behind alehouses and taverns for moldy pieces of food. Visiting a friend, a French notary encountered “a large number of both sexes . . . barefooted, and many, even excepting the women, in a nude condition.” To the north in Flanders, one man wrote that “the cries that were heard from the poor would move a stone.”
The harvest of 1315 was the worst in living memory. The wheat and rye crops were stunted and waterlogged; some oat, barley, and spelt was redeemable, but not very much. The surviving corn was laden with moisture and unripened at the ears. In the lower Rhine “there began a dearness of wheat [and] from day to day prices rose.” The French chronicles also mention the
“chierté” (dearness) of food prices
“especiaument à Paris.” In Louvain the cost of wheat increased 320 percent in seven months; in England, wheat that sold for five shillings a quarter in 1313 was priced at forty shillings just two years later. Across the English countryside that autumn, the poor did their sums; a year’s worth of barley, the cheapest grain, cost a family sixty shillings, the average laborer’s annual wage was half that amount. The price of beans, oats, peas, malt, and salt rose comparably. Even when food was available, washed-out bridges and roads often prevented it from being transported.
The early winter months of 1316 brought more suffering. As food grew costlier, people ate bird dung, family pets, mildewed wheat, corn, and finally, in desperation, they ate one another. In Ireland, where the thud of shovels and the tearing of flesh from bone echoed through the dark, wet nights, the starving “extracted the bodies of the dead from the cemeteries and dug out the flesh from their skulls and ate it.” In England, where they consider the Irish indecorous, only prisoners ate one another. “Incarcerated thieves,” wrote the monk John de Trokelowe, “. . . devoured each other when they were half alive.” As the hunger intensified, the unspeakable became spoken about. “Certain people . . . because of excessive hunger devoured their own children,” wrote a German monk; another contemporary reported, “In many places, parents, after slaying their children, and children their parents, devoured the remains.”
Many historians think the accounts of cannibalism are overblown, but no one doubts that human flesh was eaten.
In the spring of 1316, public order began to break down. In Broughton, Agnyes Walmot, Reginald Roger, Beatrice Basse, and William Horseman were exiled for stealing food. In Wakefield, Adam Bray had his son John arrested for removing a bushel of oats from the family farm. In dozens of other English villages, there were violent disputes over gleaning. Traditionally, corn discarded by harvesters became the property of the very poor, but with destitution everywhere, even wealthy peasants were on their knees in the sodden fields. That summer, more than one man had his throat slit over the leavings of a failed crop. As the violence mounted, men began to take up arms; the knife, the sword, the club, and the pike became the new tools of the peasant. Food or anything redeemable for food was stolen, and the stealing went on at sea as well as on land. With incidents of piracy mounting daily, in April 1316 an alarmed Edward II, the English king, instructed his sailors to “repulse certain malefactors who have committed manslaughter and other enormities on the sea upon men of this realm and upon men from foreign parts coming to this realm with victuals.”
All through May and June 1316, the rain continued. In Canterbury desperate crowds gathered under a brooding channel sky to pray for “a suitable serenity of the air,” but to no avail. In Broughton torrential downpours pressed the wheat and barley against the sodden earth with such force, the stalks looked as if they had been ironed. In Yorkshire the waterlogged fields of Bolton Abbey, tormented by eighteen months of unceasing rain, gave out entirely. The abbey’s 1316 rye crop was 85.7 percent below normal. The second failed harvest in succession broke human resistance. There was the “most savage, atrocious death,” “the most tearful death,” “the most inexpressible death.” Emaciated bodies winked out from half-ruined cottages and forest clearings, floated facedown in flooded fields, coursed through urban rivers, protruded from mud slides, and lay half hidden under washed-out bridges. In Antwerp burly stevedores serenaded the waking city with cries of “Bring out your dead!” In Erfurt, Germany, rain-slicked corpses were tossed into a muddy ditch in front of the town wall. In Louvain the collection carts “carried pitiable little bodies to the new cemetery outside the town . . . twice or thrice a day.” In Tournai Gilles li Muisis, a local abbot, complained that “poor beggars were dying one after the other.”
As if in sympathy with the human suffering, Europe’s animals began to die in great numbers; some sheep and cattle succumbed to liverfluke; some, possibly, to anthrax. But rinderpest—a disease that produces discharges from the nose, mouth, and eyes, chronic diarrhea, and an overpowering urge to defecate—may have been the most common killer. In the watery June and July 1316, the music of summer included the agonizing bleats of dying animals vainly trying to relieve themselves in muddy pastures.
Strange diets, putrid food, and a generally lower resistance to disease also produced a great many hard human deaths. Of ergotism, which seems to have been especially common, one English monk wrote, “It is a dysentery-type illness, contracted on account of spoiled food . . . from which follow[s] a throat ailment or acute fever.” However, this description does not do justice to the full horrors of ergotism, which was called St. Anthony’s fire in the Middle Ages. First, the ergot fungus, a by-product of moldy wheat, attacks the muscular system, inducing painful spasms, then the circulatory system, interrupting blood flow and causing gangrene. Eventually the victim’s arms and legs blacken, decay, and fall off; LSD-like hallucinations are also common. If the Irish Famine of 1847 is a reliable indicator, vitamin deficiencies were also rife. Between 1315 and l322, when the rain finally stopped, many people must have become demented from pellagra (a niacin deficiency) or been blinded by xerophthalmia (a vitamin A deficiency). Typhus epidemics may have killed many thousands more.
The fortunate died of starvation, a condition whose end stage symptoms include brown and brittle skin, the abundant growth of facial and genital hair, and ebbing away of the desire for life.
John Gylbert, whose name vanishes from Broughton’s records after 1314, may have died such a death. After months of wandering through mist and rain with a patriarch’s beard and dead man’s eyes, one day John may have sat down in a field, looked up into the sky, and, like thousands of other Europeans of his generation, concluded that there was no point in ever getting up again.
The Great Famine, the collective name for the crop failures, was a tremendous human tragedy. A half-million people died in England; perhaps 10 to 15 percent of urban Flanders and Germany perished; and a large but unknowable segment of rural Europe also succumbed.
Devastating as the Great Famine was, however, it was only a harbinger of things to come.
People who lived through the Black Death took the connection between plague and malnutrition as a given, the way we do the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer. The Florentine Giovanni Morelli attributed the city’s 50 percent plague mortality rate to the severe famine that struck central Italy the year before. Not twenty out of a hundred had bread in the countryside, he wrote. “Think how their bodies were affected.” The Frenchman Simon Couvin also described malnutrition as a handmaiden of plague. “The one who was poorly nourished by unsubstantial food fell victim to the merest breath of the disease,” he observed. However, many modern historians question the link between plague and malnutrition. For every Florence, they point to a counter example where Black Death losses were moderate or light, despite a recent history of famine. Critics also point to another inconsistency. In the years between the Great Famine and the plague, diets actually improved somewhat. If people were eating better, they ask, how could nutrition have been a predisposing factor in the Black Death?
However, it may be that critics have failed to
find a connection between plague and malnutrition because they have been looking in the wrong places. The regional outbreaks of the disease that occurred after the Black Death—the epidemics of 1366–67, 1373, 1374, 1390, and 1400—all took place in periods of dearth. More centrally, the profound malnutrition of the Great Famine years may have left millions of Europeans more vulnerable to the Black Death. “A famine of . . . three years is of sufficient length to have devastating long-term effects on the future well being of human infants,” says Princeton historian William Chester Jordan, who points out that malnutrition often impedes proper immune system development, leaving the young with lifelong susceptibility to disease.
“By inference,” declares Professor Jordan, author of a study on the Great Famine, “the horrendous mortality of the Black Death should reflect the fact that poor people who were in their thirties and forties during the plague had been young children in the period 1315–1322 and were developmentally more susceptible to the disease than those who had been adults during the Famine or were born after the Famine abated.”
Dr. Jordan’s conclusions are based on animal research, but a recent study by a British researcher, Dr. S. E. Moore, indicates that fetal malnutrition is also a factor in human immune system development. Studying a group of young African adults, Dr. Moore found that subjects born in “the nutritionally debilitating hungry season” (winter and early spring) were four times more likely to die of infectious disease than adults born in the “plentiful harvest season.” In the conclusion of her report, Dr. Moore writes, “Other evidence from the literature also favors the hypothesis that intrauterine growth retardation (caused in this case by maternal food shortages) slows cell division during sensitive periods in the development of the immune system. This would provide a mechanism by which early insults could be ‘hard wired’ such that they [would have] a permanent impact.”