The Chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis, written by a monk at the Abbey of Saint-Denis, records their start in the middle of April. Other accounts have the storms arriving in Flanders around Pentecost, May 11. The abbot of Saint-Vincent, near Laon, noted that “it rained most marvelously and for so long.” So long, in fact, that it didn’t stop, except for a day or two, until August. By one count, it rained for 155 days in a row, virtually everywhere in Europe north of the Pyrenees and Alps, and west of the Urals: throughout France, Britain, the Baltic and German principalities, Poland, and Lithuania. A weather index prepared early in the twentieth century calculated the severity of winter frosts and summer rains throughout the Middle Ages, and not only found that the two decades 1310–1330 contained the worst winters on record but that the rainy years between 1310 and 1330 included the four worst winters in four centuries. Contemporary chroniclers from Nuremberg, Flanders, and Brittany all agree; one, writing in Salzburg, perhaps understated the case when he wrote that “the whole world was troubled.” In October 1315, four mills along the River Avon were swept away by floods; the same thing happened to fourteen bridges along the River Mur. In Saxony, more than 450 villages—people, cattle, and even houses—were washed away.
When it rains without a break for four months at a time, dikes and bridges disintegrate. Buildings with foundations flood; those without collapse. Quarries can’t be mined. The two sources of fuel for heat and smelting—wood and peat—are too wet to burn. Meadows can’t be mowed. Sod can’t be cut.
But the biggest problem of all is that crops can neither be planted nor harvested. When seedbeds are too wet, pastures flood and grains rot. Bad as the rains were for bridges and roads, they were far worse for farmland itself, especially because the population growth enabled by the MWP had already pushed an ever-larger fraction of Europe’s food production onto the region’s poorest land. Soils that barely broke even in good years were about to be tested as never before.
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It’s been said that all of humanity is fed by ten inches of topsoil, and one constant theme of the four centuries of European history leading up to the rains of 1315 is the search for more of the valuable stuff. The dirt on which almost the entire food supply of the world depended—still depends today—is a sandwich of as many as eight distinct layers, resting on top of bedrock. The top layer isn’t really soil at all, but not-yet-decomposed plant matter. Underneath is the true topsoil—a complex stew of light minerals, carbon-rich organic matter, and living things: worms, insects, and untold quadrillions of bacteria.* The very best soils derive from loess, essentially wind-blown silt that accumulates over centuries or millennia and whose constant weathering makes the topsoil rich in organics. In parts of China, the Russian steppe, and the American Midwest, the loess can be hundreds of feet deep.
All of the deforestation, draining, and cultivation of millions of acres in Europe had been, in this sense, a giant project for producing topsoil. Among other things, feudal manorialism’s system of crop rotation—one field in three allowed to “rest” each season—diffused throughout Europe by 1250, could raise productivity per worker by 50 percent. But in order for crop rotation to work its magic for a growing population, even more new land had to be found every year, which was a powerful spur to land reclamation: from forests, swamps, and pasture.
All those newly assarted lands didn’t contain topsoils like those of the great river valleys, or even the Mediterranean littoral. The soil of northern Europe, for example, usually contained sufficient nutrients, but was so compacted that plowing it was just too much work. The soils that support old-growth trees tend to be extremely heavy, and even after the trees have been removed, a simple scratch plow or “ard” that farmers had been using for more than three thousand years to cut a furrow couldn’t do the job. Most especially, it couldn’t lift the bottom layer of topsoil to the top few inches; neither could it kill weeds, and so permit favored crops to prosper. The two-handled moldboard plow, which included a separate coulter (a kind of spike next to the plowshare), a horizontal blade behind the traditional vertical one, and the moldboard itself (a flat piece mounted at an angle to the share, which lifted the cut earth to one side as the plow moved), could easily turn a furrow in the newly revealed, rich-but-heavy soil of the north European plain.
A widely used medieval measure, the virgate, was the amount of land that could be plowed by two oxen in a season, approximately fifteen to twenty acres. This was the acreage thought to be required to support a single family of rural peasants.
However, a heavy wheeled plow wasn’t an affordable expense for a single farmer. The new technology could only work in the open-field villages that, by the end of the thirteenth century, had become complex multigenerational organizations, with elaborate hierarchies of traditional occupations and folkways that had evolved for a single purpose: producing food. Cultivated village land was the foundation of all food production in Europe; plow teams, worked by a village’s most skilled laborers (assisted by village smallholders, typically working for a day wage), accounted for virtually all production on Europe’s manors, and anything that disrupted their productive capacity threatened the lives of millions of people.
In a typical village, the agricultural land was worked by both the tenant farmer on his own plot, paying his landlord for the privilege with a portion of his harvest, and by the landlord’s employees—his plowmen, carters, cowherds, shepherds, and swineherds—farming the acres set aside for his personal use, his demesne, as salaried employees. The entire system required a wide assortment of transactions: payment in the form of produce, or crafts such as woven cloth, along with cash, and supervised by an even more complex set of managers—stewards and seneschals, bailiffs and reeves.
Underneath the village officers were the bulk of the rural population. A thirteenth-century jurist named Henry de Bracton is credited with the principle of omnes homines aut liberi sun taut sevi, roughly translated as “all men are either free or servile” . . . but what “taut sevi” meant in practice was complicated, particularly in England. In 1279, Edward I had ordered an even more detailed survey of England’s land and laborers than the eleventh-century Domesday Book. In two centuries, the categories of serfs, villeins, bordars, and freemen had mushroomed into more than twenty fine gradations of peasantry, including molmen (tenants released from some, but not all, of their feudal obligations in return for rent), customary tenants (free tenants who received their holdings by being given a piece of earth), and ecclesiasticals (as expected: tenants tied to church property). Moreover, as the Medieval Warm Period began its long decline, the distinction between servitude and freedom had grown fuzzy. Status changed dramatically back and forth throughout the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, even within the lives of a single peasant. In some regions, such as northern France and Scandinavia, serfdom had nearly disappeared. In the German-speaking principalities that made up the Holy Roman Empire, it was widespread, but the status of serfs varied enormously, since some serf-born joined the imperial Civil Service (as ministeriales), intermarried with noble families, and even had vassals of their own. Land itself was frequently designated “free” or “villein” land (meaning that it could be farmed with either cash payment or labor obligation, respectively), with the implication that only freemen could own free land; but by 1300, thousands of villeins owned free land, and vice versa. A good estimate is that freemen, of some variety, outnumbered “pure” serfs by 1300, and 60 percent of tenanted land was held in free tenure. By the time the rains of 1315 arrived, a man’s place in Europe’s economic pecking order was more significant than his class; a wealthy villein had higher status in most villages than a poorer freeman. What villein and freeman had in common, however, is that both were tied to the soil.
And that soil was highly variable in quality. By the beginning of the fourteenth century, virtually all of the best topsoil had been reinforced and plowed with very long furrows, which meant it could absorb huge quantit
ies of water without drainage problems, but, when the amount of annual precipitation increased fivefold—normal rainfall in England, France, and Germany is in the range of twenty-five to thirty inches annually; the storms of 1315 deposited at least a hundred inches—even the reinforced topsoil was washed away, leaving the clay subsoil behind. The newly revealed marginal stuff was too light and sandy to stand a chance. In England’s midlands and the Scottish lowlands, from northern France to Poland, and in virtually all the farmland bordering the North Sea and the Baltic, as much as half of the arable land essentially disappeared, leaving behind not even clay, but rock. One study calculated that half of all the erosion suffered by cultivated land in Germany over the last fifteen hundred years happened during the decade that began with the rains of April 1315, during which the arable topsoil receded by an average of twenty-five centimeters: nearly ten inches.
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Before the disastrous weather of April 1315 had even arrived, another set of storm clouds settled over England’s royal court. Heartened by the success of King Robert at Bannockburn, a Welshman named Llywelyn Bren attacked Caerphilly Castle and ignited a near uprising; only his defeat at the hands of Roger Mortimer, one of the lords of the Welsh Marches, prevented a rebellion throughout Wales. Another revolt, this one led by the burgesses of the port town of Bristol, was put down by the earl of Pembroke before it could spread. But the real tempest was—as always—the work of Lancaster. The earl, who had sent the minimum number of troops to support his king in his march to relieve Stirling Castle, had already decided to spend 1314 building up his own army, putting himself in position to defend against a victorious Edward, or dictate to a defeated one. After Bannockburn, one can imagine him rubbing his hands together in glee at the opportunity, and his first blow was a successful revalidation of the Ordinances at a parliament meeting in Westminster in the spring of 1315.
The same parliament removed two of the king’s most loyal supporters from the royal council, and, in response to the looming food crisis, pressured Edward to issue an ordinance fixing maximum prices for livestock, with a hay-fed ox at sixteen shillings, a cow twelve, and a pig three. England had already experienced an extraordinarily cold winter, so the torrential spring rains of 1315 made for a poor lambing year, and therefore saw a huge decline in the size of sheep flocks. Since prices had already been on the increase in England since 1305, the appropriate response was to control for another price increase in sheep, and therefore wool. Unfortunately, the royal revenues from wool exports fell from £12,200 in 1312–1313 to £7,100 in 1315–1316, which meant that the Crown’s income stream was collapsing at a time when its expenses were essentially fixed. Supporting the garrison in Berwick alone was costing nearly £8,000 a year.
As the rains began, the oligarchs responsible for the welfare of England—and everywhere in northern Europe—were, of course, unable to see the far larger dangers waiting a few months hence. Though they knew that crops must be sown in spring to be harvested in fall, they did not yet know that they were living through rains that would last longer than the ones faced by Noah, when “all the springs of the great deep burst forth, and the floodgates of the heavens were opened.” By August, after four months of unremitting rain, even the least aware of England’s rulers knew that there would be no fall harvest in 1315. The king’s council, in response, required that no noble below the rank of earl would be permitted more than two dishes at any meal, at a time when members of the nobility were likely to eat five or more.
In an era that believed that natural disasters were punishments from heaven for misbehavior (the Vita was already blaming the rains on the English people, who “excel all others in three qualities: in pride, in craft, and in perjury”) it no doubt seemed a good plan to limit opportunities for the sin of gluttony. It’s not as if Edward was completely avoiding more practical measures. In December 1315, Edward asked his brother-in-law, Louis X (who had ascended to the French throne upon the death of his father, Philip IV, the previous November), to permit a number of earls, including Gloucester, Suffolk, and Norfolk, to buy grain from the farms of the Somme valley, around Caen and Dieppe. When he learned that the rains had been so widespread that northern France was in no better shape than southern England, the Crown gave safe-conduct to grain merchants from Spain, Sicily, and Genoa, in an attempt to restore grain supplies from the relatively untouched farms of the Mediterranean.
His strategy might have worked had not the same weather reappeared in early 1316. The hardships of one year were about to multiply sevenfold and transform into the Great Famine.
• • •
History’s earliest recorded famines are chronicled in Egyptian stelae from the third millennium BCE. This was only to be expected in a region that was not only one of humanity’s first to develop agriculture at all but also one whose farms depended on the annual Nile floods that carried the life-giving silt that made the river valley so fertile. Too heavy a flood, or too light—and one year in five brought one or the other—and the risks of famine soared. But every ancient civilization experienced famine. The Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh tells of how the gods brought famine to cull the population that had annoyed them by “becoming numerous in the land [and] bellow[ing] like wild oxen.” The Old Testament is very nearly a catalog of famines. One, in the twelfth chapter of Genesis, brings Abraham to Egypt; another, in chapter forty-one—the “seven lean years”—turns Joseph into Egypt’s prime minister. Ruth and Naomi travel through a famine-struck landscape, and the prophets Elijah, Elisha, Nehemiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel constantly invoke the costs of famine. The Book of Lamentations warns, “those killed by the sword are better off than those who die of famine.”
A millennium later, famine remained an ever-present danger and a regular feature in every contemporary history. The sixth-century CE Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite documents a famine in Edessa, in what is today southeast Turkey. In 499–501:
there was a dearth of everything edible . . . everything that was not edible was cheap . . . the Emperor [Anastasius] gave no small sum of money to distribute among the poor. . . . [people ate] bitter vetches, and others were frying the withered fallen grapes . . . many villages and hamlets were left destitute of inhabitants [and] a countless multitude entered the city.*
Between 857 and 950, Europe experienced at least twenty famines large enough to be recorded in one medieval chronicle or the other. All of them were local, with local causes, such as the parasitic rust fungus that destroyed the Iberian wheat crop in both 915 and 929, with the by-now familiar lament from an anonymous Aragonese: “Destitution at last reached such a pitch that men began to devour each other, and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love.”
No famine, however, is absolute. That is, there has never been a famine where there was absolutely no food to be had. The modern Italian word for famine, carestia, comes from the Latin caritas or “dearth,” which doesn’t mean nonexistent, but expensive.* Both etymologically and practically, the nature of famine has always been economic, an explicit function of the cost of food. Famine is what happens when food becomes so expensive that a significant number of people cannot afford to buy it. Today, most major aid agencies break famines into different categories depending on the relationship between food and income, defining phase one as “generally food secure”; phase two as “moderately/borderline food insecure”; three as “acute food and livelihood crisis”; and four as a “humanitarian emergency.” Only phase five qualifies as a “famine/humanitarian catastrophe.”
Just as famines are categorized by severity, they are ranked by destructiveness, using the yardstick of “excess mortality”: the number of total deaths greater than would have been in the case in the absence of famine. The greatest man-made famines are also some of the greatest famines in raw numbers: 9 million excess mortality during the Russian Civil War of 1921–22; 5 million more during Stalin’s collectivization of 1932–33; and the biggest of all, China’s Great Leap Forward o
f 1959–61, with an estimated 15 to 25 million excess mortality; though it should be noted that even these “artificial” famines were associated with droughts, floods, and harvest shortfalls. During the decidedly man-made famine of the Great Leap Forward, destruction was exacerbated by the fact that “eight of Shantung’s twelve rivers had no water in them.”
No famine is purely natural, or completely man-made. There are, however, degrees of responsibility. Modern famines are almost always at least man-accelerated; earlier ones, far more dependent on the vagaries of nature. Many appear to have been the consequences of extraordinary one-time events, such as volcanic eruptions (Laki in 1783, and Tambora in 1815 are the causes of two of Europe’s most severe modern famines, while the so-called One Rabbit—the name of the year 1454 on the Aztec calendar—famine of pre-conquistador Mexico was preceded by the eruption of the Vanuatuan volcano Kuwae in 1452) or ecological shocks, like the Phytophthora infestans that destroyed Ireland’s potato crop in the 1840s. Usually, though, they have been driven by extreme versions of “normal” weather, as was the case after Ireland’s Great Frost of 1740, when its people suffered a “year of carnage” or Bliain an Áir. And, of course, the rains of 1315.
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