Without enough water, even the best soil is nothing but a desert. The perverse lesson of 1315 to the farmers of northern Europe was that too much water is as destructive as too little. Perhaps even more so. Lands parched by drought can return to productivity as soon as water returns; floods so extensive that they wash away the soil itself have a longer-lasting effect. Even five years after the rains began in the spring of 1315, contemporaneous German chronicles were still describing lands suffering from “an unheard-of barrenness.” One French Cistercian monk called it a sterilitas “hitherto unheard-of in the realm.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“A Dearness of Wheat”
1316–1317
The Abbey Church of Saint Albans is located in Hertfordshire, about twenty miles north of London. It’s named for Britain’s first Christian martyr, a third-century Roman who assumed the identity of a priest and was beheaded in his place. And though the present-day church dates “only” to 1077, the site of the martyrdom has been a destination for pilgrims since at least the eighth century. As a Benedictine abbey—it’s been an Anglican cathedral since 1877—it reached the peak of its notoriety in the early fourteenth century, famous for the gorgeous interiors painted by Walter of Colchester, and the thirteenth-century chronicles of the choir monk Matthew Paris. One of the most vivid accounts of the famine comes to us from a Saint Albans monk, Johannes de Trokelowe. Its most famous medieval abbot, Richard Wallingford, was a brilliant mathematician and the inventor of the most complicated astronomical clock in Britain.
Its best-chronicled moment, however, had nothing to do with monastic architecture, history, or even horology. On August 10, 1315, King Edward and Queen Isabella arrived at Saint Albans to celebrate the feast of Saint Lawrence. Even at what was then one of the largest churches in England, a visit from the royal family was a notable event, demanding the greatest hospitality any vassal could afford. Normally, fresh meat would be slaughtered and butchered, aged cheese brought up from cellars, and barrels of the rarest wine tapped. However, there was nothing normal about the summer of 1315; in the words of de Trokelowe, when Edward and Isabella arrived at Saint Albans, “The panic so weighed on the land . . . that scarcely any bread could even be bought.”
The image—no bread for the rulers of England—remains an enduring symbol for the Great Famine. It’s not that bread was medieval Europe’s only food source. Cattle, sheep, and even goats were raised for their meat, though most of it was consumed after salting and drying. Fresh meat was, almost always, reserved for feasts—religious celebrations distinguished by eating rather than fasting; the word “festival” is an etymological cousin. Lamb, for example, was so precious that even wealthy aristocrats and churchmen ate it only once a year, at Easter. Every year, northern Europe fermented hundreds of thousands of pounds of cheese, the concentrated—and, more relevantly, storable—essence of milk; ocean fisheries produced huge quantities of protein in the form of smoked cod—gadid—and herring, at least in those parts of Europe with access to the North Sea. English kings were so famously fond of lampreys—an eel-like river fish—that a Christmas tradition of presenting the sovereign with a pie, in which the lampreys were cooked in syrup and covered with a crust, lasted until the nineteenth century.
But all of them, whether the luxuries only the wealthy could afford or commonplace foods like milk and cheese, vanish into insignificance next to the calories derived from grain. Between 80 to 90 percent of all the food calories produced and consumed across the entire Eurasian landmass during the Medieval Warm Period depended on the same seed-rich grasses that had launched the Neolithic agricultural revolution in Mesopotamia a hundred centuries before. In pre-famine northern Europe alone, records of the day show a single, moderately prosperous family of ten purchasing five and a half tons of grain annually; the earl of Leicester’s household used three hundred pounds of grain a day, whether the earl’s family was in residence or not. Most of it was milled into the flour used to bake the four-pound loaves that were frequently the daily ration for an entire family—at least those living north of the fourteenth century’s vague poverty line: artisans and tradesmen in the towns, freemen and prosperous villeins in the country. Those a little further down the status ladder made do with the stuff known as maslin (or “horsebread”), which stretched out the wheat, rye, and barley flour with uncooked legumes, unmilled wheat, and lots of filler. The poorest families were likelier to get their daily rations in the form of frumenty—a gelatinized porridge of crushed and boiled seeds—and especially beer, which provided calories in an unfailingly popular form, down to the present day.
There are a dozen different reasons for a diet so dependent on grains, including the hardiness, disease resistance, and durability of grains in storage, and, not at all trivially, their ability to be fermented. But most crucially, grains possess a miraculous knack for assembling fat, carbohydrates, and protein in a single seed.
All of the grasses had their place in the human food chain. Rye, the hardiest of all, able to survive in the wet, cold lands of the post-glacial forests, was a huge part of the northern European diet from the days those forests were first cleared until it was displaced by potatoes in the seventeenth century. Rye’s only real disadvantage was its vulnerability to the mold that causes ergotism—the same hallucinogenic ingredient found in LSD. A few historians even blame the frequency of mass delusions among the rural peasantry of the Medieval Warm Period—hysterical fits, epidemics of biting, demonic possession, the uncontrollable muscular chorea known as St. Vitus’ Dance—on their heavy consumption of rye.
Barley is even more ecologically tolerant, particularly to cold, rocky soils everywhere from ancient Greece to Tibet, and could be sprouted in a kitchen garden, then boiled and served as pottage; the barley water left behind could be drunk, sometimes sweetened, or fermented into barley beer, which explains north Germany’s strong preference for six-rowed barley (Hordeum vulgare). Millet is to hot, dry ecosystems—including Ethiopia, China, and West Africa—what barley is to cold.
The only significant Old World grain not found in medieval Europe—maize, or corn, is a New World grass—was rice, which provides a fifth of the calories and an eighth of the protein consumed in the modern world, but wouldn’t be cultivated extensively in the Mediterranean until the fifteenth century.*
In medieval Europe, though, and throughout much of the modern world, the preferred method for eating those seeds was bread. Bread has been a synecdoche for food for millennia, and not just as the stuff breadwinners win; the word “lord” is derived from the Old English hlaford, meaning “keeper of the bread,” and “lady” from hlaefdigge: “kneader of the dough.” For the overwhelming bulk of Europeans, bread and beer were the food sources, providing between fifteen hundred and two thousand calories per person per day.
Though bread can be, and is, made using all sorts of grain, it still depends on the two-part protein that captures the gases released by yeast respiration, and is therefore necessary for risen bread: gluten. Corn and rice can’t produce any true gluten at all. Other cereal grains produce some, but the one whose protein chemistry produces the most, by far, is wheat.
Wheat, which now covers more than 650 million acres of the Earth’s surface, is—and has been for centuries—the world’s most extensively grown and consumed crop. Throughout medieval Europe and Britain, the best land was reserved for wheat farms. The rivers were dotted with watermills for grinding it. European farmers grew any number of varieties of the precious stuff, including emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccum), einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum), and spelt (Triticum spelta), but the favorite was, and is, bread wheat (Triticum aestivum).
Wheat’s commercial value was matched by its ecological cost. Like all plants, it needs nitrogen to make chlorophyll, and like all plants, must capture reactive nitrogen from the ground. In the words of historian Fernand Braudel, “Wheat’s unpardonable fault was its low yield . . . [it] devours the soil, and cannot be cultivated on
the same land for two years running.” In the wild, dying grasses keep the nitrogen in balance by returning their seeds to the soil. When humans cultivate those grasses in the form of wheat or any other grain, the whole point is to take them out of the soil, and put them into a flour mill.
Even without the catastrophic rains, wheat production was a tough life; not merely because of the brutal demands of harvesting using nothing but muscle and a foot-long sickle, but the profound inefficiencies of medieval farms.
The farming manuals of the day weren’t especially helpful. The most popular, the twenty-eight “Rules of Saint Robert,” written by Robert Grosseteste, bishop of Lincoln, consists almost entirely of advice to lords about running household accounts, treating subordinates, and staying on the right side of the complicated laws regarding land tenure. A manual written in French by Walter de Henley was far more specific—“an acre of wheat requires three plowings, except lands which are sown yearly . . . each plowing is worth sixpence, and harrowing a penny, and on the acre it is necessary to sow at least two bushels”—but still used up pages advising landlords how to avoid being cheated by tenants: “one often sees the grange-keeper and barn-keeper join together to do mischief.” The absence of practical information isn’t terribly surprising. Widespread illiteracy, particularly among the peasantry, meant that no one who actually plowed a field depended on anything written in a book. Medieval technique was thus very much a matter of rule-of-thumb, if that, and depended on folk wisdom to describe how much seed to sow. Too little, and weeds choked out the crop; too much, and the crop choked itself.
The lack of any standard measure for seeding partly accounts for the frighteningly low productivity of medieval wheat farming. So does the constant pressure from even “normal” weather: autumn hail, for example, regularly knocked grain off the stalk. Wheat kernels also happen to be a favorite food for rodents—modern farms can be home to tens of thousands per acre—and birds. They’re also subject to diseases like smuts and rusts. Combined with the widespread nitrogen depletion caused by the four centuries of expanding acreage, it’s a wonder that anyone made a crop at all, even before the rains of 1315 washed away topsoils all over Europe. In England, at the time of the Norman Conquest, somewhere between 6.7 and 8.5 million acres of land were under cultivation, overwhelmingly with cereal grains. Those acres were able to feed a population of around 1.5 million fairly easily. By 1300, 11.5 million acres were struggling to feed 5 million.
The acreage simply couldn’t expand fast enough to keep up with population. The reason wasn’t always a deficiency of arable land—England had perhaps 26 million at least nominally arable acres available—but a lack of power to cultivate it. A clue is in the word “acre” itself, which originated by calculating the amount of land that could be plowed by one man behind a single ox in a single day. The virgate, another early allocation of land, was the amount of land that could be plowed by two oxen in a plowing season; the virgate—generally between fifteen and twenty acres—was also supposedly the amount needed to support a family.* A hide (averaging one-hundred-plus acres) might be as few as four virgates or as many as seven. The furlong, which survives today only around horse racing tracks, was originally the length of a single strip that oxen could plow without resting, or forty rods, each of five and a half yards. A carucate was the land that could be plowed by an eight-oxen team in a plowing season, or four virgates. With so many measures in use at the time, calculating and comparing acreage was a complicated exercise, made even more so by the inability of medieval arithmetic to express a fraction with anything but a 1 in the numerator. An agricultural treatise described a plot of one acre, three and 9⁄16 roods (a rood is a quarter-acre, or a rectangle one furlong by one rod) as “one acre, and a half acre, and a rood, and a half rood, and a sixteenth of a rood.” And if that wasn’t complicated enough, the need to plow land in strips, as well as the legal tradition that made land inheritance “partible,” resulted in fragmenting much of the manorial land in Europe into a crazy-quilt of dozens of parcels, sometimes two hundred meters long by as little as twenty feet wide.
Peasants who might know nothing of the boundaries of their country, or even their lord’s manor, were well aware of those of their villages. An English tradition known as “gang-days” took an entire village’s children out a-ganging: they would be dunked in boundary streams, and bumped against boundary trees and outcroppings, so as to define the borders of the village. They knew their place, in more ways than one.
After generations of inheritance and subdivision, the narrow strips of manorial smallholdings were frequently barely wide enough for a plow to make a single back-and-forth circuit.
But those children would grow up to be the freemen, villeins, and serfs who plowed the land, distributed the seed, and harvested the crops—a privilege for which they paid, typically one sack of grain in twenty. Even then, the remaining nineteen sacks of grain weren’t especially useful for making bread (or even frumenty) until they were ground into flour. Milling grain was the source of every European landlord’s real authority. The law may have given a baron or earl the right to tax his tenants, but the mills were what gave him the power. Not only was another sack of grain demanded as payment for turning the remaining eighteen into flour, but a monopoly on the water and windmills that did so gave each landlord a way of profiting from every kernel of wheat, or barley, or rye, grown on his land.
In retrospect, it seems obvious that the tool needed for producing 90 percent of the calories consumed by medieval humanity would be invested with such importance. Throughout continental Europe, one of the most valuable feudal privileges was a monopoly on the milling of grain produced by one’s vassals; in Normandy, the banalités (which also included payment for use of the lord’s oven and wine presses) were the single biggest driver of growth in landlord income. The reason was centralization, not efficiency: the lord could not supervise milling done at home by hand or (more rarely) by horse. But the capital needed to build a wind or watermill was available only to the feudal master of the land, who could supervise, and therefore tax, the produce of his vassals. This made milling a reliable arena of conflict. One of the chroniclers who recorded the history of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds tells the story of a tenant named Herbert the Dean, who built himself a windmill under the logic that the “free benefit of the wind ought not to be denied to any man.” His lord responded with a vow that “by God’s face I will never eat bread till that building be thrown down.” In the words of the historian Marc Bloch, it was a “war of wind and water against human muscle,” and the battlefields of that war were, literally, everywhere; 5,624 mills were surveyed in the Domesday Book of 1086. Every one of them was a constant provocation to the rural peasantry. The people of the village of Saint Albans, where Edward and Isabella could find no bread, spent more than a century fighting for the right to mill grain themselves, using querns and hand mills. During the famine, they actually invaded the abbey itself, where the stones of their hand mills had been taken for confiscation, and destroyed the floor that the monks had built with them.
By then, though, the floods of 1315 and 1316 had already done much of their work for them. The floodwaters had not only washed away the topsoil covering tens of thousands of acres of wheat fields, they had also destroyed thousands of the mills that turned the grain into flour.
• • •
Two years of rain left a mark everywhere. In a good year during the Medieval Warm Period, wheat might produce eight to twelve bushels an acre. In the fertile South Downs of southeast England, which used a variety of what were considered advanced agricultural practices, such as applying marl—lime-rich calcium carbonate—and planting legumes, the net yield was still only nine bushels an acre of wheat, and twelve for barley (today it’s more than fifty). Of those eight to twelve bushels, between two and three were put back into the ground as seed corn for the next harvest. Those lousy yields were what the land was producing before the rains of 1315: in Winc
hester productivity dropped by at least 15 percent across the board; wheat that had produced net yields of 3:1 was now yielding 2.6:1. By 1316, wheat and rye harvests were only 60 percent of their historical averages, and they stayed at least 25 percent below those averages for at least another five years. Though barley and oats are less vulnerable to too much water—they are far more sensitive to drought—the rains of 1315 went on for so long that resistance to overwatering was beside the point: barley and oat seeds couldn’t even take root in the flooded fields, and yielded only two-thirds of their pre-1315 harvests.
It may have seemed, to the farmers of northern England, that the rains were disastrous enough. They did not reckon on the Scots. Bolton Priory, in Yorkshire, was raided by Bruce’s hobelars in both 1318 and 1319. Total grain production wasn’t even recorded in 1319, because the raiders took the account roll, but even between 1320 and 1324, production was only a third of the level achieved before 1315. At some points, yields actually dropped below 1:1, which meant the population was literally eating its own seed corn, and, fearing even worse from the future than it had enjoyed in the past, the priory closed.
Cereals were the most important, but far from the only, foodstuffs produced and consumed in fourteenth-century Europe. The multiple traumas of weather, disease, and war were disastrous for them all.
The Third Horseman Page 16