The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  For example, almost everything people ate required salt, either as a preservative or as an essential mineral. During the fourteenth century, most of it was produced in seaside salt pans: huge, concave, clay-lined depressions built between the lines of high and low tide. There salt “farmers” waited for it to evaporate, using both sun and fires set alongside the pans. However, during the rainy seasons of 1315 and 1316, the sun rarely shone, and the fuel for fires—wood and peat—was too wet to burn. Alternative ways of making salt, such as briquetage—pouring seawater into coarse pottery containers, then putting the containers in fires and, eventually, breaking the pottery to get the salt lining the interior, a technique dating to the Bronze Age—or boiling away the brine in huge cauldrons, were even more fuel intensive. But after four months of rain, fuel was even more difficult to find than food. The cost of salt skyrocketed, its average price in Europe doubling during the famine years. In England, the average price for twenty-five pounds of salt was three shillings in 1310; in 1316 it had quadrupled to between 11 shillings and 13 shillings.

  And so, therefore, did the price of every commodity that depended on salt. During the Medieval Warm Period, huge schools of Atlantic herring massed in the North Atlantic every spring, and passed into the Baltic via the coasts of Scotland, and were so ridiculously abundant—and the seas so relatively warm and calm—that catching them in open boats became, for the first time, a practical business. Simultaneously, demand was accidentally increased by the Church, which had, by 1200, covered nearly half the calendar with meatless holy days, which promoted the eating of all sorts of fish.

  By the thirteenth century, herring had developed into one of the most important protein sources throughout the North Sea and Baltic coastal towns. However, because herring is a fatty fish, it rots quickly if not salted, making salt an essential ingredient in the business of shipping protein from one part of Europe to another. Literally millions of herring were caught and sold in English ports alone, and every fall, the town of Yarmouth hosted a giant herring fair at which hundreds of thousands of barrels of salted herring—and, later cod—were brokered into ports on the North Sea. The most important fishery in Europe was, therefore, entirely hostage to the price of salt.

  Between the years 1315 and 1319 fish prices were the highest in a century.

  This was good news for fish brokers and salt producers, among them monasteries—nearly half of all the Cistercians in Europe were salt manufacturers—but very bad indeed for everyone else, and not just for consumers of fish. Milk, for example, was an even more popular component of the medieval diet, though its poor keeping qualities meant that it was usually consumed in the form of cheese. The rains didn’t cause milk production to plummet immediately.* But without salt, cheese-making is nearly impossible. By September 1316, salt had become so dear that Louis X of France published an ordinance in which he ordered the exile (and confiscation of all the worldly goods) of salt hoarders for “avaricious cupidity,” calling them “incapable of kindness, not knowing compassion, and devoid of charity.”

  The rains affected nearly everything. Wine, in the fourteenth century, wasn’t laid down for years before drinking, so a poor harvest was felt immediately. A year with fewer than one hundred days of sun is a disaster for any fruit, and wine grapes are no exception. Without sun, photosynthesis produces less sugar, and less sugar means less raw material for fermentation. The result? In 1316 “there was no wine in the whole kingdom of France.” Germany’s Neustadt vineyards produced “a trifling quantity” in 1317. The rains, meanwhile, brought an epidemic of the funguslike parasite known as downy mildew that stunted European vines for a decade. In places where wine was levied as payment to lords, yields dropped as much as 80 percent by 1317.

  Food production was battered everywhere in Europe; the grandest estate was as likely to be washed away in the great floods as the meanest freeholding. The effect on consumption was considerably less democratic. Since food shortages make themselves known mostly through higher prices for everything from beer to beefsteak, the severity of their impact on a family’s diet depended on the rung that family occupied on the economic ladder. Since much of what was recorded about the medieval diet was written not only from its top rungs but by its most literate population—churchmen—popular accounts of the medieval diet have been confused for centuries. The feast-day consumption for one abbot included ducks, salmon, kid, geese, chickens at Easter, and a boar at Christmas. The cellarer at a prosperous abbey would require storage for bacon, beef, herring, butter, cheese, peas, poultry, eggs, and flour. The abbess of a Benedictine nunnery in Essex had two cooks providing food for her table exclusively, and even a “poding [pudding] wife.” The cook at the Abbey of St. Augustine’s, in Canterbury, was famous throughout England—at least, among England’s gourmands—for a white ginger sauce (blancgingvyre) galantine, or green sauce (vertesauce). Even the more modest tables of lower-level ecclesiastics, such as monks, were enormously more varied than that of the typical peasant: “crispis” (i.e., pancakes) and crumb cakes on Shrove Tuesday; flans and cheese tarts on Rogation.

  While it’s difficult to find complete records of peasant diets for the era, it’s a safe bet that flans and cheese tarts weren’t a regular part of the bill of fare. Some rural peasants did cultivate kitchen gardens that produced some fresh vegetables for their own consumption, such as onions, garlic, lettuce, and parsley; they even had occasional access to fruits from cultivated trees as well as wild berries. And while it’s well documented that grain dominated the diet of between 80 to 90 percent of Europe’s population in the form of bread, frumenty, pottage, and ale, quantities are a little harder to tease out of the historical record. Peasants lacked stewards to record their monthly food bills.

  Nonetheless, some evidence exists for an annual allotment of between twelve and twenty-four bushels of cereals and legumes annually per family. In the case of the former, most of the calories would have been consumed as horsebread or frumenty; more prosperous peasants would have enough grain to brew a considerable quantity of ale, and might enjoy access to orchards, supplies of cider, and occasionally eggs, bacon, and dairy products. The food and drink given as part of the wages of farm hands hired to provide labor during harvest time on larger estates provides another clue. A normal breakdown might pay the laborer half of his wages in the form of bread and oatmeal; a bit more than a quarter in ale, and everything else—meat, fish, and cheese included—a bit less. However, some simple nutritional arithmetic reveals that, since meat, fish, and cheese were so much more expensive, they contributed far less as a percentage of calories. For every two pounds of bread paid to a harvest worker, he would receive about two ounces of cheese, one ounce of meat, and possibly some fish. At least 80 percent of those calories are, in one form or another, cereal grains.

  This remarkable level of dependence—80 percent of Europe’s population getting more than 80 percent of their food in the form of grain—is even higher than it appears, if a typical ration of ale (about half a gallon) is factored in to the daily diet; and it should be. Ale, generally made from barley, was the most common drink throughout Europe, water being a very chancy beverage indeed for anyone wanting to avoid intestinal parasites, and wine far too expensive for most families. Ale was also very cheap, traditionally three gallons for a penny in England, with the brew typically served fresh, since it turns sour so quickly (for the same reason, the ale consumed by peasant families tended to be weaker in both flavor and alcohol than that produced by the nobility).* By the ninth century, English monks had already figured out how to improve ale’s keeping qualities: making it as beer. Since beer requires fermentation to stop at some point—otherwise the beer rots—hops, an antimicrobial agent, were added, and did the trick so well that by 1086, the monks at St. Paul’s in London were brewing eighty thousand gallons a year.

  So: How many calories, and in what form, were available to the average family during the fourteenth century? It’s a nontrivial questio
n, since the magnitude of a famine is at least partly a function of what people ate in non-famine times. Unfortunately, the calculations of “normal” food intake are all over the place. One regularly cited estimate comes up with an average of around four thousand calories a day. The French historian Michel Rouche actually calculated that the average fourteenth-century person consumed more than nine thousand calories a day.

  Rouche’s stratospheric number is derived from a statute dating back to the ninth-century Carolingian Empire that allocated approximately three and a half pounds of bread, one and a half quarts of wine, half a gallon of beer, a quarter pound of cheese, and half a pound of fat or meat per person per day. The recommended diet was more the product of hopefulness than arithmetic. Yields were so low that the amount of grain required to produce the bread and beer alone would have meant at least doubling the amount of land under cultivation throughout Europe.

  Even if the acreage to produce a sufficient amount of grain had somehow been available, reaching anywhere close to Rouche’s estimate would remain impossible, because of the inefficiency of all medieval agriculture. Dairy cattle, during the fourteenth century, might produce less than three hundred gallons a year (modern cows average around nineteen hundred), and it takes a gallon of milk to produce a pound of cheese. The numbers are even more daunting for meat. Domestic livestock were barely half as large as modern versions, though they required the same grazing territory; slaughtering a fourteenth-century cow or steer provided less than 140 pounds of meat, and another 40 pounds of fat. A good-sized pig might provide a total of 80 pounds. Providing the five million residents of 1300s England with half a pound of meat daily would have meant slaughtering a lot of cattle, and even more pigs (sheep were too valuable as wool providers to add much in the way of food). Getting a quarter of the total from beef cattle would require slaughtering more than 1.6 million cattle annually; and since it takes at least two years, on average, to fatten them up, that meant grazing somewhere north of 3 million cattle, each needing 2 hectares of grazing each, or 6 million total: nearly 23,000 square miles . . . in a country whose total area is only 50,000 square miles. The pigs, by comparison, were a bargain: at 80 pounds of meat and fat per fourteenth-century porker, and requiring only six months before slaughter, England would need “only” four million or so pigs to provide each person with about six ounces of pork a day.

  In fact, pigs were far more widely held by members of the peasant class than either cattle or horses, partly because pigs were able to eat just about anything—acorns, slugs, worms, even the carcasses of other pigs. Pigs are also incredibly productive as agricultural assets, producing tallow, bristles, and leather, as well as food. Relatively prosperous peasant families could keep half a dozen pigs in sties and mark others and allow them to go feral in local woodlands, where swineherds would collect them in late fall or early winter—dangerous work, since wild pigs eat just about anything, and were just as likely to eat human children as acorns. Sometimes swineherds managed actual herds: hundreds of pigs, driven to market. However, their wide availability and relatively high resistance to both famine and disease made them extremely vulnerable to families seeking alternate sources of food—so vulnerable that the swine herd at Bolton Priory declined in the first year of the famine by 95 percent, to a single boar and six sows.

  The most reliable estimates of actual livestock in fourteenth-century England, taken from sales and tax records, total 1.67 million cattle—580,000 of them dairy (feeding five million people using Rouche’s estimate of a quarter-pound of cheese a day would have required at least 1.8 million dairy cows), 520,000 beef, and the remainder calves—8 to 10 million wool-producing sheep; 950,000 hogs; and 540,000 horses and 820,000 oxen, neither of which were raised for food. Rouche was wrong, by at least a factor of three.

  In the 1980s, Jan Peter Pals, an archaeobotanist at the University of Amsterdam, did the heavy lifting in revising the estimates of medieval consumption. His model assumed that medieval farmers produced about 1,000 kilograms of grains and legumes for every acre under cultivation, along with another 1,365 kilograms of straw. With cattle and sheep fed on harvest residue, modest estimates of milk production from both cows and sheep, and pigs foraging, more or less for free, in surrounding forests, a reasonable range of actual daily provisions for an adult looks something like this:

  thirteen ounces of bread

  a quart of beer

  an ounce and a half of cheese

  a quarter-pound of peas, or other legumes

  a little less than four ounces of mixed fat and meat

  This adds up to a more plausible total of between two thousand and twenty-one hundred calories a day—a pretty paltry ration for an adult who was required to perform substantial manual labor.

  Since, however, almost everyone was, it’s worth calculating their needs, as well as their consumption. In 2004, the Nobel Prize–winning economist Robert Fogel did just that, estimating the number of calories needed above the Basal Metabolic Rate, which is the amount of energy needed to keep vital organs functioning at complete rest, with some added for digestion of food and basic hygiene, but no other activities at all, not even preparing food.

  For an adult male, 5’6” tall and weighing 140 pounds—that is, a fairly average fourteenth-century farmer—the BMR is 1,576 calories a day. Fogel’s calculation for the additional calories needed to perform any sort of labor is 720 calories, for a total of just under 2,300 calories a day. The conclusion seems inescapable: for almost everyone living in the fourteenth century, hunger, not to say near-starvation, was constant.

  Even when food was relatively plentiful (this is a relative term; the food supply was contaminated with insects, rodent feces, molds, and aflatoxins, the highly carcinogenic poisons produced by the fungi that contaminate stored grain) almost all peasant diets were lacking in protein; even if a family owned a cow, chickens, or other livestock, they would still be forced to use the meat, milk, and eggs to generate cash, rather than as food. The diets of at least half the population was deficient not just in calories (particularly for growing children) but in lipids, calcium, and vitamins A, C, and D; and they contained so much fiber as to block the absorption of minerals like calcium, magnesium, and zinc. This was a particular problem for women of childbearing age—and, since average age at death was under forty, it affected virtually all women. Half the adult population of Europe was constantly pregnant, and therefore constantly in need of vitamins B12, C, and folic acid. And that was when things were normal.

  When things weren’t—when the lost harvests of 1315 and 1316 coincided with scorched-earth warfare everywhere from Scotland to Flanders to Germany—malnutrition became starvation.

  • • •

  In 1315, Edward II wrote a letter to the bishop of Durham, announcing his concern that the “poor and beggars were starving” to death in the Anglo-Scottish borderlands. By 1319, in Winchester, “the bodies of paupers, dead of starvation, littered city streets . . . and burial could not be delayed because of the foul stink, ‘so miche and so faste folc deaden, that vnnethes men might ham bury’ [Folk died so frequently and so quickly that men could hardly bury them].”

  Famines kill. But much of their killing is done indirectly. The most recognizable image from modern famines, the skeletal emaciation among infants known as marasmus, is a killer, though not nearly as dangerous as kwashiorkor, which is the same syndrome appearing in children older than a year and a half. Kwashiorkor, with its ulcerating sores and distended bellies, kills its victims by destroying their livers, which blow up like balloons when they can no longer process the body’s waste products.

  Both kwashiorkor and marasmus are caused by protein-calorie malnutrition, or PCM: pure calorie deprivation. But the body can be damaged just as severely when deprived of a few hundred micrograms of an essential nutrient. Too little vitamin A results in the disease known as xerophthalmia, which causes ulcers in the cornea, and, frequently, blin
dness. The progress of pellagra, a deficiency in niacin/vitamin B3, is still taught to medicine students as the so-called four D’s: diarrhea, dermatitis, dementia, and death. Scurvy, a lack of the vitamin C necessary to produce the body’s collagen proteins, causes teeth and hair to fall out, severe liver damage, and eventually a very painful death.

  A famine can claim its victims just as easily from what they do eat as from what they don’t. The typical response to profound hunger, for example, is the replacement of regular food with what are known as “strange diets.” During the Great Famine, rural poor were said to have “gnawed, just like dogs, [on] the raw dead bodies of cattle” and “grazed like cows on the growing grasses of the field.” In cities and towns, the strange diets were, if anything, even stranger, and more damaging: tainted meat, rats, insects, and bread bulked out with everything from straw to brick dust. The ergotism caused by eating moldy rye results in hallucinations and manic behavior when the fungus attacks the nervous system, and causes seizures when it attacks the muscles. In its most virulent attacks, it can cut off circulation and cause death by gangrene. Gastrointestinal anthrax is contracted from eating infected meat. Johannes de Trokelowe, the Saint Albans monk, wrote, horrified, that “men, poisoned from spoiled food, succumbed, as did beasts and cattle, dead from a poisonous rottenness of the grass. Nor does anyone remember so much dearth and famine to have prevailed in the past.”

  Even if the most acute poisonings could be avoided, one unavoidable result of eating so much with so little nutritional value is a profound lethargy. When there aren’t enough calories to maintain even the basic functions of life—the BMR—the body’s temperature drops and skin becomes pallid as the body reduces blood flow to its peripheries. People can, and did, die from lacking enough energy to find and prepare food.