The Third Horseman

by William Rosen

  However unexpected the king’s newfound support, he needed it.

  • • •

  The fall of 1321 marked yet another catastrophic harvest. This time it was occasioned not by torrential rains, as was the case six years before, but drought. Europe’s harvest of barley, which needed more water than either oats or wheat, suffered a worse failure in 1321 than it had in either 1315 or 1316.

  If Europe’s farmers were surprised by the lack of rain in 1321, they were tragically familiar with the year’s temperatures: cold, and colder. By one measure, the winters from 1303 to 1328 represent one of the coldest twenty-five-year stretches ever recorded. Using a complex system collating both tree-ring and impressionistic records—impressionistic here meaning descriptive, such as “the Rhine froze before Christmas” or “the Danube was dammed for four weeks by ice”—only one year of the twenty-five qualified as “warm.” Warm was defined as two warm months with little or no snow activity. Meanwhile, eleven were “cold” (two cold months, ground snow for weeks, and rivers frozen for one to three weeks), and four years made it all the way to “severe” (snow all winter, rivers and lakes frozen for at least a month). The winter of 1321–22 was one of the severe ones. Before January, the Baltic had frozen over once again, and a Danish chronicle recorded that horsemen and coaches could travel on the frozen sea all the way to Sweden.

  Such weather is especially hard on sheep; lambing is highly sensitive to cold. Though cold weather results in heavier individual fleeces (the average ram produced 1.93 pounds in 1321, up from a more typical 1.35 pounds), it also decimated the flocks. Wool prices, like that of nearly every other agricultural commodity grown, raised, or processed in Europe, hit a three-century peak in the decade 1310–1320.

  But wool wasn’t like any other agricultural commodity. It was at the center of the most dramatic change in the European economy since the fall of the Roman Empire.

  By the fourteenth century, four centuries of weather-enabled population growth had transformed the medieval economy from a static collection of self-contained (and self-sufficient) communities into a network that needed trade to survive. In northern Europe particularly, the towns that had emerged during the Medieval Warm Period couldn’t be fed by their surrounding fields and pastures, even when the weather was good, which meant that they needed to produce something that they could trade for grain. Textiles were the first and overwhelmingly the most important “something.” And though linen could clothe the wealthy families of northern France, and silk the great tradesmen of Italy, for everyone else the textile that mattered was woolen cloth.

  However, the regions that spun wool into thread and wove it into cloth were geographically separated from the ones that produced the best wool. The part of Flanders along the Scheldt River in possession of good clay for the “fuller’s earth” needed to bleach and filter wool before carding it into fibers, as well as many plants that could be used to make dyes, happened also to be home to sheep capable of producing only inferior coats. As a result, Flanders’ near monopoly on cloth manufacture in northern Europe was utterly dependent on sheep raised in Spain—the flocks of sheep that Don Quixote confuses with two attacking armies were part of the hundreds of thousands of merinos making their annual trek from the uplands of northern Spain to the plains of Andalusia—and especially Britain.

  English and Scottish wool was so good, and so plentiful, that the phrase “carrying wool to England” (coined by a thirteenth-century French poet) was a medieval aphorism precisely analogous to the later cliché about coals and Newcastle. The long, silky fibers of Cotswold and Lincoln sheep in Shropshire, and Leicester sheep in the Midlands and north, produced the most important cash crop and most valuable export commodity in all of Britain. Since fleeces were far more valuable than meat, wethers—castrated males—were kept alive for years as long as they could be shorn of their thicker-than-female fleeces. This was both good and bad. The fact that wool was worth more than grain meant that pastoral lands dedicated to sheep farming got farther and farther away from those used for cereals. Though East Anglia was well suited for grain production, it was almost entirely devoted to livestock by 1300, which detached the biggest producers of manure from the lands that needed it most.

  And they needed a lot of it. England’s economy, in any practical meaning, was the wool trade; wool has such a powerful meaning in England that, to this day, the seat of the presiding officer of the House of Lords is known as the “woolsack,” and has been so since the fourteenth century, when it was an actual bale of wool. As a result, the wool trade was also central to the taxing authority of every English king from Richard the Lionheart onward: the most valuable and, when exported, the easiest thing to tax. Wool was also the collateral for the Italian loans that financed the Scottish wars of both Edwards. In 1275, Edward I established the “Great and Ancient Custom” of an export tax on wool, originally 7 shillings 6 pence per sack—a “sack” was twenty-six stone, or 364 pounds—which was tolerable enough, as long as Flemish clothmakers were buying sacks for £18 each. In 1297, however, when Longshanks needed to finance wars in both Scotland and Flanders, and announced an export duty of 40 shillings a sack—effectively, the value of one sack in ten—he created a constitutional crisis. His own earls argued that “the whole community feels itself burdened by the tax on wools, which is exceedingly burdensome, for the wool of England amounts almost to the value of half the whole land, and the tax which is paid thereon to a fifth part of the value of the whole land.”*

  Which is why the lost harvest of 1321, bad as it was, wasn’t the worst of it for Edward, or his subjects. Two years after rinderpest wiped out most of northern Europe’s bovids, an epidemic of inch-long parasitic worms—Fasciola hepatica, also known as the sheep liver fluke—reduced its sheep and goat flocks by as much as 70 percent.

  The impact of this disaster—yet another in a long series—was felt most disastrously in England’s towns rather than villages. Even though townspeople neither raised wool nor (until the end of the fourteenth century) produced significant amounts of woolen cloth, they depended on the trade surpluses generated by the export of wool to purchase food. A declining supply of the nation’s most important commodity at the same time that food prices were on a sickeningly steep upward trend affected everyone, but the rural peasantry could at least grow some of their own food. Townsfolk could not.

  As a result, town mortality was orders of magnitude higher than anywhere else. As measured in the sale of properties in order to pay the taxes due when their owners died, the death rate in towns—Winchester is a good example—tripled during 1316–1320, resulting in a net reduction of population of close to 15 percent. Over the entire decade from 1310 to 1320, the mortality rate was at least 25 percent greater than normal.

  And “normal” wasn’t especially good. In modern industrialized economies, for every thousand people living at the beginning of a typical year, about eight will die—a significant improvement over the number in 1900, when it was more than seventeen. During the last half of the thirteenth century, the crude death rate in Britain was approximately 27/1000. From 1300 to 1348—which is to say, before the Black Death made its reappearance—it regularly reached 50/1,000. In towns, more than 100/1,000: one in ten.

  Bad as this was, it could have been worse. At the time of the Great Famine, only 10 to 15 percent of Europe’s population lived in towns and cities—what M. M. Postan, the eponymous author of the thesis about Europe’s “internal colonization” of marginal farmland, called non-feudal islands in a feudal sea—from one in four in Flanders to fewer than one in twenty in Scandinavia. The boundary is a little slippery, however; depending on who is doing the counting, at the beginning of the fourteenth century Europe as a whole had only between fifty-six and seventy-nine towns and cities with populations greater than ten thousand. Britain had very few; London, by far the largest, had about forty thousand to fifty thousand permanent residents. Some provincial towns, like Norwich in E
ngland, Dublin in Ireland, or Berwick in Scotland, counted between three thousand and ten thousand people, but even the most densely populated parts of Britain were home to no more than four hundred people per square mile.

  Continental Europe was considerably more urbanized. Paris was its largest city, with population estimates ranging from eighty thousand to two hundred thousand, but others were, even to a modern eye, true cities. Lille had more than twenty thousand residents; Calais, fifteen thousand; Bruges, at least thirty-five thousand; Ghent, perhaps sixty thousand. Farther east, Leiden and Strasbourg were each cities of more than ten thousand; Cologne, forty thousand.*

  Despite being a small fraction of Europe’s fourteenth-century population, or perhaps because of it, residents of towns and cities were far wealthier on a per capita basis than their rural cousins, which bred, as it always does, resentment. Even in modern societies, the virtues of trade—of buying low and selling high—are frequently seen as criminal profiteering, so it’s no surprise that a precapitalist, preindustrial world looked askance at it, particularly during times of famine. Disapproval of profiting from the misery of others was reflected in statute and traditions, sometimes both at the same time. A modern business is lauded for discovering new customers; during the fourteenth century, finding a new market in which to sell, for example, grain, was known as forestalling, and was not only illegal but shameful: “stealing” from the rightful, traditional vendor. Even worse was hoarding for purposes of speculation, which featured in dozens of stories in wide circulation by 1316: a woman denying she had bread to share with her sister, only to have God turn her hidden loaves into stone, for example.

  Even in times of plenty, towns and villages had a problematic relationship. Villages depended on towns to supply a market for their entire surplus production, which made the income of rural peasants hostage to the decisions of townsfolk. During a famine, these positions were reversed, since it wasn’t their prosperity for which towns depended on villages, but their very lives. And it took a lot of rural acreage to feed even a small town.

  Consider grain: in Devonshire, the town of Exeter, with about five thousand people, received its grain shipments from as much as twenty-five miles inland; Dijon—at least twice as large as Exeter—from a roughly circular area reaching more than fifteen miles in every direction, or more than twenty-three hundred square miles. London’s hinterlands comprised nearly a quarter of England’s stock of arable land.

  Even though towns were obliged to buy all their raw materials from their own hinterlands, they still prospered. This sort of economic leverage worked both ways, however, and during any shortage, inflation hit a cash-and-wage economy far harder than one that still included a large element of self-sufficiency and barter. The giant price increases caused by the lost harvests of 1315–1316—when output drops by half or more, prices go up by at least as much—affected towns an order of magnitude more fiercely than villages. In Valenciennes, for example, the price of cereal was twenty-four times higher in 1316 than in 1320; in Mons, thirty-two times higher. Even when compared with other nonabundant years, from decades later, prices remained five to eight times higher. The royal town of Hull, in England, was already in severe trouble before the famine; in 1310, more than a quarter of the town’s agricultural rental properties were “decayed” . . . that is, not being worked. By 1315, that number had increased to a third; by one calculation, to half. So bad did things get that Edward II ordered his men to reduce rents ruthlessly in order to preserve at least some of the crown’s income—a desperate and ultimately doomed measure, since the town, on the banks of the Humber River, was not only practically flooded out by the rains of 1315–1316 but dependent on its flocks of sheep, which were utterly destroyed by the murrain of 1320. In Hull, and in dozens of other towns, the burghers could barely afford food, much less rent.

  Those who lived in towns were also more vulnerable to both food shortages and infectious disease, since high population density increased exposure to every sort of pathogen that could be transmitted from one person to another. In the worst year of the famine, 1315, “the year of the mortality,” as many as a third of the residents of Ghent—twenty thousand men, women, and children—died from either pestilence or hunger.

  Not every aspect of the “evil times” was more ruinous for Europe’s urban population than its rural peasantry. True, they died in huge numbers from infectious disease and suffered brutally from the cold, rain, and, of course, incompetent monarchs and rebellious nobles. But they were at least better insulated than their country cousins against the ravages of war. Moreover, they were wealthier, even in the poorest of times, which meant they had a far larger arsenal of strategies for coping with disaster. Flemish and German cities regularly bought food with money raised in the bond market. They even went into the insurance business, by selling life annuities: promises to pay pensions tomorrow for cash today. So “successful” were the annuities as a hedge against famine that an annuity bubble formed; and, like all bubbles, it burst. After pledging their properties during the years 1315–1320 as collateral for the promised annuity payments, Europe’s towns, cities, and churches were left holding a highly toxic bag. The town of Stralsund, Germany, offered life annuities of 10 percent of the amount invested, and, when they were compelled to default, lost a large number of municipal properties pledged as guaranty.

  It’s a mistake, though, to assume that a typical resident of Edinburgh or London (or even Paris) believed that the famine could be relieved by better food-distribution systems, prosecution of speculators, or even annuities. The almost unfathomable series of weather-linked disasters could not have been the work of man, after all. If, on the other hand, God was testing his people, the only way for His blessings to return was by contrition: the putting aside of vanities, which meant, perversely, that fasting by those with enough to eat was viewed as a direct appeal to heaven. Another was what can only be called expiatory marches. By the fall of 1315, Parisian guilds and religious societies tried to placate God by means of barefoot processions: A contemporary French eyewitness reported, “We saw a large number of both sexes, not only from nearby places but from places as much as five leagues away, barefooted, and many even, excepting the women, in a completely nude condition, with their priests, coming together in procession at the church of the holy martyr, and they devoutly carried bodies of the saints and other relics to be adored.” The archbishop of Canterbury even went so far as to order Friday barefoot processions by all religious orders in London, so pervasive was the belief that appealing to God’s mercy could only be secured through the most public sort of contrition.

  Whatever the direct consequence of prayer and procession, charity was asked for and occasionally received. In 1318, a wealthy Londoner named Robert de Lincoln left £10 in his will to buy a meal—at a penny each—for two thousand poor people. Others with the funds to do so founded monasteries and even hospitals. Of course, private charity was easier to raise in the first years of the famine, as, year after year, economic pressure started to tell on even the wealthiest.

  The most important direct strategy for coping with famine was by importing food. Despite the ongoing war with France, and the embargo of all imports from its closest and wealthiest neighbor (and the fact that everywhere in northern Europe was suffering from the same flooding and lost harvests), municipalities were far more sophisticated in their management of a grain policy than rural estates. The Flemish were especially good at it, partly because their own territory was so dependent on trade of all sorts. The municipal council of Bruges bought stocks of grain—more than fifty-five thousand bushels of wheat alone in the spring of 1317—from Genoese, Venetian, and even Spanish middlemen, suspending the free market in grain for the duration of the emergency, and selling the grain at cost to the city-licensed bakeries, which was probably the single reason that famine-related mortality was only half as high in Bruges as in Ypres.

  The bakers of Bruges recognized a responsibility owed to
their fellow citizens, either out of public-spiritedness or fear of retribution. Not everyone was so lucky. The bakers of Paris, for example, were frequently accused—and convicted—of not just increasing the price of bread but adulterating its content. In 1316, according to the contemporary chronicler Jean de Saint-Victor, the Parisian bakers

  put many disgusting ingredients—the dregs of wine, pig droppings, and other things—in the bread that the famished people were eating . . . when the truth was known, sixteen wheels were placed on stakes in small fields of Paris, and the bakers were set upon them with their hands raised and holding pieces of the loaves so tainted. Then they were exiled from France.

  And so it went, in town after town, year after year, as rains were succeeded by drought, accompanied by murrains of cows, sheep, and horses. And while most towns and cities were safe from the widespread destruction of the armies of Scotland, England, France, and Flanders, they were still subject to self-inflicted episodes of violence.* A typical, though late, example occurred in Douai on October 28, 1322—past the worst years of the famine, but at a moment when grain hoarding and profiteering were still widely practiced and even more widely suspected. So, when two women named Jacquette Espillet and Margot Cauche appeared in the town market and, without evidence, denounced the hoarders, a riot broke out: the granary was raided, barges ransacked, burghers’ houses invaded. When justice was finally meted out, the women were sentenced to have their tongues torn out for their “evil and outrageous” words, and were banished forever, along with dozens of other rioters.