The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

by Brian Fagan

  The hunger was made worse by the previous century's population growth. Late eleventh-century England's population of about 1.4 million had risen to 5 million by 1300. France's inhabitants (that is, that part of Europe now lying within the country's modern boundaries) increased from about 6.2 million in the late eleventh century to about 17.6 million or even higher. By 1300, with the help of cereal cultivation at unprecedented altitudes and latitudes, Norway supported half a million people. Yet economic growth had not kept pace with population. There was already some sluggishness in local economies by 1250, and very slow growth everywhere after 1285. With growing rural and urban populations, high transportation costs, and very limited communication networks, the gap between production and demand was gradually widening throughout northern Europe. Many towns and cities, especially those away from the coast or major waterways, were very vulnerable to food shortages.

  In the countryside, many rural communities survived at near-subsistence levels, with only enough grain to get through one bad harvest and plant for the next year. Even in good years, small farmers endured the constant specter of winter famine. All it took was a breakdown in supply lines caused by iced-in shipping, bridges damaged by floods, an epidemic of cattle disease that decimated breeding stock and draught animals, or too much or too little rainfall, and people went hungry.

  Even in the best of times, rural life was unrelentingly harsh. Six decades earlier, in 1245, a Winchester farm worker who survived childhood diseases had an average life expectancy of twenty-four years. Excavations in medieval cemeteries paint a horrifying picture of health problems resulting from brutal work regimes. Spinal deformations from the hard labor of plowing, hefting heavy grain bags, and scything the harvest are commonplace. Arthritis affected nearly all adults. Most adult fisherfolk suffered agonizing osteoarthritis of the spine from years of heavy boatwork and hard work ashore. The working routines of fourteenthcentury villagers revolved around the never-changing rhythm of the seasons, of planting and harvest. The heat and long dry spells of summer were a constant struggle against weeds that threatened to choke off the growing crops. The frantically busy weeks of harvest time saw villagers bent to the scythe and sickle and teams of threshers winnowing the precious grain. The endless round of medieval household and village never ceased, and the human cost in constant, slow-moving toil was enormous. Yet despite the unending work, village diets were never quite adequate, and malnutrition was commonplace. Local food shortages were a reality of life, assuaged by reliance on relatives and manorial lords or on the charity of religious houses. Most farmers lived from harvest to harvest on crop yields that at the best of times were far below modern levels.

  Both archaeology and historical records provide portraits of medieval village life, but few are as complete as that from Wharram Percy, a deserted village in northeast England. Forty years of research have revealed a long-established settlement that mirrors many villages of the day. Iron Age farmers lived at Wharram Percy more than 2,000 years ago. At least five Roman farms flourished here. By the sixth century, Saxon families dwelt in their place. Scattered farming settlements gave way to a more compact village between the ninth and twelfth centuries, which was replanned at least twice. The Medieval Warm Period was good to Wharram Percy, when the settlement entered its heyday. The population grew considerably, the hectarage under cultivation expanded dramatically. The compact village became a large settlement with its own church, two manor houses and three rows of peasant houses, each with its own croft (enclosure) built around a central, wedge-shaped green. The peasants lived in thatched long houses, their roofs supported by pairs of timbers known as crucks, with flimsy walls that were replaced at regular intervals. Each building had three parts: an inner room for sleeping, sometimes used as a dairy, a main living area with central hearth, and a third space used as a cattle byte, or for some other farming purpose. (Long houses were common in Medieval villages everywhere, although architecture and village layout varied greatly between Scandinavia and the Alps.) Wharram Percy was largely self-sufficient, a prosperous community in its heyday. But the bountiful days of the thirteenth century were long fled from memory when the village was finally abandoned in the sixteenth century.

  The self-sufficiency of European villages extends deep into the past, to long before the Romans imposed the Pax Romana on Gaul and Britannia just before the time of Christ. A millennium later, life still revolved around the manor house and the farm, the monastery and small market towns. Tens of thousands of parish churches formed a network of territorial authority at the village level, where, for all the political changes and land ownership controversies, the parish priest remained a figure of respect. But times were changing as new commercial and political interests emerged. By 1250, a tapestry of growing cities and towns linked by tracks, water ways and trade routes lay superimposed on the rural landscape. Walled castles and cities rose at strategic locations, creating oases of safety in troubled lands where barons fought with barons at the slightest provocation. Towns and cities, a few with as many as 50,000 inhabitants, were places somewhat apart, striving for their own social and political identity, peopled by a growing class of merchants and burghers, who were outside the feudal system. Many of these towns lay at key ports and estuaries, at important river crossings, or around the residences of important lords and bishops. But poor communications, especially on land, meant that most communities were largely self-sufficient, as they had always been. The parish always remained the cornerstone of the ordered life of the countryside through famine, plague, and war, long after nation states and powerful commercial associations transformed the European economy.

  Medieval farming: sheep shearing sowing, and the harvest. Reconstruction based on Wharram Percy, England. Reprinted with permission of English Heritage.

  Medieval farming: interior of a long house with its crucks (timber beams). Reconstruction based on Wharram Percy, England. Reprinted with permission of English Heritage.

  Europe's commerce was still based on trade routes well known to the Romans. Wool flowed across the North Sea and English Channel, Mediterranean goods up major waterways like the Rhine and overland, along routes between Lombardy, Genoa, and Venice, important centers of trade with eastern Mediterranean lands. The Hanseatic League, a powerful commercial association based in Scandinavia, Germany, and the Low Countries, was still in its infancy. Europe's rudimentary infrastructure still depended on slow, unreliable communications across potentially stormy seas, on rivers and inland waterways, and the most rudimentary rural tracks. The amount of grain imported from the Baltic and Mediterranean lands was still minuscule compared with later centuries. In the final analysis, every community, every town, was on its own.

  Medieval farmers had few options for dealing with rainfall and cold. They could diversify their crops, planting some drought-resistant strains and others that thrived in wetter conditions. As a precaution, they could sow their crops on a mosaic of different soils, hoping for better yields from some of them. In earlier centuries they could perhaps move to richer areas, but by 1300 most of Europe's best farmland was occupied. Storage was all important. Enough grain had to be kept on hand to tide the community over from one harvest to the next and beyond, and to even out the good and bad years. Even with barns stuffed to the eaves, however, few medieval villages could endure two bad harvests, even if wealthy lords or religious foundations with their large granaries had such a capacity. The villagers' best recourse was the ability to exchange grain and other vi tal commodities with relatives and neighbors living close or afar. This form of famine relief could be highly effective on a small scale, but not when an entire continent suffered the same disaster.

  Most close-knit farming communities endured the shortages of 1315 and hoped for a better harvest the following year. Then the spring rains in 1316 prevented proper sowing of oats, barley, and spelt. The harvest failed again and the rains continued. Complained a Salzburg chronicler of 1316: "There was such an inundation of waters that it seemed as tho
ugh it was THE FLOOD."6 Intense gales battered Channel and North Sea. Storm-force winds piled huge sand dunes over a flourishing port at Kenfig near Port Talbot in south Wales, causing its abandonment. Villages throughout northern Europe paid the price for two centuries of extensive land clearance. Flocks and herds withered, crops failed, prices rose, and people contemplated the wrath of God. The agony was slow: famine weakens rural populations and makes them vulnerable to disease, which follows almost inevitably in its train. The prolonged disaster is familiar from modern-day famines in Africa and India. People first turned to relatives and neighbors, invoking the ties of kin and community that had bound them for generations. Then many families abandoned their land, seeking charity from relatives or aimlessly wandering the countryside in search of food and relief. Rural beggars roamed from village to village and town to town, telling (often false) stories of entire communities abandoned or of deserted meadows and hillsides.

  By the end of 1316, many peasants and laborers were reduced to penury. Paupers ate dead bodies of diseased cattle and scavenged growing grasses in fields. Villagers in northern France are said to have eaten cats, dogs, and the dung of pigeons. In the English countryside, peasants lived off foods that they would not normally consume, many of them of dubious nutritional value. They were weakened by diarrhea and dehydration, became more susceptible to diseases of all kinds, were overcome by lethargy, and did little work. The newborn and the aged died fastest.

  Community after community despaired and slowly dissolved. Thousands of acres of farmland were abandoned due to a shortage of seed corn and draught oxen, and to falling village populations. Huge areas of the Low Countries, inundated by the sea after major storms and prolonged rains, were so difficult to reclaim that major landowners could hardly persuade farmers to resettle their flooded lands. Across the North Sea, in the Bilsdale area of northeast Yorkshire, late thirteenth-century homesteaders had cleared hundreds of acres of higher ground for new villages. A couple of generations later, knots of hamlets, each with its own carpenters, foresters, and tanners, flourished on the newly cleared land. But climatic and economic deterioration, the 1316 famine, disease, and Scottish raids caused all of them to be abandoned by the 1330s. The hamlets became tiny single-family holdings, and the communities dispersed. Throughout northern Europe, small farming communities on marginal land were abandoned, or shrunk until their holdings were confined to the most fertile and least flood-prone lands.

  The cold and wet conditions brought profound hardship to homesteads almost everywhere. Many free landowners, forced to sell or mortgage their farms, were reduced to the basest poverty. Thousands of farmers became laborers, especially in areas around London and other large cities, where there was much demand for food and such tasks as plowing were made more laborious by the wet, clogged soils. Real estate records and rent lists reveal a dramatic increase in land transactions, as richer landowners exploited their poorer neighbors and families deeded fields to their children to enable them to survive. Compared with 1315, for example, the manor of Hindolveston in Norfolk witnessed a 160 percent increase in surrenders of property by tenants in 1316, and a 70 percent overage in 1317. In most cases, a handful of rich farmers bought out their poorer colleagues. One Adam Carpenter acquired five parcels of land in 1315 alone. By the time the rush of transactions abated, he had acquired forty-seven.

  The year 1316 was the worst for cereal crops throughout the entire Middle Ages. In many places, the crops simply did not ripen. Where wheat could be harvested, the plants were stunted, the yields pitiful. Throughout the thirteenth century, the Winchester manors in southern England had enjoyed more or less constant yields of about three bushels for every one sown. The 1316 crop was only 55.9 percent of normal, the lowest between 1271 and 1410. The estate's income accounts record "from lamb's wool nothing this year, because they were not shorn on ac count of the great inconsistency of the weather in the summer." "From the sale of hay in the meadow, nothing on account of the abundance of rain in the summer." The Bishop of Winchester's mill made no profit "because the mill did not grind for half the year on account of the flood." 7 Not only wheat but barley, beans, oats, and peas yielded crops that were 15 to 20 percent lower than normal. Northern Europe generally experienced comparable shortfalls.

  Salt and wine production plummeted. Downy mildew attacked French grapes, so vines never reached their proper maturity and "there was a great failure of wine in the whole kingdom of France." Chroniclers complained of shortages and harsh taste. The vineyards of Neustadt in Germany were hard hit: 1316, "a trifling quantity of wine"; 1317, "very little wine." That of 1319 was "sour," while the cold in 1323 was so extreme that the root stocks died. Not until 1328, six years after the famine ended, was there "very much and exceptionally good wine."8

  The weather attacked not only crops but animals. Just feeding them in winter became a serious headache. The fields were so damp that, even if hay could be mowed, the crops could not dry in the open. Stored in a barn, uncured hay rots, builds up heat and methane gas, and can burst into flames unless turned regularly. What drying ovens and kilns were available were used to dry unripened grain for human consumption. The worst for animals came later in the famine years. The bitterly cold winter of 1317/18 used up the already depleted fodder stocks. When these ran out, farmers had to turn their animals out to forage for themselves in short-lived warmer spells. Thousands of head starved or froze to death in their pastures. Sheep suffered especially badly from the cold, for prolonged snow and frost early in the year make lambing a risky proposition. The raw summer brought virulent rinderpest, which attacked cattle with diarrhea, dehydration, and intestinal failure. Thousands of putrefying carcasses were burnt or buried in mass graves. A parasitic worm infection called liver fluke reduced sheep and goat flocks by as much as 70 percent in some places.

  "The great dying of beasts" continued into the early 1320s, bringing severe shortages not only of livestock but of manure for the fields. The impact was felt immediately. Oxen and horses lay at the heart of the rural economy, the former used extensively for plowing. Teams of oxen, often owned jointly by several families, plowed heavier soils for entire communi ties and were heavily used by medieval manors. Inevitably, the stock shortage translated into fewer hectares plowed, abandoned fields, and lower crop yields. Only pigs were relatively unaffected. Fast-breeding swine were abundant until the shortfall in bread, beef, and mutton caused people to increase the amount of pork in their diet and herds were decimated.

  In the towns, the urban poor ate less bread. Wrote a Flemish observer in 1316: "The people were in such great need that it cannot be expressed. For the cries that were heard from the poor would move a stone, as they lay in the street with woe and great complain, swollen with hunger."9 In Flanders, bread was no longer made from wheat but from anything that was available. Sixteen Parisian bakers were caught putting hog dung and wine dregs in their loaves. They were placed on punishment wheels in public squares and forced to hold fragments of the rotten bread in their hands. People went days without eating and assuaged hunger pangs by eating leaves, roots, and the occasional fish taken from a stream. Even King Edward II of England had trouble finding bread for his court. Famine was often more severe in cities and towns than in the countryside, with widespread diarrhea and lethargy resulting from "strange diets." The hungry suffered greatly from the intense winter cold. There had not been so many deaths from disease or such instability in towns within living memory. Robbery with assault became commonplace as thieves stole anything that could be eaten or sold for food, be it hay, timber, or church roof lead. Piracy flourished as desperate locals preyed on fishing boats and grain vessels.

  Grave robbing had always been a fact of life, especially in times of scarcity, when thieves would dig for coins, clothing, and fine objects buried with the dead that could be pawned. Towns like Marburg in Germany maintained faint lights in their cemeteries, which may have prevented some looting, but no one protected rural burial grounds. One can imagine the surreptit
ious gleam of candle lanterns in country graveyards in the small hours of the night, the stealthy digging into a fresh grave, the quick stripping of the corpse of its shroud and silver ornaments. By morning, there would be only scattered bones, perhaps a grinning skull and dismembered finger bones, their rings torn away. From there, it was but a short step to rumors of secret cannibalism, of people eating their children. London taverns bred tales of hungry villagers seen eating their kin and of famished prisoners in jail consuming fellow inmates, but no chronicler ever wrote of a specific instance.

  Beggars flocked to the cities from the countryside. In the Low Countries, they gathered in large groups, scavenged the middens that lay outside town walls or "grazed like cattle" in the fields. Bodies littered cultivated land and were buried in mass graves. The mendicants spread disease. In the town of Tournai in modern-day Belgium, 1316 was "the year of the mortality." Gilles de Muisit, abbot of Saint-Martin de Tournai, wrote: "men and women from among the powerful, the middling, and the lowly, old and young, rich and poor, perished daily in such numbers that the air was fetid with the stench." 10 Huge communal cemeteries entombed the previously segregated dead, rich and poor alike. In Louvain, a wagon from the hospital "loaded with six or eight corpses twice or thrice a day continuously carried pitiable little bodies to the new cemetery outside the town." Between 5 and 10 percent of Flanders's urban population perished in the Great Famine.