The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (10 page)

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 surreptitious 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.

By 1317, as the rains continued through another wet summer, people
everywhere despaired. The church performed complex rogation ceremonies
to pray for divine intervention. Guilds and religious orders in Paris
processed barefoot through the streets. In the dioceses of Chartres and
Rouen, chronicler Guillaume de Nangis 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."" After generations of generally good harvests and settled weather, they believed divine retribution was at hand for a Europe divided by wars. Rich and poor alike endured the punishment of God.

The famine brought an outpouring of religious fervor and, for some,
profit. Canterbury Cathedral with its wealthy priory attracted streams of
pilgrims, many of them poor travelers in holy orders. The priory had an
honorable tradition for charity. Its budget had run at a deficit because of
its generosity, showing only four years with modest surpluses between
1303 and 1314. In 1315, the monks made an unexpected profit of £534,
despite the famine. Their wheat yields were as bad as anyone else's, but
they were able to sell considerable amounts of oats. Their real profit came
from £500 worth of offerings to the priory by pilgrims praying for better
weather. In 1316, the monks found themselves in the same position as
everyone else, with significant grain shortfalls and a need to pay much higher prices for anything they could not produce for themselves. They
also faced a moral dilemma. The priory was besieged by poor pilgrims
seeking relief. Yet offerings were off by 50 percent. Rents from the priory
estates had declined by nearly half, but the house could not reduce its level
of relief without affecting its good reputation among the devout. At the
same time, consumption of communion wine had increased twofold owing to the increased level of devotions. The monks resorted to cost-cutting
measures reminiscent of modern times. They curtailed pensions, delayed
essential maintenance on buildings, and postponed costly lawsuits.

The priory's problems were compounded by increased royal taxation to
pay for wars with the Scots. King Edward I had conquered Wales between
1277 and 1301 and secured it with a line of castles from Harlech to Conway. He had also invaded Scotland unsuccessfully to intervene in a succession dispute. Edward's poorly timed intervention provoked a Scottish bid
for total independence. He was succeeded by Edward II in 1307, whose
army was defeated by Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in
1314. Warfare continued until 1328, when the Scots prevailed. The cost
for the English was enormous, at a time of great suffering. Royal taxation
fell heavily on a hungry populace and on Canterbury priory. The monks
still managed to produce plenty of high-priced oats, but most of their carefully thought out savings were eaten up not by pilgrims but by the new
taxation for Scottish wars. However, the priory's refusal to cut relief soon
rebounded in its favor. When the harvest improved in 1319, offerings
promptly skyrocketed to a record £577. The monks received so many sacred relics for a cathedral already well endowed with such artifacts that
they sold them off for over £426. It was well they had plenty of money in
hand, for cattle disease struck in 1320, with devastating effects on the surrounding area. Fortunately, offerings reached over £670, as people prayed
for relief, and the priory weathered the crisis.

The suffering lasted for seven years before more normal harvests brought a
measure of relief. Horrendous weather continued through 1318, with extensive flooding in the Low Countries in 1320 and 1322. The cycle ended
in 1322 with a reversal of the NAO, which brought a bone-chilling winter that immobilized shipping over a wide area while thousands more perished from hunger and disease. The settled climate of earlier years gave
way to unpredictable, often wild weather, marked by warm and very dry
summers in the late 1320s and 1330s and by a notable increase in storminess and wind strengths in the English Channel and North Sea. The
moist, mild westerlies that had nourished Europe throughout the Medieval Warm Period turned rapidly on and off as the NAO oscillated from
one extreme to the other. The Little Ice Age had begun.

COOLING BEGINS