The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 (17 page)

After the famine, the quality of nutrition in town and village seems to
have improved somewhat or at least held steady. Populations declined in
some districts, making farming land more plentiful. Slightly more efficient agriculture came from a slow trend toward larger farms, a precursor
of the large scale enclosures of common land in later centuries.

Northern Europe never again endured a hunger as catastrophic as that
of 1315. Later famines, however local, served as reminders of the great
fragility of society. Not until the late seventeenth century in England, and
more than a century later in France, did new agricultural methods and
crops, much improved commercial infrastructures, and large-scale food
imports significantly reduce the threat of famine.

Village life in France was typical of that over much of Europe. In 1328,
agents of the King of France counted households and parishes across the
land and found between 15 and 18 million people living within the geographical extent of what was, three centuries later, the sovereign nation
known as France.2 Ninety percent of Frenchmen were peasants, an enormous number relative to the available food supply. Despite areas of high
agricultural productivity, like the great estates around Paris and the winegrowing region near Bordeaux, nine-tenths of the nation's labor was dedicated simply to feeding itself. As the population quickly recovered after
the 1315-22 famine at a time of relatively low crop yields and finite cultivable land, grain production reached an inevitable ceiling, making the
rural population all the more vulnerable to poor harvests. At the same
time, the peasants suffered under high rents, low wages, and excessive
subdivision of the land, most of which belonged to the nobility. Nevertheless, the early fourteenth century was relatively prosperous. Some
French historians refer to this period as the monde plein, the full world."

The "full world" did not last long. By the thirteenth century, the
Mongol empire extended from the Yunan region of southern China
across Eurasia to the Black Sea. Mongol networks of highly mobile
horsemen linked Asia to Europe and India to Manchuria. During the
fourteenth century, Mongol supply trains picked up rats carrying fleas
infected with a complex series of bacterial strains known as Yersinia
pestis, which cause bubonic (glandular) plague.3 Where they did so is a
matter of debate, but it was probably in the Gobi Desert. Bubonic
plague broke out in Central Asia in 1338/39 and reached China and In dia in 1346. Harsh climatic change may have hastened the spread of the
disease. As Europe went through a wetter cycle, hotter, drier conditions
affected Central Asia, triggering constant movements of Mongol populations searching for fresh grazing grass. Plague fleas and their hosts accompanied them. The epidemic reached the Black Sea port of Caffa by
1347 when besieging Mongols are said, implausibly, to have hurled
plague-infested corpses over the walls with catapults. It is more likely
that the disease entered the town on the back of infiltrating rodents.
Fleeing Genoese ships then carried the fleas and their hosts to Constantinople, Italy, and Marseilles. At least 35 percent of Genoa's population
perished in the first onslaught.

From the prosperous Italian cities, the Black Death spread in waves
over western Europe. In the Paris region, the population fell by at least
two-thirds between 1328 and 1470. The district of Caux in Normandy
lost at least two-thirds of its villagers. One estimate places the population loss for France as a whole at no less than 42 percent, much of the
mortality among people who had suffered from malnutrition during
the great famine a generation earlier. The plague entered Britain
through several ports, among them Bristol, where the plague swept
ashore in August 1348, "where almost the whole strength of the town
perished, as it was surprised by sudden death; for few kept their beds
more than two or three days, or even half a day."4 By July 1349, the
Black Death had reached Scotland, where "nearly a third of mankind
were thereby made to pay the debt of nature. . . . The flesh of the sick
was sometimes puffed out and swollen and they dragged out their
earthly life for barely two days."5 This first onslaught did not run its
course until 1351.

The Black Death left a legacy of irregular epidemics, which descended
about every decade, sometimes more frequently, especially in crowded
towns. People were powerless to combat the epidemics, their only perceived recourse the centuries-old panacea of religious processions and
prayer. In Germany, penitents stripped to the waist and beat their backs
with weighted scourges, singing hymns in loud voices. "They sang very
mournful songs about nativity and the passion of Our Lord. The object
of this penance was to put a stop to the mortality, for in that time ... at
least a third of all the people died."6 Not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did rational quarantine methods such as disinfection and isolation come into widespread use by armies, hospitals, and civil
authorities.

By the beginning of the fifteenth century, the depopulation of the countryside by famine, plague, and war had led to the abandonment of as
many as 3,000 villages across France alone. Thousands of hectares of
arable land lay vacant and did not come back into cultivation until the
end of the century or even later. Again, war was a villain. Frightened peasants fled behind city walls and dared not venture out to cultivate fallow
land nearby, thereby compounding food shortages caused by poor harvests and wet weather. In Scandinavia, sodden fields prevented farmers
from planting. English visitors to a Danish royal wedding in 1406 remarked that they passed many fields, but saw no growing wheat. Farmhouses were abandoned by the score, as families now shared the same
buildings.

The recurrent plagues and regular famines kept population in check
for generations. There were well-documented food crises around Paris
and Rouen in 1421, 1432, 1433, and especially from 1437 to 1439,
probably years when a high NAO index brought unusually heavy rainfall
ashore in western Europe. The famines resulted in large part from poor
harvests, mostly caused by excessively wet winters, springs, and summers,
when waterlogged and flattened cereal crops spoiled in the fields. Bad
harvests came about every ten years, at a time when food shortages were
aggravated by constant war and brigandage. With the population much
reduced, there should have been fewer food shortages, but famine
scourged the land with distressing regularity, in large part because of the
constant fighting associated with the Hundred Years War.

The 1430s brought a run of exceptionally harsh winters, with at least
seven years of prolonged frost and severe storms. French vineyards suffered
much frost damage in 1431/32, when a persistent high pressure center
over Scandinavia brought intense cold to Britain and much of western Europe. Dozens of ships were wrecked in Bay of Biscay storms with the loss
of hundreds of lives. Far out in the Atlantic, a Venetian ship bound for the
port of Bruges was blown far off course by a fierce, ten-day northeasterly gale. The crew abandoned the vessel far out in the Atlantic the day after
Christmas 1431 and, in a remarkable feat of seamanship, reached the Norwegian coast safely in a small open boat on January 14.7 Tree rings from
southern English oaks confirm a series of stressful years with many cold
winters and springs, also some warm summers, between 1419 and 1459. A
Europe-wide famine in 1433-38 almost rivaled the great hunger in its intensity. By 1440, wine growing had virtually disappeared in Britain. Only
the vineyards at Ely in eastern England persisted until 1469, before they,
too, ceased operation after years of producing sour, unripe juice.

The first signs of recovery in France came with the end of the Hundred
Years War in 1453, during a time of milder oceanic conditions. The next
half-century saw spectacular gains in grain production as land that had
been abandoned after the Black Death was again cultivated. Food shortages were unknown in many areas until at least 1504. Grain became so
cheap that many producers turned to livestock and other more profitable
foods. Cattle and sheep were excellent investments and good insurance
for landowners against poor harvests, even if their tenant farmers and the
poor went hungry in bad years. So were fish. Between 1460 and 1465, a
chancellor of France built a large pond with a forty-meter dam near Lassay. The elaborate barrier had three outlets and formed a fifty-fourhectare, reed-lined lake with a depth of six meters, where thousands of
fish flourished. Every three or four years, the outlets were opened, the water drained and thousands of fish gathered, to the delectation of local fish
merchants. While the landowner counted his profits, his peasants plowed
the wet land beneath the dam and planted oats or grazed cattle.s

These benign conditions persisted into the early sixteenth century. The
dates of the wine harvest hint at a long period of warm springs and summers between 1520 and 1560, surrounding three cold years with late harvests in 1527-29.9 The 1520s produced five exceptional English harvests in
a row, when people adapted readily to greater plenty. A spike of sudden
cold weather in 1527 brought immediate threats of social unrest. In that
year, the mayor's register at Norwich in eastern England noted "there was so
great scarceness of corne that aboute Christmas the comons of the cyttye
were ready to rise upon the ryche men."10 Still, life in the countryside went
on much as before. Crop diversification, self-sufficiency, and the realities of
hunger and death changed little in rural England and France from year to year. Nor did the simple farming technology of the day make adapting to
cycles of warm or cold an easy matter.

Even relatively privileged landowners lived close to the edge, at risk
from rain and drought, but like the peasants they have left few records of
their prosaic lives. In the mid-1500s, a century after the end of the Hundred Years War, Gilles de Gouberville was a "quasi-peasant, lord of a small
manor at Le Mesnil-en-Val, an hour's walk inland from Cherbourg in
Normandy."I I He was typical of his time except that for more than two
decades he kept a journal, which offers a fascinating portrait of life on a
large estate at near-subsistence level. He and his "farm-boys" relied on the
simplest of technologies-and ran up constant blacksmith's bills because
their light plow shares kept breaking in the rocky soil. Gouberville was a
fairly efficient farmer with a strong practical streak, who placed little reliance on the superstitions of the time. He did not, for example, sow his
crops at full moon, as many farmers did. The teachings of the seer Nostradamus about timing his planting briefly captivated him in 1557, but
gave him only average results in 1558. Nostradamus's book stayed on the
shelf after that. Instead, Gouberville diversified away from cereals.

Like everyone else, Gouberville rotated cereals, mixed fodder, and fallow
in his fields, growing peas to regenerate his soil and produce more food. He
tried all manner of fertilizers on his cultivated lands, but they failed to increase his crops, grown by the near-free labor of his villagers and mostly
consumed by his family and his laborers-or by the rodents in his barns.
Gouberville's profit came from livestock, especially cattle, horses, and pigs.
His cattle roamed free in the nearby forests, the pigs fed on acorns from the
forest. He also sold grazing rights in the forest to his villagers for large sums.
Gouberville was no innovator, but he knew the wisdom of diversification
and of drinking cider. "Cider restores the roots of humour and humidity,"
wrote a seventeenth-century academic, who praised its ability to keep the
belly "soft and relaxed, by the benignity of its vapors."12 Apart from these
medical powers, cider kept people in "modesty" and "moderation." Gouberville tended the fourteen apple varieties in his orchards with sedulous
care, for cider, a relatively sterile liquid, was far less dangerous than the polluted water supplies of the countryside. Cider was an insurance against illness and death. As Gouberville well knew, when local cider became too expensive, the peasants turned to water and the death rate promptly rose.