Chapter thirteen ended with a success story. Better ploughs, horse collars, three field rotation, mills, cleared forests and drained marshes, and a population that roughly doubled between the tenth century and the fourteenth.
Population growth of that kind has a limit, and the limit is not a wall you hit but a slope you climb. As numbers rise, the good land is already taken, so the next generation farms the thinner soil, the steeper slope, the wetter ground, the higher field. Those plots yield less in a good year and nothing in a bad one.
At the same time holdings get subdivided among heirs until many families are working plots too small to feed them, and depend on wage labour or on rights of common to make up the difference.
By 1300 there are signs across northern Europe that this point had been reached. Yield ratios recorded in manorial accounts, the grain harvested for each grain sown, are low and in some places declining. Land is being cultivated that would be abandoned within two generations and never ploughed again. Wages relative to grain prices are poor, which is what an oversupplied labour market looks like.
None of that is a catastrophe on its own. It is a society with no margin, and margin is what you need when the weather changes.
Europe had enjoyed several centuries of relatively warm conditions, warm enough that vineyards were worked further north than they are now and that Norse farmers kept cattle in Greenland.
Around 1300 that period ended and a long cooler, wetter and more variable phase began, which climate historians call the Little Ice Age and which ran, with fluctuations, into the nineteenth century. We are not inferring this from chronicles alone. Tree rings, which record growing conditions year by year, ice cores, glacial advances, lake sediments and harvest dates in wine growing regions all point the same way.
The mechanism most often proposed for the sharpest early episode is volcanic. A very large eruption somewhere in the tropics in 1257, and further activity in the following decades, put enough material into the stratosphere to cool summers, and the ice cores carry the chemical signature.
What that meant on the ground in 1315 was rain. It began in the spring across a band from Ireland to Poland and continued through the summer. Grain rotted in waterlogged fields or failed to ripen. Hay could not be dried, so there was no winter fodder. Salt, which was made by evaporating seawater in the sun, became scarce and expensive, so meat and fish could not be preserved.
Then it happened again in 1316. And the harvest of 1317 was poor as well.
To see why a wet summer was lethal, you have to know how narrow the diet was.
For most of northern Europe the answer is grain, and mainly not wheat. Rye, barley and oats, as bread, as porridge, and as ale, which was drunk in quantity by everyone including children and which was a significant part of daily calories rather than a recreation. Add peas and beans, a garden of cabbage and onions, dairy where a family had a cow or access to one, and meat rarely.
Estimates from institutional records, where a monastery or a hospital wrote down exactly what it issued to each person, put the grain share of calories at something like three quarters to four fifths. A household of that kind has no substitution available. If the grain fails there is no second staple to fall back on, because the second staple is also grain.
The margin above subsistence was thin even in good years. Where wage series survive, a labourer in the decades around 1300 was earning enough to buy his family's bread and not a great deal more, which is why a doubling of the grain price is not an inconvenience but a catastrophe, and why a tripling is a death sentence for the landless.
Rights of common were the buffer. Grazing on the waste, gathering firewood and nuts, fishing, gleaning after harvest: these were not quaint customs but the difference between a bad year and a fatal one for households whose own plots were too small. Every enclosure of common land, from this period through to chapter forty one, removed some of that buffer from the people who most needed it.
The first failure empties the stores. The second is the one that kills, because a household that has eaten its reserve then eats the grain it was keeping to sow, and a field sown thinly yields thinly even if the weather turns.
Prices in the surviving records rise to several times normal and in places much more, and they rise fastest where transport is hardest. A town on a navigable river can import; an inland village cannot, because the cost of moving grain overland eats the value of the grain.
Then the animals died. From 1319 a cattle disease swept across northern Europe, and manorial accounts in some regions record losses of half to two thirds of the herd. That is not just meat and milk. It is the plough team, and the manure that kept the arable fertile. Estates that lost their oxen took years to restock and in the meantime cultivated less land, which prolonged the shortage after the weather had improved.
Mortality is hard to pin down and the honest range is wide. Careful local studies of well documented English and Flemish communities suggest something in the region of a tenth of the population dying in the worst affected places, with figures both lower and considerably higher argued for elsewhere. Most of them did not starve outright. They died of the diseases that carry off the malnourished, and of the exposure and violence that come with people on the roads.
Chronicles report the abandonment of children, the eating of dogs and cats, executed criminals cut down for meat, and cannibalism. The last of these should be treated carefully: it is a standard item in the medieval vocabulary for describing famine, appears in almost identical language in accounts centuries apart, and is very rarely attached to a verifiable case.
The most striking thing about the response is how little there was.
There was no institution with the capacity to move food at scale to where it was needed. Kings issued price controls, which made grain disappear from the open market, and then withdrew them. Some rulers banned exports, which helped their own cities and worsened matters next door. Charitable distribution by monasteries and by towns was real and was quickly overwhelmed; several religious houses recorded turning people away because their own stores were gone.
What did exist was hoarding, and the records show it plainly. Landowners with surplus grain held it as prices climbed, and religious houses that were both charitable institutions and large commercial farms did both things at once. Town governments bought on their own account to feed their citizens and forbade sales to outsiders, which is rational for a town and disastrous for the countryside around it.
The English king travelled to St Albans in 1315 and his household could not buy bread, which is the sort of detail that survives because it embarrassed somebody.
This is worth dwelling on because it defines the difference between this crisis and later ones. A famine is not simply a shortfall of food; it is a shortfall plus an inability to move food to people who cannot pay for it. Fourteenth century Europe had neither the transport, the fiscal capacity, nor the administrative idea. The construction of states that could do something about this is one of the long threads of the following twenty chapters, and it is a thread with a very poor early record.
The rain stopped, harvests recovered, and by the mid 1320s prices were more or less normal. In one sense the episode passed.
In another it did not. Marginal settlements founded during the expansion were abandoned, and archaeologists can date the abandonment. Some regions never returned to the acreage they had cultivated in 1300. Herds took a generation to rebuild. And a great many households had sold or mortgaged their land during the crisis to survive it, which concentrated holdings and left a larger class of people with nothing but their labour.
The law records show the other consequence, which is that order frayed. Prosecutions for theft rise sharply in the surviving English court rolls in these years, and what is stolen is food and animals rather than valuables. Bands on the roads, desperate rather than professional, appear in the same records. A society in which the poor are stealing bread and being hanged for it is one in which the settlement described two chapters ago has stopped describing anything.
It also broke something less tangible. The three orders scheme of chapter thirteen said that those who prayed interceded, those who fought protected, and those who worked were sustained. Three years in which prayer, protection and work all visibly failed to prevent mass death put a question mark against that arrangement that did not go away, and the following decades saw a marked rise in movements the church regarded as dangerous.
And thirty years later the plague arrived. The old explanation was direct: a population weakened by famine was easy prey. That link is now treated with much more caution, because plague of this kind killed the well fed and the young and strong in large numbers too, and because a generation had passed. What can be said is that Europe met the epidemic of chapter twenty having already lost its reserves, its confidence and a good deal of its capacity to grow food.
Firm: the climate. The reconstruction from tree rings, ice cores and glaciers is independent of any written source and is now detailed enough to give year by year growing conditions across much of Europe.
Firm: the prices and the yields, at least where manorial accounts survive. English estate records in particular allow the crisis to be tracked harvest by harvest on individual manors.
Soft: mortality. There was no census. Every figure comes from extrapolating out of a handful of well documented places, and the well documented places are not a random sample.
Soft: the chronicles. They are moralising documents that read the famine as divine punishment, and their most vivid details are the least reliable.
Contested: the underlying model. One influential reading treats the fourteenth century crisis as fundamentally Malthusian, a population that had outgrown its technology being cut back by hunger and disease. Critics argue this understates how much the distribution of land and the extraction of rents determined who starved, and point out that the crisis fell far more heavily on the landless than on anyone else. Both sides accept the weather. They disagree about whether the vulnerability was natural or arranged.