The Great Famine of 1315-1317
The first of the great crises of the fourteenth century. Beginning with relentless rain in the spring of 1315, three years of harvest failure and a devastating cattle epidemic struck a European population at its medieval peak, killing millions and ending three centuries of demographic and economic growth. The famine marked the onset of the late-medieval crisis era that culminated in the Black Death.
Events
Europe at Its Medieval Peak
The Medieval Warm Period had allowed European populations to grow to levels unmatched until the nineteenth century in some regions, with new farmland cleared and towns expanding. But wheat yields per seed had been falling since 1280 and food prices rising, leaving a large population with almost no margin for a poor harvest.
Location: Europe
The Rains of 1315
Persistent, heavy rain began across most of Europe in the spring of 1315 and continued through the summer, from Ireland and England east to Poland and south to the Alps. Crops rotted in waterlogged fields, harvests failed, and roads became impassable. The rains also halted salt production and shipping, which prevented meat from being preserved for winter. The climate event is associated by researchers with the onset of the Little Ice Age and possibly with a volcanic eruption, the so-called Dantean Anomaly.
Location: Northern Europe
A Second Failed Harvest and Social Breakdown
The summer of 1316 brought another failed harvest, and grain prices multiplied several-fold in the worst-affected towns. Chroniclers recorded extreme crime, disease, and — in accounts debated by historians — reports of cannibalism and infanticide. King Edward II of England was halted at St Albans because the roads were too muddy for his retinue to proceed, a detail that became emblematic of the paralysis of medieval governments before a continental disaster.
Location: Europe
The Harvest of 1317 and Slow Recovery
A lethal cattle disease, the Great Bovine Pestilence, spread across Europe beginning late in the famine, and over the following decade sheep and cattle numbers fell by as much as 80 percent by some estimates. The loss of draft animals and manure deepened the agricultural crisis and slowed recovery for a generation, leaving farming capacity reduced on the eve of the Black Death.
Location: Europe
The Great Bovine Pestilence
A lethal cattle disease, the Great Bovine Pestilence, spread across Europe beginning late in the famine, and over the following decade sheep and cattle numbers fell by as much as 80 percent by some estimates.
Location: Europe
The End of Growth and the Prelude to the Black Death
The famine closed the long period of growth that had begun in the eleventh century. In England, recorded life expectancy for the royal family fell from about 35 years in 1276 to under 30 in the famine years. Estimates of the death toll range up to a quarter of the population in some towns, and rural France remained less populous than before 1315 into the modern era. The Great Famine is regarded by historians as the first of the interlocking disasters — followed by the Black Death from 1347 — that defined the crisis of the late Middle Ages.
Location: Europe