PART I
FOURTEENTH CENTURY
Chapter 1
The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century
Joseph Canning
The fourteenth century in Europe witnessed the impact of power, violence and mass death in particularly acute ways, so much so, that this period has entered folk memory as one of extreme devastation. Indeed, these disasters produced such far-reaching and long-term changes that the late medieval world which they helped to shape seems radically different from that of the High Middle Ages.
The catastrophes of this time were the product of non-human causes; the interaction of these with human agency; and human actions. Centuries are, of course, artificial divisions projected on to the past for the convenience of historians and their audiences, but in this case there is justification for beginning in about 1300. The previous period of the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries had experienced a warmer phase in the long-term climatic cycle, providing the conditions in which the great economic and cultural expansion of the High Middle Ages took place. The European population had doubled, supported by internal colonization with the clearing of forests, draining of fields and bringing of marginal lands under cultivation. The result was that the limits of subsistence had been reached by the end of the thirteenth century, given available technology. Any seriously adverse factor could have tipped the balance and led to a slide into disaster involving great loss of life. At the beginning of the fourteenth century that is what happened. There occurred a climate change, especially in northern Europe. The average annual temperature cooled by about 1°C. with the result that winters became colder and wetter; summers were shorter; the growing season was curtailed; and marginal lands had to be abandoned. It was in this macro-context of factors outside human control that the micro-stories of the sufferings of individual lives were played out.
The first scourge that came to afflict the land was famine. The possibility of famine was always present in the Middle Ages, but a bad harvest could normally be coped with. The difficulty emerged, if two such came in a row. In the years 1315-22 there occurred the Great North European Famine. This was primarily the product of the climate change exacerbated by human action. The repeated crop failures and associated animal diseases produced famine conditions in which starvation and death occurred on a scale unknown before in the Middle Ages. The crisis was caused by a combination of production and distribution problems. The crop failures through bad weather were made worse by inadequate storage and transportation and, in places, by the depredations of war. The weather did, however, finally improve and a disaster on such a scale did not occur again in the remainder of the Middle Ages. In his paper, William Chester Jordan examines the reactions of different social groups to the conditions of the famine. But an intriguing question remains. Was there a link between the Great Famine and the next scourge which came to strike fourteenth-century peopleâthe Black Death? Could the famine have so weakened the population that it was particularly vulnerable to disease? This certainly cannot be proved with one possible exception: it is arguable, as Jordan has suggested, that those who were children at the time of the Famine may have had their immune systems so damaged that they were more susceptible to infection when the Black Death struck them later as adults.1
The Black Death which spread through Europe between 1347 and 1351 produced massive loss of life, although any attempts to reach anything like accurate demographic figures are bound to be inaccurate because of the lack of reliable statistical evidence. The pandemic was unforeseen, sudden and overwhelming in its attack: the great Italian jurist, Bartolus of Sassoferrato, for instance, saw it as evidence of âthe hostility of Godâ.2 The experience and impact of the Black Death have raised so many questions for historians. One in particular is now in the forefront of debate. It has been conventional to maintain that the Black Death had several forms: bubonic, pneumonic and septicaemic plague. This orthodoxy was questioned with the suggestion, now abandoned, that the disease may have been anthrax. The paper by Samuel Cohn casts doubt upon the identification of the Black Death with bubonic plague. He maintains that modern historians have been guilty of a fundamental mistake in arguing that the Yersinia pestis bacillus, only discovered in 1894, was responsible for the Black Death. The problem with the history of disease is that contemporary accounts of symptoms and the profile of epidemics cannot with certainty reveal the precise nature of a disease. Only scientific analysis of tissue or blood samples could do that. This produces huge difficulties when dealing with diseases in the pastâa well-known example would be the problems faced by those trying to discover the strain of influenza which caused so many deaths in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. We may well never know, for certain, the precise nature of the Black Death and subsequent âplaguesâ. Ignorance in matters of hygiene almost certainly made matters worse. At the time, the possibilities of human action to protect against the disease were severely limited because of lack of medical knowledge, although draconian quarantine measures, as in Milan, could and did limit its spread.
Human action was however paramount in producing the third scourge afflicting fourteenth-century Europe: war. The Hundred Years War which broke out between England and France in 1337 is the most well-known and certainly most prolonged. It had particularly devastating economic and social effects on the population in large parts of France. But it was only one war amongst many. A.D. Carr in his paper provides a survey of the range of conflicts which affected Europe as a wholeâfew areas escaped. As always, it was mainly civilians who suffered most, often in conditions of total war.
Overall, the fourteenth century does provide much evidence of mass death resulting from famine, disease and war. The immediate effects of these calamities were, of course, huge loss of life and immense human sufferingâa great mass of individual tragedies. As tends to be the case with disasters, many survivors did benefit economically and socially from the deaths of their fellows, but there were long-term damaging effects for society as a whole: a deep distrust of human institutions, notably the church; profound anxiety caused by the precariousness of life; and, for many, diminished hope for the future.
1 William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, 1996), pp. 186-7.
2 See his commentary on Digestum novum, 41.3.5, fol. 100v (ed. Turin, 1577).
Chapter 2
Famine and Popular Resistance: Northern Europe, 1315-22
William Chester Jordan
Drawing on and expanding some already published work, I intend in this chapter to describe briefly the environment in which northern Europeans lived in the years 1315 to 1322, specifically the nature of the weather and of political conditions and the results for crops, animals and the human population in the era known as the Great Famine. Second, I sketch the reactions of superordinate groups to these conditions. Third, and at greatest length, I expand on an issue to which I did not devote sufficient attention in earlier studies, namely, the attempts of women and men of subordinate status to resist many of the policies and practices those with the greatest political and economic power established in order to protect their interests.1
The Great Famine
It is generally agreed that enormous demographic growth and expansion of settlements into once heavily forested lands and comparable wildernesses characterized northern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.2 Field systems achieved an extraordinary complexity,3 since husbandmen laid them out in part to adjust to the physical character of the land and in part to make cultivation suitable for a wide array of crops.4 Probably because of the varied diet and judging in part from skeletal remains, especially the length of human leg bones, the population was also extremely healthy, healthier, for example, than it was in many northern European regions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.5
All this began to change towards the year 1300. Population pressure pushed farmers into cultivating lands whose yields were extremely low.6 The very working of these fields put them at risk of erosion.7 The urban population, anywhere from 5 percent to 20 percent of the regional population, depending on how one defines a town,8 was particularly at risk from shortfalls in harvests.9 And, in general the relatively high integration of the thirteenth-century northern economies,10 even of regions still only imperfectly monetized, like Norway, Sweden and Lithuania,11 meant that shortfalls in any major region would have a significant impact far beyond that region.
The harvest shortfalls arose from a lengthy period, up to seven years (1315-1322) in some areas, of extremely bad weatherâheavy continuous rains in the first years, drought in the latter, and all punctuated by cruelly severe winters.12 Relatively less affected regions in the north could not systematically provide the harder hit regions with necessary foodstuffs in part because of political conditions, notably war. And, of course, war contributed directly to the production crisis and the decline in prosperity.13 Sometimes the evidence is impressionistic, as for example when the English king issued a pardon and reduction of fines that had been imposed on the inhabitants of Morganno in southern Wales. These people had risen against the English crown in support of the Welsh rebel Llewelen Bren. The king authorized the pardon and reduction in fines because theyâthe inhabitantsâhad to sell âmost of their chattels at a loss [the year before] to raise the [money for the fine] and ...