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The Great Famine of 1315–1317 was one of the worst famines in European history, and it marked a major turning point in the transition from the High Middle Ages to the Late Middle Ages. The famine was caused by a series of unusually wet and cold summers that destroyed crops across Europe, from Ireland and England to northern Italy and from Spain to Scandinavia. The famine was followed by a series of epidemics — the sheep scab epizootic, the bovine murrain, and the murrain of fish — that further damaged the food supply and the economy. The Great Famine is often cited as the beginning of the demographic and economic crisis of the Late Middle Ages, and it prepared the way for the Black Death of 1347 and the other catastrophes of the fourteenth century.
William Chester Jordan, “The Great Famine” (1996), is the standard English-language treatment. The proximate cause is well-established (three successive failed harvests in 1314, 1315, 1316); the deeper causes — the demographic ceiling, the war-finance of Edward II and Philip IV, the climatic transition out of the Medieval Warm Period — are still debated.
Causes of the Great Famine
The causes of the Great Famine are well documented in the chronicles of the period and in the modern scientific analysis of the climate of the early fourteenth century. The immediate cause was a series of unusually wet and cold summers in 1314, 1315, and 1316, caused by a shift in the climate that brought cooler and wetter conditions to Europe. The wetter and cooler climate was associated with the end of the Medieval Warm Period and the beginning of a cooler and more variable climate that would dominate the next several centuries.
The climate of the period was affected by a number of factors, including the increased volcanic activity of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the decreased solar activity of the period (the Wolf Minimum of solar activity, c. 1280–1350), and the changes in ocean circulation that accompanied the cooling. Major tropical and high-latitude eruptions are now considered the most likely forcing. The 1257 eruption of Samalas (on Lombok, Indonesia) and the 1104 eruption are the strongest candidates for the cluster of eruptions that cooled the climate of the early 1300s; Mount Hekla in Iceland erupted in 1300 and is also sometimes cited. These eruptions produced sulfate aerosols that reduced the amount of solar radiation reaching the Earth’s surface and may have contributed to the cooler climate of the period.
The climate was not the only cause of the famine. The demographic and economic pressures of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries had already stressed the European economy, and the famine of 1315–1317 was the first of a series of catastrophes that would deepen the crisis. The decline in real wages that had begun in the late thirteenth century (as population growth outstripped the supply of land) had reduced the purchasing power of the peasantry, and the increased taxation by the kings and lords of the period had further reduced the resources of the peasantry.
Course of the Great Famine
The course of the Great Famine is well documented in the chronicles of the period, which describe the failure of the harvests, the increase in prices, the starvation of the population, and the social disruption that accompanied the famine. The famine began in the winter of 1314–1315, with a failure of the autumn sowing and a severe winter that killed many livestock. The summer of 1315 was unusually wet and cold, and the harvest failed across Europe. The winter of 1315–1316 was also severe, and the spring and summer of 1316 were again unusually wet and cold, with a second failure of the harvest.
The famine of 1315–1317 produced widespread starvation and death across Europe. The chronicles of the period describe people eating grass, roots, bark, and even corpses in their desperation. The mortality was highest among the poor, the young, and the elderly, but even the wealthy and the aristocratic suffered from the famine and the diseases that accompanied it. The famine was followed by a series of epidemics — the sheep scab epizootic, the bovine murrain, and the murrain of fish — that further damaged the food supply and the economy.
Consequences of the Great Famine
The consequences of the Great Famine were profound and far-reaching. The famine weakened the European population and made it more vulnerable to disease, and it was followed by the Black Death of 1347, which killed perhaps a third of the European population. The famine disrupted the social and economic order of medieval Europe, and it contributed to the rise of social tensions that would erupt in the Jacquerie in France in 1358, the Ciompi Revolt in Florence in 1378, and the English Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. The famine also weakened the royal governments of Europe and made it more difficult for them to cope with the subsequent crises.
The Great Famine is often cited as the beginning of the demographic and economic crisis of the Late Middle Ages, and it prepared the way for the catastrophic events of the fourteenth century — the Black Death, the Hundred Years’ War, the Babylonian Captivity of the papacy, and the Great Schism — that would mark the end of the medieval world. The Great Famine is also cited as a major example of the vulnerability of pre-modern societies to climate change, and it has important lessons for our own time as we face the challenges of global warming and climate change.
Sources
Principal sources used in this article:
- William Chester Jordan, The Great Famine (Princeton, 1996).
- B. M. S. Campbell (ed.), Before the Black Death: Studies in the “Crisis” of the Early Fourteenth Century (Manchester, 1991).
Further reading:
- R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution (2000), ch. 1.
For a recent single-volume synthesis with full scholarly apparatus, see the relevant chapter of Barbara H. Rosenwein, A Short History of the Middle Ages (University of Toronto Press, 2014).