Late Middle Ages

The Great Famine of 1315–1317

The Great Famine of 1315–1317 was the most acute subsistence crisis of the central Middle Ages north of the Alps. Three consecutive harvest failures, driven by an extraordinary run of cold and wet summers, struck a population already pressing against the limits of its land. The crisis is the hinge on which Georges Duby’s account of the “age of famines” turns, and it is the conventional opening movement in the long recession that culminates in the Black Death of 1347–1351. Contemporary chroniclers — the Annales Paulini, the Chronicon Henrici Knighton, the Vita Edwardi Secundi, and the Cronaca fiorentina of Dino Compagni — preserve a uniform picture of empty fields, abandoned plough-teams, and a public life suspended in favour of prayer, processions, and the unaccustomed eating of acorns, fern, and even (rumour had it) human flesh.

The famine mattered less for its death toll — perhaps ten per cent of the population of northern Europe — than for what it revealed about the resilience of the medieval social order. The institutions of the High Middle Ages — the manor, the parish, the itinerant court, the granary, the alms of the great monasteries — were tested by a shock of weather that the agronomical literature had no answer to, and the test exposed their limits.

The Climatic Trigger

The proximate cause was an extraordinary climatic anomaly. Beginning in the spring of 1315, a high-pressure system parked itself over the British Isles and the North Sea, deflecting the polar jet southward and producing a run of cold, wet summers across the North-Sea basin, northern France, the Low Countries, and much of the Empire. The summers of 1315 and 1316 were the wettest in the instrumental record for much of England until modern times; contemporary chroniclers at St Paul’s and at Meaux Abbey in Yorkshire used the same language of “untimely rain” and “floods in August.” The harvest of autumn 1315 was poor; that of 1316 was worse; the third failure in 1317 produced the full catastrophe. Lambs, calves, and draft oxen perished in the wet of the late summer, and the seed corn of 1317 was in some villages eaten by the living before the winter sowing.

The climatologist Christian Pfister and the historical demographer Jean-Noël Biraben have placed the famine in a broader climatic narrative: the closing phase of the Medieval Climate Anomaly, with the North Atlantic Oscillation locked in a negative phase that drove the storm tracks south. The economic historian Bruce Campbell, working from the Customs Rolls and the Calendar of Close Rolls, has shown that wheat yields in eastern England in the worst years fell to a third of the 1300–1308 mean. The famines of 1315–1317 were, in this sense, a climatic event before they were a social one. But they were not unprecedented: a generation earlier, in 1290–1294 and again in 1304–1306, the Taxatio Ecclesiastica and the Valor Ecclesiasticus predecessors had already recorded sharp local crises. What made 1315 different was the back-to-back quality of the failures and the exhaustion of the rural reserves.

A Malthusian Margin

The Malthusian reading, refined by Duby and by E. A. Wrigley, treats the famine as the inevitable consequence of a population that had tripled between 1000 and 1300, against a productive technology that had been roughly stationary for a century. The carrying capacity of the medieval agrarian system — the heavy plough, the three-field rotation, the horse collar, the water mill — had been reached, and reached unevenly. The British Isles and northern France, the demographic heartland of Western Christendom, were the worst affected. Settlements planted during the great wave of internal colonisation of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries — the assart lands of the Forest of Dean, the new polderlands of the Low Countries, the marginal upland pastures of the Massif Central — were the first to be abandoned as the famine bit. The chronicle of William de Nangis records the flight of peasants from the Île-de-France to the towns, where the duke and the chapter of Notre-Dame organised a public kitchen that fed some 1,200 of the poor of Paris through the winter of 1316–1317.

Duby, in L’Économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval (1962), argued that the crisis of 1315 was structurally overdetermined: the thirteenth-century demographic expansion had pushed rents up, had reduced the average peasant holding to a size that could not absorb a single bad year, and had eroded the customary buffers — the manorial granary, the great tithe, the dole of the religious houses — that earlier generations had relied on. The English evidence supports him. Mark Bailey’s reconstruction of the Bedingham customary in Norfolk and the Rickinghall accounts in Suffolk shows that by 1315 customary tenants were living on holdings that produced perhaps three to four quarters of wheat against an annual consumption need of five: a deficit of one bad year. The two consecutive harvest failures of 1315 and 1316 converted that thin margin into outright famine.

The Course of the Crisis

The famine unfolded unevenly. It struck first and hardest in the Low Countries, the Rhineland, northern France, and England; the harvest failures were less catastrophic in southern France, the Mediterranean, and the Italian peninsula, where the climate pattern was different and where the granaries of the great commercial cities offered a buffer. Within northern Europe the regional geography of suffering was sharp: the chronicle of the St Paul’s annalist records that “in the north [of England] they died by the wayside, in the south they suffered great hunger but not so much death.” The most lethal moment was the winter of 1316–1317, when the cold, the wet, and the typhoid that followed the consumption of unripe grain and rotten meat compounded the shortage.

The crisis reshaped daily life. The English Fleta and the assize of bread were repeatedly suspended in 1315 and 1316 as grain prices moved outside the customary range. The price of wheat in southern England in 1316 reached 28s. the quarter against a 1301–1308 mean of about 5s. — a sixfold rise that has rarely been matched in English agrarian history. The Dyer’s chronicle at Colchester, the Registrum epistolarum of John Kirkby, bishop of Carlisle, and the Compotus rolls of the bishop of Winchester’s estates all preserve the same picture of grain prices, cattle prices, and land rents collapsing as the land was abandoned. In the towns the urban authorities intervened. The mayor and aldermen of London imported rye from the eastern Baltic through the German Hanse; the échevins of Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres imposed maximum prices on bread and beer and rationed the municipal granary. The pattern of intervention — public granaries, price controls, the licensing of begging, the prohibition of grain exports — would be repeated in every subsistence crisis of the next two centuries.

Mortalities, Disease, and Livestock

The famine did not kill as the Black Death would kill; it killed by starvation and by the diseases of hunger. The mortality estimates of Biraben and of David Herlihy (in The Black Death and the Transformation of the West, 1997) place the demographic loss at between five and ten per cent of the population of the worst-affected regions, and at perhaps half that in the Mediterranean. The new close-grained demographic work on English manorial records by Bruce Campbell and John Hatcher, and on Tuscan catasti by Herlihy and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, suggests that the famine was less demographically destructive in its first year than in the second and third, when the cattle plague that had been endemic since 1310 and the sheep scab that swept the English downlands in 1316 compounded the food shortage.

The livestock epizootics are central to the story. The Chronicon Henrici Knighton at Leicester reports that the murrain of 1316 killed nearly a third of the cattle of the Midlands, and the Annales Paulini record a similar pattern in southern England. The Flemish and Dutch chroniclers note the same losses in the Low Countries; the chronicler of the Bois-le-Duc annals describes the cattle dying “as though cut down by a sword.” The loss of draft animals was the loss of plough-power: communities that had been on the margin of subsistence in 1314 were unable to plant the autumn sowing of 1317, which produced the last of the three famine harvests. The long-term effect on the rural economy, as John Langdon has shown in his work on English horse and ox prices, was a persistent depression of livestock numbers that would not be repaired before the Black Death.

The State, the Church, and the Crisis of Authority

The famine exposed the institutional limits of the medieval state. Edward II of England, in need of money for his war against Robert Bruce, was unable to suspend the export of wool or to organise public relief on any significant scale. Philip IV of France, whose Lit de Justice of 1315 against the Templars was the great political theatre of the moment, died in November 1314, and his successor Louis X — le Hutin — faced the famine in the first year of his reign with depleted treasuries. The chancery enrolments of Edward II and the Ordonnances des rois de France of Philip V show a flurry of ordinances against forestalling and regrating, the licensing of exports only by royal licence, and the occasional subsidy of the urban poor by the great abbeys, but nothing on the scale of a public relief programme.

The church, however, was the principal responder. The mendicant friars, especially the Franciscans and the Dominicans, organised the soup-kitchens of the towns and went out into the countryside to bury the dead. The chapter of the cathedral chapter of Paris, the bishop of Lincoln’s Registrum antiquissimum, and the papal almoner at Avignon all show a marked increase in almsgiving and in the licensing of emergency mortmain grants. But the failure of the ecclesiastical calendar to deliver — processions, relics, the regular rogations of the liturgy — fed the perception, which would recur in 1348–1350, that the institutional church had been found wanting. Chroniclers at Meaux and at St Albans openly blamed the wealth of the bishops and the absenteeism of the cathedral chapters for the failure of the response. The Great Famine is, in this sense, a rehearsal of the Black Death: the same charge of episcopal indifference, the same expectation that the king should feed the poor, the same disappointment.

Famine, Memory, and the Late-Medieval Recession

The Great Famine is the conventional starting point of the long late-medieval recession. The numismatics of the period — the sharp fall in the output of the English mints at London, Bristol, and Newcastle between 1315 and 1318, the contraction of the Champagne fair circuit, the depression of Florentine and Sienese cloth exports — register the same shock. The demographic work of Russell, Campbell, and Hatcher places the English population on a plateau from 1300 to 1348, and on a slow downward trend through the recurrent murrains of 1319, 1325, 1326, 1331, and 1340. The famine of 1315 was, in this reading, the first of a series of “crises of subsistence” that prefigured the catastrophe of 1348.

The historiography of the famine has moved in two directions. The older Malthusian reading, of Duby and Postan, treats the crisis as the predictable outcome of demographic pressure; the more recent revisionist work, of John Hatcher in Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348–1530 (1977) and of Mark Bailey in The English Manor c. 1200–1500 (2002), has stressed the role of institutional rigidity — the inflexibility of the manorial economy, the failure of grain markets, the inability of the state to organise a coordinated response. The two readings are not incompatible. The famine of 1315 was, in the end, both: a Malthusian crisis exposed by a climatic shock, and a crisis of the institutions that the High Middle Ages had built to manage that exposure.

The Long Shadow

The legacies of 1315–1317 are not the kind that the documentary record catches easily. They are visible in the slower planting, the lower rents, the abandoned assarts of the second quarter of the fourteenth century. The English Inquisitions post mortem show a sustained fall in the capital value of customary holdings in the 1320s; the Tuscan catasto of 1427–1430, projected backward, suggests that the same contraction had been under way for more than a century before the Black Death. The famine shaped the pessimism of the chroniclers — Henry Knighton’s vision of a degenerate age, the De mortalitate of the Premonstratensian John of Tynemouth — that would colour the response to the Black Death a generation later. It taught the English Crown that it could not finance a war by wool exports in a subsistence crisis; it taught the French Crown that the taille could not be raised on a starving peasantry; it taught the Italian banking houses that the lending of last resort to princes was a riskier business than they had supposed.

The Great Famine was, in the long view, the first great shock of the fourteenth century. The second, the Black Death, would be far more lethal. But the institutions, the assumptions, and the social expectations that the famine of 1315–1317 exposed as inadequate were the very institutions that the Black Death would shatter. To understand the fourteenth-century crisis as a whole, the famine has to be taken as the prelude, not the catastrophe.

References and Further Reading

  • Georges Duby, L’Économie rurale et la vie des campagnes dans l’Occident médiéval (1962), 2 vols.
  • Jean-Noël Biraben, Les hommes et la peste en France et dans les pays méditerranéens, vol. 1 (1975).
  • David Herlihy, The Black Death and the Transformation of the West (1997).
  • Bruce M. S. Campbell (ed.), Before the Black Death: Studies in the Crises of the Early Fourteenth Century (1991), with essays by Campbell, Hatcher, and Bailey on the agrarian crisis.
  • Christian Pfister, “The Little Ice Age and the Changing Character of Climate in Europe,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Climate History (2018).
  • John Hatcher, Plague, Population and the English Economy 1348–1530 (1977).