The Black Death wasn't the only great calamity of the Late Middle Ages. There was also the Great Famine of 1315-1317.

The Black Death wasn't the only great calamity of the Late Middle Ages. There was also the Great Famine of 1315-1317.

The 14th century wasn’t off to a good start. In 1309 weather patterns changed and for 8 years Europe experienced a sequence of wet summers and extremely hard winters. Crop failures weren’t uncommon in the Middle Ages, but they tended to be short lived. This sequence of 8 bad years was exceptional and it had a compounding effect. Yields in 14th century were quite low. I saw numbers of just 3 to 4 grains per seed. 

That was above the levels of the 10th century but not much. Improved agricultural technology such as the horse-driven plough and crop rotation were offset by 200 years of expansion of agricultural land into less and less productive parcels. 

The problem was that if one seed produced just 4 grains, a quarter of the harvest had to be set aside as seed for next year. In normal years about 10-30% of the produce was sold at market, depending on proximity of urban centres. The rest aka 2 grains per one seed was needed to feed the peasant and his family. In a crop failure the harvest dropped to half of the normal yield or less. 

Now we have just 2 grains per seed, 1 of those is needed to seed the next harvest and only 1 grains is available to feed the farmer and for sale. Given the producers used to have 2 grains just for themselves, they are now starving even if they do not sell anything. But not selling anything would be difficult since the peasant owed rent to the local lord in cash or had to deliver a fixed amount of produce in lieu of payment. 

Having given away some of their scarce grain, farmers had to dip into the grain reserved for seeding next year’s crop. Which means that even if the following year is a good year, not all fields will have been seeded and the total harvest is lower than normal. 

If you have several years of crop failure in a row, the seed reserve shrinks and shrinks so that even in years with decent yields the absolute amount of harvest is down dramatically. 

That is what happened in 1309 to 1317. The series of crop failures exhausted the system. Even though the Hanse merchants were now busy bringing grain from the Prussia, Lithuania and even Ukraine into the empire, famine gripped almost all of Europe. 

As always children were the worst affected. Childhood malnutrition has long-term outcomes for its survivors, including impaired growth, altered body composition, greater cardiometabolic disease risk, cognitive impairment, and behavioural problems. Not an ideal starting point for these children who are in the 30s and 40s when we get to the Black Death.

For more about the Black death and the other calamities affecting the 14th century and how this changed the economy, society and politics of the time, listen to episode 157: Black Death and Other Calamities  of the History of the Germans, available of Appel podcasts, Spotify, Pocket Casts or wherever you get your podcasts. Or go straight to my website: https://historyofthegermans.com/2024/08/01/black-death/