I’ve been on a little deep dive into the Great Famine in Europe 1315-1322.
This is inadequately covered by a lot of history because of the worldwide impact of the Great Death/Black Death in the 1340s. A lot of the demographic impact of the Great Famine has been swept into the Great Death.
The population had been increasing for about two centuries due to the Medieval Warm Period, which saw the best harvests of premodern Europe of about seven to one; seven grains produced for each one planted. The population had reached levels that would not be seen until the late 18th century, which was the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the UK though not in all of Europe.
Then there were two years of basically constant rain. Chroniclers record less than ten days of no rain per year in 1315-17 fairly consistently across Europe, regardless of location (those will ofc be different days etc etc but the trend is very clear). Seeds were washed from the ground and topsoil washed away; there are, for example, areas of Yorkshire that still show the impact of this in topsoil depth because by 1317 they were little more than bare rock. Herds of animals were reduced from hundreds to dozens, both because of murrains (cattle illnesses), animals being washed away and people eating their herds in starvation - and this had a huge and lasting impact on peasants, whose main source of dietary protein was dairy. Whole towns were washed away and others became depopulated as people fled to forage in the forests and commons.
There is increasing evidence the Great Famine was a huge part of the reason the demographic impact of the Great Death was *so* high. Childhood malnutrition has lasting impacts on lifelong health, particularly on immune function. People who were children during the Great Famine succumbed to the Great Death in their thirties in massive numbers.
As I said, the Great Famine is underrepresented in scholarship. And some of the only attention that has been given historiographically has been scholars *blaming* the peasants for the Famine. Conjuring up everything from failing to maintain crop rotation to maintain soil fertility to planting on too much marginal land out of greed.
Let’s say it has been impossible for me to miss the parallels with the media and popular discourse blaming people on benefits for their own food insecurity. It has been thrown into particularly sharp relief with the situation with SNAP benefits not being paid in the US rn due to the fascist-engineered governmental shutdown, but it is an ongoing phenomenon here in the UK too.
Let me make it 100% clear; we, as the technological society we are, would be utterly fucked by two years of constant rain. We depend on topsoil and growing food in it as much as medieval Europe did, on a societal scale. We can’t stop it raining and our (lack of) capacity to replace fertile topsoil has been thrown into relief by climate change-induced flooding in the past decade. Even with the technological alternatives we theoretically could access, such as vertical growing, hydroponics etc? Doing them at scale would require a willingness to organise, take control of food production and to collect and spend public money on a scale every government on Earth has shown a complete incapacity and unwillingness to do in response to far less immediately impactful threats.
I feel I don’t need to push the many, many parallels here. The death from the Great Famine was in no way equally distributed across society. The people who died in the greatest numbers were those who were already on the bottom of the socioeconomic pyramid. The poorest people.
And, of course, those who survived from that class were also the ones with the largest remaining health effects that left a time bomb which hit them when the Great Death hit. The resulting deaths from the Y.pestis pandemic were also unequally distributed in Europe and the Near East (I know less about the demographic effects in the rest of the world and it was part of a whole Several Decades of Calamities in China that was so horrific the demographic effects of the Plague are actually quite difficult to pick out there!) with the poorest people very broadly suffering the highest casualty rates. There has been a lot of debate about the reasons for that historiographically, but there is now increasing evidence that the lifelong immune impact of the Great Famine was a very notable factor.
Where am I going with this? Well, broadly, I’m giving a long view as a historian with evidence of why we need to organise immediately with a view to eliminating human-caused food inequality in all of our societies, and to preparing for as much societal resilience to climate change-caused food insecurity as humanly possible as well as eliminating fossil fuels. This particular idea of deliberately starving our society’s lower economic levels to fulfil the screaming demands of disaster capitalism - which is 100% what current lack of price controls and benefit slashes are doing; we currently produce so much food we could give mass amounts away for free that are currently destroyed - is societal suicide on top of being horrific by every human scale imaginable. We are weakening our entire society’s resilience to the climate disaster and accompanying epidemic disease we know is coming by every piece of scientific evidence we collect.
This is one of the reasons I keep breaking myself to do Food Not Bombs. The radical impact of feeding people, and a space for uncoupling food from our current disaster capitalist exchange, is almost impossible to measure. It’s only going to get more vital going ahead.
(Necessary caveats; I am not a mediaevalist. My area of expertise is the early modern period, although there are classifications that include the 14th century in the Long Early Modern period because of the long impact of these events. My thanks to Michelle Butler and Anne Brannon of the True Crime Medieval podcast for sending me on this particular dive.)
