Great Famine of 1315–1317

The Great Famine of 1315–1317 was a prolonged food crisis across northern Europe, caused by years of torrential rain and cold that ruined harvests from the British Isles to Poland. It killed a significant share of the population in many places, was followed by a devastating disease among cattle and sheep, and marked the end of the long period of population growth and prosperity that Europe had enjoyed since the eleventh century. It was the first of the great calamities of the fourteenth century.

By around 1300 Europe's population had grown to its medieval peak. Farmland had been extended onto poorer soils, and yields were low: in a bad year a farmer might harvest only twice the seed sown. Food prices were already rising and many peasants lived close to the margin. The climate was also turning cooler and wetter in northern Europe at the start of the fourteenth century, a period sometimes seen as the onset of the Little Ice Age.

In the spring of 1315 heavy rain began to fall and continued through the summer. Fields became too waterlogged to plough, seed rotted, grain failed to ripen, and hay could not be dried for winter fodder. Salt, needed to preserve meat, became scarce because evaporation was impossible. Prices soared; in England the cost of food is said to have doubled within a few months. The rain returned in 1316, and the harvests failed again. Normal weather came back only in the summer of 1317, and recovery took several more years.

The famine affected most of northern Europe, including England, Ireland, Scotland, northern France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany and western Poland; the Alps and the Pyrenees roughly marked its southern limit. People ate seed grain and draught animals, and then whatever else they could find. Weakened by hunger, many died of disease. Chroniclers recorded children abandoned by their parents, a sharp rise in crime and rumours of cannibalism, though such reports are difficult to verify. Towns were hit hard because they depended on food from outside.

Estimates of the total death toll are uncertain. Historians commonly suggest that around 10 to 15 percent of the population died in parts of England and northern France, and that some towns may have lost a quarter of their inhabitants.

Soon after the famine came the Great Bovine Pestilence, an epidemic among cattle whose cause is uncertain; rinderpest is often suggested. It spread across northern Europe in the late 1310s and reached England and Wales around 1319, where perhaps three-fifths of the cattle died. Together with disease among sheep it reduced livestock numbers in some areas by as much as 80 percent, destroying plough teams and supplies of milk and meat for years.

Even kings were not spared: when Edward II of England stopped at St Albans in August 1315, it was reportedly hard to find bread for his household. The famine undermined trust in governments and in the church, whose prayers and processions failed to bring relief, and it contributed to social unrest. The population, already weakened, then suffered the Black Death in 1347–1351, which killed far more people. Wars such as the Hundred Years' War, beginning in 1337, added to the strain on a society that had stopped growing.

Our 1300 map shows the states of northern Europe that the famine struck, including the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire.