Famine

It's Easter, the end of Lent, of six-plus weeks of giving up excess luxuries.  For medieval people, Lent was almost a famine period, because last fall's stored food would be about gone, but the spring crops hadn't produced yet.  Some people certainly go hungry in the US, but unlike some other parts of the world, it's been an awful long time since we've had widespread famine.  Medieval people would say we're lucky.  Let's feel some sympathy for our ancestors while we munch those chocolate bunnies.

Famine, in the past as now, comes about through a combination of overpopulation and failure to produce enough food.  The modern world actually grows enough food to feed everybody, due to improvements in crop genetics and fertilizers (though the planet’s current warming may make many areas less and less suitable for crop growing).  Our problem is distribution.

In the US, for example, farmers produce at least 4000 calories a day for every man, woman, and child.  That is about twice what an adult needs (on average), unless they are an elite athlete training heavily.  So what happens to the rest?  A lot is exported to other countries, a lot goes to explain why, shall we say, the American population is a tad plumper than it was fifty years ago, and a lot is wasted.

Unless you plan your shopping carefully, so you never have to throw out spoiled food, and unless you clean up everything on your plate every meal, you’re throwing out food that could have fed someone.  Grocery stores throw out fruits and vegetables that look malshapen and cans with dents or even just torn labels.  Restaurants fill up their dumpsters every night.

So a lot of the modern world’s problem is getting food to people who need it.  If we have a distribution problem in the US, where grocery stores throw out perfectly edible food that looks funky, where many have refrigerators stuffed with food they will never eat even though others in the same community do not have enough, then just imagine the problem in the Middle Ages, when it was very difficult to move food around from one place to another.  And they didn’t just have distribution issues.  They had genuine shortages.

Even though today less than 5% of the US population lives on a working farm, that tiny group still manages to feed everybody.  In the Middle Ages however almost everyone had to be engaged in farming to produce enough food. The breakdown of trade routes and the cooling of the climate that started in the sixth century brought genuine food shortages in the early Middle Ages.  An inopportune hail storm that wiped out a crop in one area would lead to local famine, because other areas would not have enough extra food to feed anyone but themselves, even aside from the difficulty of transporting the food.

But in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, a period where the climate had warmed up just enough to improve the likelihood of getting in the crop, and when farmers had adopted new technology like the carruca, there were long stretches without famine.  City councils stockpiled grain in good years to be prepared for future shortages.  Count Charles the Good of Flanders was called “the good” in part because he took the lead in distributing stockpiled grain in a bad year and keeping hoarders from jacking up prices.

Periodic famines still happened, and there were always stories told of the horrors (usually involving cannibalism) that the famine led to—in the next county over, never in the immediate vicinity of the person telling about.  But overall most people, most of the time, got enough to eat.

Not surprisingly, the population grew.  By the late thirteenth century western Europe’s rural population was probably about what it is now (though not of course the urban or suburban population).  With more mouths to feed, more and more land had to be cultivated to grow food.  Even the lower slopes of the Alps were growing grain.

Then, in the early fourteenth century, Europe became overpopulated.  “Over” populated is a relative term; it doesn’t mean actual numbers of people but rather too many people for the food supply.  More marginal cultivated areas started giving out just as the climate grew worse, going into what has been called a mini ice age, when even rich, productive lands might see crop failures.

Then there were several years in a row of really awful weather, “years without a summer” as they were called.  Crops failed miserably.  Europe had been able to deal with local famines, but nothing on this scale.  Starving people took off in bands, trying desperately to find food, stealing anything they could get their hands on that was edible.  With weakened conditions, the population was not prepared for a major outbreak of a pandemic, the Black Death.  Let's just say the fourteenth century was a difficult time.  It's also when the Hundred Years War got underway, but that's a story for another day.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018 

For more about feast and famine during the Middle Ages, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.