The Black Death

Tuscany was in no way unique. In France ‘many districts supported as many, or very nearly as many, inhabitants as at the beginning of the twentieth century’.^{48} In the region of Oisans, south-east of Grenoble, there were about 13,000 inhabitants in 1339; by 1911 the total had risen only to 13,805. Around Neufbourg in the Eure a population of some 3,000 in 1310 was 3,347 as late as 1954. Around Elloe in the Fenland, settlement was almost as dense in 1260 as in 1951. In certain areas, in particular Artois, Flanders, Champagne and parts of Western Germany, the surplus population sought a solution to its problems in a move towards industrialization. In the whole of Western Europe, villages grew into towns and cities with ten or twenty thousand inhabitants were no longer freakish rarities.^{49} But the flow to the towns drew off only a small part of the rising population in the countryside.

So long as the growing population had unused land ready to hand which could easily be exploited to produce more food, then no unmanageable problems were posed. In certain areas – Basse-Provence, Catalonia, Sweden and Scotland – this was still the case until well on into the fourteenth century.^{50} Europe, viewed as a whole, still had a fair amount of under-developed territory even as late as 1350. But in the great population centres, from which the peasantry could not or would not move, the end of the thirteenth century was a period of acute crisis. The forests that remained were jealously conserved, the mountains offered no hope to the would-be farmer. Productivity fell as erosion, lack of manure, failure to let fields lie fallow or to rotate crops on scientific principles, drained the goodness from the tired soil. The population soared, more and more mouths had to be filled, the gap between production and demand grew ever wider.

Taine’s aphorism about the Ancien Régime: ‘The people are like men walking through a pond with water up to their mouths; at the smallest depression of the ground or rise in the level of the water, they will lose their footing, sink and drown’ can be applied as well to the peasant of the later Middle Ages. And in Europe of the fourteenth century depressions of the ground seemed more the rule than the exception. The climate played a major part in the mischief seventy or eighty years before the Black Death. The intense cold led to a striking advance of the glaciers, polar as well as Alpine. High rainfall caused a rise in the level of the Caspian Sea. The cultivation of cereals in Iceland and of the vine in England was crippled and virtually extinguished; wheat growing areas were reduced in Denmark and the uplands of Provence.^{51}

The most grave consequence was a series of disastrous harvests. There were famines in England in 1272, 1277, 1283, 1292 and 1311.^{52} Between 1315 and 1319 came a crescendo of calamity. Almost every country in Europe lost virtually the whole of one harvest, often of two or three. The lack of sun hindered the production of salt by evaporation and thus made still more difficult the conservation of what meat there was. Even if there had been food to store, facilities for storage did not exist. In England wheat more than doubled in price. Cannibalism was a commonplace; the poor ate dogs, wrote one chronicler, cats, the dung of doves, even their own children.^{53} Ten per cent of the population of Ypres died of starvation.^{54} Nor was this the end: 1332 was another disastrous year for the crops and the period between 1345 and 1348 would have seemed uniquely unfortunate in any other century.

Before the Black Death, therefore, much of Europe was in recession or, at the very least, had ceased to advance. Colonization stopped even where fresh fields lay open for the conquest. The Drang nach Osten petered out at the frontiers of Lithuania and Latvia. The cloth trade of Flanders and Brabant stagnated. The great fairs of the Champagne, indices of the economic health of a large and flourishing region, significantly declined.^{55} The prices of agricultural produce were falling: agriculture was no longer the easy road to prosperity which it had been for the past two hundred years. Put in the simplest terms, Europe had outgrown its strength and was now suffering the physical and mental malaise which inevitably follows so intemperate a progress.