This story is fascinating. I love Medieval history, as it was a period that led to earth-shaking changes, not only cultural but environmental and physical, all over the world. Here’s what happened in England.
The Black Death did not arrive in England to find a well fed population. It arrived to find a generation that had been raised without milk, because the cattle had died thirty years earlier.
It began with rain. In 1315, 1316 and 1317 it rained across northern Europe on a scale nobody had a word for. Three harvests failed in succession. The Great Famine took perhaps a tenth of the population of northern Europe and it is the worst subsistence crisis on the record north of the Alps. In August 1315 Edward II stopped at St Albans and there was no bread to be had for the king of England and his household, which is the kind of detail that survives because everyone present was appalled.
Between 1319 and 1320 a cattle plague, almost certainly rinderpest, moved into Britain from the continent and went through the herds like fire in stubble. Philip Slavin went through the manorial accounts, the workaday parchment where a reeve had to record every animal on the demesne and answer for it, and the figure that comes out is sixty two per cent. Nearly two beasts in three dead across England and Wales in twenty four months. On some manors the loss was total.
In September 1319 Simon Eye, the abbot of Ramsey, wrote to Edward II to say that a sudden pestilence had struck his animals, that they were dead in such numbers that the air was infected with the stench of the carcasses, and that he feared a pestilence among people would follow. St James’s Hospital at Westminster wrote in the same year complaining of the mortality of animals.
Rinderpest kills between eight and nine animals in ten once it is into a herd, and it moves on shared water and shared pasture, and in 1319 there was nothing on earth a reeve could do about it but watch and count. The chroniclers describe carcasses lying in the fields because there were not enough living animals left to drag them off.
The ox was the tractor. Fifty five per cent of them went, and you cannot plough with an intention. Horses were bought in as a stopgap, which cost money and gave nothing back, because a horse yields no milk, no cheese and no calf.
And the cow was the dairy. Butter, cheese, buttermilk, whey, curds: the fat and the protein and the calcium that carried an ordinary family through a winter and put growth on a child. Dairy output halved after the pestilence and did not climb back to eighty per cent of its old level until the middle of the 1330s. Cattle numbers reached four fifths of the old figure by the end of the 1320s. Oxen were at eighty five per cent by 1331.
So there is a stretch of about fifteen years in which the children of England grew up in villages where the milk had gone.
Sharon DeWitte and Philip Slavin went to the bones. The skeletal evidence from the decades before 1348 shows chronic shortage of protein, calcium and vitamin B12 running for at least a generation, far longer than the three wet summers usually blamed for it. The famine had already killed the frailest. What the bovine pestilence did was take a population that had survived the famine and raise its children without animal food.
Those children were in their late twenties and thirties when the plague ships tied up in 1348.
What the body had been built out of decided who walked away from 1348, and that is now sitting in the burial record rather than in anybody’s theory, and it points at dairy.
The story we tell about the fourteenth century is rain, then rats. Two acts of God, thirty three years apart, with nothing worth mentioning in between.
The thing in between was the loss of two thirds of the cattle in the country, and a generation that grew up without butter.
So, for England in the early 14th Century, natural Climate Change was a factor in the plagues that occurred. The 1300s were the beginning of a “Little Ice Age,” which led to cooler temperatures, more precipitation, and land that previously was cultivable becoming less fertile. Combine that with diseases of both cattle and people, and you have a recipe for disaster. This is a fascinating history lesson. Thanks, Sama!
Calling-all-RushBabes 