Read Online The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850 by Brian Fagan - Free Book Online

India. People first turned
to relatives and neighbors, invoking the ties of kin and community that
had bound them for generations. Then many families abandoned their
land, seeking charity from relatives or aimlessly wandering the countryside in search of food and relief. Rural beggars roamed from village to village and town to town, telling (often false) stories of entire communities
abandoned or of deserted meadows and hillsides.
    By the end of 1316, many peasants and laborers were reduced to
penury. Paupers ate dead bodies of diseased cattle and scavenged growing
grasses in fields. Villagers in northern France are said to have eaten cats,
dogs, and the dung of pigeons. In the English countryside, peasants lived
off foods that they would not normally consume, many of them of dubious nutritional value. They were weakened by diarrhea and dehydration,
became more susceptible to diseases of all kinds, were overcome by
lethargy, and did little work. The newborn and the aged died fastest.
    Community after community despaired and slowly dissolved. Thousands of acres of farmland were abandoned due to a shortage of seed corn and draught oxen, and to falling village populations. Huge areas of the
Low Countries, inundated by the sea after major storms and prolonged
rains, were so difficult to reclaim that major landowners could hardly persuade farmers to resettle their flooded lands. Across the North Sea, in the
Bilsdale area of northeast Yorkshire, late thirteenth-century homesteaders
had cleared hundreds of acres of higher ground for new villages. A couple
of generations later, knots of hamlets, each with its own carpenters,
foresters, and tanners, flourished on the newly cleared land. But climatic
and economic deterioration, the 1316 famine, disease, and Scottish raids
caused all of them to be abandoned by the 1330s. The hamlets became
tiny single-family holdings, and the communities dispersed. Throughout
northern Europe, small farming communities on marginal land were
abandoned, or shrunk until their holdings were confined to the most fertile and least flood-prone lands.

    The cold and wet conditions brought profound hardship to homesteads almost everywhere. Many free landowners, forced to sell or mortgage their farms, were reduced to the basest poverty. Thousands of farmers became laborers, especially in areas around London and other large
cities, where there was much demand for food and such tasks as plowing
were made more laborious by the wet, clogged soils. Real estate records
and rent lists reveal a dramatic increase in land transactions, as richer
landowners exploited their poorer neighbors and families deeded fields to
their children to enable them to survive. Compared with 1315, for example, the manor of Hindolveston in Norfolk witnessed a 160 percent increase in surrenders of property by tenants in 1316, and a 70 percent
overage in 1317. In most cases, a handful of rich farmers bought out their
poorer colleagues. One Adam Carpenter acquired five parcels of land in
1315 alone. By the time the rush of transactions abated, he had acquired
forty-seven.
    The year 1316 was the worst for cereal crops throughout the entire
Middle Ages. In many places, the crops simply did not ripen. Where
wheat could be harvested, the plants were stunted, the yields pitiful.
Throughout the thirteenth century, the Winchester manors in southern
England had enjoyed more or less constant yields of about three bushels
for every one sown. The 1316 crop was only 55.9 percent of normal, the
lowest between 1271 and 1410. The estate's income accounts record
"from lamb's wool nothing this year, because they were not shorn on ac count of the great inconsistency of the weather in the summer." "From
the sale of hay in the meadow, nothing on account of the abundance of
rain in the summer." The Bishop of Winchester's mill made no profit
"because the mill did not grind for half the year on account of the
flood." 7 Not only