FAMINE

. Conditions of death or starvation resulting from crop failure caused by poor weather, infestation by pests, warfare, or other factors were considered famine. Records depict crowds of beggars waiting for food at the gates of monasteries, peasants abandoning holdings to seek food and livelihoods in other districts, distended stomachs from attempts to live on grass and roots, and human flesh hung up for sale in the markets. For the early Middle Ages, such conditions cannot have been markedly different from normal subsistence levels of the populace, which was consistently near starvation, when endemic malnutrition caused high infant mortality and low fertility, and when a diet composed almost entirely of cereals meant that human productivity and resistance to disease were low. Given the almost total dependence of the agricultural population on cereals and the extremely low yields of agriculture at the time (between 2:1 and 3:1 yield-to-seed ratios being considered normal) any slight worsening of weather, infestation of crops, or other bad luck could cause the inhabitants of a district to begin consuming grain needed for next year’s planting, pushing them into even more dire consequences and true famine in the following year if sufficient seed had not been found elsewhere to plant at normal levels. Even the lords could suffer famine insofar as they had to waive payment of rents, tithes, and taxes and hand out food and seed grain, in order to ensure that agricultural laborers did not depart or starve to death. Moreover, even for the lord or ecclesiastical almsgivers, once local reserves were gone there was little possibility of coming to the relief of the local population, for transport and communications were poor. Thus, although the diversity of climate, soils, and topography of France meant that bumper crops in one area might be accompanied by poor harvests in another, famines could be relieved not by importing food but only, to some extent, by people taking to the roads. When year after year of low yields followed one another in many areas, the results could be social unrest and even cannibalism (as was described by the Cluniac monk Raoul Glaber for ca. 1000) or the lowered resistance and susceptibility to diseases that followed the European-wide famines of 1315-17.

Constance H. Berman

[See also: AGRICULTURE; DISEASES]

Duby, Georges. The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the

Seventh to the Twelfth Century, trans. Howard B. Clarke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.