In the 1310s and 1320s England suffered famine, typhoid, livestock dieoff, inflation, economic decline, and an oppressive aristocracy that literally stole food from the poor and gave it to the rich ("To seek silver for the king, I sold my seed" goes one song from the period). A series of crop failures due to bad weather led to famine. Many of the poorest, who were subsisting on 1 or 2 acres, were pushed off their marginal lands. Oxen (the main “tractor” of the day) and sheep died in droves in various disease outbreaks. Food shortages were widespread, and the poorest simply dropped dead.
THE EXPANSION OF THE TWELFTH AND THIRTEENTH CENTURIES IS A commonplace of economic history. Substantial population growth brought rising land values, rising corn prices, and falling real wages. Pressure on the land led to a considerable extension of the area of cultivation as woodland, fen and waste were reclaimed for the plough. With a population of possibly more than five millions by the turn of the fourteenth century, the countryside of England may have been as full as at any time before the eighteenth century. Equally commonplace is the contraction of the later middle ages as these trends were all reversed. In an era of falling population, wages rose as corn prices and land values dwindled. Arable dropped out of use, much of it never again to be tilled, tenements fell vacant, villages were deserted, and encroaching woodlands in some areas took partial revenge for the earlier victory of the plough…
It once seemed obvious: the Black Death of 1348-9 was the clear divider between expansion and contraction, a freak epidemic which cut the population by at least a third. But since the last war economic historians in Western Europe, notably in England Professor M. M. Postan, have come to argue that the seeds of the population decline and agrarian contraction are to be found in the very period of expansion, that this expansion had the makings of its own nemesis. The plough was forced to take over poor, marginal soils which after a while brought diminishing returns; and as the very limits of cultivation were reached, the colonization of new land more or less petered out. Yet all this while population had been growing and the poverty-stricken rural proletariat of landless and near-landless increasing its numbers. By the early fourteenth century population had outgrown resources…”
The result? Famine and mass suffering. The author writes that in “some areas Malthusian causes seem to have been in operation. The drying-up of all available sources of colonizable land, falling crop yields from exhausted soils, proliferation of smallholders on the verge of starvation, and declining opportunities resulting in a drop in marriage- and birth-rates could all have played their part in some places....”
Poor people ate what they could find, and if they couldn't find anything resembling food, they died in the streets:
Trokelowe claimed that even horse-meat was too expensive, and he and other writers referred to the poor being forced to eat dogs, cats and other "unclean things". Rumours of cannibalism - of people stealing children to eat them - may have been exaggerated but they testify to the stark horror which this period of extreme famine impressed upon the memories of contemporaries….The bodies of paupers, dead of starvation, littered city streets.
Things were really bad for a decade or so, got sort of better for a while, then the Black Death hit in the 1340s, killing off a third or so of the population. Bring out your dead!
Makes our challenges 700 years later look a little less formidable, at least in the developed world. Imagine being the poor bastard born an English peasant in 1300. A lifetime of repression, famine, and pestilence to look forward to. Cue Monte Python skit.
SOURCE: The Great Famine and Agrarian Crisis in England 1315-1322 Author(s): Ian Kershaw Source: Past & Present, No. 59 (May, 1973), pp. 3-50
On the other hand they didn't have to worry about nuclear war or nuke plant meltdowns.
