Four years worse than 2020: 1315
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“You know what I’m craving? A little perspective.” —Anton Ego in Ratatouille
A week or two ago the Babylon Bee published the story “2020 Rated Worst Year Ever, Provided You Never Lived At Any Other Time In History”—a precision strike piece of satire. Not to be outdone, but missing the joke, last week Time published this.
The Worst Year Ever. While I thought perhaps the internet-inflected childishness might just be an attention-grabber, the cover story embraces it. The author of the piece, a film critic, makes a formal acknowledgement that “[t]here have been worse years in U.S. history, and certainly worse years in world history,” such as those of the Spanish Flu, the Depression, or World War II. But from there the writer turns inward, self-ward, implying that, where previous generations were somehow prepared for the Spanish flu or the Depression, we “have had no training wheels for this.”
That metaphor says more than I think the writer intends.
Back in the Spring, when all of this was just getting started, I shared a post on CS Lewis’s essay “On Living in an Atomic Age.” That essay is worth revisiting in its entirety, but let me quote one of its great lines and leave it at that:
“[D]o not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.”
Lewis’s essay was written and delivered to students in the late 1940s, then living with the new and unprecedented fear of atomic warfare. The line above, which comes early in the essay, introduces what I think is the most helpful concept in the essay: perspective.
With that in mind, in September I began to fiddle with a blog post about the many, many years that are demonstrably worse than 2020. That Time piece finally irritated me enough to complete it—not as a single post, but as a short series I’ll be sharing this week. What I hope to accomplish with these posts is what I hope to accomplish anytime I get to talk about history: to offer perspective, to participate in broadening the range of our experiences so that the now, the tyrannical present, cannot dominate us with its fleeting concerns, however serious they may be. “One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves,” Christopher Dawson once wrote. A vaccine against the hysteria of the present, if you like.
2020 has not been a good year. But there have been worse years—much, much worse years, unimaginably worse years—and it is not hard for a history teacher to think of a few. Here are four—two from the more distant past and, since it became abundantly clear this year that many do not care about anything that happened before the present, two from within living memory.
1315
The obvious choice for a bad year in the 14th century is some date in the late 1340s because of the Plague. Granted—and we’ll take a look at that shortly. But I’m starting with 1315, as it was not only a bad year in its own right but began a century of calamity.
How it happened
Contrary to “Dark Ages” myths, the early Middle Ages was a time of flourishing and growth. Thanks in part to the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from the 10th to the 13th century, growing seasons lengthened, crop yields increased, and the population of Europe exploded. That changed in the 14th century. After the Medieval Warm Period ended in the mid-1200s the summers slowly shortened and average temperatures slowly, slowly fell, eventually to bottom out in the “Little Ice Age.” 1315 is the year western Europe felt the first serious effects.
What happened
First, it began to rain. It rained and rained and barely stopped—for two years. Flooding became a continent-wide problem, especially in many already marshy coastal areas, and many coastal settlements, including well-established and prosperous towns, were partially or totally abandoned.
Most seriously for a world built entirely on farming and the stewardship and control of farmland, agriculture became nearly impossible. There was too much rain and therefore not enough sunlight, the temperatures were too cool, and even those crops that could be planted failed, either not germinating or rotting on the stalk. In other places the rains reduced fields to mud or washed the topsoil away. Other broad, flat regions of ploughland in northern France or England became lakes. Hay could not be kept dry and so livestock starved for lack of fodder or succumbed to disease.
The lack of food caused prices to rise exponentially and the vast peasant population of Europe was reduced to scavenging for wild plants, eating their livestock—even draught animals like horses. Perhaps as much as 80% of livestock died of disease or were eaten during the famine. Some ate dogs, pigeons, or bird droppings. The most desperate ate their seed grain, the grain set aside for the next year’s planting, thus only postponing starvation. Others, it was darkly rumored in many places, resorted to cannibalism.
According to one English chronicler:
Four pennies worth of coarse bread was not enough to feed a common man for one day. The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And, according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children.
Armies could not march or fight because the ground was so swampy, and the king of England, perhaps the wealthiest kingdom in northwestern Europe in these centuries, could not find food during some of his progresses through the country. Grain proved so scarce in his kingdom that even brewing beer was prohibited. The peasantry, unable to survive in the villages and on the manors to which they were bound, sometimes abandoned their ancestral homes to live wild or to roam in search of work and food. As the chronicler quoted above noted: “There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry.”
And, as I mentioned earlier, 1315 was just the beginning. The rains continued through 1316 and into 1317 before the weather returned to its more accustomed patterns.
The consequences
But the damage had been done. Widespread starvation led to a breakdown of social order, with sharp rises not only in prices (for those mostly concerned economic effects) but in crime and violence, food riots, and even the prevalence of conspiracy theories—rumors that so-and-so in the village, often the miller, had a secret stash of grain, sometimes leading to lynching and disappointment when the stash was not found—and, of course, most fundamentally, a massive loss of life. According to historian Christopher Given-Wilson, in his short biography of England’s king at the time, Edward II:
Around 10 per cent of the population starved to death, not just in England but in much of northern Europe, a terrible human tragedy compounded by war and social unrest. Flocks of sheep were decimated, and wool exports, the basis of England’s customs revenue, fell by 40 per cent between 1313 and 1316.
Even those that got enough to eat to survive remained more susceptible, owing to the wet weather and their dramatically diminished nutrition, to disease. The population growth typical of the Medieval Warm Period was not only ended but reversed, with huge numbers dying as a result of the famine. The consequences were not limited to the time of the famine itself, though, as it took years for European agriculture to recover, with many localized famines in the coming decades.
And, finally, the Great Famine of 1315-17 left Europe—its economy, its political and social institutions, and most of all its people—weakened ahead of the arrival of the Plague.
We’ll talk about that tomorrow.
Further reading
The book I quote on the effects of the famine on England is, Edward II: The Terrors of Kingship, by Christopher Given-Wilson, part of the excellent Penguin Monarchs series. While this book’s treatment of the Great Famine is brief, it will give you a view of the broader context of the famine, especially the difficult and complicated political situation of the time and how Edward in particular, already a weak king, struggled with the aftereffects. You can read the transcript of a short lecture on the famine by Lynn H Nelson of the University of Kansas here. Note that he links the famine directly to the later Plague. Medievalists.net’s listicle “10 Things to Know About the Great Famine” is a handy introduction to the events of 1315-22. Finally, you can read a lengthier excerpt of English chronicler Johannes de Trokelowe’s eyewitness description of the famine here.
