The rain that triggered the Great Famine began on Pentecost — Sunday, 15 May 1315 — across northern Europe and continued, with brief breaks, until the late autumn. The English chronicler John Trokelowe, writing at St. Albans, recorded that May 1315 was “wet beyond memory.” The summer that followed was the wettest documented across the northern European climate record between approximately 800 and 1500. The grain crops planted in April and May — the staple wheat, oats, and rye that fed almost the entire population of medieval northern Europe — failed catastrophically. By the harvest of August 1315 it was clear that most of the affected region’s food supply for the coming year was gone.
The same pattern repeated in 1316. And again in 1317. And in modified form, with additional complications from livestock plague, through 1322. The seven-year crisis is now called the Great Famine — the worst sustained subsistence failure in medieval European history and the opening event of the Little Ice Age. It killed, by the conservative modern estimate of the historian William Chester Jordan, approximately ten percent of the population of northern Europe between 1315 and 1322. In the worst-affected cities — Ypres, Bruges, parts of Brabant — the mortality reached twenty to twenty-five percent of urban populations. The Great Famine was the first general food-system collapse in continuous medieval Europe and the most thoroughly documented because, by the early fourteenth century, the relevant cities had administrative records that allow modern historians to count the dead.
The exact contemporary documentation is grim and specific. Cities locked their grain stores to prevent looting. Hospitals turned away the sick. The price of bread in northwestern Europe quintupled in the first eighteen months of the crisis. There are repeated, well-documented reports of cannibalism from across the affected region. The political consequences would reshape European institutions for the rest of the medieval period.
Why the climate had changed
The 1315 catastrophe was not an isolated weather event. The summer of 1315 was the most extreme single year of a climate transition that had been building since approximately 1290 and that would, with brief recoveries, continue for the next five centuries. The transition from the relatively warm Medieval Climate Anomaly (roughly 950-1250) to the cooler Little Ice Age (roughly 1300-1850) involved a small but sustained drop in mean temperature — perhaps half a degree Celsius across northern Europe — and a substantial change in atmospheric circulation patterns that produced wetter summers and longer winters.
The triggering mechanism for the early Little Ice Age was probably a combination of reduced solar activity (the early portion of what would later be called the Wolf Minimum, 1280-1350) and increased volcanic activity. The 1257 eruption of Mount Samalas in Indonesia — the largest volcanic eruption of the last 7,000 years — had injected enough sulfate aerosol into the upper atmosphere to drive measurable global cooling for several years. Subsequent eruptions through the late thirteenth century continued the pattern. By the early fourteenth century the cumulative effect was a meaningfully cooler and wetter northern European climate, with a corresponding contraction of the agricultural growing season.
The agricultural system of northern Europe in 1315 had been built, over the previous three centuries, for the warmer climate that was now ending. The fields had been pushed to higher latitudes and elevations than would prove sustainable. The population had grown to its historical peak — northern Europe in 1300 contained an estimated 75 to 80 million people, possibly the largest population the continent had supported until the industrial era. The agricultural system, in the late medieval phrase, was “fully extended.” There was no margin for failure.
The failure came in 1315.
What the failure looked like
The rains of May-August 1315 produced two distinct problems for the medieval grain system. The first was that the wet conditions caused the planted seed to rot in the ground before the seedlings could establish themselves. The second was that the surviving plants could not be harvested — the wet straw could not be cut, bound, and stored without molding. The losses across the wheat crop in northwestern Europe in 1315 are estimated at sixty to seventy percent of normal yield. The oat and rye crops fared marginally better but were also substantially reduced.
The autumn and winter of 1315-1316 saw the food prices begin to rise. By December 1315 the price of wheat in London had tripled from the pre-famine baseline. In Paris the price had quadrupled. The early-spring planting of 1316, with reduced seed reserves, was further compromised by sustained rain through April and May. The 1316 harvest failed at roughly the same scale as 1315.
The third failure, in 1317, was the catastrophic one. By 1317 the seed reserves had been almost entirely consumed. The fields had not been properly drained in two consecutive wet years and contained substantial standing water. Many farms had been abandoned as their owners died or migrated. The 1317 harvest was reduced to perhaps thirty percent of normal across the affected region. By the autumn of 1317 the food crisis had moved from “expensive bread” to “no bread available.”
This is the moment, in the historical record, when the Great Famine becomes recognizably a famine in the modern sense — not a temporary crop failure managed through reserves, but a sustained collapse of the food supply that produced mass mortality.
What the cities did
The urban response to the third year of the famine, in late 1317 and through 1318, produced the first administrative measures in European history that resemble modern famine-relief policies. The major cities of Flanders — Ypres, Bruges, Ghent — established municipal grain reserves to ration the available food. The reserves were inadequate to the scale of the crisis but they did produce the first formal urban grain-distribution records in European history, now preserved in the city archives. The records are how modern historians have been able to calculate the mortality.
The Ypres records are the most detailed. The city’s mortality records for 1316-1317 show death rates running at five to six times the pre-famine baseline. The deaths were concentrated among the poor — Ypres had a substantial textile-worker population that depended on wages to buy food and had no agricultural reserves of their own. The wage workers of Ypres died in the famine at substantially higher rates than the city’s surviving merchant and craft-guild population.
The cities locked their gates. Several major Flemish cities, in early 1317, formally closed their walls to refugees from the surrounding countryside. The rural poor who had been displaced by farm failures were forced back into the deteriorating countryside, where mortality was even higher than in the cities. Bruges’ rural hinterland — the dense agricultural zone of the southern Low Countries — was, by some estimates, depopulated by thirty percent between 1316 and 1318. Many of these rural deaths were never counted.
The Catholic Church organized large-scale charitable distributions in several affected cities. The Bishop of Tournai distributed grain from the cathedral reserves to the urban poor through the winter of 1316-1317. The Cluniac monastic network supplied grain to surrounding villages. The Cistercian houses in northern France, with substantial agricultural holdings of their own, served as small islands of survival in the broader collapse.
The cannibalism reports
The Great Famine is the first major European event for which there are multiple independent contemporary reports of cannibalism. The reports come from multiple chronicles, from administrative records, and from later court testimony.
The chronicle accounts include, among others, the Annales Anglie of John Trokelowe at St. Albans, who records that “in some parts of England the people ate the flesh of the dead” during the winter of 1316-1317; the Chronicon Aulae Regiae, written in Bohemia in the 1320s, which describes “fathers and mothers killing and eating their children” during the worst months of 1317; the Vita Edwardi Secundi, the contemporary English chronicle of the reign of Edward II, which reports executions in northern England in 1317 for the murder and consumption of travelers; and the chronicles of the Flemish cities, which report several specific instances of cannibalism from the rural areas surrounding the affected urban centers.
The reports are difficult to evaluate definitively. They have the medieval pattern of moralistic reportage in which true and exaggerated elements are interwoven. But the consistent appearance of the reports across multiple independent sources, in different languages, written for different audiences, suggests that the underlying phenomenon was real. The historian William Chester Jordan, in The Great Famine, evaluates the reports carefully and concludes that scattered cannibalism almost certainly occurred in the worst-hit areas of the famine, though probably at substantially lower frequency than the chronicles suggest.
The Edwardian English court records from 1317 — preserved in the National Archives at Kew — contain at least three documented prosecutions for murder-and-consumption in northern England, all of which resulted in convictions and executions. The court records are the most legally evidentiary source for the cannibalism reports. They cannot be dismissed as moralistic chronicle exaggeration. They describe specific named defendants and specific recorded testimony.
The political consequences
The Great Famine reshaped the political institutions of northern Europe in ways that would persist for centuries. The Flemish cities, after their experience of the urban famine, established permanent grain-reserve obligations that became the model for early modern European municipal food-security policy. The English monarchy, under Edward II, was substantially weakened by its inability to manage the crisis — a weakening that contributed directly to the political instability that would lead to the 1326-27 invasion of Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer and the deposition of Edward II. The French monarchy under Louis X (1314-1316) lost substantial popular legitimacy during the famine; Louis’s premature death in June 1316 began the political instability that would, within twelve years, end the senior Capetian line and trigger the dynastic dispute leading to the Hundred Years’ War.
The famine also produced a sustained shift in the demographic balance of northern Europe. The population that died in 1315-1322 was disproportionately rural and poor. The surviving population had higher wages and lower competition for land than before. The economic effects of the famine — paradoxically beneficial for the survivors — would persist through the rest of the fourteenth century and would be amplified by the Black Death of 1347-1351. By the late fourteenth century, real wages for European agricultural laborers had nearly doubled from the pre-1315 baseline. The Great Famine, in other words, was the opening act of the demographic crisis that would, over the following century, end European serfdom and begin the long transition to the early modern wage economy.
The Belgian city of Ypres, where the urban mortality had been highest, never fully recovered its pre-1315 population during the medieval period. The city’s textile industry — the basis of its pre-famine prosperity — was substantially reduced and shifted to neighboring cities that had suffered less mortality. Ypres would have a second major demographic collapse during the First World War, six hundred years later, when it was almost entirely destroyed in the trench warfare of the Ypres Salient. The medieval city plans that survive in the modern Ypres tourism guides show streets and quarters that were partially depopulated in 1317 and never fully repopulated for the next six and a half centuries.
The rains that started on Pentecost 1315 did not stop affecting European history until the modern era. The cooling that began with them ended only in approximately 1850. The agricultural system they destroyed was not fully rebuilt — under industrial inputs and modern crop genetics — until the late nineteenth century.
In a sense the famine has not ended. The climate transition it announced is still in process. The Little Ice Age conditions ended in 1850; the warming that followed has continued; the next phase, in the twenty-first century, is being constructed in real time. The rains of May 1315 were the leading edge of a climate change that has not yet finished.