Generalities on Medieval Famines in England.
Summing up the English famine-pestilences of the medieval period, we find that they included the usual forms of such sickness—spotted fever of the nature of typhus, dysentery, lientery or looseness (such as has often subsequently accompanied typhus or famine-fever in Ireland), and putrid sore-throat. That some of these effects were due to spoiled grain and fruits, as well as to absolute want, we may reasonably conclude; for example the harvest of 1258 rotted on the ground, and yet the mouldy corn was sold at famine prices. With all those records of famines and their attendant sicknesses in England, it is significant that there is little indication of ergotism. The immunity of England from ergotism, with such a record of famines as the annals show, can only have been because little rye was grown and little black bread eaten. The standard of living would appear to have been higher among the English peasantry than among the French. A bad harvest, still more two bad harvests in succession, made them feel the pinch of famine more acutely, perhaps, than if they had accommodated themselves to the more sober level of rye bread. Hence the somewhat paradoxical but doubtless true saying of the Middle Ages—“Anglorum fames, Francorum ignis.” The saying really means, not that England was a poor country, which would be an absurd repute for foreigners to have fixed upon her; but that the English were subject to alternating periods of abundance and scarcity, of surfeit and starvation. The earliest English work which deals fully and concretely with the social condition of the country is the fourteenth-century poem of “The Vision of Piers the Ploughman.” A few passages from that poem will be of use as throwing light upon the famines of England, before we finally leave the period of which they are characteristic.
Langland’s poem describes the social state of England in peculiar circumstances, namely, after the upheaval and dislocation of the Great Mortality of 1349; and in that respect it has an interest for our subject which comes into a later chapter. But in so far as it illustrates the alternating periods of abundance and scarcity, the vision of medieval England concerns us here before we quit the subject of famine-pestilences. The average industrious ploughman, represented by Piers himself, fares but soberly until Lammas comes round[133]:—
“I have no penny, quod Piers, pullets for to buy,
Ne neither geese nor pigs, but two green cheeses,
A few cruddes and cream, and an haver-cake,
And two loaves of beans and bran ybake for my fauntis.
And yet I say, by my soul, I have no salt bacon,
Nor no cookeney, by Christ, collops for to maken.
And I have percil and porettes and many kole-plantes,
And eke a cow and a calf, and a cart-mare
To draw afield my dung the while the drought lasteth.
And by this lyflode me mot live till lammas time;
And by that I hope to have harvest in my croft;
And then may I digte thy dinner as me dear liketh.”
Some are worse off than the ploughman in the slack time before the harvest:
“All the poor people tho pesecoddes fetched,
Beans and baken apples they brought in their lappes,
Chibolles and chervelles and ripe cherries many,
And proferred Piers this present to plead with Hunger.
All Hunger ate in haste, and axed after more.
Then poor folk for fear fed Hunger eagerlie,
With green poret and pesen, to poison Hunger they thought.
By that it nighed near harvest, new corn came to chipping.
Then was folk fain, and fed Hunger with the best,
With good ale, as glutton taught, and gerte Hunger go sleep.
And though would waster not work but wandren about,
Ne no beggar eat bread that beans in were,
But of cocket or clerematyn or else of clean wheat:
Ne no halfpenny ale in none wise drink,
But of the best and of the brownest that in burgh is to sell.
Labourers that have no land to live on, but their hands,
Deigned nought to dine a-day night-old wortes.
May no penny ale them pay ne no piece of bacon,
But if it be fresh flesh other fish fried other bake.”
The waster being now in his season of plenty falls to abusing the Statute of Labourers:
“And then cursed he the king and all his council after,
Such laws to loke, labourers to grieve.
But whiles Hunger was their master there would none of them chide,
Nor strive against his statute, so sternly he looked.
And I warn you, workmen, wynneth while ye mowe,
For Hunger hitherward hasteth him fast.
He shall awake with water wasters to chasten.
Ere five year be fulfilled such famine shall arise
Through floods and through foul weathers fruits shall fail.
And so said Saturn, and sent you to warn ...
Then shall death withdraw and dearth be justice,
And Daw the dyker die for hunger,
But if God of his goodness grant us a truce.”
He proposes to feed the lazy wasters on beans: