Endless Rain Brings the Great Famine to Europe

In the spring of 1315, relentless downpours swept across northern Europe, opening several years of cold and waterlogged seasons. The unyielding wet weather prevented crops from ripening, drowned lowlands, and left the saturated earth too heavy for medieval plows to turn. Because hay and straw could not be cured in the damp, farmers lost essential animal fodder, while salt production plummeted as brine failed to evaporate without sun. Deprived of the main preservative for meat and facing ruined fields, communities rapidly consumed their immediate reserves, watching prices for basic staples multiply across markets from the British Isles to the borders of western Poland.

The disaster fell upon a continent ill-prepared for an agricultural collapse. Over the preceding centuries of the Medieval Warm Period, Europe had undergone substantial demographic growth, pushing populations to levels that strained arable land. Yield ratios had already declined from late thirteenth-century highs, leaving contemporary society with negligible margins of safety. When successive harvest failures struck between 1315 and 1317, the crisis extended across Scandinavia, northern France, Germany, the Low Countries, and the British Isles, bounded to the south by the Alps and Pyrenees. Most peasant families, the great majority of the population, had little or no food in reserve.