The Third Horseman: A Story of Weather, War, and the Famine History Forgot
William Rosen
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0143127144
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
How a cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history—years before the Black Death
In May 1315, it started to rain. For the seven disastrous years that followed, Europeans would be visited by a series of curses unseen since the third book of Exodus: floods, ice, failures of crops and cattle, and epidemics not just of disease, but of pike, sword, and spear. All told, six million lives—one-eighth of Europe’s total population—would be lost.
With a category-defying knowledge of science and history, William Rosen tells the stunning story of the oft-overlooked Great Famine with wit and drama and demonstrates what it all means for today’s discussions of climate change.
intimidate Balliol, it failed. The Scottish king had little value as a military leader; he avoided combat himself and had neither the stature nor the talent to direct a strategy to be conducted by subordinates. But he was enormously important as a symbol, being the only man who could agree to terms with Edward. So when Balliol sent word that he refused to come to Edward in order to pay fealty, the English king reportedly said, “If he won’t come to us, we’ll go to him,” and did. A column of
The Flemish cloth industry was a direct, and very profitable, consequence. Another consequence of the climate-driven growth of towns and textiles was that Flanders became the first place in northern Europe where commoners regularly became richer than the nobility; weaving cloth, it turns out, is far more productive than growing wheat. This made the relationship with England—the largest wool producer in Europe—more and more important, and therefore more and more troubling to the county’s nominal
north of the Firth of Forth (as well as a fair bit of northern England) but the English still maintained garrisons in the most formidable castles in Scotland. As long as they remained in the hands of an occupying army, their recapture was King Robert’s highest priority. Without artillery to throw boulders at castle walls—fourteenth-century trebuchets used a counterweighted arm to sling projectiles weighing two hundred pounds nearly a quarter-mile—he was unable to batter his way to victory in the
affection but to invite criticism of his lack of ruthlessness. If the Lancaster rebellion of 1322 was notable for how it restored Edward’s fortunes—at least temporarily—it is even more remarkable for just how much it hammered the already fragile agricultural economy of Britain. After three relatively good years, the harvest of 1321 had been another disaster, compounded by the king’s confiscation of grain at far below market price. Moreover, looting was widespread, an explicit tactic of both the
rains of 1315, the manorial lords who depended on the rents from those farms for gold, as well as the townsmen who depended on them for food, were strapped. They couldn’t replace lost income by shifting to other activities, and neither could they purchase food from anywhere nearer than the Mediterranean. For most, the best available option was alienation: essentially pawning property to raise cash, which happened dozens of times between 1315 and 1320. Literally hundreds of pieces of real property