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"Seven hundred years ago this month, people across northern Europe saw a comet in the sky and feared the worst. They were already running out of food. It had rained too much in 1315—sometimes every day for weeks at a stretch. Wheat, barley, and oats rotted in the fields, and it was too wet to make hay. Then, after an unusually cold winter, the rains started again, and the 1316 harvest failed, too. Grapes in vineyards were covered with a fuzzy mildew, and, one observer wrote, “there was no wine in the whole kingdom of France.” There wasn’t much bread, either. The historian William Chester Jordan, in his book “The Great Famine,” recounts how Parisians first put to the wheel and then exiled a group of bakers whom they accused of bolstering their loaves with waste. Across the Continent, there was also a severe shortage of salt—used to make cheese and to preserve food—since there was not enough sun to dry the salt pans on the Baltic and North Sea coasts. In 1317, the rains came again. Storms washed away not only newly planted grain—which was already scarce, because farmers had begun eating their seed corn to survive—but also topsoil and dikes. Sheep and cattle, standing in cold, muddy pastures, began dying of infection. People died, too, from malnutrition and illness.
In some regions of Europe, the Great Famine of 1315-17 killed a tenth of the population, shattering social norms and local economies. Villages were abandoned, religious houses were dispersed, and minor feudal lords pawned their land to whoever could pay. Peasants and the urban poor were left to fend for themselves. And yet the Great Famine is not as well known as it might be; William Rosen, the author of “The Third Horseman,” calls it “the famine history forgot.” In part, this is because of what followed it: the Black Death, which reached Europe in 1347 and killed a third of the population; and the Hundred Years’ War, which was fought between 1337 and 1453, and was as brutal a slog as it sounds. Those catastrophes, though, were visited on a population that had been left physically weak and divided by the famine, which, in turn, increased the damage they did. If nothing else, the hard times of seven centuries ago demonstrate that hunger has both moral and political costs..."
— Source: “The Next Great Famine” by Amy Davidson Sorkin (New Yorker) 2016
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"Why did people think cannibalism was good for their health? The answer offers a glimpse into the zaniest crannies of European history, at a time when Europeans were obsessed with Egyptian mummies.