The crops rotted in the fields; some people were forced to eat their own seed corn. Mothers abandoned their babies. There were rumours of fresh corpses of criminals pulled from gallows for food. In the years that followed, with continuing poor harvests and unusually cold winters, a fatal murrain spread among hungry oxen, and that left some land unploughed, further exacerbating the food shortage. The population then stagnated for three decades until the Black Death arrived in the 1340s and caused a crash in human numbers. The plague returned in the 1360s, followed by more bad harvests and more
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