The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time

by John Kelly

The harvest of 1315 was the worst in living memory. The wheat and rye crops were stunted and waterlogged; some oat, barley, and spelt was redeemable, but not very much. The surviving corn was laden with moisture and unripened at the ears. In the lower Rhine “there began a dearness of wheat [and] from day to day prices rose.” The French chronicles also mention the “chierté” (dearness) of food prices “especiaument à Paris.” In Louvain the cost of wheat increased 320 percent in seven months; in England, wheat that sold for five shillings a quarter in 1313 was priced at forty shillings just two years later. Across the English countryside that autumn, the poor did their sums; a year’s worth of barley, the cheapest grain, cost a family sixty shillings, the average laborer’s annual wage was half that amount. The price of beans, oats, peas, malt, and salt rose comparably. Even when food was available, washed-out bridges and roads often prevented it from being transported. The early winter months of 1316 brought more suffering. As food grew costlier, people ate bird dung, family pets, mildewed wheat, corn, and finally, in desperation, they ate one another.