pay packets shrank, demand for the goods supplied by merchants must have begun to stall. To feed the growing population, marginal land was being ploughed, and was yielding fewer and fewer grains for each grain sown. Diminishing returns dominated. Predatory priests and chiefs did not help. Before long hunger was a real risk. It came suddenly in the sodden summers of 1315 and 1317, when wheat yields more than halved all across the north of Europe.
