which covered many thousands of acres. By 1300, sheep farming had developed into the most important agricultural industry, with a national flock of twenty million breeding ewes providing a surplus of twelve million fleeces for export.
The Cistercian and Benedictine Orders were principal owners of sheep farms, establishing enormous flocks across the uplands of Northern England and Southern Scotland, and using the wealth from wool to build magnificent abbeys at Kelso, Melrose, Jedburgh, New Abbey in Dumfriesshire or Rievaulx and Fountains in North Yorkshire, to name only a few. Wool wsa traded principally with the Italians, who had a very sophisticated economic system in those days which enabled the monks to sell wool on futures contracts in exactly the same way as some producers do today. For example, an arable producer would be offered a price to sell his grain by a merchant long before harvest, based on what the merchant thinks the world demand for grain would be; the farmer has the option of taking the money then, or waiting for harvest in the hope that the price will be better. The economy was now strongly trade-and cash-based, with over a million pounds of coins in circulation and accountants calculating profits. Taxation was also a key part of this market economy, which satisfied the King’s need for revenue rather more easily than through owning land direct.
The rise of taxation also led to the rise of ‘parliament’, where representatives of the regions would come to London when summonsed to hear of the King’s initiatives, and gradually these representatives were afforded more power. Twenty per cent of the population lived in the 800 or so towns, where craftsmen specialised in their trades under control of the various guilds. New professions developed and doctors, lawyers, administrators and clergymen all found a living in the new urban environment.
Britain was effectively a part of France and benefited from trade opportunities for cloth, leather and surplus corn. However, there was a fly in the ointment: advances in agricultural production had enabled the population to grow from two and a half million at the end of the Anglo-Saxon era to seven million by 1300. This population peak coincided with agricultural yields reaching maximum output and, as with all organic systems, the medieval farmers struggled to maintain fertility. In an effort to meet the demand for grain the three-crop system of rotating grain with fallow which provided natural fertilisation was abandoned and grain was grown in the same field year after year without a break. This merely leached all the fecundity out of the ground and harvest yields fell. Landlords attempted to ameliorate the problem by reclaiming more land in marginal areas of heath, marsh and high moorland where the effort and cost of production were often greater than the output.
The price of foodstuffs escalated for both humans and livestock, which prohibited keeping enough beasts through the winter to provide the manure desperately needed as fertiliser. Suddenly, the country was in a self-perpetuating spiral of declining fertility, collapsing harvest yields and ever-increasing prices. Added to this, the 500-year warm cycle came to an abrupt end and the weather turned cold, wet and unstable. Between 1315 and 1322, a succession of cold wet summers and freezing, sodden winters caused arable crop yields to fall dramatically – periods of prolonged rain had prevented harvest, so grain had rotted where it stood. Fodder crops were equally affected, with much hay being lost or even left uncut, leading to the premature culling of livestock.
Food prices soared, many peasants were forced to sell their oxen and became dispossessed. Prolonged cold, wet weather caused animals to lose condition and led to periodic bouts of ‘murrain’, a deadly disease of cattle and sheep. Among humans, there were many cases of the frightful effects of eating bread made from grain blighted with the deadly fungus, ergot. Claviceps purpurea start life in early summer as tiny, pale pink, drumstick-shaped fruit whose thread-like spores are carried by the wind to flowers of a wide variety of weed grasses, particularly black grass and rye species. By autumn, as these plants ripen, some of the kernels appear as small, elongated, black seeds, similar in shape to mouse droppings. These are the sclerotia and they contain a number of alkaloids that are massively toxic. Ever since cereal production began in Mesopotamia, 9,000 years before Christ, providing further host plants for ergot, these little sclerotia have found their way into the food chain and have been the cause of hundreds of thousands of agonising deaths.
THE EARLY CHRISTIAN MONKS WHO FIRST RECORDED THE EPIDEMICS THAT SWEPT ACROSS EUROPE IN 857, 945 AND 1000 AD, WHEN 50,000 PEOPLE DIED OF IT IN FRANCE, REFERRED TO THE DREADFUL EFFECTS AS IGNIS INFERNALIS – ‘HELL’S FIRE’.
Unfortunately, no one made the association between the deadly blackened seeds among rye, the principal cereal of the poor, but also to some extent wheat and barley, and its appalling consequences until the nineteenth century. Ergotomine poisoning affects both humans and livestock by paralysing the motor nerve endings and restricting the flow of blood to the extremities. Grazing animals are less at risk as ergot matures at the point grass ceases to be palatable and is usually dislodged by the movement of stock as they feed. Those that do ingest even the smallest quantity collapse with staggers and their tails, ears, lips and hooves can slough off. Humans who become infected through bread made from contaminated flour experience violent convulsions, wrenching muscle contractions which caused pregnant women to miscarry, an agonising sensation of burning, terrifying hallucinations, followed by gangrene and death.
The early Christian monks who first recorded the epidemics that swept across Europe in 857, 945 and 1000 AD, when 50,000 people died of it in France, referred to the dreadful effects as ignis infernalis – ‘Hell’s Fire’. So prevalent were outbreaks of the sickness during the medieval period that the Hospital Brothers of St Anthony established 370 hospices, painted bright red for easy identification, across Europe and Britain, with one erected as far north as Leith, Scotland, in 1430.
Ergot thrives after cold winters followed by wet springs, and the climate change of the fourteenth century provided ideal conditions for sporadic outbreaks at least every ten years, when whole rural communities were wiped out through eating infected bread. What are now believed to be mass infections of ergotism were often confused with the plague. The dancing manias synonymous with the Black Death and their associated mortalities were almost certainly hallucinogenic symptoms of ergot. The second decade of the fourteenth century was a period marked by extreme levels of crime, disease and mass death, which had consequences for Church, state, European society and future calamities to follow later in the century:
When God saw that the world was so over proud, He sent a dearth on earth, and made it full hard. A bushel of wheat was at four shillings or more, Of which men might have had a quarter before… And then they turned pale who had laughed so loud, And they became all docile who before were so proud. A man’s heart might bleed for to hear the cry Of poor men who called out, ‘Alas! For hunger I die…’ POEM ON THE EVIL TIMES OF EDWARD II (c.1321)
Worse was yet to come. In the abnormally wet summer of 1348, as the wretched peasants watched another harvest rotting in the ground, the bubonic plague which had been ravaging Europe arrived in England. The disease spread throughout the country with dizzying speed and fatal consequences, particularly in towns where overcrowding and primitive sanitation aided the contagion. It reached London before Christmas, and in the following months nearly half the city’s population of 70,000 inhabitants were carted off to mass graves on the outskirts of London, in what is now the East End. There would be no survivors once the plague reached isolated communities, such as villages, monasteries and hospices or Spitals. Place names which include Spital, as in Spitalfields, indicate the site of a medieval leper colony and the only positive consequence of the Black Death was the virtual eradication of leprosy in Britain.
THE BUBONIC PLAGUE WHICH HAD BEEN RAVAGING EUROPE ARRIVED IN ENGLAND … IT REACHED LONDON BEFORE CHRISTMAS, AND IN THE FOLLOWING MONTHS NEARLY HALF THE CITY’S POPULATION OF 70,000 INHABITANTS WERE CARTED OFF TO MASS GRAVES ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF LONDON, IN WHAT IS NOW THE EAST END.
Peasants fled their fields, livestock were
