by Ed West
An observer in Flanders wrote that “the cries that were heard from the poor would move a stone.”10 In Ireland the starving “extracted the bodies of the dead from the cemeteries and dug out the flesh from their skulls and ate it.” A German monk wrote: “Certain people . . . because of excessive hunger devoured their own children. In many places, parents, after slaying their children, and children their parents, devoured the remains.”11
At the time most people received between 80–90 percent of their calories from crops; the Normans who conquered England, for instance, got 80 percent of their calorific intake from just one type of bread. Meat was rare, and lamb was a great luxury eaten by aristocrats once a year, while the poor would never see it on their plates. Most people at the time of the famine already lacked protein, and even during good years, the diet of at least half the population was deficient in calories and also calcium, Vitamins A, C, and D, magnesium, and zinc.
Rye bread was widespread in northern Europe, but it was vulnerable to ergotism, a fungus that has the same essential property as LSD; some blame the various demonic possessions of the period on ergotism, although people at the time often attributed it to the Devil. Eating mouldy rye would lead to the fungus attacking the nervous system, and it can even cut off circulation and cause gangrene. There was also gastrointestinal anthrax caused by eating infected meat.
Fish was also essential to many people’s diet, but the trade relied on salt for preservation, again dependent on the weather. England’s long coast held huge seaside salt pans, depressions built between lines of high and low tide in which salty water was captured until it evaporated. But because of the lack of sun there was a huge shortage of salt from 1315, so between 1315–1319 fish prices rose to a record level.
The production of wine was also devastated, as grapes require one hundred days of sun a year, which is why today Saxony is the most northerly wine-producing region in Europe. In 1316 “there was no wine in the whole kingdom of France,” much to their obvious distress, and Germany’s great Neustadt vineyard produced “a trifling quantity” the following year. Wine production in England declined, although it continued to be produced for some time, but of far inferior quality; by the Victorian age a popular magazine joked that drinking English wine requires four people—one to drink it, two to hold him down, and the other to force it down the victim’s throat.
As well as starvation, many after 1315 died from scurvy, dementia, or blindness, caused by such things as pellagra (a niacin deficiency) or xerophthalmia (a lack of vitamins). Malnutrition in youth also often leads to problems with the immune system in later life, and this would have very serious consequences later on when an even worse catastrophe befell Europe.
Crime shot up, and there was widespread (if understandable) theft of grain, while rioters took over towns such as Douai in Flanders. Landless knights and men-at-arms took to extortion, and mobs from the countryside flooded into Paris, “an assortment of unemployed youths seeking adventure, brigands, thieves, unfrocked priests, beggars and whores.”12 They seized the Grand Châtelet, the city’s main stronghold, pillaged abbeys and also attacked Jews, who were thrown into a fiery pit. In fact, there is a correlation between medieval European temperatures and the intensity of anti-Semitic violence, as resources became scarcer.13 Starvation does not bring out the best in people.
From 1317 gangs of schavaldores, a local word meaning robbers, terrorized Northumberland, robbing people at home and in the fields, stealing their cattle and pigs, and often killing them—perhaps a mercy, as they would surely starve otherwise. In the north of England, desperate Scots were more of a menace than ever.
There was also cannibalism, which occurs during all periods of hunger (during a famine in China in the third century BC, the emperor had even officially allowed parents to eat their own children). In Estonia, “the mothers were fed their children,” while an Irish chronicle wrote that people “were so destroyed by hunger that they extracted bodies of the dead from cemeteries and dug out the flesh from the skulls and ate it; and women ate their children out of hunger.” In Poland and Silesia there were reports whereby “parents devoured their children and children their parents.”14 Some also ate the bodies of hanged criminals. The somewhat sinister fairy tale Hansel and Gretel comes from the famine years, when sending children off to the forest was not an unknown way for desperate parents to avoid watching their children starve.
The winter of 1317–8 was the harshest of all, with cold weather lasting almost until May. The Baltic froze in 1318, the third time since 1303, and rivers feeding it turned to ice too, isolating coastal cities.
There were now a series of huge storms in the North Sea basin, caused by the growing temperature differences between the Arctic Ocean and Gulf Stream. These tempests became more severe in the English Channel, a funnel between two seas and so more dangerous; Dunwich in East Anglia, one of the largest towns in England at the time was devastated by one flood after another, losing 269 buildings. It never really recovered, and today is home to just eighty-six people. The Chronicler of Salzburg described how in 1317, floodwaters in the Mulde River near Leipzig were so violent that a church was lifted off its foundations and drifted away.
Most estimates of the Great Famine suggest that between 5 and 12 percent of Europe’s population died, mostly from starvation. This disaster was followed by a disease of cattle and sheep; the parasitic worms Fasciola heaptica, known as sheep liver fluke, reduced sheep and goat numbers by 70 percent from 1321, while flocks were likewise hit by sheep pox, also known as the Red Death. The cattle disease murrain hit the country in 1319, devastating the population—it was the same disease that afflicted Egyptian-owned cattle but spared the Hebrews during the time of Exodus. What more obvious sign of God’s displeasure could there be?
A LANCASTER ALWAYS PAY HIS DEBTS
Just six weeks after Bannockburn, the Scots, led by Bruce and “Black” James Douglas, were piling into the counties of Northumberland and Durham, and the following year the raids were even worse. Over the summer of 1316, they reached as far as Yorkshire, led by the courageous but ruthless Douglas. Back in 1308, Black Douglas had become notorious when his men attacked an English garrison on Palm Sunday, entering a church and shouting “Douglas!” Prisoners were taken to the castle larder where they were beheaded and their corpses put on a pile, which was then set on fire, after which the Scotsmen poisoned the wells with salt and dead horses. Douglas also removed the right hand of the captured archers, hated and feared across the border, for as the proverb stated, “every English archer carried 24 Scottish lives in his belt.”15 It became known as the Douglas Larder and made Douglas more notorious “than the devil in hell.”16
By 1318, the city of Berwick was slowly starving and surrounded by Scots, the English reduced to eating their horses. The edge of the town fell in March after street fighting, but it was another three months before Berwick Castle surrendered to Black Douglas, whose father William had handed it over to the English twenty-two years earlier. The Scots now penetrated deeper into English territory, at one point controlling almost all the north, yet the realm was crippled by conflict between King Edward and his enemies. In 1319, the king summoned twenty-three thousand soldiers to muster at York, but only eight thousand appeared, and further disaster occurred with a horse epidemic, the pathogen burkholderia mallei, killing half of all the animals between 1320–1322. Edward invaded Scotland with a cavalry force but returned with infantry.
And with Gaveston out of the way things, perversely, got worse. Opposition continued to revolve around Lancaster, but there were also deep divisions, made worse when Thomas’s father-in-law, the Earl of Lincoln, the most moderate of the king’s critics, died in 1311. Meanwhile after the death of Gaveston, Edward had found solace in an even more venal favorite Hugh le Despenser, a brutal, violent bully who became Edward’s lover.17 Despenser had recently murdered a captive, Llewelyn Bren, a shocking crime that broke the laws of chivalry, but it was certainly not the only one, and on a
nother occasion “one John de Sutton was held in prison until he had surrendered the castle of Dudley,” while a wealthy heiress called Elizabeth Comyn was kidnapped and held hostage for a year until she handed over her estates.18 Despenser was particularly notorious for preying on widows with desirable houses; one of his victims, Lady Baret, was tortured so much that her four limbs were broken and she went insane as a result. And yet he had a hold over the king—much to the queen’s distress.
Queen Isabella had in 1322 given birth for the fourth time, to a girl, and as she grew into her role she had been handed more power and responsibility at court, the king valuing her advice. Her relentless acquisitiveness and love of luxury remained unbated, however, and despite the country’s hardships, she still kept sixty seamstresses to ensure her household kept up with the latest fashions, as well as 180 servants, including “an almoner, whose only job was to dispense alms on feast days and holy days, using ‘the Queen’s great silver alms dish.’”19 A Queen was expected to show pity to the poor.
Such was Lancaster’s unpopularity that there had also formed a middle party, opposed to both the royal cousins, led by Bartholomew Badlesmere—an MP, baron, and veteran of Edward I’s wars—whose home was Leeds Castle in Kent. Other magnates had remained loyal to the king, despite his faults, among them the marcher (border) lord Roger Mortimer, whose family had held the title of Baron Wigmore since 1074. Mortimer was “tall, swarthy of complexion, and strongly built . . . tough, energetic, decisive, and versatile in his talents.” He was also “arrogant, grasping and ambitious” and proud of his family pedigree and background.20 He had refined tastes and had turned his castles in Wigmore and Ludlow into palatial properties worthy of his grand name.
And yet the brutality of the Despensers was too much even for him. On top of this, the Despenser and Mortimer families also had an old grudge that went back to the 1260s, when Roger’s grandfather, another Roger Mortimer, had killed Hugh’s grandfather, also his namesake, at the Battle of Evesham. Despenser, ever greedy for land, preyed on his rival’s territory and so, in the spring of 1321, Mortimer mobilized a group of marcher lords where they attended a meeting in Yorkshire with Lancaster and other northern rebels.
The more moderate Pembroke, seeing that the king’s relationship with Despenser was destroying him, warned Edward: “He perishes on the rocks that loves another more than himself.”21 The queen had begged her husband on her knees to remove Despenser from court, but to no avail. Isabella had been a mere child when her husband had humiliated her with Gaveston, but now she was a grown woman, had borne her king two sons and two daughters, and deserved respect. Yet King Edward was as much under the spell of Despenser as he had been of his previous obsession, and his favorite was intent on ruining and, if possible, removing the queen.
To add to Isabella’s humiliation, Edward also had an interest in low-born men; records showed that he made payments to various individuals, including Wat Cowherd, Robin Dyer, and Simon Hod. This may have been an ongoing feature of their marriage, for back in 1314, Edward and Isabella had spent Christmas apart, the king “rowing in the Cambridge Fens with a great concourse of simple people, to refresh his spirit” and swimming with “silly company.”22
In August 1321, Lancaster turned up in Parliament with a force of five thousand armed retainers, ordering that Despenser and his father Hugh le Despenser the Elder be banished. The younger Despenser fled to his vessel and became a pirate, capturing a Genoese ship and killing the entire crew, and stealing five thousand pounds worth of treasure—but he soon returned.
As Despenser became more powerful and ingrained at court, moderate men like Badlesmere turned increasingly toward Lancaster. The king responded by having Badlesmere banned from his county of Kent, and in October 1321, while he was away in Oxfordshire, the queen was sent, en route to London, to stop at Leeds Castle. When Isabella arrived, however, and demanded entry, Lady Badlesmere instead ordered her archers to fire on the queen’s retainers, killing six men in front of her eyes. The queen headed back to London, shaken, to inform her husband.
Things came to a head the following March when an army loyal to Edward met Lancaster’s force at Boroughbridge where the northern barons’ cavalry was overwhelmed by the king’s archers. Lancaster’s ally the Earl of Hereford was stabbed by a pike-thrust from below his horse and died horribly, bowels hanging out.23 Lancaster was taken prisoner and condemned to death by being hanged, drawn, and quartered, but out of respect for his royal blood this was commuted to beheading; Lancaster was forced to ride to his execution on an old mare, wearing a ripped hat, while locals pelted him with snowballs. Alice de Lacy, the earl’s unhappy wife, afterward married her lover, Eubulo L’Estrange.
This was followed a week later by the killing of six of Thomas’s leading followers. On March 22, another twenty-four of Lancaster’s associates were executed in various horrible ways, and over the next month 118 in total were put to death, including six leading noblemen. For his role in the rebellion, Baron Badlesmere was dragged through the streets of Canterbury before being decapitated, and afterward “his head spread on a pike and set to stare down, hollow-eyed, on the cowed townspeople from the city’s east gate.”24 Edward also hanged the constable of Leeds Castle along with thirteen others, and imprisoned Lady Badlesmere and her children in the Tower of London. Also jailed was Lancaster’s elderly mother-in-law, the countess of Lincoln, whose husband had been a loyal, if critical, subject. The king’s troops also captured Mortimer, who was sentenced to death, but with the bloodlust burning out he was instead locked up in the Tower indefinitely.
This ruthless purge of his enemies made Edward appear strong, although his temporary popularity did not last. Europe’s barley harvest collapsed, worse in 1321 than even in 1315, and the following year fifty-two people were crushed at the gates of the Preaching Friars in London, fighting over food. The king became increasingly tyrannical under the sway of Despenser, now more powerful than ever. The Earl of Carlisle, who had loyally defeated Lancaster on behalf of the king, had accepted peace overtures from the Scots, and when the king learned of this, he had him cruelly executed.25
In August 1322, Edward II invaded Scotland, but Bruce escaped beyond the Forth and now the Scots chased them back and the Earl of Richmond was captured, yet another humiliation. Worse still, Edward had left his queen at Tynemouth Priory on the Northumbrian coast, at the mercy of the Scots nearby, and made no attempt at rescue her from the Earl of Douglas nearby. This was the second time he had deserted her in this way, the first being when he had fled with Gaveston; the queen and her damsels eventually escaped in a boat, but in their desperation one of her ladies fell overboard and drowned. Her hatred was growing, and the She-Wolf would not take the humiliation forever.
“I HEARD IT SAID THAT POISON IS A WOMAN’S WEAPON.”
In August 1315, King Louis’s wife Margaret died in a Normandy dungeon, supposedly of a cold, although poison was suspected; at the very least she was heavily maltreated. However, the following year Louis died too, aged just twenty-six, from a chill caught after playing tennis, and many spoke of poison at the hands of his brother Philippe’s mother-in-law Mahaut of Artois. A few months later, Louis’s heavily pregnant second wife Clemence gave birth to a boy, John, but he succumbed after just six days, and so the crown passed to the Iron King’s second son, conveniently for Mahaut.
Poison was often suspected in French court politics, but as forensics was not capable of detecting its presence in a corpse much is just speculation. Mahaut was rumored to be a killer, and some even believed her to have murdered the infant king too to further her daughter’s position. Perhaps. Just as poison was prevalent in Essos and Dorne, so courts in France, Italy, and Spain were said to be hotbeds of such trickery. The Normans in particular were notorious for it, and their dukes certainly poisoned at least one Duke of Brittany—their chief rival—but many other rivals died under mysterious circumstances. In Moorish Spain in 1008, Abd al-Malik, ruler of Cordoba, was on his way to fight the C
hristians when he collapsed, apparently after his brother had offered him an apple laced with deadly poison. This Spanish tradition was maintained by the caliphate’s Catholic successors and, in the fourteenth century, Blanche of Bourbon, Queen of Castile, was fatally drugged at the behest of her husband, King Pedro the Cruel.26
Many believed unicorn horns were an antidote to poison, and these were bought at markets across Europe; although as unicorns don’t actually exist, what they were being sold was the horn of the narwhal, a type of whale found in the cold, northern seas. In reality, there were no known cures for most types, and so the French court kept a Master of the Stomach to protect the monarch from anyone who might wish to remove him. Being a royal food taster to the king of France, however, would not have been the worst job, as the Valois kings helped to invent what we now think of as cuisine. They employed one of the most important figures in the history of the culinary arts, Guillaume Tirel, who was enfant de cuisine (kitchen boy) to Charles IV’s queen Jeanne. Later he became head chef to Philippe VI, and wrote Le Viandier, the first cookbook of the medieval period, which details the food of northern France; it is because cuisine was first developed formally in Paris that, even today, to become a chef is to learn, firstly, about French food.
Philippe V had been able to claim the throne because of the suspicions of illegitimacy hanging over his brother’s surviving daughter; it was instead decreed that the crown could only be inherited through the male line, using a dubious historical precedent, the “Salic Law” of the Franks. In just a few years, this legal dispute would explode into a war costing millions of lives, but this was all in the future. Tragically, however, Philippe died aged just twenty-nine, further proof of the curse of the Templars in some people’s minds, and the crown in turn passed to his youngest brother Charles in 1322.
