Climate and economy in the early fourteenth century: The 1314–1322 agrarian crisis in Bresse (France) as depicted in manorial rolls
Type de matériel :
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The agrarian crisis that affected Western Europe between 1314 and 1322 is seen as the visible symptom of the economic downturn that struck the medieval economy from the end of the thirteenth century. Two harvest failures sketch the pattern of this crisis. The three back-to-back harvest failures of 1315–1317 brought the worst famine in its history to the whole of northwestern Europe, the so-called Great Famine. Then, although it did not lead to such a disaster, the harvest failure of 1321–1322 saw prices abruptly rocket to a record level. Recent climate reconstructions show that this crisis happened in a period of rapid climate transition, between the Medieval Climate Anomaly and the Little Ice Age. Hence, in the context of global worries about climate change, historians have renewed the analysis of the agrarian crisis through the lens of environmental history. To date, available econometric reconstructions of the crisis have been achieved only with English archival materials, i.e., through the study of the many manorial accounts produced by estate administrations since the beginning of the thirteenth century. This paper aims to shed light on this period from a geographically different point of view. The collection of roll accounts produced by the administration of the former County of Savoy makes it possible to reconstruct continuous prices and yield series from 1280 onward, as well as a detailed analysis of the coping strategies adopted by rural communities. In this paper, we focus on the region of Bresse, in eastern France. It is shown that the conjuncture followed the same patterns in Bresse as in southern England, with climate having the same overarching impact, though less disastrous. We also discuss the process of increasing vulnerability induced by continuous climate stress on these communities, whose own coping strategies worsened their situations. The social consequences were then more dramatic after 1321, continuing throughout the 1320s.
Réseaux sociaux