A Book of Britain: The Lore, Landscape and Heritage of a Treasured Countryside. Johnny Scott

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 abandoned to fend for themselves, and crops were left to rot. Henry of Knighton, an Augustinian canon at the Abbey of St Mary of the Meadows, Leicester, who wrote a detailed eyewitness account of the Black Death, observed: ‘Many villages and hamlets have now become quite desolate. No one is left in the houses, for the people are dead that once inhabited them.’’ The Scots saw the pestilence ravaging England as a splendid opportunity to invade, but before they had got very far the army fell victim to the plague and the soldiers dispersed, spreading the plague deep into Scotland where 20 per cent of the population died. The cumulative effects of the famine years and Black Death reduced the population in an incredibly short period of time by 50 per cent, to below three million people. Entire communities were lost and population levels did not reach those of 1300 until some three centuries later. Many of the new villages that had been formed in the preceding centuries were deserted, soon to become ruined and disappear into the landscape. Ambion, Andreskirk, Elmesthorpe and Soby in Leicestershire are examples, or Lower Harford in the Cotswolds. Here the bumps, hollows and flat-topped banks covering about a hectare indicate a sunken medieval main street. Hovels were once strung out on the level areas and the outlines of banks and ditches mark where these villagers kept livestock and grew a few crops. After the Black Death the much-reduced demand for grain lead to marginal arable land being converted to pasture or reverting back to scrub, woodland and moor. Although the area of arable declined, it did not shrink as much as the fall in population numbers, so food supplies increased comparatively and grain prices began to revert to affordable levels. Flax became re-established as a fibre crop, having been largely absent since Roman times, and although the cloth made was of poor quality, it eventually had a place in the growing textile industry. Sheep farming and wool production remained the main pastoral activity but patterns of taste changed and wool exports were reduced by the Hundred Years’ War. Increasingly the wool clip was utilised at home in the fast-growing textile industry, largely based in towns near fast-flowing streams that ran the mills. While wool exports declined, exports of cloth increased. Out in the fields an increase in the use of the horse brought about higher ploughing work rates and assisted in the production of grain from a reduced workforce.

      There was a profound change in farming systems. With a decimated population, peasants who had been bound to their lords by feudal ties suddenly found that they were able to leave for better terms elsewhere. The lords who now found it difficult to find sufficient workers gave up their role as direct producers, becoming landlords and leasing their land to tenants. These were to become a new class of yeoman farmer who provided the main driving force behind change in the countryside, typically consolidating their holdings, specialising in arable or livestock and building their own homes.

      THE BIRTH OF MODERN FARMS

      As the consolidation of farms began, so the practice of enclosing land was taken up by both farmers and the peasants themselves who collectively agreed to the rearrangement of their holdings in the search for efficiency. By 1400 economic activity was again picking up, and with the enclosures a new chapter in the development of the countryside began.

      Enclosure, or inclosure, is the process by which common land is taken into full private ownership and use.