Tallen Cyenns, Tales Of The Great Famine (1315–1317)

In the year of 1315 and until 1317 there was a famine that was the first of a series of large-scale crises of the fourteenth century. Most of Europe, extending east to Russia and south to Italy, was affected. This famine caused millions of deaths over an extended number of years and marked a clear end to the period of growth and prosperity from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. It was then as if the lands in the Kingdom had fallen into one of dearth and darkness. Famines were familiar occurrences in Medieval Europe. For most people there was often not enough to eat, and life was a relatively short and brutal struggle to survive to old age.

It was called the "Great Famine" and it started with bad weather in the spring of that year. Crop failures lasted through 1316 until the summer harvest in 1317, and Europe did not fully recover until 1322. The period was marked by extreme levels of crime, disease, mass death and even cannibalism and infanticide. The crisis had consequences for the Church, state, European society, and for future calamities to follow in the fourteenth century. While this famine coincided with the end of the Medieval Warm Period, between 1310 and 1330, northern Europe saw some of the worst and most sustained periods of bad weather in the entire Middle Ages, characterized by severe winters and rainy and cold summers. Tallen recalled two different years when storms struck during the spring months in which there were hail stones that were just over three inches in diameter. At least during one of these storms the sky was said to have turned an aqua blue/green color and the wind was so strong that the hail stones were blowing sideways which caused extensive damage to much of the area. Some had often thought that since the "War of Cold", which although it lasted almost 50 years and was ongoing during this time, that the seasonal changes then was one way how that war got it's name.

This famine started while Tallen and his good friend John FitzStephen were still serving together in military service. And he remembers an event that took place while they were both on that far away tour located somewhere in the frozen northern part of the country where it seemed for months at a time there would be blowing blinding snow blizzards and sub-zero temperatures. While this was a very serious event Tallen and John, being Veterans of service to their Country by then and with having a somewhat sarcastic outlook upon life at times, often joked that just perhaps this was revenge for killing one of the fabled "Pooka" they were said to have once encountered. Tallen remembers them chasing and killing one during an evening patrol they were on and thought it to be the cause of a repeated security violation at one of the many outpost they were in charge of guarding. You may recall from an earlier story that Pookas while not classified as a wholly malevolent spirit would often appear in the form of horses and goats, although occasionally they appeared as other animals or even in human form and were said to be prone to violence and considered to be vicious pranksters. Most others thought the Great Famine may have been precipitated by a volcanic event, perhaps that of Mount Tarawera, New Zealand, which lasted about five years.

Changing weather patterns in the spring of 1315 brought unusually heavy rain to much of Europe. Throughout the spring and the summer, it continued to rain, and the temperature remained cool. Under such conditions, grain could not ripen, leading to widespread crop failures. Grain was brought indoors in urns and pots to keep dry. Stores of grain for long-term emergencies were limited to royalty, lords, nobles, wealthy merchants and the Church. As military men even Tallen and John were often forced to eat some very unusual meals that were prepared by a Cook that was assigned to the area they would regularly patrol. These dishes were often completely frozen and were found to be wrapped in some sort of tin-foil like materials that could at least be used to heat them up in individual portions. A number of documented incidents show the extent of the famine. In August of 1315 Edward II, King of England, stopped at St Albans and had difficulty finding bread for himself and his entourage. It was a rare occasion in which the King of England was unable to eat. The French, under Louis X, tried to invade Flanders, but being in the low country of the Netherlands, the fields were soaked and the army became so bogged down they were forced to retreat, burning their provisions where they left them, unable to carry them away.

Even in the area that Tallen and John were they often had to traverse some rained soaked areas. The readers here may recall the story that was never officially confirmed about when they, as experienced young horseman, had been called upon for a scouting mission just days after there had been torrential rains and were surrounded by their opponents and thought to be captured when they ran their horses into a mire and the horses fell. The leader of the opposing force immediately took their weapons and requested their headgear in which Tallen daringly refused and was able to keep his headgear long after his time served. Tallen was said to have remembered hearing John retelling of this story from time to time and for some unknown reasons John always said the word as "captcha'd", to which Tallen would always tell him that he keeps using that word and he don't think it means what he thought it meant. In the spring of 1316, it continued to rain on a European population deprived of energy and reserves to sustain itself. All segments of society from nobles to peasants were affected but especially the peasants, who represented the larger portion of the population and who had no reserve food supplies. To provide some measure of relief, the future was mortgaged by slaughtering the draft animals, eating the seed grain, abandoning children to fend for themselves and, among old people, voluntarily refusing food for the younger generation to survive. The chroniclers of the time noted many incidents of cannibalism. The height of the famine was reached in 1317, as the wet weather continued. Finally, in that summer, the weather returned to its normal patterns.

By then, however, people were so weakened by diseases such as pneumonia, bronchitis and tuberculosis, and so much of the seed stock had been eaten, that it was not until 1325 that the food supply returned to relatively normal conditions and that the population began to increase again. It was then as if the lands in the Kingdom had begun it's journey back into prosperity and lightness. This was also the year that Tallen had left for a quest where it was believed that he traveled to the place of his birth which was thought to be in the southeastern area of the County of Cork in Ireland and the effects of the famine may have been just one of the reasons he did. The Great Famine coincided with and greatly influenced the Bruce campaign in Ireland, the attempt of Edward de Bruce, a younger brother of Robert the Bruce of Scotland, to make himself High King of Ireland. At first, the Irish-Scottish alliance seemed unstoppable, as it won battle after battle and gained control of most of Ireland in less than a year. It was on the verge of driving the Anglo-Norman settlers out of Ireland altogether. The famine hit Ireland hard in 1317 and struck most of the country, making it difficult for Edward de Bruce to provide food to most of his men. He never regained momentum and was defeated and killed in the Battle of Faughart in 1318. Edward's body was cut into quarters, sent to different towns in Ireland. His head being delivered to the King of England, Edward II. That ended the last organized effort in many centuries to end English rule in Ireland.

The Great Famine was restricted to Northern Europe, including the British Isles, northern France, the Low Countries, Scandinavia, Germany, and western Poland. It also affected some of the Baltic states except for the far eastern Baltic, which was affected only indirectly. The famine was bounded in the south by the Alps and the Pyrenees. In a society whose final recourse for all problems had been religion, and Roman Catholicism was the only tolerated Christian faith, no amount of prayer seemed effective against the causes of the famine. That undermined the institutional authority of the Church and helped lay the foundations for later movements that were deemed heretical by the Church, as they opposed the papacy and blamed the perceived failure of prayer upon corruption within the Church.

Medieval Europe in the fourteenth century had already experienced widespread social violence, and even acts then punishable by death such as rape and murder were demonstrably far more common, especially relative to the population, compared to modern times. The famine led to a stark increase in crime, even among those not normally inclined to criminal activity, because people would resort to any means to feed themselves or their family. For the next several decades, after the famine, Europe took on a tougher and more violent edge. It became an even less amicable place than during the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. This could be seen across all segments of society, perhaps most strikingly in the way warfare was conducted in the fourteenth century during the Hundred Years' War, when chivalry ended, as opposed to the twelfth and the thirteenth centuries when nobles were more likely to die by accident in tournament games than on the field of battle. And once again we are reminded of the incident with Tallen and John FitzStephen being thought to have been captured at first only to have reinforcements arrive later and ending up capturing their opponents which at times was thought to have been simply just an exercise or simulation of a war time scenario, much like a tournament game the nobles participated in. And unfortunately Tallen recalls two different accidents which claimed the lives of his Brothers in Arms. One involved a tragic mishap with a weapon during a changeover of sentry duty in which there was one fatality. While the other was from the results of a crash of a transportation device for troops that were providing support for a heavy weapons movement. That accident took the lives of two officers and three lower ranking persons. Those three, worked in the same type duties as Tallen did. They were indeed hard times and even though life was a relatively short and brutal struggle for most to survive to old age, Tallen was thought to have passed in 1396, which would have made him 107 and John FitzStephen was 92 years old when he passed in 1374.