Climate and Economy in the Beginning of the Fourteenth century: the 1314-1322 Agrarian Crisis in the Bresse (France) as depicted in Manorial Rolls

The agrarian crisis that affected Western Europe economy between 1314-1322 reflects as a symbol the downturn that struck medieval economy since the 13th century. Two harvest failures design the pattern of this crisis. The three back-toback harvest failures of 1315-1317 induced all across North-Western Europe the worse famine of its history, the so-called Great Famine. Then, though not having induced such a disaster, in 1321-1322 prices abruptly rocketed 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 worries about global change, historians 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 archive materials, i. e. by the study of the great deal of manorial accounts produced by estates administrations since the beginning of the 13th century. This paper aims to enlight this period from a geographically different point of view. The collection of roll accounts produced by the administration of the ancient county of Savoy makes it possible to reconstruct continuous prices and yield series from 1280 onwards, and for a detailed analysis of coping strategies adopted by rural communities. In this paper we focus on the region of the Bresse, in Eastern France. It is shown that the conjuncture follows the same patterns in the Bresse as in south England, with climate having the same over-arching impact, though less disastrous. We discuss also the process of increasing vulnerability induced by continuous climate stress on this communities, whose own coping strategies worsened their situations. In this perspective, we propose that exogeneous and indogeneous factors are closely intertwined to trigger the social crisis. Two examples make it particularly relevant. First, in order to cope with the culmination of prices in 1315-1317, a large part of the peasantry had to sell lands, goods or cattle in order to preserve their access to food market. Subsequently, an increasing impoverishment of the peasantry occured, reaching its climax in the 1320's. During this decade, accounting documentation provide numerous evidences that a non negligible part of the peasantry was not able anymore to cultivate their plots. Like in a vicious circle, this decline of the labor capacity that initially resulted from a coping strategy adopted to cope against climate stress, added its own effect in 1321 with climate stress on production to trigger an even more dramatic social crisis than after 1315. Secondly, the documentation suggests that the contraction of the grain market caused by the decrease of the production after 1315 appears to be non linear with the production decline. It means that stewards retrieved from the market bigger quantities of their stocks during period of low production (after 1315) than in period of benevolent harvests (before 1315). In other words, the more production declined, the more cautious the stewards were in selling their stocks. Comparable to a process of self-fulfilling prophecy, this strategy, by restricting the supply had a booster effect on the increase of prices in 1322 alongside the production decline induced by climate. Finally, if the commnities have been more or less able to cope with the catastrophic climate stress of 1315-1317, their ability to absorb a nevertheless weaker exogeneous shock on the harvest in 1321 was lower, due to coping strategies adopted few years earlier. The social consequences were then more dramatic after 1321 and during the entire 1320's.