ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the environment in which northern Europeans lived in the years 1315 to 1322, specifically the nature of the weather and of political conditions and the results for crops, animals and the human population in the era known as the Great Famine. It is generally agreed that enormous demographic growth and expansion of settlements into once heavily forested lands and comparable wildernesses characterized northern Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Great Famine was therefore a shock in multiple ways. It was protracted, intense, and usual mechanisms to deal with problems, even if they were working were not adequately filling the needs of the northern populations. Not every action by a medieval peasant or urban worker was a form of "resistance" to the domination of the superordinate classes in the thirteenth century or even in the famine period. Petty crime in general was also an expanded activity in the famine years, both in rural and urban areas.
