Posted on 09/14/2026 11:07:52 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
This is the story of a largely forgotten disaster that struck medieval Britain between 1315 and 1319. Overshadowed by the Black Death just a generation later, it rarely gets the attention it deserves. 1315 was an extraordinarily bad year. The real problem was… things just kept getting worse.
The Disaster BEFORE the Black Death | 10:34
Paul Whitewick | 267K subscribers | 12,109 views | September 13, 2026
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Chapters
00:00 - Britain Had a Problem
02:59 - The Food Problem
05:57 - It Wasn't over
08:12 - Where did it go?
YouTube transcript reformatted at textformatter.ai *may* follow.
People look at some of the ruins and say, "but where did they go?"
One year of bad harvest? Not a good time but survivable.
Two? You are starting to lose people.
Three? You have now lost people and animals you can not afford to lose.
Four? Your chances of having enough healthy people left to do any planting is minimal.
Five? Dead.
Egypt had Seven............
Also it changed the society completely. Once the famine was over the Pharaoh owned EVERYTHING except for what was owned by the priesthood.
Most people do not read chapter 47. They should.
Chapter 47 of what??
Where part of the account of the seven year famine is located.
Basically the land, chattels and people went from mostly being privately held to owned by the state. It ended up being rented back to the people for a 20% tax on everything they cultivated.
You could say that it was a civilization ending event because what came after was much different than the civilization that was before.
They had the same people we have like Bill Gates and politicians and others who think we should rent everything or die.
There's actually an undercurrent on YouTube, videos of people trying out the local English weeds, which were availed of back at that time, and probably before and after, because that's how people used to live before our current era of plenty.
My great-g's pioneered here. By contrast, if I'd been a pioneer, I'd have been dead in about five minutes, either via accidents (tree falling on me when I'm trying to cut it down, for example), starvation, or being eaten by some local wildlife.
They overlook calories. To do the kind of hard manual labor these people were doing they needed to consume at a minimum of 3000 calories a day. You are not going to be able to get that much from eating weeds.
The wild plants that you forage contain trace minerals, vitamins and flavor. A handful of dried bilberries in your pottage will give you enough vitamin C to ward off scurvy. But you need to have the wheat, barley, oats or beans in there as well for the calories.
Raising chickens and cows will give you milk and eggs which are full of calories but they are seasonal. You have both for about half of the year. And you need hay and husks to keep your animals going though the winter. Grain is really the only thing that you can store to keep you going through the winter.
Even among the wealthy about 60% of their calories came directly from grain and beans.
If you add in what was grown for animal fodder it goes way up.
But yeah, if we tried to live like that, we would undoubtedly be dead in a week. Probably from tetanus or dysentery.
Thank you very much - I’ll check it out.
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