In January 1274, a woman named Emma of Hatch spent the day going door to door in the village of Beeston, begging bread. Toward evening, she turned back to find somewhere to lodge for the night. Her way took her over a plowed field in the parish of Northill. There, according to the coroner’s roll that records her death, she was seized by the cold, and she died.

No one recorded her age or whether she had family. A man named Ranulf Lacrasse came across her body afterward. English law gave him a title, the first finder, and with it the duty to raise the alarm and produce neighbors who would guarantee he appeared before the coroner. The jury gave the cause of death as cold.

As far as the crown was concerned, that finished the business of Emma of Hatch. Emma comes down to us through the Bedfordshire coroner’s rolls, which survive for stretches of the 1260s and 1270s. The office of coroner had been created in 1194. Local knights, unpaid, viewed every sudden death in the county and kept a record for the king’s judges.

The rolls are plain documents. A person dies suddenly, a coroner rides out, a dozen neighbors swear to what happened, and a clerk writes a few lines. Kings and bishops hardly appear. Cobblers do, and washerwomen, and children of eighteen months.

For most of the people in these records, those few lines are the only time anyone holding a pen noticed them. It took a sudden death to earn that notice. Who do we mean when we say peasants? By the usual estimates, something like nine people in every ten across most of medieval Europe.

In an English village of Emma’s day, they came in grades. At the top sat families with a full holding, thirty acres or so scattered in strips across the open fields, with a plow team or a share in one. Below them were half-holders, and below those came cottars, who had a cottage and a garden and perhaps an acre, and lived by hiring out their hands. Lowest of all were people like Emma, who had nothing to hire out that anyone wanted in January.

A great many of these families were unfree. The lord of the manor owned their labor for set days each week, took a fine when their daughters married, and took their best animal when they died. Every one of them, from the thirty-acre man down to the beggar, faced one problem once the days shortened. Nothing grows from November to March.

Whatever a household was going to eat, burn, and wear through those months had to be under its roof before the first hard frost. For a medieval peasant, getting through winter was mostly settled in autumn, months before any snow fell. Harvest began in August and ran into September. The whole village turned out for it, and the lord’s fields came first.

His tenants owed him boon days at harvest, so a man cut the lord’s wheat while his own stood ripe. After the lord’s corn was in, the villagers cut their own strips with sickles and stood the bound sheaves up to dry. Behind the carts came the gleaners, and village bylaws were strict about who they could be. Gleaning was kept for the old and the crippled, people who could not earn a harvest wage.

A woman like Emma in a better season might have gathered a few pecks of dropped ears that way and counted it as her winter. How much came in from the fields was the whole question. Medieval farmers counted their yield against the seed they had put in the ground. A decent year gave back four grains for every one sown.

A splendid year might give seven. A bad year gave two, and in a two-grain year, one of those grains was already owed back to the soil as next year’s seed. The family looked at its stack of sheaves in September, knowing that a share of it could never be eaten, no matter how hungry February got. Michaelmas arrived on the twenty-ninth of September, and with it the rent.

Every tenant needed silver pennies, and most peasants had only one way to get them: by selling grain. They sold in the weeks after harvest, when every other peasant in the county was also selling, and the price was at its lowest point of the year. Come May, when their own bins were empty, many of them would be buying grain back at the highest price of the year. What remained after the seed, the tithe, and the rent was the winter.

The house itself did very little to help. Archaeologists who dug the deserted Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy for forty years uncovered row houses built of cruck frames, wattle and daub walls, and thatched roofs. The building had two doors facing each other across the middle, making a passage that divided the house in half. The family lived in one side.

Their animals lived in the other. The fire sat in the middle of the living end on a slab of stone, burning right on the floor in the open with no chimney above it. Smoke from the hearth rose to the underside of the thatch and found its own way out through a hole in the roof or simply through the straw. The smoke did useful work.

It cured the bacon in the rafters and coated the roof timbers in tar that kept the beetles out. The family also breathed it every winter of their lives. In 1995, researchers opened the sinuses of medieval skeletons from Wharram Percy and from a poor parish in York. In York, fifty-five percent of the people examined had the bony damage of chronic sinusitis.

At Wharram, the figure was thirty-nine percent. Chronic sinusitis means years of a blocked, aching face and infected discharge. The researchers put it down to smoke, damp, and poor housing. The inside surfaces of medieval ribs often carried a rough layer of new bone where the lung beneath had been infected for a long time.

Tuberculosis was in those houses too, and chemical tests showed these people caught it from each other, not from their cattle. Babies were breastfed until about eighteen months, which gave them some protection through their first winters. After weaning, growth fell behind. A Wharram child of fourteen was about the height of a ten-year-old today.

Help with the heating came from the animals. A plow ox or a cow gives off a great deal of heat, and with only a low partition, or none at all, between the two ends of the house, some of that warmth drifted through to the people. So did the smell of the dung. Otherwise, the cold months were lived in dimness.

Windows, where a house had any, were small openings closed by wooden shutters that stayed shut in winter to keep the heat in. The interior was dark at midday. Wax candles were for the altar. Ordinary people made rush lights, dried rushes drawn through melted fat, which burned with a small smoky flame for about twenty minutes.

People slept long, in a first sleep and a second sleep. Between them, they lay awake, mended the fire, checked the animals, talked, said prayers. The bed was a sack stuffed with straw laid on the floor or on a low platform of boards. The whole family got into it together, the baby included.

Fuel was where the peasant ran straight into his lord. Every tree on the manor belonged to somebody, and it was almost never the person who needed the firewood. The villagers held customary rights with old names. Housebote was the right to take timber for mending your house.

Firebote was fuel for the hearth, and it nearly always came with conditions. On many manors a tenant could take only dead wood, sometimes only what he could carry on his own back, or only on set days, and never with a cart. What a poor family burned was sticks, brushwood, thorn cuttings, furs from the common, bean stalks, anything dry. Such stuff flares up and is gone in minutes.

A proper log that would hold a fire through the night was the lord’s property, or it cost money. People took what they were not entitled to, and the manor courts are full of them. At Wakefield in Yorkshire, a man named Hudd was fined twelve pence for carrying off splintered timber from a neighbor’s barn that had blown down in a storm. The jury valued what he took at a single farthing.

Consider what sort of Christmas a man is having when he walks to a neighbor’s wrecked barn to pick up a farthing’s worth of broken wood. Hedges were a usual target. At Merton in Surrey, the court ordered that nobody should break the hedges of any tenement or carry wood from them for the fire, on pain of forty pence, several weeks’ wages for a laborer. That court also warned parents they would forfeit forty pence if their children broke the neighbors’ hedges.

At Willington in Bedfordshire, a man named John Abel was fined and written down as a common malefactor of hedges. What a peasant wore against the winter was thin protection at the best of times. Most people owned one set of clothing. A man had a linen shirt if he was fortunate, a woolen tunic to the knee, a pair of hose, and a hood with a short cape.

A woman had a long woolen gown over a shift and a kerchief for her head. The cloth was coarse and often left the color of the sheep. A statute of 1363 tried to make that compulsory: plowmen, carters, and shepherds with goods worth under forty shillings were to wear nothing but blanket cloth and russet. When a tunic wore through, a patch went on, and after enough years the patches had patches.

Clothing was valuable enough to be named in wills and stolen in burglaries. Shoes were the weakest point, a single thickness of leather stitched inside out with a flat sole no thicker than a belt. On wet ground, they soaked through quickly. Around 1394, an unknown English poet wrote a piece called Pierce the Plowman’s Creed.

In the middle of it, he stops to describe a plowman at work in winter. The man’s coat is made of the cheapest coarse cloth. His hood is full of holes and his hair sticks out through them. His shoes are lumpy with patches and his toes poke out as he treads the ground.

His hose hang down around his shins plastered with mud. On his hands are two mittens made of rags, the fingers worn through and caked with dirt. He is wading in the mire almost to the ankle behind four oxen so thin, the poet says, that a man could count every rib. Beside him walks his wife.

Her coat has been cut off short for a cloak. She has wrapped herself in a winnowing sheet, the sacking used for tossing grain, and she is barefoot on the bare ice, the poet writes, so that the blood followed. At the end of the furrow lies a little wooden bowl, and in the bowl is a baby wrapped in rags. Two more children are on the ground beside it, all of them crying.

It is a poem, with a religious argument to make, but a winnowing sheet worn as a cloak is an odd thing to make up. Cold worked on a body in stages, and a peasant in January lived most of the time in the early ones. Hands and feet went first. Fingers and toes swelled into chillblains that itched badly when they warmed and split open at the knuckles.

Feet that stayed wet for days turned pale and numb, and afterward the skin came away in sheets. In real frost, with a gale taking the heat out of a bare foot, the flesh itself froze. A frozen toe goes hard as wax and feels nothing at all. When it thaws, it swells and blisters.

Over the following weeks, it shrivels and turns black. Eventually it comes off, or someone takes it off with a knife. Past that stage lies what happened to Emma. A person losing heat faster than the body can make it begins by shivering hard.

The hands stop obeying. Speech slurs and the legs grow clumsy. Thinking goes soon after, and people in that state become confused. At last the shivering stops.

A heavy drowsiness comes on, and the person sits down or lies down to rest. From the outside, it looks like sleep. Emma had been on her feet all day in midwinter, begging her food. What she had been doing was the nearest thing the age had to a system of relief.

The destitute went from door to door and asked, and giving to them was a religious duty most villagers took seriously. They gave a crust or a bowl of pottage or a place in the barn for the night. When a wealthy person died, the family often paid for a dole, a penny or a loaf to every poor person who came to the funeral. The system had limits.

It worked best for the village’s own poor, the widow everyone had known since she was a girl. A stranger did less well, and in a hard year when every household was counting its own loaves, less well again. Emma’s was far from the only death of its sort. The inquests that historian Barbara Hanawalt went through, more than three thousand of them, contain a steady scatter of people found dead of cold on roads and in fields: beggars, the old, strangers passing between villages.

Cold season did not excuse anyone from work. The first of it was threshing. All the grain stored in the ear had to be beaten out with a flail before it could be eaten or sold, a few thousand swings of the club a day, in a freezing barn, from November into spring. A good part of that threshing was not for the thresher.

Unfree tenants owed week work to the lord all winter, commonly two or three days in every seven. On those days they threshed his corn, carted his dung, cut and hauled wood for the hall fire. Hedges had to be mended and ditches cleaned, which meant standing in ditch water in thin shoes. Many also owed carrying service, taking the lord’s grain to market on their own backs, sometimes a journey of a day or more over roads that winter had turned to slop.

The oldest voice we have for this work comes from about the year one thousand, when a monk named Ælfric wrote Latin dialogues for his pupils. His plowman says he works very hard, that he goes out at daybreak and drives the oxen to the field, and that no winter is so harsh that he dares stay home for fear of his lord. The teacher says it sounds like great toil. It is great toil, the plowman answers, for I am not free.

Women worked as long as the men. Spinning was constant, the distaff tucked under one arm, the thread drawn out and twisted on a weighted spindle. A woman spun while she watched the pot, minded the children, walked to the well. The poet William Langland described the poor in their cottages, burdened with children and rent, going hungry and suffering in winter, getting up at night to rock the cradle, carding and combing wool, patching and washing, peeling rushes.

He says it would be a pity to set down in rhyme the misery of the women who live in those hovels. Then he sets it down anyway. Christmas was the one real break the peasant year allowed. On most English manors, week work stopped for twelve days from the Nativity through Epiphany.

Christmas was also a rent day, and tenants owed the lord hens at Christmas, often loaves and ale besides. In return, custom on many manors obliged the lord to give something back. The customs of one thirteenth-century Somerset manor spell it out: the shepherd was entitled to a loaf of bread and a dish of meat on Christmas Eve, and his dog to a loaf of its own on Christmas Day. Other tenants were to share loaves, a dish of beef and bacon with mustard, a chicken, a cheese, fuel to cook with, and as much beer as they could drink in the day.

For people who lived on dark bread and pottage, a dish of beef and a day’s beer was a long way from ordinary. The danger in the house was the hearth, and it fell hardest on the youngest. A fire burning in the open on the floor, with straw underfoot and cooking pots standing over the flames on trivets, meant some of the children were going to be burned. On the eighteenth of December 1273, a girl named Alice, eighteen months old, was sitting by the fire in the village of Cople in Bedfordshire.

A copper dish full of boiling water was standing over the fire on its trivet. The roll says the dish fell onto her and scalded her to death. Two weeks later, Emma froze in her field. The two villages lie a few miles apart.

A model entry used to train coroners’ clerks deals with a two-year-old girl who pulled herself up against a barrel full of hot water. The teaching example chosen was a toddler and a tub of scalding liquor. Babies in cradles were the most exposed of all. A cradle was put near the hearth, and the baby in it was swaddled, bound round with linen bands so it could not move its arms.

On Christmas Day 1345, a man named William Senan and his wife went to church, leaving their baby Lucy with her sister Agnes, who was three. Agnes went out to play, and the baby burned to death. The worst stretch of the peasant year was still ahead: the months between the end of the old grain and the cutting of the new, from about April to the start of August. Farmers have called it the hungry gap.

Langland has his plowman Piers explain it to the figure of Hunger in person. Piers says he has no money for chickens or geese or pork. All he has is two fresh cheeses, a little curds and cream, an oat cake, and two loaves made of beans and bran baked for his children. He swears he has no salt bacon left and no eggs.

He has parsley and leeks and plenty of cabbages, a cow with her calf, and a mare to pull the dung cart, and on that the household must live until Lammas, the first of August, when he hopes to have a harvest in his field. Households that were not doing well started down a list every villager knew. First they stretched the flour. Bran went back into the bread, then ground beans, then acorns soaked to take out the bitterness.

They picked nettles and whatever green weeds were coming up in the hedge bottoms and boiled them into the pottage. In harder years, they dug roots. During the bad years of 1437 to 1439, country people in England were trying to make bread out of fern roots and ivy berries. In Norway and Sweden, the soft inner layer of pine bark was stripped off in early summer, dried, pounded, and mixed into the flour.

A winter of that diet left its mark. Month after month of grain and dried peas with hardly any fresh food brings on scurvy. The gums swell and bleed, the teeth work loose, bruises spread, and old scars reopen. Bone specialists find the traces of it on medieval children, a fine porous roughness on the skull and around the eye sockets.

When the bread ran out came borrowing. A family borrowed grain from a better-off neighbor against the coming harvest, or it sold an acre. The manor court rolls record these little surrenders of land in a line or two each, and in bad years they multiply. Selling an acre meant a smaller harvest next year, so it only put the trouble off.

The animals starved alongside the people. Hay ran short, and cattle were kept alive on straw, then ivy and holly and the twigs of elm and ash. By March, the plow oxen were at their thinnest, and these were the animals that now had to drag an iron-shod plow through wet clay. Sheep that had stood all winter on sodden ground came down with rot.

A cottar who lost his one cow in March had lost the milk and cheese meant to carry his children through the summer. Everything up to this point describes an ordinary winter, one a village expected and mostly lived through. The winters that went beyond anything the old people could remember were the ones chroniclers wrote down. For the winter of 763 to 764, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle says only that it was the great winter.

Irish annals speak of snow lying for close to three months. A Greek chronicler describes the Black Sea frozen so hard that sea and land could not be told apart, and when the ice broke up, he and about thirty other children climbed onto one of the flows to play. Under 1115, the English chronicle says the winter was so severe with snow and frost that no living man remembered a worse one, and it brought a great destruction of cattle. Irish monks recorded that one too: frost and snow lasting from the middle of December to the middle of February, making a slaughter of birds and beasts and people, and afterward great want spreading across the whole of Ireland.

The order of events in that entry is the usual one, with the cold arriving first and the famine coming behind it. This is how a hard winter usually killed. Some people froze like Emma. More often the deaths came twelve months on, in the winter after the failed harvest, when the weather might be perfectly ordinary and the barns were empty.

A single bad year could be endured. Villages had ways of spreading the pain through loans, a second-best crop, and the charity of whoever still had something. The catastrophes came when two or three bad seasons arrived in a row and every one of those cushions was used up. The great famine historians call it began with rain.

In the spring of 1315, it started raining across the whole of Northern Europe, from Ireland to Poland, and it rained through May, June, July, and August. Tree-ring studies rank those years among the wettest runs the continent has had in seven centuries. Out in the fields, the peasants watched their whole year come apart. Low ground flooded and stayed flooded.

The seed rotted before it could sprout, or it sprouted and the plants lay down flat in the mud. Hay cut in June would not dry and went black in the swath, and with it went the fodder meant to carry the cattle through the following winter. What grain did ripen came in wet, moldy, and light, and had to be dried in ovens before it could be ground at all. At St Albans, a monk named Johannes de Trokelowe kept a record.

By his account, a quarter of wheat that had sold for five shillings two years earlier went for twenty in 1315. Salt reached thirty-five shillings a quarter, which put the curing of a pig beyond most cottages. On the tenth of August, the king himself, Edward II, arrived at St Albans with his court, and Trokelowe says bread could hardly be found to feed even the royal household. Trokelowe also says the bread had lost its usual strength.

People ate large amounts of it and were hungry again almost at once, because the loaves were baked from damp, half-spoiled grain bulked out with whatever would go through a sieve. A body that is not fed begins to consume itself, and it goes about it in a set order. The fat is used up first, then the muscle, so that arms and legs thin down to the bone and the buttocks hollow out. The skin dries and flakes and turns a dull grayish brown.

Hair comes out in handfuls. Later, the starving begin to swell. Fluid leaks from the blood into the flesh, and the feet, the legs, and the belly puff up tight and shiny. A dull indifference settles over the person, and children stop crying.

At the end, it is usually some passing infection, a cough or a flux, that finishes a body with nothing left to fight it. The government tried to help and made matters worse. In 1315 Parliament fixed maximum prices for cattle, sheep, poultry, and eggs. Sellers responded by keeping their animals at home, so the markets emptied, and within a year the ordinance was withdrawn.

Trokelowe goes on to describe the shifts people were put to. Fourpence worth of coarse bread, he says, would not feed one working man for a day. Horsemeat became a prized dish. Fat dogs were stolen for eating.

And he adds, as something he had from many reports, that men and women in a number of places secretly ate their own children. The annals of Bermondsey give a similar list: the poor ate dogs and cats and the dung of doves, that entry says, and their own children. Chroniclers also record that thieves locked in jail fell upon each newly arrived prisoner, tore him apart, and devoured him while he was still half alive. Whether mothers in English villages really cooked their children is something no court record confirms and no chronicler claims to have watched.

Several monks writing in separate houses heard it and thought it believable. They were surrounded by people eating dogs and pigeon droppings, and they did not find the next step hard to credit. The sickness that came with the famine is described more plainly. Trokelowe says a dysentery brought on by rotten food struck nearly everyone, and behind it came a burning fever and a pestilence of the throat.

Dysentery is what happens when starving people eat grain gone to mold and animals that died of disease. In a one-room house, it went through the whole family. Trokelowe describes the poor lying dead in the streets. The church’s explanation was sin.

God was angry, the rain was his punishment, and the remedy was to show sorrow. The Archbishop of Canterbury ordered the clergy to walk barefoot in procession carrying the consecrated host and the relics with bells ringing. For the peasants themselves, the famine can be followed through the dry entries of their own manor courts. The number of small surrenders of land shoots up in 1316 and 1317.

A half-acre here, a rood there, given up by a poor tenant to a richer one for a few shillings or a few bushels. Families were eating their land. Each strip sold bought a little time and left the holding smaller for the next year. Some families, when the last piece went, left the village.

The records of the criminal courts show thefts of food and livestock climbing steeply, and the penalty for stealing goods above a shilling in value was hanging, and a sheep was worth more than a shilling. Trokelowe noticed where some of the robbers came from. Great lords and monasteries, he says, cut down their households and withdrew their customary alms. The servants they turned out had lived comfortably and knew no other trade.

They could not dig, he writes, and they were ashamed to beg. And they took to robbery and killing until the country was full of them. Inside the families, the choices left little on paper. Historians of the famine describe small children put out to fend for themselves and old people who stopped taking their share of food so that the younger ones who could still work the fields might live.

It rained again in the summer of 1316, and that second harvest was as bad as the first. By the following winter, the seed corn was gone in a great many households, eaten in the months when holding out had stopped being possible. Estimates for England as a whole run from one person in ten to one in seven dead across those years. In the cloth towns of Flanders, crowded with country people who had come in looking for bread, it was worse.

At Ypres, the town paid for the burial of nearly 2,800 bodies in about six months of 1316, roughly a tenth of everyone living there. The weather finally improved in 1317, and at that point the animals began to die. A cattle disease reached England in 1319, likely rinderpest. An infected ox ran a fever and stood with its head down, streaming from the eyes and nose, its mouth filled with ulcers so that it could not eat.

Within a week or ten days, it was dead. Estate records put the average loss at around six cattle in every ten. Trokelowe adds that the dogs and birds which fed on the carcasses swelled up at once and died, and that nobody dared to taste the beef for fear of dying the same way. After three years of hunger, people were afraid to eat the meat lying dead in their own yards.

For a plowing village, the loss of the oxen was a second disaster. A plow team needed eight beasts shared among several families. Without them, the heavy plow could not be moved, and without plowing, nothing could be sown, whatever the weather did. Men harnessed horses where they had them.

Milk, butter, and cheese disappeared from the diet for years. The famine is usually dated from 1315 to 1317, but for the peasant it went on until about 1322, when the herds had started to recover. Whoever a peasant was, death brought a visit from the lord. When the head of a household died, the lord’s reeve came to the house and chose the most valuable beast, the custom called heriot.

Then the parish priest arrived and, by a matching custom called the mortuary, took the second best. In February, a widow with children to feed for five more months before harvest could lose her ox, which would have plowed her land for the spring sowing, and her cow, which was the summer’s milk. If the household had no animals at all, the lord’s man took the best thing he could find, a brass pot or a cloak. In a famine, the heriots piled up.

On the bishop of Winchester’s manors, the number collected rises sharply in 1316 and 1317. Each one an animal taken from a household that had just lost its head. In the villages where most years most people came through, winter ended slowly. Sometime in March, the doors could be left open and the smoke cleared from the rafters.

The cow calved and came into milk. Ewes dropped their lambs. The plow teams, thin as they were, got the spring barley and the oats into the ground. Women found the first green things in the hedge bottoms and put them in the pot.

Easter came, and Lent was over. When English parish registers begin in the 1530s, they show burials bunching in March and April, at the very end of the cold season. The old went then, worn down by months of it, and so did the babies born since autumn. The medieval pattern was probably no different.

In April of 1274, the spring that followed Emma’s death and little Alice’s scalding, the Bedfordshire coroner was called out to the village of Risley. A girl named Joan had been going through the village from house to house, begging for bread. The roll calls her a poor child and gives her age as five. She came to a bridge the villagers called Forbridge, and she fell from it into the water and drowned.

Her mother Alice found her.