Peoples of the Kingdom
War, Plague, Slump And Recovery
The steep fall in overseas trade affected rural society - the producers of the wool, skins and hides which made up the vast bulk of exports - no less seriously. Pastoral farming must have contracted sharply. Yet these were long-term economic movements, softened by occasional recovery until the 1370s, and their seriousness, at least in the eyes of contemporaries, depended on how they interacted with other factors. There were far fewer complaints made by the chroniclers of a decay of trade than of famine. The Chronicle of Holyrood complained of 'a very great famine, and pestilence among animals' in 1154, and the Chronicle of Lanercost mentioned 'a great corruption of the air and inundation of rain' causing a wholesale failure of the harvest in 1256. These seem to have been only occasional disasters, less serious than the succession of poor harvests which afflicted both Scotland and much of northern Europe in the early fourteenth century. There was widespread famine in 1315-16 and in the later 1330s. It is impossible to say whether this amounted to a subsistence crisis which brought about either a check or a stop to a long period of population increase, for this crisis was shortly overtaken by another - the Black Death.
The first serious outbreak of plague was in 1349, when it was promptly labelled the foul death of England' where it had struck a year before. Another epidemic came in 1361-2, although it probably affected only southern Scotland, and there were further outbreaks, confined mostly to the burghs, in 1379, 1392, 1401-3, 1430-2, 1439 and 1455. According to Fordun, 'nearly a third of mankind' died in 1349. This estimate was confirmed by Wyntoun, who, however, cast some doubt on his own credibility by asserting that one in three also died in 1362. The death toll was huge, if unquantifiable. With well over a half of the population living to the north of the Tay, it seems unlikely that Scotland would have been as badly hit as England, where the first epidemic did kill one in three people. Even so, the outbreak of 1349 was almost certainly the worst in Scotland's history, far surpassing the epidemic of 1645 which claimed one in five of the urban population.
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