The Third Horseman

Climate Change and the Great Famine of the 14th Century

By: William Rosen

Narrated by: William Hughes

How a seven-year cycle of rain, cold, disease, and warfare created the worst famine in European history.

In May 1315 it started to rain. It didn't stop anywhere in north Europe until August. Next came the four coldest winters in a millennium. Two separate animal epidemics killed nearly 80 percent of northern Europe's livestock. Wars between Scotland and England, France and Flanders, and two rival claimants to the Holy Roman Empire destroyed all remaining farmland. After seven years, the combination of lost harvests, warfare, and pestilence would claim six million lives - one eighth of Europe's total population.

William Rosen draws on a wide array of disciplines, from military history to feudal law to agricultural economics and climatology, to trace the succession of traumas that caused the Great Famine. With dramatic appearances by Scotland's William Wallace, the luckless Edward II, and his treacherous Queen Isabella, history's best documented episode of catastrophic climate change comes alive, with powerful implications for future calamities.

©2014 William Rosen (P)2014 Blackstone Audio

A wonderful mystic like Book

What a lisent this book is. It covers how people in world adapted to the 400 year warming trend from 1000 AD. until 1400 AD.
Mostly how UK and Ireland behaved.

should be titled "The Scottish Wars."

the book is a fair accounting of the 13th century but concentrates more on the Scottish Wars rather than on climate change and famine. we narrated, a good editor could have arranged the chapters to marry the scientific aspects of climate change with the history of the kings of England and Scotland.

One of my favorite listens

This book, although written about the effects of weather and drought on countries and history was SO WELL WRITTEN that it increased my understanding of the kings and monarchs in the time period and history in general. I will listen again!

Interesting, mostly focused on England & Scotland

Interesting book, weaves the reign of Edward 1 and 2 of England together with the impact of climate change in the early 1300s.

A litany of gruesome ways to die

I enjoyed the book, especially the sections on the climate change that led to the 7-yr famine begun in 1315. There was a somewhat brief description of the medieval warm period which led up to the start of the 14th century. Things were great then: abundant crops, relatively abundant food, new warmer areas to be colonized. Starting about the turn of the century, things began going badly. The book provides the facts behind Mel Gibson's Braveheart. William Wallace at 6'5" to 7' would have been better played by Liam Neeson. Starting with William Wallace's 'traitor's death,' Rosen describes a long litany of ways that members of all classes of society and their domestic animals died, each seemingly more gruesome than the last. The most awful for the majority of people was starvation due to crop failure from intense rains which washed away crops and soil followed by drought. Most of the focus of the book is on Scots-English politics, with some on the Welsh and a little about France and the Holy Roman Empire (German states). There is passing reference to the 1840s Irish potato famine and the Chinese famines which rivaled or exceeded the 14th century famine in the misery they caused. This is a grim book for a grim period of history.