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If the land was stingy, it was also capricious. In most regions of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, harvests were poor, or even failed completely, every eight or nine years. The vast majority of the population who lived off the land might survive a single bad harvest by eating less and drawing on their reserves of grain. But when the land combined with peristent bad weather -- too much rain rotting the seed or drought withering the young stalks -- the result was catastrophic. Meager grain reserves were soon exhausted, and the price of grains soared. Provisions from other areas with better harvests wee hard to obtain. ~ Page 608

Such unbalanced and inadequate food in famine years made people weak and extremely susceptible to illness and epidemics. Eating material unfit for human consumption such as bark or grass, resulted in dysentery and intestinal ailments of every kind. Influenza and smallpox preyed with particular savagery on populations weakened by famine. In famine years, the number of deaths soared far above normal. A third of a village population might disappear in a year or two. The 1690s were as dismal as many of the worst periods of earlier times. One county in Finland, probably typical of the entire country, lost fully 28 percent of its inhabitants in 1696 and 1697. Certain well-studied villages in the Beauvals regions of northern France suffered a similar fate. In preindustrial Europe, the harvest was the real king, and the king was seldom generous and often cruel. - 610