Demographic Crises
Recovery
The towns suffered worst, but they recovered best. There's no evidence of permanent decline, and the losses were made up by immigration from the countryside. There was also some population movement into eastern Europe, as vagabonds were able to find available land in Brandenburg and Prussia.
The general tone is of population recovery. Indeed, we can find no evidence of a permanent loss of population in the wake of the Great Famine. Its importance should be understood more as demonstrating both the resiliency and the vulnerability of European populations on the even of the Black Death.
Certain segments of the population were especially vulnerable. That the poor were vulnerable is obvious. They had no resources. They either were directly dependent upon charity, or else were dependent upon economic good times to scrape by on their own. Almost as vulnerable were large numbers of farmers who lived in areas of dense population and who were dependent upon marginal farmlands. Less obviously, towns were vulnerable not only because of high concentrations of population but because they were therefore dependent upon importing food to sustain themselves, and because they had large numbers of subsistence-level people within their walls. Disruption of the food supply, which could happen for a variety of reasons, led not only to mortality but also to the risk of civil disorder. Finally, even the nobility were at risk, because the economic changes that followed upon high mortality directly affected their incomes while at the same time driving up prices. Many (not all!) of the nobles were essentially on fixed incomes. While those incomes were large, so were their expenses, and they were impacted by sudden changes in prices.
The resiliency of the population was demonstrated in a variety of ways. The peasants and townspeople of Europe did not passively suffer. A famine did not merely happen to them, while they helplessly sat in their fields and starved. The Great Famine shows that they had recourse first of all to stored grain and secondarily to imported grain (at a much higher price, of course). This is what saw most people through a single crop failure. As the crisis lengthened, people sold off what they could. They ate the grain that had been saved for planting. As things worsened, they left. They became vagabonds, alternating between the desperate alternatives of begging and banditry. Some managed to find new homes, such as those who became serfs on estates in Poland and elsewhere. Finally, in the wake of hard times, people engaged in a variety of recovery strategies, including changes in marriage patterns, acquisition of land, changes in agriculture patterns, and demands for new rights. We'll see all of these in play when we consider the next demographic crisis, the Black Death.