A great destruction of cattle: The impact and extent of epizootic disease in early fourteenth-century northwestern Europe.
Published: 2006
Language: eng
Number of pages: 99
ISBN-13: 9780494213360
Description: The current neglect of infectious livestock disease's impact on pre-industrial human economies is not warranted. Extensive stock mortalities, epizootics, have long afflicted Europe. Using chronicles, annals, manorial accounts, popular literature, letters, government ordinances and price indices, this thesis illustrates the temporal and geographical extent, and examines the agrarian and thus economic fallout of the first quantifiable cattle epizootic in Western history. The phenomenon affected eastern and northwestern Europe between 1318 and 1322. It was the first of its scale in at least four hundred years. The geographical and social variances of the epizootic's impact in Britain and Ireland are detailed here. Considerable time is spent on early fourteenth-century cattle demography, husbandry, and the outbreak's evident epizootiology in order to safely speculate a loss of 60 to 70 percent of Britain and Ireland's cattle. The epizootic extended the Great Famine in Britain and severely disrupted the agrarian production and standards of living of many long after its diminution.
Notes: Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-03, page: 1264.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Toronto, 2006.

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