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History of the Franks
St Gregory of Tours, tr. Dalton, 1927
Book 7, 45. Concerning the Famine of This Year
In this year almost all Gaul was oppressed by famine. Multitudes were reduced to making a kind of bread by drying and pounding grape-seeds or hazel blossom, and adding a little flour, while others did the same with fern roots. There were many who cut the green corn-stalks and treated them in like manner; many others, who had no flour at all, plucked and ate various kinds of grass, whereupon their bodies swelled and they died. Great numbers languished and were starved to death. Then the merchants grievously robbed the people, so that a bushel of corn or half a measure of wine was hardly sold for a triens.1 The poor sold themselves into slavery for the sake of a morsel of food.
Notes
- One-third of a gold piece, or solidus.