next year’s planting, pushing them into even more dire consequences and true famine in
the following year if sufficient seed had not been found elsewhere to plant at normal
levels. Even the lords could suffer famine insofar as they had to waive payment of rents,
tithes, and taxes and hand out food and seed grain, in order to ensure that agricultural
laborers did not depart or starve to death. Moreover, even for the lord or ecclesiastical
almsgivers, once local reserves were gone there was little possibility of coming to the
relief of the local population, for transport and communications were poor. Thus,
although the diversity of climate, soils, and topography of France meant that bumper
crops in one area might be accompanied by poor harvests in another, famines could be
relieved not by importing food but only, to some extent, by people taking to the roads.
When year after year of low yields followed one another in many areas, the results could
be social unrest and even cannibalism (as was described by the Cluniac monk Raoul
Glaber for ca. 1000) or the lowered resistance and susceptibility to diseases that followed
the European-wide famines of 1315–17.
Constance H.Berman
[See also: AGRICULTURE; DISEASES]
Duby, Georges. The Early Growth of the European Economy: Warriors and Peasants from the
Seventh to the Twelfth Century, trans. Howard B.Clarke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1974.
FARCE
. Dramatic farces are short comic plays usually involving a trick by which one or more
characters deceives another for personal gain. Major popular entertainments in urban
areas in the 15th and 16th centuries, they were often played on trestle stages that were
quickly set up in streets or squares on holidays. The small number of roles required few
actors and few stage props, making the plays easily transportable. Farces were written
and played by amateur groups, such as student organizations, municipal confraternities,
and trade guilds. The comic theater owes a special debt, however, to the Basoche, or
guild of law clerks, a chapter of which was found in every major city in France. It was no
doubt the play-loving law clerks who were responsible for the large number of legal
themes and courtroom scenes in the farces. When professional acting troupes began to
appear in France in the 16th century, they too were avid practitioners of the genre.
The earliest extant play of the farce type is Le garçon et l’aveugle (13th c.), in which a
boy tricks his blind but miserly master out of both money and clothes. The play’s title
lacks a genre designation, and it was probably not called a farce. The first recorded use of
“farce” to designate a dramatic work is found in a document from Paris dated 1398,
which forbids the playing of jeux de personnages par manière de farces. There are
numerous references in 15th-century documents to the staging of farces, but no plays
have survived that antedate the Farce de maistre Pathelin, written in the 1460s. About
175 farces have survived from the hundred years following the appearance of Pathelin.
Most of these farces portray the comic side of domestic life. The characters are
ordinary people who exemplify everyday relationships (husbands, wives, mothers-in-law,
neighbors) or who engage in familiar occupations (shoe-makers, tailors, tavern keepers,
The Encyclopedia 645