Worth remembering................................

      Famines subsided along with the plague.  It is hard to realize today, but famine was a common European phenomenon through 18C.  France, for example, among the richest of the European countries, experienced 13 general famines in 16C, 11 in 17C, and 16 in 18C, plus hundreds of local famines that affected a single town or region.  The explanation for the famines was simple.  The yields from cereal grains were low and the capacity to store reserves primitive.  Two bad harvests in a row, and people starved.  It was during 18C that technological progress in agriculture began to break the grip of that brutal arithmetic.
-Charles Murray,  Human Accomplishments:  The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950