Great Famine of 1695–1697

The Great Famine of 1695–7 was a series of famines which struck northern Europe in the 1690s, becoming most intense between 1695 and 1697. The famines came at the end of the Little Ice Age which struck Europe and other parts of the world between the fourteenth and early eighteenth centuries. In northern Europe it resulted in the 1690s being the coldest decade since the middle of the tenth century 750 years earlier. As crops failed in the freezing weather, famines ravaged Scotland, Scandinavia and the Baltic States region where Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are today. In some places 20% of the population died of starvation and associated illnesses in the space of a few short years. The famine also led to considerable migration as people fled their homes to survive or in search of better opportunity. Migration from Scotland was particularly acute, with many crossing the Irish Sea to Ulster in the north of Ireland. Many of these migrants would in turn depart from Ireland in the course of the eighteenth century for North America where they became the Scots-Irish who profoundly influenced the demographic makeup of states like Georgia, the Carolinas and Tennessee.

The Great Famine of 1695–7 chronology of events

The Thames Frost Fair of 1683–4 by Thomas Wyke

The Great Famine of 1695–7 was rooted in a phenomenon known as the Little Ice Age. There is an ongoing debate as to what caused the Little Ice Age, but one factor which was at work was the sheer drop in global population levels between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. This was owing to a combination of factors. First, the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth century killed anywhere between 40 and 60 million people across Asia. Then the Black Death, the bubonic plague epidemic of the fourteenth century, killed anywhere between 80 and 200 million people in Eurasia. Finally, the introduction of European diseases such as smallpox and measles to the New World killed tens of millions of people there in the course of the sixteenth century. As this occurred land which had been cleared and used for agriculture was reclaimed by nature. All of this resulted in fewer people worldwide and a decline in carbon in the atmosphere which cooled the planet, leading to lower temperatures and what has been termed a ‘Little Ice Age’. This peaked in the seventeenth century, a time when temperatures were so low in the winters that in cities like London the River Thames froze so hard that ‘Winter Fairs’ were held on the ice and ice-skating became a popular hobby.

While ice-skating and winter fairs sound fun, there was nothing pleasant about what happened in the 1690s. Archaeological studies have determined that this was the coldest decade in northern Europe for 750 years. As the freezing cold weather struck, crops failed and famines occurred across Scotland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Latvia. Some people were starving and then dying. Additionally, the poor law systems in operation in these regions were unable to handle the crisis. It is estimated that 20% of the population died in some regions in these countries, though it was between 5% and 10% in others. The worst affected were Scotland, Finland, Estonia and parts of northern Sweden. Although the famine peaked in 1695, 1696 and 1697, it was a decade-long phenomenon in some regions. For instance, in Scotland it went on throughout the 1690s and became known as the ‘Seven Ill Years’ as commentators drew comparisons between it and the biblical famine from the Book of Genesis which lasted for seven years in Egypt.

Extent of migration during and after the Great Famine of 1695–7

Inevitably, the crisis led to people packing up their belongings and leaving their homes in an effort to survive. Andrew Fletcher, a Scottish political figure more widely known for opposing the 1707 Act of Union with England, claimed in 1698 that there were 200,000 people migrating around Scotland, either towards the cities like Edinburgh or towards the port towns to head overseas. The famine also led to the ill-judged Darien scheme whereby Scottish migrants tried to establish a colony at the Darien Gap near the Isthmus of Panama in Central America in the late 1690s, but in this instance the vast majority of the 2,000 or so participants died owing to tropical diseases and starvation.

In Estonia and Latvia people migrated southwards to warmer climes and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth where foodstuffs were in greater supply. The scale of the migration in parts of Scandinavia is difficult to determine owing to a lack of demographic records from this time, also because the famine disaster soon melded into a war emergency as the Great Northern War broke out in 1700 between Russia and Sweden, the latter of which controlled Finland and parts of Estonia and Latvia at the time. A wave of plague between 1708 and 1712 in this region further compounded the problems it was experiencing.

Demographic impact of the Great Famine of 1695–7

The demographic impact of the Great Famine varied from place to place. It led to a reduction in the population of the worst affected regions by upwards of 20%. In terms of the migratory impact, the most important country was Scotland as hundreds of thousands of people left their homes. Some of these headed for Edinburgh and other urban centers in search of food and poor relief, but a majority took ship in the ports of western Scotland for Ulster, the northern province of Ireland. This was one of three great waves of Scottish migration to the north of Ireland in the seventeenth century, which transformed the demographic landscape of that region; the others having occurred as part of the Ulster Plantation of 1609–10 and the second wave occurring in the 1660s. Between them these waves of migrations transformed Ulster from the most culturally and ethnically Irish of all Ireland’s provinces into a haven of Scottish Presbyterianism. This paved the way for the subsequent development of Northern Ireland as a part of the United Kingdom in the twentieth century.

Frederick Jackson Turner

Indeed the Scottish migration to Ulster during the ‘Seven Ill Years’ had even more profound consequences. Such was the scale of the Scottish influx into Ulster in the seventeenth century. By the 1720s and 1730s the province was becoming relatively overpopulated. As this occurred, many second, third and fourth generation Scottish settlers in the north of Ireland, packed up their belongings once again and sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to the British colonies of North America. There they settled in particularly large numbers, first in Pennsylvania and Delaware, but then in growing numbers in Virginia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Georgia. These Scots-Irish settlers, as they have become known, played a huge role in the history of the American south, eventually migrating inland to form a large part of the early settlement of Tennessee and Kentucky. The famous American history of the frontier, Frederick Jackson Turner, once called them “the cutting-edge of the frontier.” Over three million Americans identify today as Scots-Irish, though the number with some level of descent from the Scots-Irish settlers of the eighteenth century is probably considerably higher. Thus, the demographic impact of the migration which followed from the Great Famine of 1695–7 was still being felt decades later.

See also

• The Scots-Irish
• Scotland
• Estonia

Explore more about the Great Famine of 1695–7

• Scotland, Births and Baptisms, 1564-1950 record collection on MyHeritage
• Who were the Scots-Irish? at Legacy Family Tree Webinars
• Using Y DNA testing to investigate Ulster and Scottish surnames at Legacy Family Tree Webinars

References

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