In 1695 and 1696 the summers failed, one after the other. By the end of 1697 perhaps a third of the people of Finland were dead. The famine is counted among the worst disasters in Finland’s history, and in Turku it filled the courts with hungry children.
Two summers that failed
- A cold summer. The summer of 1695 was very cold. Rye was reported to be still growing on 6 August, and an early frost then destroyed the little that had ripened Well documented.
- A strange spring. January and February 1696 were unusually warm, but frost returned in March. Heavy snow followed, and when it melted, floods delayed the work in the fields Well documented.
- Nothing left to sow. The harvest of 1696 failed too. After two bad years there was no grain left to eat, and none to sow for the next year Well documented.
- Not only Finland. Cold, wet years brought famine to much of northern Europe: France in 1693–94, Norway in 1695–96, and Sweden, Estonia and Finland in 1696–97. Topic 2 explains why the weather was so harsh Well documented.
Bark bread and beggars
- Famine food. People baked bread from the inner bark of pine and mixed ground straw into what flour they had. Some ate moss. These foods filled the stomach but gave little nourishment, and already in 1696 they were causing deadly diarrhoea Well documented.
- On the roads. Starving families left their homes to beg. They walked from farm to farm and on to the towns, and they carried disease with them to places such as Turku and Stockholm Well documented.
- The year of deaths. Deaths peaked in the spring and summer of 1697. Many did not die of hunger alone: weakened by it, they died of dysentery, typhus and typhoid Well documented.
- A third of the people. About a third of Finland’s people died, perhaps 150,000 out of 500,000. In Estonia about a fifth died, and in Sweden about one in ten Likely.
- A boy king. In April 1697, in the middle of the famine, King Charles XI died. His son Charles XII was only 14. Within three years he was at war, and that war would bring Russian armies to Finland (stop 20) Well documented.
Hungry children in Turku
- A town with stores. The historian Veli Pekka Toropainen has studied the Turku court records of the famine. In his view many townspeople had laid in good stocks of food, and food was on sale in the town all the time. The poor stole from those stocks Likely.
- Courts full of thieves. In 1696–1698 most cases in Turku’s town court and lower court were thefts, and many of the thieves were children. Most had come in from the countryside, sent by their families or on their own, because there was no food left at home. Few were from Turku itself Well documented.
- More children than adults. More children than adults were caught stealing. Almost every adult living in the town had a job or a trade. Most of the adults who stole food were women whose own small trades had collapsed during the famine Likely.
- What they took. Bread, cheese, flour, rye and dried meat, but also linen yarn, clothes and purses, which could be sold or swapped for food with the women who sold food at the market Well documented.
- Pity and hatred. Townspeople treated beggar children with anything from pity to hatred. In March 1697 a judge of the Court of Appeal took a crippled beggar boy, Matts Johansson, to court for spreading the story that the judge’s household had beaten him. Matts crawled into the courtroom on his knees. A woman had given him warm beer and bread, others had turned him away, and in the end the governor, Baron Lorentz Creutz, took him into his home Well documented.
- An open ending. The man who beat Matts was not in town, and the case was never finished. Toropainen suggests that Matts was paid something out of court, or that he starved. We do not know which Debated.
- The punishments. A thief had to pay back what was stolen and, as a fine, three times its value. Children under 15 were whipped at the town hall gate, older thieves at the whipping post, and then they were banished from the town. Many came back Well documented.
- Neck iron and stocks. Brita Thomasdotter from Hämeenkyrö, a maid in a merchant’s house, had stolen food and sold some of it. Her thefts were worth 18 daler and 28 öre in copper money. She could not pay the fine, so she had to stand in the neck iron at the market and be whipped. For cursing in court and breaking the Sabbath, she was also sentenced to two Sundays in the stocks at the church door Well documented.
How do we know?
The minutes of Turku’s town court and of its lower court for 1697 survive in the National Archives of Finland. Toropainen has read them and retold the cases used on this page. They give the children’s names, ages and home villages, and even their own words in court. The national death toll is much less certain. No one counted the dead across the country at the time, so the figure of about a third is a modern estimate.