During the late 1960s, a wide consensus emerged among social and economic historians regarding the causes of the decline in the high European death rates that prevailed at the beginning of the early modern era. The high average mortality rates of the years preceding the vital revolution were attributed to periodic mortality crises that raised normal mortality rates by 50 to 100 percent or more. It was the elimination of these peaks, rather than the lowering of the plateau of mortality in normal years, that was believed to be principally responsible for the much lower mortality rates that prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century (Helleiner 1964; Wrigley 1969; Flinn 1970). These crises, it was held, were precipitated either by acute harvest failures or by epidemics (Flinn 1970). Some scholars argued that even if the diseases were not nutritionally sensitive, famines played a major role because epidemics were spread by the beggars who swarmed from one place to another in search of food (Meuvert 1965). Whatever the differences on this issue, it was widely agreed that many of the mortality crises were due to starvation brought on by harvest failure (Wrigley 1969; Flinn 1970, 1974).