I managed to get to 300 population, with a town center and 6 stockpiles/storage barns around it.

However suddenly I had 50 people die off rapidly before I quit. Everyone was starving in the fields.

I've tried to spread housing around evenly. What could be the cause of this? Is there a technique of large scale village building I've not grasped yet?

Thanks.

Is there a chance that people died of old age and not of starvation?

Maybe you don't have labourers to carry food from your storage to the houses. Did you build a marketplace to help the distribution of goods?

Disclaimer: I'm a banished noob so be kind to my suggestions/question.

Nah, was starvation. And sorry when I said town centre I meant marketplace. I had 12 vendors and thought would manage it.

Nope, like me you must have a village full of mental deficients.

First time my adult pop was about 120 then a huge starve-off dropped it down to about 85 once I closed the schools to get more into the labor pool.

I slowly built up the population to around 110 and just now lost about 40 again to the point where I just didn't care and ran the speed up to 10 until it hit early spring again and I saved and quit.

What started as a nice relaxing way to build a village has turned into sheer frustration. At best I'm contemplating ditching this village, (would hate to as I would like to see it grow) and starting another on just the easy level to hopefully avoid such stupidity but it may end up as something I don't go back to at all.

I was impressed at first. I told people to get it. Now I will probably tell them to not bother.

If they're too stupid to find food, they're too stupid to live, and Darwinism wins again.

Hello
Mayby is somekind of bug. I start losing peopel with plenty of food in stocks.

Townsfolk can only eat at their individual homes (which have their own storage for food and fuel. If their household store of food is empty, they have to get some from nearest storage barn or market to their home (and by "get some", I mean visibly walk there, load some into their personal inventory, and carry it back) before they can eat it.
Every resource in the game has to be transported in real time (well, in-game real time) by townsfolk from its origin to storage, and then from storage to home or workplace; only then can they make use of it. Your problem might be something to do with the distance between some people's homes and their workplaces, and the distance between one or both of those places and the nearest storehouses. It could also be that one of your warehouses or markets isn't having enough food deposited to serve all those who live nearby, and the rest of the neighbors are having to walk to the next closest warehouse that still has some. It's also very possible that your market (if you have one) has depleted most of the food from your "neighborhood" storage barns, thus making everyone have to walk all the way to wherever your market is to find food to trundle back home with. (Personally, I'd recommend not using markets until you're more familiar with the game mechanics -- and if you already have one, don't fully staff it. 1-4 vendors should be plenty unless some of your storage barns start to get full.)