Dearth and the English revolution:The harvest crisis of 1647-50 'The price of food [is] excessive', wrote the Leveller John Wildman from London in 1648, 'and Trading [is] decayed'. 1 It would, he thought, 'rend any pitifull heart to heare and see the cryes and teares of the poore, who professe they are almost ready to famish'. 'While our divisions continue, and there be no settlement of the principles of freedom and justice', he insisted:trading will but more decay every day: Rumours and feares of Warre, and the Army coming now into the City, makes Merchants unwilling to trust their goods in the City, and exchange beyond sea falles, and there will be no importing of goods, and then there will be no exporting and so the staple commodities of the kingdom which maintains the constant trade, will not tend to the advantage of the labourers, and then most of the poore in the kingdom which live by spinning, carding, &c will be ready to perish by famine.Wildman had heard some Wiltshire clothiers, gathered at the Saracen's Head in Friday Street, protesting that trading was so dead, that some of them, who set at work formerly a 100 did not now set at work above a dozen or the like, and that the poor did gather together in troops of 10, 20, 30 in the Roades, and seized upon Corne as it was carrying to market, and devided it among themselves before the owners faces, telling them they could not starve.Wildman was accordingly convinced that 'a suddain confusion would follow if a speedie settlement were not procured'.