Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

Abstract

Surveying government and crowd responses ranging from the late Middle Ages through to the early modern era, Buchanan Sharp's illuminating study examines how the English government responded to one of the most intractable problems of the period: famine and scarcity. The book provides a comprehensive account of famine relief in the late Middle Ages and evaluates the extent to which traditional market regulations enforced by thirteenth-century kings helped shape future responses to famine and scarcity in the sixteenth century. Analysing some of the oldest surviving archival evidence of public response to famine, Sharp reveals that food riots in England occurred as early as 1347, almost two centuries earlier than was previously thought. Charting the policies, public reactions and royal regulations to grain shortage, Sharp provides a fascinating contribution to our understanding of the social, economic, cultural and political make-up of medieval and early modern England.

Climate, disease and society in late-medieval Ireland

“…154 Miller, 'Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age'. 155 Campbell,Great Transition,[198][199][200][201][202][203][204][205][206][207][208] Mark Hennessy, 'Making Ireland English in the thirteenth century: the evidence of the Irish lay subsidy of 1292', in P.J. Duffy and W. Nolan (eds), At the anvil: essays in honour of William J. Smyth (Dublin, 2012), 81-91; Campbell, 'Boom to bust'.…”

Climate, disease and society in late-medieval Ireland

“…203 The following year prices in England were high (Figs 6 and 8) and attempts to export grain provoked the first recorded English grain riots. 204 Edward III had already launched his ambitious and expensive invasion of France in the opening phase of the Hundred Years War, so the fiscal and economic situation was once again volatile and the capacity of both English and Irish society to cope with bad harvests correspondingly reduced. 205 The timing of this new military initiative, and the strain it placed upon the financial resources of the English crown, could hardly have been worse since from the early 1340s another short-term global climate anomaly had begun.…”

6. Coping with Risk in the Seventeenth Century: The First Age of the English Old Poor Law: A Regional Study

“…England suffered its last famine in 1623, and even this was a regional affair. We know relatively little about famine in earlier periods, although there was clearly major crisis in the years around 1315-1321, a famine in 1438, and recurrent crises in the reign of Henry VIII (Kershaw 1973, Pollard 1989, Sharp 2016. There is evidence for starvation, even in Westminster, in the late 1550s, although this is hard to disentangle from a much wider set of epidemics at the end of that decade.…”