9
Phillipp R. Schofield
Historians of the Middle Ages have, with some notable exceptions, tended to address the issue of famine often only obliquely; this is in no small part a reflection of the changing approach to the study of the medieval past and the kinds of source types that encouraged and directed initial studies in this area. Later-nineteenth-century historical focus on high politics and constitutional history was also founded on study of narrative sources, especially chronicles. While, as we shall have cause to discuss in what follows, chronicle accounts contain much of importance for students of medieval famine, their narrative is above all directed at the deeds of the elite members of medieval society, an approach that has left less room for reflection on some at least of the major climatic and consequent socioeconomic upheavals of the time. Modern political narratives reflect the same concerns and illustrate the same emphases; so, for instance, the latest highly authoritative account of Edward II and his reign includes only a page or so on famine, even though the Great Famine of the early-fourteenth occurred in the middle years of the reign and may have resulted in the deaths of 10% of the English population.1
In recent years a growing interest in crisis more generally has directed historians’ interest in the direction of topics such as famine. There has in particular been an increased emphasis on famine, its causes and consequences in the work of scholars from southern Europe as well as a reasonably persistent focus on crisis or conjoncture amongst British and French social and economic historians.2 Predating that has been a long-standing but sometimes fleeting investigation of famine, its chronology and its impact. More than a century ago economic historians such as Rogers recognised that famine might have a significant part to play in the narrative of long-term economic change in the Middle Ages while, in the early-twentieth century, historians such as Curschmann and Lucas set about gathering narrative accounts and associated information in order to develop detailed chronologies of famines and, in the case of Lucas, the Great Famine of the early-fourteenth century.3 The major contribution, in the Anglophone historiography, was made by Ian Kershaw whose 1973 article in Past and Present offered the first systematic assessment of the Great Famine of the early-fourteenth century, exploring evidence for its immediate impact and assessing the longer-term consequences of the event for the behaviour of the medieval economy in the following decades. Kershaw’s overall assessment of the impact of the famine years, which is set in a wider debate regarding crisis in the agrarian economy, its causes and consequences, is equivocal. Recognising that a famine event of such apparent magnitude must have had some impact though he also recognises the difficulty of isolating famine and harvest and livestock failures as the major driving forces for any downturn in the preplague economy. Subsequent work has yet to challenge this view of medieval English famine as potentially significant but not easily or accurately measurable, either in terms of its incidence or significance.4 Historians, instead, have tended to focus on elements of the associated impact of famine, such as its consequences for intracommunal responses in terms of economic and social exchange, as well as some few attempts to add flesh to the bones of famine’s demographic impact, and these are points to which we will return in more detail below.
Identifying ‘famine’ in the Middle Ages is not entirely straightforward. Contemporary chroniclers identified with some frequency famine-events and continental European historians have been particularly assiduous in making use of narrative accounts to construct detailed chronologies of famine- and near-famine events. As noted, Curschmann’s careful recording of early and high medieval famines in Europe illustrates the extent to which contemporary writers noted, even if they did not always expand in detail about, famine events.5 Henry Lucas also detailed the Great European Famine of the early-fourteenth century, again by making extensive use of the narrative accounts contained in contemporary and near-contemporary chronicles.6 Much more recently, Pere Benito i Monclus has also used the evidence of a range of sources for high medieval Catalonia in an attempt not only to chart famine events but also to gain some sense, heuristically, as he notes, of the relative significance of any particular event; in this respect, textual references to scale and severity become important markers of the perceived nature of a particular period of dearth or famine.7
In addition to a range of narrative sources, historians of high and late medieval England are particularly advantaged in having at their disposal strong series of grain yield, price and wage data that allow a more quantitative mapping of famine chronologies and the likely pressure points when prices moved to unusually high levels; this is especially the case from the second half of the thirteenth century when there appears to have been a significant increase in the use of detailed written accounts for the manor and higher institutions. Christopher Dyer has applied a set of straightforward criteria in order to distinguish the worst harvest years from more typical or less disastrous harvests. Identifying those years for which yields of grain dipped 15% below the identified average for the period, Dyer notes that the most difficult years were potentially calamitous for sections of the population. These particularly difficult years occurred with considerable frequency throughout the high and late Middle Ages, with clusters of the worst harvests in the mid-1220s, 1240s, 1250s, 1270s, 1280s, 1290s and, most especially, the 1310s.8 Poor harvests continued with some frequency into the fifteenth century and beyond, but it is likely that, with certain exceptions, the impact of poorer harvests reduced after the early years of the fourteenth century, a point to which we will return. Other studies have also served to confirm these trends, and a combination of wage and price data has helped direct historians’ attention to years of particular and acute pressure. So, studies that have sought to establish the relative buying capacity of individuals during the high and late Middle Ages have identified years in which the labouring poor might, for instance, be especially vulnerable. This has recently been set out by Gregory Clark whose long-term analysis of farm workers’ wages set against food prices has confirmed and heightened our understanding of years of particular shortage and disadvantage in the Middle Ages as well as in later periods.9 This points to the early decades of the fourteenth century as being uniquely disadvantageous, with Clark reporting that the years between 1310 and 1323 witnessed six of the seven worst years in terms of recorded real wages, the seventh occurring in the last decade of the thirteenth century (1296). The years 1316 and 1317 were, respectively, the lowest and second lowest years in terms of real wages between the early-thirteenth century and the later-nineteenth century.10 While, then, later years in the fourteenth and fifteenth century, as well as in the thirteenth century, experienced events akin to real shortage and, indeed, famine, a threat that also persisted into the early modern period, the touchstone for comparison with all famine- and famine-like events in medieval England has to be the so-called ‘Great Famine’ of the early-fourteenth century.
Historical attention, within this broad span of poor harvest years, has also tended to focus on those moments where harvest failure and its consequences have been identified as especially significant. In this respect the narrative sources, the chronicles and annals have guided the initial view of historians and directed them to certain famine events while later work, such as that already mentioned, has tended to confirm, or at least to test, the particular force of these ‘historical’ famines; in general terms, this more quantitative work appears to suggest that those events most likely to be reported by contemporaries were also the most severe events of their kind, relatively speaking. Chroniclers and annalists certainly tended to write as if the famines recorded by them were unique, or at least atypical, events. So, for instance, the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi describes the shortage during the first year of the Great Famine, in 1315, as ‘neither seen in England in our times nor heard of during the last 100 years’.11 Other, slightly more prosaic, measures of relative significance, such as the behaviour of grain prices, again documented the unusual and, while these were not set against a running commentary on annual or seasonal grain prices, chroniclers appeared confident that statements to the effect that ‘such was the extent of the shortage’ that ‘the price of wheat rose to 40s’ would serve to impress on their readers the severity and atypicality of the dearth or famine they described. On occasion chroniclers and annalists also identified famine events with the onset of more long-term periods of dislocation or shortage; for instance, the author of the Chronicle of Meaux records that the shortage and high prices of 1284 ushered in forty years of grain shortage, which lasted until the end of the reign of Edward II.12 While most chroniclers tended to confine their comments to reflections on the weather and its consequence for harvest and subsequent grain prices, some few chroniclers offered a far fuller account and assessment of certain famine events. This is most obviously the case in the accounts by Matthew Paris for the famine of 1258–59 and that by John de Trokelowe for the first and worst years of the Great Famine, in 1315 and 1316; Trokelowe describes, as well as the impact of poor weather on growing conditions and epidemic disease consequent on famine, the social devastation as households threw out unwanted servants and prisoners took to devouring each other in prison.13 It is also worth noting that certain years, which also give the impression of crisis – high prices, some evidence of socioeconomic disruption and an indication of increased deaths, as measured in accounts, court records and sources other than chronicles, and to a degree comparable to famine years also mentioned in the narrative sources – do not feature as significantly, or even at all, in the contemporary accounts of chroniclers. For instance, the years 1310–11, which suggest, according to various indices, that this was a time of significant hardship and disequilibrium, feature hardly at all in English chronicle accounts of famine, a reflection less, perhaps, of the relative significance of the crisis and more of the inconsistency in the contemporary recording of famine events.14
Both contemporaries and modern historians agree that the immediate cause of famine in the Middle Ages was weather. Changing weather conditions allied to other key factors, notably poor yielding grain and a growing population, served to create the kinds of conditions ripe for famine. Contemporary chroniclers and annalists tended to explain famine’s appearance in terms of changed weather patterns. For instance, the Annales Paulini associates the onset of famine in 1315 with severe rainfall that lasted almost the whole year; the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi also associates the appearance of famine in 1315 and 1316 with ‘floods of rain’ and the ‘hand of God…raised against us’.15 The Vita also considers the astrological conjunctions that may have occasioned the disastrous weather conditions.16 Earlier still the extraordinary weather patterns of the mid-thirteenth century were also commented on by chroniclers and annalists.17 There is only oblique reference to other factors, such as food availability relative to population, and the causative analysis of contemporaries tends to associate famine events with a sudden decline in food availability, itself the consequence of unusual weather conditions and the consequent damage to grain harvests. In fact, contemporaries tended to see famines in terms of, and what is sometimes now referred to as, food availability decline; they had much less interest in the reduced ‘entitlement’ to food that has been central to modern explanations of famine, especially to famines in the modern era.18 We can return later to consider the ways in which social and political responses may or may not have served to ameliorate or exacerbate famine events. For now we can note that contemporaries were almost certainly correct in their general assessment that changed meteorological conditions were the immediate cause of famine in this period; unusual or indeed highly atypical combinations of poor weather conditions served to turn difficult conditions into catastrophes. As Campbell points out, it was not only the failure of the main grains in certain years – which was bad enough – but, in the case of the especially devastating famines of 1256/57 and 1315/16, the back-to-back nature of harvest failure that transformed these into exceptional occurrences, even during a period when poor harvests and consequent dearth and famine were relatively familiar episodes.19 The identifiable cause of these atypical weather phenomena was, in the case of the Great Famine of the early-fourteenth century, ocean warming in the Atlantic, which caused prolonged periods of rainfall and led to widespread destruction of crops in northern Europe.20 Fluctuations in patterns of ocean warming and ocean cooling led to inconsistent weather patterns across the period while the volatility of such adjustments ensured that weather events were often extreme. By contrast, some mid-thirteenth-century famines were likely to have been caused by east Asian volcanic activity, a catastrophic eruption causing poor weather conditions and a global downturn in growing conditions.21
What were the consequences and impact of these famine events in medieval England? The first and most obvious response we might expect to identify is a demographic one. That said, measuring the demographic response to famine in the Middle Ages is deeply problematic. Contemporaries were inconsistent in their recording of famine’s effect in terms of deaths, some hardly mentioning death as a consequence while others inclined to a formulaic hyperbole, such as the author of the Annales Londoniensis who suggests that, with the onset of famine of 1315 there were soon ‘scarcely enough living to bury the dead’, a phrase often used by chroniclers in describing major crises, including the advent of plague later in the century.22 In fact, modern estimates of medieval famine in England suggest that the overall demographic impact of famine, especially in terms of mortality (the most visible of the key demographic indicators but still largely hidden from detailed view), was relatively slight, at least in comparison to the far greater catastrophe of plague and its recurrence. Current estimates of famine mortality in the worst of the famine years – the early-fourteenth century – suggest that between 10% and 15% of the population may have died. Estimates of mortality for other years of poor harvests are limited, though there are clear indications that the incidence of mortality rose quite markedly in those years, especially during the thirteenth and early- to mid-fourteenth centuries, when grain prices were also unusually high. Matthew Paris describes a response to extreme levels of urban mortality in the famine of 1258–59, which we may speculate was exacerbated by movement to towns and cities by impoverished and desperate countryfolk, and the record of death-duty payments on manors, especially from eastern England, also point to years of peak mortality.23 Postan and Titow’s famous depiction of mortality on the bishop of Winchester’s estates illustrates the significant fluctuation in death-duty payments (heriot) relative to grain price between 1245 and 1350.24 According to Postan and Titow’s analysis this was especially marked amongst poorer tenants, identifiable by their payment of heriots as small money sums rather than as livestock.25 In fact, and unsurprisingly, the heriot data extracted by Postan and Titow suggests a distinction in the mortality experience of relatively poor tenants, with a greater likelihood that they would succumb in larger numbers than did their wealthier counterparts.26 While, as Ohlin pointed out, the general movement of mortality, and its association with grain prices is a reasonable inference, the overall mortality rate calculated by Postan and Titow may well be too high, possibly a misassumption regarding the stability of the overall tenant population. Ohlin does however accept the further inference drawn by Postan and Titow that money heriots suggest a higher per capita mortality rate amongst poorer tenants, their greater frequency a possible consequence of subdivision of holdings (i.e., an increase in the total population of heriot-owing holdings allied to accelerated tendency toward small-holdings by the early-fourteenth century) rather than a general and severe upward trend in the mortality rate.27
Just as distinctions in wealth and, thereby, relative vulnerability to declining food availability are evident within individual local communities, as the Winchester heriot data suggests, so they may also be visible between different parts of the country. While medieval England exhibited significant distinctions in the distribution of regional wealth, regionality of mortality in medieval England remains, to date, a little explored feature of famine-related mortality. Campbell and Bartley’s mapping of regional wealth, drawing on the lay subsidy returns from 1327 and 1332 that listed individual taxpayers, illustrates not only the relative wealth by region but also, and more importantly in this context, per capita wealth by region.28 Campbell has also previously argued that certain parts of the country, though wealthy in absolute terms, were victims of their own success in other respects; this was especially true of parts of eastern England and especially counties such as Norfolk where the opportunities for piecemeal employment encouraged population growth as well as the consequent development of a small-holder class, and placed intense pressure on resources.29 Any reduction in resources, most obviously through harvest failure, may have made such populations especially vulnerable. While it remains difficult to chart such distinctions quantitatively through the relative incidence of mortality, there is at least some suggestion to date that fluctuations in tenant mortality, as evidenced by heriot payments, were more pronounced in parts of eastern England. Historical work to date has unearthed greater amounts of evidence for mortality trends associable with poor harvest and rising prices for eastern England, and this may reflect a greater vulnerability of the population in this part of medieval England. Ian Kershaw has already noted that heriot evidence from manor courts throughout England is far from consistent and that, even in the worst harvest years, this was not reflected in tenant deaths on some manors. He remarks, importantly, that deaths of relatively wealthy tenants, if few in number, almost certain mask the more typical experience of poorer subtenants and sublessees, less visible in our records and far less likely to generate data in terms of death-duty payments.30 In fact, we may go further and suggest that it was in those areas of the country, such as parts of East Anglia, where a likely early morcellation of peasant landholding created smaller units of land, some at least retaining customary obligations in terms of rent and death-duty payments, that a vulnerable small-holding population not only existed but was also relatively visible in our records.31 We might also suppose, though it remains difficult to illustrate with any degree of certainty that a regional dynamic to famine intensified as the overall risk of famine declined in the later Middle Ages; an upturn in standard of living and a greater recourse to regional specialisation may, conceivably, have left parts of the north of the country, for instance, more vulnerable to famine and dearth by the fifteenth century.32
While then deaths of the more vulnerable might well be more visible in certain parts of the country than in others, it seems highly likely that there simply were areas, with a greater concentration of poor people relative to available resources, where the risk of famine-related death was greater. A further element in the demographic context, mobility, also helps explain that tendency. So, the lure of opportunity or, at least of better survival chances, served to draw people from their native hearth to seek food and employment elsewhere. Mobility was not only caused by crises, of course. There is good evidence that, as is the case with modern famine, that shortage at home may have driven people to seek resources elsewhere. Contemporaries certainly noted that dearth and famine might encourage greater movement of people. As we had cause to mention earlier, Trokelowe, in his near-contemporary account of the famine, describes how, for instance, lay and religious households reduced their budgets during the period of famine by withdrawing alms and disposing of some of their household servants; these people, ejected from the security of their familiar lives, were forced into a life of penury and begging.33 More generally, it is very likely, though often difficult to illustrate in detail, that individuals left their home communities and regions in search of opportunities elsewhere. Occasional references in manorial and other local courts speak to piecemeal mobility, with references to the housing of incoming strangers or reports of absences of residents, their disappearance sometimes explained by poverty; in addition, as Elizabeth Rutledge has shown for early-fourteenth-century Norwich, towns and cities almost certainly increased their numbers at this time as individuals headed to them in the hope of food and work.34 Undoubtedly such actions were not confined to famine years, with movement in search of relatively scarce resources a chronic condition during a period of high population, but it also seems reasonable to assume that this ‘crisis’ mobility was accentuated in the most difficult years.
One other little-studied component of heightened mobility may, conceivably, have been the spread of disease. In modern famines people die not only from starvation but also from illnesses associated with want and the heightened mobility of large groups of people.35 Again, contemporaries recognised, in medieval famine, the potential for associated disease to kill. Creighton’s listing of narrative accounts of ‘famine-sickness’ from 679 to 1322 illustrates, as he remarks, that the frequency of years ‘of such famines with attendant sickness…is… considerable…’. In the thirteenth century alone, according to Creighton’s listings drawn from the chronicles, there was more than one episode of famine and associated disease in England in each decade; in the twelfth century, the frequency was greater still with more than two recorded episodes per decade.36 One of the fullest descriptions of famine-related infectious disease for medieval England is that provided by John de Trokelowe for the Great Famine of the early-fourteenth century, who describes a dysenteric disease, caused by corrupted foods, accompanied by an acute fever or an infection of the throat (pestis gutturuosa).37 Identifying and distinguishing the impact of such morbidity from starvation is far from straightforward, not least when the mortality data is, generally speaking, so limited. One possible insight into the mortality effect of disease accompanying famine can be gained by examining the seasonality mortality of those members of society with relatively high status. Applying the assumption that relative elites did not starve, identification of mortality peaks in famine years might be taken to indicate other crisis-related causes of deaths. This seems, for instance, to be the case in the period of the Great Famine, for when there is some reasonable indication that clerical mortality underwent considerable upswings in the late summer and early autumn of known famine years. A concentration of deaths of priests in the weeks during and immediately after the harvest may indicate the spread of epidemic disease; there is also some indication that requires further detailed analysis – that priestly deaths were concentrated in certain areas and at certain times, as for instance in a small flurry of summer deaths of priests in Warwickshire in the diocese of Coventry and Lichfield in August 1316, suggestive of the spread of disease carried by those seeking to escape famine conditions and the consequences of poor harvests, and infecting those with whom they came into contact.38 Derek Keene has similarly suggested that an increase in the number of deaths of magnates in 1258–59 may also arise from disease in the wake of, or closely related to, famine.39
If the demographic consequences of medieval famine are often rather remote, historically speaking, there is greater opportunity to describe the immediate social and economic consequences of famine in the medieval English countryside. Historians have tended to focus on a few key indicators of dislocation when examining the immediate economic impact of famine in the countryside. The first and most obvious of these, as already noted above, is the effect of famine on food prices, especially the price of grain. Across the high and late Middle Ages, poor harvests had an inevitable and immediate effect on grain prices, causing dramatic increases in prices. These increases were especially notable in the thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries but fluctuating and unusually high prices persisted into the fifteenth century, and indeed beyond. These prices, set against wages as a rough but certainly inexact proxy for income, illustrate the ways in which famine and dearth could exercise a devastating effect on standards of living and real incomes, such as the years between 1296 and 1323.40 Decades in which known famine-type events and severe harvests occurred, such as the end of the 1430s, do not display the same pressures, as wages generally continued to outstrip prices in the late-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.41
Historians have tended to use such indices of disruption as the context for explaining other similar measures of dislocation. So, most obviously, the market in customary land in the thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries has been long identified as a key index of economic change encouraged by famine. The frequency of land transfers can certainly be seen to alter quite dramatically on some manors during this time; this seems to be especially evident in the east of England as a number of manorial case studies have shown. In Lincoln, Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire the count of inter-vivos transfers in small plots of customary land indicates that peak activity in such land transfer occurred during or in the wake of bad harvest years; a fluctuating market in land evincing significant highpoints in known famine and dearth years in the 1270s, 1280s, 1290s and 1310s.42 On a simple level, peaks in total annual numbers of land transfers certainly indicate crisis sales, encouraged both by the need of impecunious landholders to mobilise capital in order to cope with high prices and relative shortage as well as the opportunism of purchasers, eager to acquire land presumably often at beneficial rates. These are points to which we will return below. For now, we can note that a good deal of buying of land in this period was most likely acquisitive in its nature; the relative significance of aggressive acquisitiveness, as against purchases motivated by communal and familial responsibility to support the less advantaged, is hardly possible to gauge with any accuracy. Accumulation by wealthy individuals and families, often for no more than a generation or two in the early-fourteenth century, has been charted by Richard Smith for the Bury St Edmunds manor of Redgrave (Suffolk) and similar campaigns of land acquisition and accumulation may have served to change the nature of a land market and its responsiveness to crisis over the longer term; so, as more land fell into the hands of the relatively advantaged so we might anticipate that, in a period of successive crises, the overall extent of land likely to appear on the market would decline. In actual fact, total numbers of land transfers on manors in eastern England appear not to have decreased during the Great Famine of the early-fourteenth century, a feature possibly consistent with the more general vulnerability of the peasant landholding population and, as Smith has also described, the disinclination or incapacity of the wealthier peasants to maintain large accumulations of land for more than a few years before redistributing them.43
Elsewhere in medieval England, where the evidence for an active market in customary land is much less, where lords were resistant to the piecemeal inter-vivos transfer of smaller parcels of land, and the land was instead often maintained in larger units associated with the virgate or bondland, the same indices of volatility and responsiveness to shifting grain prices and yields are much less apparent. So, for instance, on the estates of Westminster Abbey there is far less evidence for disruption during years of high grain prices and any movement of land, observable in the estate records, tends to relate to a typically small number of postmortem transfers or short-term and temporary leasing arrangements, in some instances evidently related to deaths associated with famine.44 On estates and manors such as these the level of disruption and adjusted economic response is therefore far less observable and it is also reasonable to conclude that the kinds of structural dislocation associated with a significant reorganisation of landholding were also muted. In fact, landlords appear to have adopted sometimes strict policies with regard to the transfer of customary land consistent with prevailing landholding structures; in parts of eastern England, as we have seen, this meant that a market in small units of land was a significant and highly responsive feature of crisis conditions whereas, in parts of ‘midland’ or ‘champion’ England, where larger units of landholding owing labour-rent had been deliberately and carefully preserved by lords and their wealthier tenants, existing tenurial structures and allocations tended to ride out crises occasioned by poor harvests.
If we move beyond land transfers and look for other important indices of a peasant response to famine and dearth, we can find similar patterns of peaks and troughs in the record of interpersonal litigation recorded in manorial courts. This has been charted especially for litigation over debt and, as more than one historian has observed, also illustrates a tendency, on some manors and, again typically in manors studied to date in eastern England, for litigation over debt to rise and fall in fairly close association with high grain prices, in a pattern broadly consistent with similar fluctuations in the amount of land transfers.45 In time, the consequence of these severe fluctuations may also have been to drive credit out of local communities as potential creditors recovered capital and then chose, in the medium term at least, not to risk relending it while crises persisted. This appears to have been the case on the Suffolk manor of Hinderclay, for instance, where an initial surge in debt recovery in 1315/16, the first year of the Great Famine, both in terms of total number of pleas and the amount of capital recovered, was followed by a falling away in the extent and number of debts recovered for the next five years.46 Such indications of emiseration and polarisation of relative wealth, even at the level of the medieval village, may indeed have been one of the more enduring consequences of the worst famines of this period.
To what extent were responses to famine and dearth policed or controlled in some way? One obvious element in addressing this question is to consider criminality and its response in the medieval countryside. Barbara Hanawalt’s study of preplague crime illustrates most effectively the ways in which criminal behaviour responded to food shortage; Hanawalt’s analysis of types of criminal activity and their frequency showed in particular an increase in theft during the worst of the famine years, especially the years of the Great Famine.47 While evidence for an overall increase in such activity is clear, and can also be identified in amercements for similar kinds of misdemeanour, such as piecemeal theft of crops, in the manorial courts, it is far from clear if such an increase hides an even greater and unrecorded growth in minor thefts. In other words, our records allow us to see the type and number of crimes prosecuted, but permit us only limited insight as to the moral and political context in which such crimes were prosecuted or the decisions taken that led to prosecution in those instances that came to court. In other respects, political responses to famine, especially in terms of progressive measures intended to alleviate suffering and distribute resources, were few and far between. There is little to suggest that famine and high price years in the Middle Ages generated, in and of themselves, significant change in broad ‘political’ terms and political leaders, either at the national or the regional and local level, were seldom prepared to adjust their behaviour in ways that suggested a considered response to any prevailing famine conditions or one that may have ameliorated conditions in the medieval English countryside. In the first instance, there is little or no indication that government reduced taxation or its military or political ambitions during times of famine. Lay subsidy assessments and returns were levied at high rates in the later-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries, the returns in no small part evidence of the capacity of medieval villagers and townsmen to generate a surplus against which central government could exact its impositions.48 The same was also true, as John Maddicott has described, of military levies and other shared responsibilities such as coast-guard duty, none of which were reduced by government in time of famine.49 In 1316, during the Great Famine, the Lincoln Parliament, while recognising the travails of the population and the high price of foodstuffs, granted a lay subsidy and military levy to the crown in anticipation of a campaign against the Scots. That the levy ultimately failed was a product both of contemporary internecine politics and the reluctance and incapacity of individuals and institutions to meet their obligations during a time of real shortage.50 This seeming disregard also extended to other kinds of ‘political’ activity, carried out during famine years without evident regard for the welfare of a wider populace; for instance, warfare, including cross-border conflict between England and Scotland in the early-fourteenth century, and civil unrest, such as the revolt of Llywelyn Bren, might continue unabated during periods of food shortage, the capacity of relatively small military units unaffected at least in the short term by a more general want.51
As we have also seen, for unfree peasant tenants in some parts of the country, some of the choices they might elect to make were denied them by seigneurial policy. So, most obviously, on those estates where lords jealously guarded existing tenurial structures, especially larger units of land intended to support the manorial economy through office-holding, rent and labour service, the option to sell off all or part of a holding in difficult years in order to raise capital was far less than it was in certain other parts of the country. The same was also the case in terms of other kinds of action in the face of food shortage, such as movement away from a home village in search of opportunity elsewhere, a response that might also meet with seigneurial resistance and censure. In a similar fashion, landlords also appear hardly to have deviated from other standard practices in periods of famine and dearth, manorial accounts in particular revealing little or no amelioration of rent or other obligations owed by their tenantry.52
Similar approaches are identifiable amongst rural dwellers at lower social levels. While evidence for the motive of buyers and sellers is seldom, if ever, explicit in our records, the wider context of interpeasant exchange, as recorded in local manorial courts, tends not always to encourage a view of shared struggle and mutual support.53 Instead, there is evidence of acquisitive behaviour on the part of the relatively wealthy, with a reallocation of land seemingly fuelled by the desire of wealthier buyers to buy land, possibly at advantageous rates, from the poorer and more vulnerable landholders in medieval villages. This is especially evident in the decades on either side of 1300 when a combination of poor yields, high grain prices and land hunger encouraged redistributive markets in small units of land, where such markets were tolerated.54 Similar impulses may have driven other kinds of economic activity in the medieval village, not least the pursuit of debt during poor harvest years; recent research has suggested that pursuit of the larger debts by creditors in manorial courts accounted for the greater proportion of total capital pursued in litigation even though the pursuit of smaller debts was actually greater. This tendency is explicable in terms of the profit-maximising behaviour of creditors who can be observed calling in large debts, often in grain, in order either to reduce the risk of failing to recover outstanding debts or to recover assets, such as grains, or their equivalent costs, during a period of dramatic price hikes.55 Such behaviour may well reflect a desire to take the best advantage of unusual economic conditions, even if, by so doing, it generated negative consequences for other parties, and as such it is apparently consistent in its motive with some of the activity in the peasant land market described earlier.
It is, furthermore, difficult to identify the extent to which contemporaries attempted to adjust any inclination to self-serving behaviour in order to protect their neighbours and kin. While, as we have seen, activity on the part of those engaging in land and credit markets may not suggest a careful regard for mutual support and reciprocity, not all such activity was so obviously exploitative. As Richard Smith has shown in one of the most detailed explorations of land transfer and its circumstances in the medieval village, transfers between kin, of which he identifies a significant proportion on the Suffolk manor of Redgrave, may also illustrate support and charitable behaviour between family members. If we can posit such positive motives between kin we might also reasonably assume that some of the motivation for nonkin to buy land from their poorer neighbours may also have been charitable. The same might also be the case for apparently piecemeal acts of charity offered to villagers as well as to passing strangers, such as references in local court records to the illegal housing of strangers or breaches of local bye-laws relating to gleaning by nonresident poor.56 Governmental responses also indicate that, despite other evidence to the contrary as already discussed, those in power were both mindful of such difficult conditions and able to conceive of some degree of response, even if any such response was often rather limited. Buchanan Sharp has recently set out the ways in which English government sought to control a market in grain and to improve a wider access to grain during famine years.57
Such mixed and often partial responses almost certainly reflect a degree of ambivalence in the face of famine and harvest failure. Social commentators saw in famine a crisis at least occasioned by powers utterly beyond their control, an opportunity to moralise and to reflect on the failings of society. So, with the onset of the Great Famine of the early-fourteenth century, the author of the Vita Edwardi Secundi proclaimed that
the inclemency of the weather destroys the fatness of the land; wheat is sown and tares are brought forth. All this comes from the wickedness of them that dwell therein. Spare, O Lord, spare thy people!58
As famine receded in the later-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, contemporary moralists and social satirists maintained the view that famine was a response to collective moral failing. Authors such as William Langland and John Gower, critical of the relative ease of labourers in the last decades of the fourteenth century, longed for an earlier time of hardship and basic foodstuffs where men and women knew their estate and were constrained by the ever-present threat of shortage and starvation.59
Just as some contemporaries, or near contemporaries, were prepared to reflect on the necessary social correction afforded by famine and its consequences, so others, notably those who lived during rather than after the worst famine-events of the Middle Ages, described and criticised the kinds of social failing that allowed the more vulnerable to suffer in such circumstances. The writers of contemporary political poems and venality satire tended to speak to a society ill-disposed to offer mutual support and the actual application of charitable precepts. Much of this comment is directed at the experience of rural dwellers, and the ways in which their lot was worsened by the rapacity of landlords and tax-collectors.60 Robert Mannyng also criticised those who hoarded grain in anticipation of maximising profit, keeping it from the poor and leaving it for vermin to devour in barns.61 This was clearly a more general view and, as we have already mentioned, is sometimes reflected in government policies aimed at diminishing the impact of grain hoarding and forestalling, which appear to have been common practices throughout the period.
In terms of longer-term development, did medieval famine matter? The overall impact of medieval famine and dearth on population change and growth in the Middle Ages remains a moot point. Poor harvests and low yields did not prevent population from growing in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, though limited resources and inconsistent food supplies must have inhibited that growth. There is some evidence that the famines of the early-fourteenth century brought a halt to the population growth of the high Middle Ages and effected an initial decline three decades before the devastation of the Black Death brought about a halving of the medieval population. Poos’ analysis of Essex tithing penny payments remains the best indication of a 10% death rate during the Great Famine and subsequent downward trend in the adult male population but, informative as this data is, it raises a number of questions, not least those relating to the regional and typical experience of those males represented in the tithing penny payments as well as the relative impact of mortality and mobility in the tithing penny data. It remains at least possible that the 10% death rate is an inaccurate reflection of the death rate, especially as those sections of the population most vulnerable to food shortage, the very young, the poor and landless, the infirm and the elderly, are, as nonlandholders or less productive and ‘entitled’ members of society, simply less likely to be visible in our records. As the overall structure of the population, and indeed the total population, is and is likely to remain unclear, any estimates of population, even employing model life tables, are likely to include a large margin of error.62
In general terms, however, if the more vulnerable sections of society were most likely to be victims of famine events, we might not be surprised to find that the population was able to respond quite vigorously and to recover from single or even multiple famine events. In the early modern period, as Lee’s discussion of English parish registration data illustrates, the population recovered speedily from mortality crises occasioned by food shortage, chiefly on account of increased fertility in the wake of famine.63 Further to this, the suggestion that the famine events of the early-fourteenth century created an inherent weakness amongst youngsters that was manifested in a weakened resistance to plague when it struck in the mid-fourteenth century has yet to be adequately supported by relevant archaeological data; it also runs counter to the experience of modern plague, the virulence of which is not dependent on the pre-existing debility of the victim.64 In the longer term, the history of medieval population from the mid-fourteenth century to the end of the fifteenth century, in so far as it can be judged with any kind of accuracy, does not suggest that its pattern was dictated to any significant degree by famine mortality or other food crisis. In fact, the historical consensus tends to the view that, unlike in other parts of western Europe, later medieval England escaped the shadow of famine and that the main drivers of late medieval population movement were either a mortality regime dominated by epidemic and endemic disease or a fertility regime characterised by late marriage and a lowered fertility rate.65
In addition, while high price years persisted throughout the Middle Ages, as noted, the important distinction between the later-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries and the later-fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was one of resources relative to population. While the common experience of shortage almost certainly declined across the period, the possibility at least existed that certain parts of the country or sections of the population remained uniquely vulnerable to high prices. So, as in the later-sixteenth century when the north of England was especially vulnerable to famine, it is also possible that the north was displaying signs of some particular exposure to famine by the fifteenth century. So, most obviously, in 1438–40, while the country generally experienced high prices and signs of an economic slump it appears that parts of the north of England were especially exposed.66 Overall, however, it appears to have been a fairly general reduction in population, especially following the first outbreak of plague in 1348/49, with subsequent and positive consequences for wages, standard of living and availability of land, that saw an end of the kinds of pressure on resources that underlay the famine-prone nature of England before the mid-fourteenth century. In that earlier period, as Kershaw and others have pointed out, the economic consequences of recurrent harvest failure, murrains and famines could be locally devastating and their effects capable of persisting for decades.67 That said, while recurrent harvest failure, a consequence of disastrous sequences of exceptionally poor weather in the thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries, undoubtedly contributed to a widespread emiseration of sections of the population and served to accentuate local and regional vulnerabilities, the wealthier and more secure were able not only to survive but also even to emerge advantaged from such occurrences. The most significant changes in the later medieval agrarian economy, including an accelerated decline in villeinage and the seigneurial economy as well as the growth of the pastoral sector and a generally improved standard of living, arose chiefly in a postplague context rather than a postfamine one.68
Notes
1. S. Phillips, Edward II (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 252–4; on the same point, see also R.M. Smith, ‘Dearth and local political responses: 1280-1325 and 1580-1596/97 compared’, in M. Kowaleski, J. Langdon and P.R. Schofield, eds, Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy. Essays in Honour of Professor Bruce Campbell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 385–8.
2. See, most obviously, H.R. Oliva Herrer and P. Benito I Monclús, eds, Crisis de Subsistencia y crisis agrarias en la edad media (Sevilla: Universidad de Sevilla, 2007) and P. Benito I Monclus, ed., Crisis alimentarias en la Edad Media. Modelos, explicaciones y representaciones (Lleida: Universidad de Lleida, 2013); H. Kitsikopoulos, ed., Agrarian Change and Crisis in Europe, 1200-1500 (London: Routledge, 2012); F. Menant, M. Bourin, and Ll. To Figueras, eds, Dynamiques du monde rural dans la conjoncture de 1300 (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2014); D.R. Curtis, Coping with Crisis. The Resilience and Vulnerability of Pre-industrial Settlements (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
3. F. Curschmann, Hungersnöte im Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Deutschen Wirtschaftgeschicte des 8. bis 13. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: B.G. Teubner, 1900). H.S. Lucas, ‘The great European famine of 1315, 1316 and 1317’, in E. Carus-Wilson, ed., Essays in Economic History (London: Arnold, 2 vols., 1962), ii, pp. 49–72; originally published in Speculum 5 (1930).
4. I. Kershaw, ‘The great famine and agrarian crisis in England 1315-1322’, Past and Present 59 (1973), pp. 3–50, reprinted in: Peasants, Knights and Heretics, ed. by R.H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), pp. 85–132 (from which subsequent references are taken). The most authoritative general study, which provides an effective summary of writing on the Great Famine across early fourteenth-century northern Europe is provided in W.K. Jordan, The Great Famine. Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U.P., 1996). An important new study was published after this chapter was written: P. Slavin, Experiencing famine in fourteenth-century Britain (Turnhout: Brepols, 2019).
5. Curschmann, Hungersnöte im Mittelalter, pp. 206–7.
6. Lucas, ‘Great European famine’.
7. P. Benito i Monclús, ‘“Et si sterilitas, ut solet, in terra illa fuerit…” Frecuencia, longevidad y gravedad de las carestías en Cataluňa durante la “fase de crecimiento” de la economía medieval (Siglos XI-XIII)’, in Oliva Herrer and Benito I Monclús, Crisis de Subsistencia, pp. 79–110, and especially, pp. 89, 97, 101–6.
8. C. Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages: Social Change in England c.1200-1520 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1st edition, 1989), pp. 261–8.
9. G. Clark, ‘The long march of history: farm wages, population, and economic growth, England 1209–1869’, Economic History Review 60 (2007), pp. 97–135.
10. Clark, ‘Long march of history’, p. 110.
11. W.R. Childs, ed., Vita Edwardi Secundi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 120.
12. That the chronicler, a few sentences previously in the chronicle, notes that the birth of Edward of Caernarvon, the future Edward II, occurred in December 1284 may conceivably also hint at the ushering in of troubled times, E.A. Bond, ed., Chronica monasterii de Melsa (Rolls Series, 3 vols., London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867), ii, p. 180.
13. H.R. Luard, ed., Matthaei Parisiensis monachi Sancti Albani Chronica Majora (7 vols., Rolls Series, London: Longman, 1872–83), v, pp. 673–4, 690, 693–4, 701–2, 710–12, 746–7; H.T. Riley, ed., Johannis de Trokelowe et Henrici de Blaneforde Chronica et Annales (Rolls Series, London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1866), pp. 92–6.
14. For near-contemporary narratives of these years, see, for instance, Riley, Trokelowe, pp. 68–9; Childs, Vita Edwardi Secundi, pp. 16–39. Famine in 1311 is recorded in annals and chronicles elsewhere in northern Europe, notably central and southern Germany where poor weather combined with military conflict to cause the deaths of large numbers: Curschmann, Hungersnöte im Mittelalter, pp. 206–7.
15. W. Stubbs, ed., Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and II (Rolls Series, London: Longman, 1882), i, p. 278; Childs, Vita Edwardi Secundi, p. 111.
16. Childs, Vita Edwardi Secundi, p. 123.
17. See, for instance, D. Keene, ‘Crisis management in London’s food supply, 1250-1500’, in B. Dodds and C.D. Liddy, eds, Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurship in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), p. 54.
18. A. Sen, Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1981), p. 1; see also, idem, ‘Starvation and exchange entitlements: a general approach and its application to the great Bengal famine’, Cambridge Journal of Economics 1 (1977), pp. 33–59, and for a general discussion of the same, C. O’Grada, Famine. A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 159–94. Though note the contemporary comment on the ways in which merchants and others charged excessive prices to the detriment of others, Childs, Vita Edwardi Secundi, p. 103; that said, governmental response to forestalling predated the worst famine years of the second decade of the fourteenth century and was also directed at foodstuffs other than grain, including wine, points to which we will return.
19. B.M.S. Campbell, The Great Transition. Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2016).
20. Campbell, The Great Transition, p. 205.
21. Campbell, The Great Transition; Keene, ‘Crisis management’, p. 54.
22. Stubbs, Chronicles of the Reigns of Edward I and II, p. 236.
23. R.M. Smith, ‘Demographic developments’, in B.M.S. Campbell, ed., Before the Black Death: Essays in the Crisis of the Early Fourteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p. 54; P.R. Schofield, ‘The social economy of the medieval village’, Economic History Review 61 S1 (2008), p. 46.
24. M.M. Postan and J.Z. Titow, ‘Heriots and prices on Winchester manors’, Economic History Review 11 (1959), pp. 392–411; reprinted in M.M. Postan, Essays on Medieval Agriculture and General Problems of the Medieval Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 1973), pp. 150–85.
25. Postan and Titow, ‘Heriots and prices’, pp. 153–6.
26. Postan and Titow, ‘Heriots and prices’, pp. 172–4.
27. G. Ohlin, ‘No safety in numbers: some pitfalls of historical statistics’, in R. Floud, ed., Essays in Quantitative Economic History (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1974), pp. 68–90, and especially pp. 76–7.
28. B.M.S. Campbell and K. Bartley, England on the Eve of the Black Death. An Atlas of Lay Lordship, Land and Wealth, 1300-49 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 328–49.
29. B.M.S. Campbell, ‘The agrarian problem in the early fourteenth century’, Past and Present 188 (2005), pp. 3–70.
30. Kershaw, ‘Agrarian crisis’, at p. 119.
31. Campbell, ‘Agrarian problem’; Campbell, Great Transition, p. 257; P.R. Schofield, ‘Lordship, land markets and the response to environment’, in M. Kowaleski, J. Langdon and P.R. Schofield (eds), Peasants and Lords in the Medieval English Economy. Essays in Honour of Professor Bruce Campbell (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), pp. 201–24.
32. P.R. Schofield, ‘Regional price differentials in fifteenth-century England’, in Richard Britnell and Ben Dodds, eds, Agriculture and Rural Society after the Black Death. Common Themes and Regional Variations (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2008), pp. 40–55.
33. Riley, Trokelowe, p. 93.
34. E. Rutledge, ‘Immigration and population growth in early fourteenth-century Norwich: evidence from the tithing roll’, in R. Rogers, ed., Urban History Yearbook (Leicester: University of Leicester, 1988), pp. 15–30.
35. O’Grada, Famine.
36. C. Creighton, A history of epidemics in Britain from AD 664 to the extinction of plague (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1891), pp. 15, 16–7.
37. Riley, Trokelowe, p. 94; see also Creighton, Epidemics, p. 52; Lucas, ‘European famine’, p. 357.
38. See, for instance, J.B. Hughes, ed., The Register of Walter Langton. Bishop of Coventry and Lichfield, 1296–1321 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), vol. 1, pp. 73–174.
39. Keene, ‘Crisis management’, p. 55.
40. Clark, ‘Long march of history’, p. 110, and see above.
41. Clark, ‘Long march of history’, pp. 108–9.
42. W. Hudson, ‘The prior of Norwich’s manor of Hindolveston: its early organization and rights of the customary tenants to alienate their strips of land’, Norfolk Archaeology 20 (1921), pp. 179–214; R.M. Smith, ‘Families and their land in an area of Partible Inheritance: Redgrave, Suffolk 1260-1320”, in Richard M. Smith, ed., Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 135–95; B.M.S. Campbell, ‘Population pressure, inheritance and the land market in a fourteenth-century peasant community’, in Smith, Land, Kinship and Life-Cycle, pp. 87–134; P.R. Schofield, ‘Dearth, debt and the local land market in a late thirteenth-century Suffolk community’, Agricultural History Review xlv (1997), pp. 1–17; C. Clarke, ‘Peasant society and land transactions in Chesterton, Cambridgeshire, 1277-1325’ (Unpublished D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1985), chapter four.
43. Smith, ‘Families and their land’, pp. 160–85.
44. B.F. Harvey, Westminster Abbey and Its Estates in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1977), pp. 299–307; P.R. Schofield, ‘Land, family and inheritance in a later medieval community: Birdbrook, 12921412’ (Unpublished D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1992), pp. 98–9.
45. See, for example, Schofield, ‘Dearth, debt and the local land market’, p. 1; idem, ‘Social economy’, pp. 38–63; C.D. Briggs, Credit and Village Society in Fourteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 2009), pp. 151–5, 190–3.
46. Schofield, ‘Social economy’, p. 46; P.R. Schofield, ‘Dealing in crisis: external credit and the early fourteenth-century English village’, in M. Allen and M. Davies, eds, Medieval Merchants and Money: Essays in Honour of James L. Bolton (London: IHR, 2016), pp. 253–70.
47. B.A. Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities, 1300-1348 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979).
48. W.M. Ormrod, ‘The crown and the English economy, 1290-1348’, in Campbell, B.M.S., ed., Before the Black Death. Studies in the ‘Crisis’ of the Early Fourteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 1991), pp. 149–83.
49. J.R. Maddicott, ‘The English peasantry and the demands of the crown 1294–1341’, Past and Present Supplement I (1975).
50. J.R. Maddicott, Thomas of Lancaster Thomas of Lancaster, 1307-1322 (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1972).
51. C. McNamee, The Wars of the Bruces (East Lothian: Tuckwell, 1997), pp. 105–15; J.B. Smith, ‘The rebellion of Llywelyn Bren’, in T.B. Pugh, ed., Glamorgan County History. Volume III. The Middle Ages (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1971), pp. 72–86.
52. Schofield, ‘Land, family and inheritance’, pp. 116–20.
53. Schofield, ‘Social economy’.
54. Schofield, ‘Dearth, debt and the local land market’; ‘Social economy’.
55. Schofield, ‘Dealing in crisis’.
56. R.M. Smith, ‘Transactional analysis and the measurement of institutional determinants of fertility: a comparison of communities in present-day Bangladesh and pre-industrial England’, in J.C. Caldwell, A.G. Hill and V.J. Hull, eds, Micro-approaches to Demographic Research (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 215–41.
57. B. Sharp, Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England. The Regulation of Grain Marketing, 1256-1631 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P., 2016), pp. 11–55.
58. Childs, Vita Edwardi Secundi, pp. 121–3.
59. See, for instance, for discussion of the views of William Langland and John Gower in this respect, J. Hatcher, ‘England in the aftermath of the Black Death’, Past and Present 144 (1994), pp. 3–35, and especially, pp. 14–7.
60. P. Coss, ed., Thomas Wright’s Political Songs of England from the Reign of John to That of Edward II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J.R. Maddicott, ‘Poems of social protest inearly fourteenth century England’, in W. Ormrod, ed., England in the Fourteenth Century. Proceedings of the 1985 Harlaxton Symposium (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1986), pp. 130–44. See also P.R. Schofield, ‘Manorial court rolls as a source for the peasant land market. Eastern England, c. 1250-c.1350’, in L. Feller and C. Wickham, eds., Le marché de la terre au Moyen Âge (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2005), pp. 237–71.
61. …a year or two holdest thy corn
that thou might sell it right dear.
And to help the poor of that you will not hear.
………………………..
For you give mice to eat
That which was ordained for man’s meat
Robert Mannyng of Brunne, Handlyng Synne, ed. Idelle Sullens (Binghamton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1983), ll, pp. 5380–1. See also C.M. Woolgar, The Culture of Food in England, 1200-1500 (New Haven, CT and London: Yale U.P., 2016), p. 215, for similar views from John Bromyard, writing just before the Black Death.
62. For recent estimates, see S. Broadberry, B.M.S. Campbell, A. Klein, M. Overton, and B. van Leeuwen, British Economic Growth 1280-1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P.,2015), pp. 20–7.
63. R. Lee, ‘Short-term variation: vital rates, prices and weather’, in E.A. Wrigley and R. Schofield, eds, The Population History of England, 1541-1871: A Reconstruction (London: Edward Arnold, 1981), pp. 356–401.
64. S. DeWitte and P. Slavin, ‘Between famine and death: England on the eve of the black death—evidence from paleoepidemiology and manorial accounts’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History xliv (2013), pp. 37–60.
65. For a recent discussion of the population history of late medieval England, see P.R. Schofield, Peasants and Historians. Debating the Medieval English Peasantry (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2016), pp. 151–71.
66. A.J. Pollard, ‘The north-eastern economy and the agrarian crisis of 1438-40’, Northern History 25 (1989), pp. 88–105; idem, North-Eastern England during the Wars of the Roses. Lay Society, War, and Politics 1450-1500 (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1990), pp. 49–52.
67. Kershaw, ‘Agrarian crisis’; P. Slavin, ‘The Great Bovine Pestilence and its economic and environmental consequences in England and Wales, 1318–50’, Economic History Review 65 (2012), pp. 1239–66; Campbell, Great Transition.
68. On this point see also Campbell, Great Transition, p. 258.