Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England

To medieval and early modern people, the four horsemen of the Apocalypse—Pestilence, War, Famine and Death—were familiar in the abstract and in reality. Focusing on the responses of late medieval kings and parliaments to the third horseman, Buchanan Sharp argues that their actions in regulating the grain market anticipated the better known books of orders issued by Elizabeth I and the early Stuart kings. Whereas other historians have concentrated on local authorities’ responses to scarcity and local market regulation, he reinstates the role of Crown and parliament, arguing that central government provided policies that overcame, or at least attempted to overcome, localism in attitudes towards grain supply and prices. But local responses to shortage might take other forms, such as rioting, petitioning and even seditious talk or conspiracy: these too are considered. Sharp’s discussion of early market regulation to 1327 includes a lucid account of the current state of (dis)agreement over the size of the pre-Black Death population. Whatever its size, population growth had led to increasing numbers of markets, which needed regulating through enforcement of assizes of weights and measures, and of ale and bread. How far notions of ‘market morality’ informed market regulation can be judged from Edward II’s response to the great famine of 1315–17. The immediate official reaction was to control market prices, which simply led to a withdrawal of supplies from the market. Responding to this, Edward wrote to all bishops lamenting the situation but asserting that there would be sufficient grain but for people hoarding it for their own use: they should be encouraged to sell. Although probably ineffective at the time, this letter foreshadowed later governmental responses to dearth. Sharp is at pains to emphasise the Crown’s paternalism, but while kings were concerned about those subjects who were not grain producers, they also always tried to ensure that troops were supplied with sufficient grain, wherever they were fighting to further the Crown’s foreign political aspirations. Paternalism vied with military ambition and the latter usually won the battle for grain. And if not troops, then supplying London was frequently the Crown’s major concern

Economic history · Economics · Economy · Enforcement · Famine · Government (linguistics · Market economy · Parliament · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Scarcity · Sociology · Demography · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law