Four famines and a pestilence: harvest, price, and wage

Four famines and a pestilence: harvest, price, and wage variations inEngland, 13th to 19th centuries

Campbell, B. (2009). Four famines and a pestilence: harvest, price, and wage variations in England, 13th to 19thcenturies. In B. Liljewall, I. A. Flygare, U. Lange, L. Ljunggren, & J. Söderberg (Eds.), Agrarhistoria på mångasätt; 28 studier om manniskan och jorden. Festskrift till Janken Myrdal på hans 60-årsdag (Agrarian historymany ways: 28 studies on humans and the land, Festschrift to Janke Myrdal 2009) (pp. 23-56). KSLAB,Stockholm, Sweden.Published in:Agrarhistoria på många sätt; 28 studier om manniskan och jorden. Festskrift till Janken Myrdal på hans 60-årsdag (Agrarian history many ways: 28 studies on humans and the land, Festschrift to Janke Myrdal 2009)

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agrarhistoria på många sätt 1

It is a truism of pre-industrial European eco-nomic history that the annual grain harvest, which supplied society with its staple food-stuff, was highly variable. For producers and consumers alike, periodic bad harvests were an unavoidable fact of life. Most to be dreaded were those harvest failures which lasted for two or more consecutive years and, above all, those characterised by grain-output losses in excess of 25 per cent. Shortfalls of this duration and magnitude were almost invariably the re-sult of major short-term climatic shocks, aris-ing from a variety of environmental forcing agents (solar, volcanic, greenhouse, and the El Nino Southern Oscillation) which them-selves varied in magnitude and were of irregu-lar occurrence. The effect of such shocks was typically to screen out solar radiation, lower temperatures, and/or dislocate circulation pat-terns at continental, hemispherical, and global scales. Moreover, these not unusually (but for reasons as yet little understood) either trig-gered of heightened susceptibility to major pathogenic attacks upon plants, animals, and humans whose economic and demographic consequences were more far reaching than the original climatic perturbation.

Identifying past environmental hazards has advanced apace in recent years due to the de-tailed insights into Holocene environmental conditions provided by dendrochronology and ice-core and pollen analysis.

1 This new, scien-

tifically obtained, historical evidence presents a double challenge to historians; first, to in-corporate it into conventional historical nar-

ratives and analyses and, second, to evaluate, contextualise, and amplify it with evidence from historical sources in order to distinguish what was significant historically from what was important environmentally. This interface between economic history and environmental history promises to be highly fruitful, not least because it offers fresh insights into key epi-sodes of acute socio-economic stress and the opportunity to make a more critical evalua-tion of the influence of environmental factors upon the course of socio-economic develop-ment, before the advent of industrialisation and rapid economic growth transformed the traditional organic and animate relationship between humans and their environment.

Identifying major harvest crises – (i) the evidence of grain prices:Grain prices have provided the starting point for most analyses of the historical incidence of bad harvests and, by implication, of dearth and famine, since in any pre-industrial society it is usually safe to equate years of abnormally high prices with acute food scarcity and real hardship for the poorest and most vulnerable fifth or more of households.

2 Prices, moreover,

are typically the most widely recorded item of information about grain, although the nature of that information – the units in which it is recorded, whether the grain is measured by weight or volume, whether the prices are sale or purchase, and the time of year to which the prices relate – is rarely unproblematic. Not-

Four famines and a pestilence: harvest, price, and wage variations in England,

13th to 19th centuries

bruce m.s. campbell

Agrarhistoria, Campbell.indd 1 2009-09-04 13:01:12

2 agrarhistoria på många sätt

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withstanding a great deal of effort, good, long, grain-price series for the era before the advent of European industrialisation are scarce. For Ireland, for instance, a recently constructed high-quality price series extends no earlier than 1755 and due to a lack of relevant sources can probably never be extended back much before 1700.

3 For Sweden the situation is far

better, and a consumer price index has recent-ly been reconstructed extending back to 1290.

4

For well-documented England it is better still and several alternative grain-price series are now available, all of them commencing in the thir-teenth century and the earliest of them starting in 1165–6, although only becoming continuous from 1267–8.

5 Of these variant English grain-

price series, methodologically the most consist-ent in construction, accurate in contents, and continuous in chronological coverage is the Phelps Brown and Hopkins “Farinaceous” se-ries as checked and corrected down to 1700 by John Munro. This combines prices for wheat, rye, barley, and peas (but not oats).

Figure 1 demonstrates that whereas high-price years were common, years of extreme grain-price inflation were neither frequent nor regular in their occurrence. A grain-price inflation in excess of 50 per cent occurred in just twenty of the 600 years under examination and an inflation in excess of 75 per cent in only six of them. On three exceptional occasions – 1316, 1317, and 1439 – prices even rose to more than 100 per cent above average, reaching 130 per cent above average in 1316, which on this measure was the single dearest year of all. Not surprisingly, the chances of such a pronounced grain-price inflation persisting for two consec-utive years were remote: across the whole 600-year period, 1316–17 is the sole instance. Even a back-to-back inflation of at least 50 per cent was rare; 1556–57 and 1800–01 are the only ex-amples (although 1294–5, 1438–9, 1597–8, and 1648–50 also come very close). On this meas-ure, the most serious pairs of years for con-sumers were therefore 1294–5, 1316–17, 1438–9, 1556–7, 1597–9, 1648–50, and 1800–01, with

Men harvesting and women gleaning (Naomi and Ruth gleaning on the field of Boaz), as shown in the Queen Mary Psalter, produced in England for a royal patron at the height of the famine and agrarian crisis of 1315−21. BL Royal MS 2 B VII folio 47v., reproduced with the permission of the British Library.



four famines and a pestilence

prices typically reaching their maximum the year following a harvest failure.

6 Of these ex-

treme episodes, none was worse than 1316–17.Prices, however, are diagnostic of more

than just the quality of the harvest. They re-flect conditions of demand as well as of sup-ply, the efficiency or otherwise of markets, the amount of money in circulation, and the disruptive effects of war and plague. It is no coincidence that strong domestic demand, monetary inflation, and international warfare were common denominators of the massively inflated grain prices of 1316–17, 1597–98, and 1800–01. All the more noteworthy, therefore, are years of extreme grain-price inflation in times of slack demand, general price deflation, and comparative peace, as in the case of 1439 and 1483, which rank among the five dearest

years on record. Under these circumstances there is little reason to doubt that these sky-high prices reflect a genuine and acute scarcity of grain.

Identifying major harvest crises – (ii) the evidence of tithes and yields:Direct measures of grain output obviously provide a truer measure of harvest quality than price alone. Those most likely to be preserved within the historical record are the receipts or value of grain paid as tithe to the Church and the yields of individual crops calculable from information contained in annual farm ac-counts. Tithe statistics are widely preserved in Europe, although their effective use presents a

figure 1. Annual variations in English grain prices 1250–1900 (% of 25-year moving average centred)

sources: prices to 1700 calculated from Munro 2008; from 1700 calculated from Phelps Brown and Hopkins 1981, pp. 54–8



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number of methodological problems, due to the completeness or otherwise of the record, varying efficiency of the administrative ar-rangements for tithe collection, tendency for tithes to be sold or leased for cash, and ambi-guities over the units in which actual receipts of grain were recorded.

7 How successfully

tithe records fully capture long-term trends in aggregate grain output is uncertain but short-term variations in grain output arising from the varying quality of the harvest do seem to stand out reasonably clearly. That at least is the lesson offered by Lotta Leijonhufvud’s comprehensive analysis and discussion of the voluminous Swedish grain-tithe data which survive for the period c.1540 to 1680. Con-temporaneous farm accounts for the estates of the Swedish Crown are also extant and Lei-jonhufvud uses these to demonstrate that, at least in the Swedish counties of Östergötland and Uppsala, annual variations in grain yields

largely account for the observed annual vari-ations in tithe receipts. Re-analysis of the full range of her tithe and yield data for the period 1575–1625 confirms the existence of a positive relationship between harvest quality and tithe receipts (Figure 2).

8

English tithe records are far less volumi-nous and geographically comprehensive than the Swedish and only recently have begun to attract serious scholarly attention, mainly on the initiative of Ben Dodds, but they do survive for a significantly earlier period – the mid thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries – and are complemented by a far greater and more solid body of yield data for individual demesne farms, spanning the thirteenth, four-teenth, and fifteenth centuries.

9 In fact, these

English statistics of late-medieval crop yields constitute the earliest reliable record of annual grain harvests currently available for any coun-try and one of the most voluminous available

figure 2. Swedish tithe receipts compared with yields per seed of rye and barley, 1575–1624.

source: Calculated from Leijonhufvud 2001, pp. 269–331.




for any period before the late nineteenth cen-tury.

10 With the more limited body of available

tithe data, they complement and in certain re-spects correct the picture of extreme harvest fluctuations implied by grain prices.

The two principal English tithe series so far available relate to the Hampshire parish of Hambledon in southern England between 1276 and 1438 and thirteen parishes belong-ing to Durham Cathedral Priory in County Durham in north-eastern England between 1341 and 1519. Series for additional parishes in southern and eastern England are currently in the process of construction and the documen-tary potential for expanding this measure of agricultural output is considerable. At Ham-bledon the terrible harvests of 1315 and 1316 resulted in a 30 per cent reduction in tithe re-ceipts accounted for in 1316 and 1317 while in Durham the reduction in 1316 was over 50 per cent. Hambledon’s receipts in 1349–52 were

even lower and in 1350 were 58 per cent below average; in Durham 1349, 1350, and 1351 also witnessed a massive reduction in tithe receipts of 42–57 per cent, with 1350 again the worst year. Indeed, of the years common to both tithe series, 1349–51 were conspicuously the lowest yielding.

1408–10 and 1438 also stand out as poor in both series, along with 1346, 1401–2, 1424, 1432–3, 1435, 1437, and 1481–2 at Durham. How closely these years of abnormally re-duced tithe receipts coincide with years of ab-normally high grain prices is revealed by Fig-ure 3. Here the Hambledon and Durham data are combined, using regression analysis, into a single series, expressed as the annual variation from the 25-year moving average. The grain prices are similarly expressed but inverted and advanced one year to take account of the fact that prices typically rose when tithe receipts fell and did so with a lag of one year.

figure 3. Annual variations in English tithe receipts and grain prices (inverted & advanced 1 year).

sources: tithe data for Hambledon, Hampshire, and County Durham parishes supplied by Dr Ben Dodds, University of Durham; price data from Figure 1.



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Years identified as unusually adverse by both measures – tithe receipts and prices – include 1315–17, 1349–52, 1437–8, and 1481–2. Of these, 1437–8 witnessed the strongest contraction in tithe receipts and 1315–17, by a narrow margin, the most marked deviation in grain prices. Given that the reduction in tithe receipts in 1349–52 was on a par with that of 1315–17 it is striking that the corresponding price response was comparatively muted. The explanation, of course, lies in the fact that demand as well as supply contracted massively in these years due to the heavy loss of life precipitated by the Black Death of 1348–9. This highlights the importance of matching prices against other independent evidence of harvest quality since in this instance prices fail to capture a curtail-ment of output which the tithes reveal to have been of famine proportions. Conversely, the conspicuously high prices of 1370 and 1391 are not corroborated by the tithe receipts as the products of particularly bad harvests.

Unfortunately, the Hambledon and Dur-ham tithe series are neither chronologically comprehensive nor geographically representa-tive of lowland grain-growing England as a whole. Remarkably, the record of crop yields derived from manorial accounts is far superior in volume and coverage and provides explicit information on the yield of individual grains from which a composite measure of the yield of all grain crops (wheat, barley, and oats) can be generated. These data, totalling some 30,000 individual yield observations, are most abundant and comprehensive for the 150 years c.1275 to c.1425.

11 The picture of annual varia-

tions in grain yields thereby revealed is shown in Figure 4. As will be seen, the back-to-back harvest failures of 1315–16, 1349–50 and 1350–1, 1374–5, 1437–8, and 1471–2 (by which time the yield data are limited and localised in their coverage) stand out clearly. 1315–16 is con-firmed as the sharpest serious crop failure of them all and 1349–51 as the most prolonged.

figure 4. Annual variations in English grain yields, 1275–1490.

source: Calculated from Campbell, 2007.




Plotting the evidence of the grain yields against that of the tithe receipts provides the result given in Figure 5. Allowance needs to be made for the fact that the tithe series is less continuous and representative than the yield series, nevertheless only four years stand out as exceptionally bad on both measures, with yield and output reductions in excess of 25 per cent – 1283, 1350–51, and 1438. The famine years of 1315–16 do show up in both series but the congruence between them is not exact. And whereas 1315–16 and 1438 also show up strongly in the price data as exceptionally bad years (Figures 1 and 6), 1350 and 1351 do not, even though on the combined evidence of the yields and tithes these were ostensibly the two worst years of all. Given these discrepancies between the price and output/yield series it is all the more unfortunate that the latter do not extend into the sixteenth century when there was such a succession of extreme high-price

years, no doubt fuelled by the combination of rampant monetary inflation and run-away population growth.

12

Identifying the hazards which caused harvest crises:Harvest failures and price inflations of these orders of magnitude, of which those of 1315– 17, 1349–51, 1437–8, and 1482 appear to have been the most notable, can have been the product of no ordinary runs of adverse weather. Instead, each was almost certainly the outcome of some abnormal and extreme short-term climatic perturbation. Dendrochronology provides a further precisely dated annual record of grow-ing conditions, at least for certain species of tree, across wide areas.

13 Analysis of the chemi-

cal composition of the annual layers of ice preserved in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets can also reveal much about past atmos-

figure 5. Annual variations in English grain yields and tithe receipts 1275–1499.

sources: Figures 3 and 4.



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pheric conditions and patterns of circulation.14

Records of the dates at which Dutch canals and rivers were frozen, the duration of win-ter snowcover and extent of Alpine glaciers, and the earliness or lateness of the Pinot Noir grape harvest in Burgundy shed further light on weather conditions over northern Europe from the fourteenth century.

15 Contemporary

comment, of which there is a great deal, is less quantifiable but provides valuable corrobora-tion and amplification of these proxy envi-ronmental measures.

16 The historical record

of volcanic eruptions is also relevant, since a major eruption almost anywhere in the world can affect circulation patterns and tempera-tures throughout the planet. A single super-eruption could disrupt growing conditions for at least three years. Major eruptions have been widely reported and additionally almost all have left a sulphate signature in either or both the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.

Keith Briffa has listed the largest explosive volcanic eruptions that have occurred since AD 1400; the Smithsonian’s “Global Volcan-ism Program” lists others, spanning a far longer period of time.

17

Conceivably, the eruption of Mount Fuji, Japan’s largest volcano, in late 1435 and early 1436 may have contributed to the lowered temperatures which prevailed over north-western Europe from 1435 to 1438. Winters in these years, at least in the Netherlands, were unusually cold and summers were late and cool, delaying the grape harvest in Burgundy. In England the grain harvests of 1437 and 1438 were the worst of the fifteenth century and, on the evidence of Figures 5 and 6, the most disas-trous since 1349–51. Nevertheless, how much, if any, of this is attributable to the eruption of Mount Fuji or other contemporary volcanic activity remains to be established. The case for a volcanic cause of the harvest failures of

figure 6. Annual variations in English tithe receipts, grain yields, and grain prices (inverted & advanced 1 year) 1250–1524.

sources: Figures 3 and 5.




1481–3 is stronger. Briffa lists the double erup-tion in 1480 and 1482 of Mount St Helens, North America, as among the most explosive of the last 600 years, and almost simultane-ously, in 1481, the Javanese volcano of Kelut erupted. The Dutch proxy temperature record identifies 1481 as an unusually cold year and in Burgundy the grape harvest was consider-ably delayed. In England the scarcity of grain triggered the fourth greatest price inflation on record. In 1554 another spate of eruptions – Hekla in Iceland, Haku-san and Kirishima in Japan, Merapi in Indonesia, and possibly others in Colombia and Mexico – may again have wrought havoc with the weather. 1555 was cold and the grape harvest late while in England the marked grain-price inflation of 1556–7 (Figure 1) denotes poor harvests in 1555 and 1556. A generation later, in 1585–6, a spate of volcanic eruptions in Spain, Mexico, Gua-temala, Japan, and especially Indonesia may

ultimately have been responsible for the ad-verse weather and poor harvest which greatly inflated prices in 1587. Finally, a cluster of eruptions in the late 1790s both in Europe and further afield, followed by the re-eruption of Mount St Helens in 1800, may have been re-sponsible for the last major inflationary spike in English grain-price history, namely that of 1800–1 when, in the midst of industrialisation and a major European war, prices rose to lev-els that would never again be experienced.

Volcanic activity may therefore have been partially or wholly responsible for the climatic perturbations that triggered some of these ex-treme harvest failures, although none of these hypothesised connections can as yet be prov-en. On the other hand, some of the biggest known volcanic eruptions – the apparently colossal but as yet unidentified equatorial eruption of c.1257/8, and the eruptions of Hy-naputina in Peru in 1600, Laki in Iceland in

Two men threshing sheaves with flails, as shown in the Queen Mary Psalter, produced in England for a royal patron at the height of the famine and agrarian crisis of 1315−21. BL Royal MS 2 B VII folio 47v., reproduced with the permission of the British Library.



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1783–4, and Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 – are represented by far less striking deviations in the historical records of yields and prices.

18 In-

deed, a sustained cannonade of relatively mi-nor eruptions, as in 1554, may sometimes have had a greater cumulative impact upon the weather than a single great explosive event.

Obviously, the sowing, sprouting, growing, and harvesting of grain had seasonally specific weather requirements and much depended upon how these were affected by any volcani-cally-induced deviation in climatic conditions.

19

Unseasonable weather could do more harm to agriculture than year-on-year variations in av-erage temperature and rainfall. There is much here which therefore remains to be investigated. Equally intriguingly, this catalogue of possible

eruption-induced weather perturbations leaves unexplained the disastrous harvests of 1315–17, 1349–52, and 1596–7. There are no immediately eligible eruptions that might account for what were arguably the three worst English harvest failures of the last 750 years.

20 Nor is there envi-

ronmental evidence of major volcanic activity immediately prior to each of these disasters.

21

Instead, some other major environmental forc-ing agent or combination of agents must have been responsible.

In the case of the disastrous back-to-back harvest failure of 1315–16, the most severe on English historical record, evidence from Greenland ice cores and the global dendro-chronological record is beginning to reveal a clear environmental context. Thus, recon-

figure 7. Evidence from Greenland ice cores of variations in sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic, 1270–1400.

source: Redrawn from Dawson, Hickey, Mayewski, and Nesje 2007, p. 431.




struction of sea-surface temperatures in the North Atlantic based on the deuterium con-tent of datable Greenland ice layers identifies a period of heightened oceanic temperature variation which began in the final decades of the thirteenth century and was at its most pronounced in the first half of the fourteenth century, before fading away in the final quarter of that century (Figure 7). Years of unusually warm Atlantic surface waters, as in 1315, 1316, and 1317, “provided a source of moisture for prolonged summer rains as well as winter storms”.

22 The onset of this specific

stormy episode also coincided with an equally sudden inversion in the growth records of Old World and New World trees, as revealed by dendrochronology (Figure 8). Evidently,

some fundamental shift had occurred in glo-bal atmospheric circulation which heightened contrasts in growing conditions across the planet.

23 This growth inversion lasted until

about 1339–40, when the Old World and New World dendrochronologies converged once again and thereafter displayed a remarkably close correlation. The first and most acute stage of this inversion, from c.1314 to c.1321 (designated the Dantean Anomaly by Neville Brown), proved to be disastrous for English grain producers; the second stage from c.1325 to c.1338 delivered some of the most bounti-ful harvests on record (Figure 4).

24 Onset of

the latter is associated with a striking reversal of the carbon-decay curve as identified by ra-diocarbon dating, probably due to the release

figure 8. Dendrochronological evidence of major global shifts in growing conditions, 1275–1375.

source: calculated from data supplied by Professor M.G.L. Baillie, Palaeoecology Centre, The Queen’s University of Belfast.



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into the atmosphere of significant amounts of carbon stored in the earth’s crust.

25 The chal-

lenge now, of course, is to decipher the mean-ing of the environmental message contained in the dendrochronological and radiocarbon records and identify the cause of the profound short-term climatic deviation, whose com-mencement had such a negative impact upon grain producers in north-western Europe.

The harvest failure of 1349–52 was on an even greater scale, mainly because it was more prolonged (Figure 4).

26 On this occasion the

effects of inclement weather were greatly exac-erbated by the heavy mortality of workers and managers inflicted by the Black Death which reached England in 1348 and spread throughout the country the following year. The environ-mental context of this uniquely catastrophic episode was a global reduction in tree growth (Figure 8) probably occasioned by a general cooling of the earth’s atmosphere for which

there is as yet no explanation. Evidence from ice cores confirms the unusual nature of these years. Over western Greenland temperatures reconstructed from the deuterium content of ice registered a prolonged depression (Figure 9): this was at its most pronounced from 1349 to 1353 and, in 1352–3, sank to a minimum low-er than that at any subsequent point in history, including the notoriously cold 1690s – the cold-est decade of the Little Ice Age – when harvests were again poor.

27 The onset of this episode is

possibly tracked by a rapidly widening diver-gence between the growth records of New Zealand cedars on one side of the globe and that of British Isles oaks on the other, which began in 1347 and, significantly, was at its most extreme between 1349 and 1353.

28 Meanwhile,

right the way across the World but especially in the Southern Hemisphere, trees registered a major growth trough between 1345 and 1355, with a collective minimum value at 1348–50.

29

figure 9. Ice-core evidence of extreme cooling events over western Greenland, 1270–1450.

source: Redrawn from Dawson, Hickey, Mayewski & Nesje 2007, p. 431.




Coincidentally, these were the very years when plague (whatever that disease was) irrupted and spread throughout Europe.

30 Whatever

the reason for this global depression in grow-ing conditions, it provided the context for the greatest of all human biological disasters.

Whereas the climatic downturn of the 1340s is manifest in both hemispheres, that which culminated in the early 1590s appears to have been confined to the Northern Hemisphere (Figure 10) and, in Europe north of the Alps, seems to have been associated with a signifi-cant cooling of temperatures.

31 It is, however,

the lesser harvest failure of 1586 rather the double back-to-back harvest failure of 1595–7 – when harvests everywhere were a wash out – that marks the nadir of this growth depres-sion. Nor has the exceptional wetness of the 1590s left any particularly conspicuous imprint in the European dendrochronological record, unlike the exceptional coldness of 1601–2,

figure 10. Dendrochronological evidence of depressed growing conditions in the Northern Hemisphere in the 1570s and 1580s.

source: Calculated from data supplied by Professor M.G.L. Baillie, Palaeoecology Centre, The Queen’s University of Belfast.

where 1601 stands out as a year of minimal oak growth (Figure 11).

32 For the latter, if (in terms

of English grain harvests) lesser, event there is a clear environmental cause, namely the erup-tion of Huaynaputina in Peru in 1600 and may-be another volcano somewhere in the northern hemisphere.

33 In Iceland and Norway there are

good eye-witness descriptions of the strange-ness of the atmospheric conditions which fol-lowed these eruptions.

34 Resultant solar screen-

ing and changes in atmospheric circulations initiated what Briffa considers to have been the period of most intense cold of the last 600 years over northern Europe.

35 Scandinavia and

other parts of northernmost Europe appear to have borne the brunt of the bitter weather and Swedish tithe receipts in 1601 and 1602 stand out as the lowest on record between 1544 and 1680 (Figures 2 and 12).

36 Yields of rye and bar-

ley on royal demesnes in southern Sweden fell to barely half their normal level in 1601, lower



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even than in the famine year of 1597 (Figure 12). 1600 had witnessed a much delayed grape harvest in Burgundy and, on the evidence of reconstructed Dutch winter temperatures; this was followed by an exceptionally hard winter.

Whereas there is a clear consensus among the available environmental indicators that 1600–01 experienced very abnormal weather conditions, there is no such clear and con-sistent environmental signal for 1594–7, other than that provided by tithes, yields, grain prices, real wages, and much contemporary comment. As in 1315–17, the problem for grain producers was less extreme coldness than ex-cessive wetness. True, the winter of 1595 does stand out in the Dutch temperature record as unusually cold (Figure 12), but not those of 1596 or 1597, when the combination of mild and wet weather ensured that European oaks grew moderately well (Figures 11 and 12). The overcast skies and lack of warmth nevertheless delayed the grape harvest in Burgundy and

delivered poor grain harvests across northern Europe. Swedish yields of rye and barley were less than 60 per cent their normal level in 1597 and tithe receipts were down by more than a third. The constant cloud and rain were to blame, yet what caused such prolonged bad weather remains a mystery and one that so far has received only cursory attention from historians of climate.

37 This episode may show

up more clearly in the historical than the en-vironmental record, but it is the latter which undoubtedly contains the clues to explaining why the weather turned so inclement at this time, thereby reducing much of Europe to a state of famine and near famine.

Measuring the human impacts of weather-induced harvest crises – (i) wages and living standards:Irrespective of the precise environmental causes of these harvest failures, what were

figure 11. European oaks mean chronology: years of minimum growth 1450–1749.

source: calculated from data supplied by Professor M.G.L. Baillie, Palaeoecology Centre, The Queen’s University of Belfast.




their human impacts? The absolute and rela-tive levels of the real wages of building and agricultural labourers provide two simple comparative measures of the effect upon pur-chasing power of marked rises in the prices of staple foodstuffs. For England, two real wage series are currently available. The first is the celebrated index of building worker’s wages constructed by Phelps Brown and Hopkins, as recently corrected and revised by Munro for the period 1264–1700 with respect to the price and changing composition of the “basket of consumables” that a worker was capable of purchasing.

38 The second is an independently

constructed index of farm worker’s wages con-structed by Clark, which employs a different set of prices and methodology to define the all-important “basket of consumables”.

39 The

Clark series starts earlier, 1209 rather than 1264, than the Phelps Brown and Hopkins series and is also more continuous. Here they are used both comparatively and in combination.

There were only a dozen occasions over the 650-year period from 1250 to 1899 when the real wages of building and farm workers fell to less than three-quarters of their normal value (Figure 13). The single greatest recorded fall was in 1316, when real wages sank to only

figure 12. Environmental indicators of growing conditions during the double harvest failure of 1597 and 1601.

sources: Swedish tithes and yields Figure 2; European oaks Figure 11; Burgundian grape harvests Chuine, Yiou, Viovy, Seguin, Daux & Le Roy Ladurie 2004; Netherlands winter temperatures van Engelen, Buisman, and IJnsen 2001.



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62 per cent of their current average. Moreover, this was the first of two consecutive years when the purchasing power of wages was reduced by more than a quarter. Back-to-back real wage reductions on this scale were extremely rare: 1347–8 and 1556–7 are the only other examples of a reduction in excess of 25 per cent for two consecutive years (Figure 13). On each occa-sion the situation was undoubtedly greatly compounded by a simultaneous contraction in the amount of waged employment that was available, as reduced harvests meant there was less grain to reap, cart, stack, thresh, and win-now, while persistent inclement weather made all forms of farm work difficult. Even the mak-ing of salt and salting of fish suffered.

40 Pat-

ently, such times witnessed acute economic stress for all wage earners as well as those petty producers who relied for their livings upon supplying wares and services to others.

41 In de-

scending order of severity, the years which de-livered the greatest negative income shocks to

wage earners were 1316–17, 1370, 1439, 1347–8, 1597, 1801, 1295, 1538, and 1556–7 (Figure 13). It will be noted that five of these years fall in the calamitous fourteenth century (and a sixth at the threshold of that century) and four in the sixteenth century, whose poor, according to R.H. Tawney, “lived in terror of floods and bad harvests and disease, of plague, pestilence, and famine”.

42 Purchasing power would not again

be squeezed so hard until 1801, and then for the very last time.

More important to wage earners than the relative scale of real-wage reductions was the absolute level to which they were reduced. Self evidently, populations with comparative-ly high real incomes were better able to with-stand the impact of a serious harvest shortfall than populations where a high proportion of households were living close to the minimum required for bare subsistence. On the evidence of Figure 14, three periods stand out when real-wage reductions affected populations

figure 13. Annual variations in English labourer’s real wages 1250–1899.

source: calculated from Munro 2008 and Phelps Brown and Hopkins 1981, pp. 28–31.




whose purchasing power was already close to the minimum for subsistence: at the climax of medieval population growth between the 1250s and 1340s, at the culmination of early modern population growth from the 1590s to 1640s, and, more fleetingly, at the time of fastest modern population growth at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

43

These were all periods when the limited pur-chasing power of the poorest households left them particularly vulnerable to any shortfall in the supply and inflation in the price of sta-ple foodstuffs. Years in which proportionately large reductions in purchasing power (i.e. of more than a quarter) reduced real wages sub-stantially below the minimum mean indexed value of 43 were rare and include 1295, 1316–17, 1347–8, 1597, and 1801 (Figure 14).

Which of these episodes marks the tempo-ral nadir for English wage earners is a matter of debate. On the revised Phelps Brown and Hopkins index of real wages, 1597 was the sin-

gle worst year for building workers, closely fol-lowed by 1316–17 and 1630–1. On the alterna-tive Clark index of real wages, 1316–17 was sig-nificantly worse than 1597, and 1295–6, 1309–11, and 1322–3 were almost as grim. Combining the two indexes suggests that 1316–17, 1295, and 1323 were all worse than 1597, with respective minimum index values in the range 27 to 34. Wage earners were nevertheless harder hit in 1597 than in 1258, 1272, 1348, 1631, 1649–50, or 1801, when minimum index values were in the range 35 to 38. By any definition, however, these were all years when the poorest members of society experienced extreme hardship. In contrast, the proportionately large real wage reductions of 1439, 1482, 1528, and 1556–7 did not pose such a serious threat to basic sub-sistence needs because they occurred at times when rates of remuneration were relatively good (Figures 13 and 14). Grim as these years no doubt were to those who experienced them, in none were real wages reduced below the

figure 14. Purchasing power of English building- and farm-workers’ wages 1250–1874.

sources: Calculated from Munro 2008 and Phelps Brown and Hopkins 1981, pp. 28–31; Clark 2007, pp. 130–4.



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long-term minimum and in 1439 and 1482 they remained at least 50 per cent above that mini-mum. These, therefore, were years of dearth rather than famine when poverty rather than deaths mounted.

Measuring the human impacts of weather-induced harvest crises – (ii) mortality and fertility:Acute scarcity had demographic as well as economic repercussions, although these are harder to measure across such a long period since consistent demographic information on births, marriages, and deaths is only available at annual resolution from 1538 with the advent of Anglican parish registers and their officially enforced registration of baptisms, marriages, and burials. Information extracted from a na-

tional sample of 404 of these parishes is the empirical basis of the annual estimates of births, marriages, deaths, and the rate of in-crease reconstructed by E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield.

44 Earlier periods are not a complete

demographic void but such evidence as exists for marriages and deaths relates to individual manors and is illustrative rather than repre-sentative of wider conditions.

45

Annual variations in the Crude Death Rate between 1550 and 1859 are plotted in Figure 15. This highlights the fact that the magnitude of extreme death rates tended to decline over time: 1558, the deadliest year of the sixteenth century, witnessed an 85 per cent rise in the Crude Death Rate; 1625, the most fatal year of the seventeenth century, saw death rates rise by 64 per cent; in 1729, the worst year in the eighteenth century, the increase in the death

figure 15. Annual variations in English grain prices and death rates, 1550–1859.

sources: Prices from Figure 1; death rates calculated from Wrigley and Schofield 1989, pp. 531–5.




rate was 45 per cent; but in 1849, the most unhealthy year of the nineteenth century, the excess of deaths was only 13 per cent. In fact, rises in death rates in excess of 25 per cent were rare and over this entire 300-year period oc-curred on only 13 occasions. In chronological order these were 1557–59, 1593, 1597, 1603, 1625, 1658, 1665, 1681, 1728–29, and 1742.

Strikingly, few of these years with major surges in death rates coincided exactly with years of acute food scarcity as defined by peaks in grain prices (Figure 15). Nor when mortal-ity peaks did coincide with price peaks were the death rates ever as high as in the deadliest years of all, since famine was a far less effective killer than epidemic disease. It was influenza which killed with such ferocity in 1558, plague in 1625, small pox in 1729, and cholera and typhus in 1849. Nevertheless, each of these deadly epidemics followed hard on the heels of extreme scarcity, which suggests that there may have been some indirect connection be-tween harvest crises and the outbreak of ma-jor epidemics. Not unusually, what began as a subsistence crisis ended as a biological crisis, as in the case of the Great European Famine when, in the immediate aftermath of three consecutive harvest failures, cattle herds were devastated by the worst rinderpest epidemic of the Middle Ages.

46 Pure subsistence crises

accompanied by nothing more contagious and deadly than the normal quota of starva-tion-related diseases – dysentery, typhus etc – were rare and are chiefly recognisable by the modesty of their death rates relative to the dearness of grain. Thus, 1597, one of the dearest of dear years, experienced only a 33 per cent rise in death rate, and the equivalent rise during the serious harvest failure of 1741–2 was 18–28 per cent.

47 Even more strikingly, the

harvest crisis of 1800–01 – which at a time of national military crisis harked back to some of the grimmest years in England’s pre-industrial past – appears to have raised death rates by no more than 8–9 per cent. In contrast, the lesser harvest crisis of 1728 saw a 30–45 per cent rise

in the death rate, mainly because it was ac-companied by smallpox and other contagious diseases.

48 Probably the Black Death is the sin-

gle most striking example of the capacity of deadly micro-organisms to transform a major harvest crisis into something entirely differ-ent, with altogether larger and more enduring demographic consequences.

49

A marked increase in deaths is one of the most obvious distinguishing features of fam-ines. Typically more deaths arose from starva-tion-related diseases than starvation per se and most of the victims came from those who were naturally most vulnerable – the young, the old, the infirm, and, above all, the poor. Ad-ditionally, famines were usually characterised by marked reductions in marriage and birth rates, since hard times were hardly propitious for the formation of new households and mal-nutrition reduced conceptions and increased spontaneous abortions. Probably, too, there was some deliberate elimination of unwanted extra mouths. The net outcome was an excess of deaths over births and reduction in aggre-gate population, although it was rare for losses to exceed 10 per cent of the total population unless a major epidemic was also involved.

As will be seen from Figure 16, between 1550 and 1849 only a small minority of years display the distinctive combination of above-average death rates and below-average birth and mar-riage rates which are the tell-tale demographic symptoms of subsistence crisis. Moreover, as estimated by Wrigley and Schofield, on only a dozen occasions was the demographic shock inflicted by subsistence crisis so great that rates of natural increase became negative and in only five of those potential famine years (in descending order of severity, 1557, 1728–9, 1679, and 1742) did the crude rate of natural increase fall below –5. Surprisingly, net losses were proportionately smaller in 1597, 1623, and 1741, even though their birth, marriage, and death rates mark them out as years of extreme economic hardship and 1597 witnessed one of the greatest of all reductions in real wages



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(Figures 13, 14, and 16). This highlights how rare it was, at least in post-medieval England, for famine per se to have a big negative im-pact upon the total population especially at times, such as the late sixteenth century, when underlying reproduction rates were compara-tively high.

Distinguishing between famine, dearth, and disease:The preceding discussion has identified ten potentially famine situations in England be-tween the opening of the fourteenth and the close of the nineteenth centuries, each associ-ated with a major failure of the grain harvest. Table 1 summarises their measurable econom-ic and demographic characteristics.

figure 16. England: annual variations in birth/marriage rates and death rates (inverted x 0.5), 1550–1849.

source: Calculated from Wrigley and Schofield 1989, pp. 531–5.

Crisis 1 – The Great European Famine of 1315–21:The earliest of these ten harvest failures is probably the most unequivocal example of a genuine famine during the six centuries un-der review. The severe back-to-back harvest failure of 1315–16 shows up prominently in the chronologies of both tithe receipts and grain yields and is further attested by a wealth of contemporary comment.

50 The consequent

inflation in grain prices was extreme, the re-duction in real wages severe, and the actual level of real wages at the height of the crisis, the lowest on historical record (Table 1). There are no systematic national-level demographic estimates for this early period in time, but on the extensive estates of the bishops of Win-chester in southern England as also on the




midland manor of Halesowen there is explicit evidence that the number of marriages was re-duced and that deaths among tenants of all classes, but especially the poorest, rose signifi-cantly.

51 Population losses of 10–15 per cent are

recorded for some manors, of which Haleso-wen is one.

52 That there was acute and wide-

spread socio-economic stress is provided by evidence of a surge in petty land sales almost everywhere, as tenants liquidated portions of their capital assets in order to meet credit obli-gations and purchase food.53 Those who had forfeited their legal entitlement to food resor-ted to illegal methods of survival, as witnes-sed by a wave of crimes against property.54 In much of the north of England the economic hardship of these years was greatly heightened by a series of deliberately destructive Scot-tish raids.55 Then, throughout the country in 1319–20, in the immediate aftermath of the harvest crisis, irruption of a deadly and highly contagious disease of cattle reduced herds by at least half with particularly serious effects for draught power in an economy still heavily

reliant upon oxen.56 This ensured that the aft-ter-effects of the crisis were felt long after the abnormal weather had passed and yields had returned to normal. Nor was the cattle plague the end of the crisis, for in 1321, following a hard winter and late spring, the harvest failed once more.

57

Crisis 2 – The episode of the Black Death:Compared to the harvest failure of 1315–17, the double back-to-back harvest failure of 1349–51 was on an even greater scale and, given the absolutely low real wages prevailing at the onset of the crisis, might be expected to have precipitated a famine of equal or greater sever-ity (Figure 5). Yet, perversely, the opposite oc-curred: the consequent price rise was as muted as it was belated and in the midst of possibly the worst harvests on record, nominal and real wages actually improved (Table 1). On this unique historical occasion, in fact, the har-vest crisis was the lesser of two simultaneous disasters, of which the outbreak of the Great Pestilence (alias Black Death) was the greater.

Filling a bin with threshed grain (How Joseph causes the granaries to be filled everywhere), as shown in the Queen Mary Psalter, produced in England for a royal patron at the height of the famine and agrarian crisis of 1315−21. BL Royal MS 2 B VII folio 4tv., reproduced with the permission of the British Library.



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Year % of 25-year moving average Real wage indexed on

1451–75

% of 25-year moving average Crude Rate of Natural

Increase per '000

Grain yield

Tithe receipt

Grain price

Real wage

Crude Death

Rate

Crude Birth Rate

Crude Marriage

Rate1313 106 109 74 116 51

1314 114 87 83 107 47

1315 57 81 122 94 41

1316 35 80 230 62 27

1317 84 64 222 65 28

1318 111 128 107 89 39

1319 107 ? 63 113 49

1347 110 116 122 73 40

1348 117 117 127 68 38

1349 51 84 79 89 49

1350 43 65 103 109 60

1351 64 75 142 115 63

1352 94 82 171 94 52

1353 95 84 130 108 60

1436 90 104 90 104 99

1437 56 91 92 104 98

1438 71 47 147 83 79

1439 108 100 229 68 65

1440 150 116 107 82 78

1441 99 120 65 117 111

1442 61 106 67 118 113

1479 115 105 105 95 90

1480 159 99 97 97 92

1481 ? 88 101 92 87

1482 78 84 142 78 73

1483 80 ? 189 85 81

1484 94 101 131 85 82

1485 51 105 91 109 104

1554 89 102 62 73 92 59 11.2

1555 130 91 55 86 100 86 10.1

1556 160 75 45 82 98 69 10.8

1557 170 75 45 144 76 67 -15.1

1558 79 107 65 185 87 101 -22.8

1559 82 92 57 165 76 106 -20.1

1560 83 107 66 111 97 133 2.9

1594 82 104 54 84 108 107 14.8

table 1. Comparative economic and demographic profiles of years of extreme harvest failure: England, 14th to 19th centuries.




1595 128 89 46 85 100 95 11.8

1596 145 87 44 97 92 91 6.3

1597 194 70 35 133 88 79 -4.1

1598 147 82 40 105 89 97 2.7

1599 86 87 43 90 110 104 13.4

1600 96 101 49 84 103 102 12.8

1620 69 110 47 88 110 106 12.7

1621 66 112 48 83 108 100 13.2

1622 107 94 40 83 101 81 11.0

1623 117 95 41 120 87 75 -2.3

1624 99 96 41 108 93 95 2.2

1625 100 101 43 164 100 89 -9.6

1626 110 101 43 98 94 98 4.7

1725 114 92 54 84 100 99 7.8

1726 112 90 53 91 103 105 6.7

1727 107 96 57 117 102 93 -1.2

1728 135 85 51 130 86 92 -10.8

1729 125 85 50 145 87 96 -15.4

1730 94 100 60 116 94 122 -4.7

1731 85 104 62 108 108 126 2.3

1738 94 108 67 90 104 96 7.8

1739 91 107 67 90 106 99 8.3

1740 126 89 56 103 100 94 2.6

1741 144 84 53 118 92 84 -3.5

1742 97 96 61 128 90 94 -5.8

1743 85 104 66 102 99 105 4.9

1744 73 113 72 89 100 105 9.0

1798 82 111 59 95 101 107 14.4

1799 100 101 53 96 96 97 12.6

1800 157 78 41 102 94 88 9.9

1801 160 73 38 108 87 82 5.8

1802 91 96 50 104 99 116 11.9

1803 76 101 52 109 105 119 12.9

1804 80 104 54 94 105 108 17.1

Year % of 25-year moving average Real wage indexed on

1451–75

% of 25-year moving average Crude Rate of Natural

Increase per '000

Grain yield

Tithe receipt

Grain price

Real wage

Crude Death

Rate

Crude Birth Rate

Crude Marriage

Rate

sources: Crop yields calculated from Campbell 2007; tithe receipts calculated from data supplied by Dr Ben Dodds, University of Durham; prices and real wages calculated from Phelps Brown and Hop-kins 1981, pp. 28–31, 54–8, Munro 2008, Clark, 2007, pp. 130–4; crude death, birth, and marriage rates and rates of natural increase calculated from Wrigley and Schofield 1989, pp. 531–5.



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Within the space of 18 months the population had been reduced by at least 30 and maybe as much as 50 per cent.

58 This colossal and whol-

ly unparalleled demand shock therefore offset the coincident supply shock and meant that starvation and starvation-related diseases were only a minor component of this greatest of all historical mortality crises. Undoubtedly, too, the heavy loss of life with all its accompanying trauma added to the difficulties of bringing in the harvest, rendering the crop failure greater than it might otherwise have been.

Crises 3, 4 and 5 – The harvest shortfalls of 1437–8, 1481–3 and 1555–6:The next two big harvest failures, those of 1437–8 and 1481–3, occurred in times of rela-tive plenty rather than of want, since average real wages prevailing on the eve of these re-spective crises were more than double those prevailing in the first half of the fourteenth century (Figure 14 and Table 1). The yield and output data for the 1437–8 harvest failure are better in quantity and quality than those for the 1481–3 failure (Figure 5) but both leave lit-tle doubt that these were back-to-back events of considerable magnitude. The price response on both occasions was pronounced, with the price inflation of 1439 rivalling that of 1316 and the inflation of 1483 eclipsing that of 1352 (Figure 1). The reduction in real wages was likewise sharper and bit deeper in 1439 than 1482 and identifies the former as probably the single grimmest year of the fifteenth century (Figure 13). Nevertheless, at their minimum in 1439, real wages remained far above the level plumbed in the famine year 1316 (Figure 14 and Table 1). Probably the unusually wide margin between average earnings and the minimum required for subsistence prevented either of these harvest crises from escalating into major mortality crises, although they cannot but have contributed to the general un-healthiness of the times.

59 They demon-

strate that even relatively well-paid and well-fed populations with a per capita abundance

of resources were by no means immune to the vagaries of Nature.

By the mid-sixteenth century per capita purchasing power was declining once more and real wages had already fallen significantly from their mid-fifteenth century peak (Fig-ure 14). The crisis of 1556–9 therefore struck a more vulnerable population than those affect-ed in 1439 and 1482. It is probably the clearest historical example of a disaster which began as a subsistence crisis and ended as an epidemic and, like the earlier crisis of 1349–52, was all the deadlier for it.

60 That harvests must have been

bad in 1555 and 1556 is borne out by the inflat-ed prices and reduced real wages that followed each (Table 1), together with the heightened death and lowered birth and marriage rates registered in 1557 (Figure 16). Nevertheless, whereas real wages thereafter recovered and marriage rates quickly returned to normal, mortality continued to rise and remained at a high level long after prices had fallen (Ta-ble 1). The explanation lies in the influenza epidemic which broke out at the height of the subsistence crisis.

61 For three consecutive years

deaths significantly outnumbered births and the population registered a sharp decline, of a magnitude out of all proportion to the origi-nal harvest crisis, severe though that had evi-dently been. Paul Slack reckons that as much as 11 per cent of the national population may have perished at this time.

62

Crises 6 and 7 – Scarcity in the 1590s and 1620s:1597 alone among sixteenth-century crisis years displays a demographic profile equivalent to that of 1557, with a heightened death rate, de-pressed birth and marriage rates, and negative natural increase (Figure 16 and Table 1). Mark-edly inflated prices and depressed real wages in 1595, 1596, and 1597 point to a succession of bad harvests and yields reconstructed from probate inventories confirm that this was the case.

63

Elsewhere in Europe there is further explicit evidence of abnormal weather conditions and




significant reductions in grain output (Figure 2).

64 In 1597, the worst year of all, grain prices

doubled and real wages were reduced by 30 per cent, to a level lower than in any other crisis year except, probably, 1316 (Figures 1 and 14). Simultaneously, the death rate rose by 33 per cent and the birth and marriage rates fell by 12 and 21 per cent respectively (Table 1). These respective changes in vital rates are all near to the extremes for the period 1550–1859 and identify 1597 as a time of acute demographic stress with all the classic symptoms of a famine situation. The rise in the death rate fell some way short of the rises achieved by the big killer diseases of plague, influenza, and smallpox but was nonetheless impressive (Figure 15). Rarely, however, did birth and marriage rates register such comparatively large reductions (Figure 16). As a result there was briefly a modest ex-cess of deaths over births, although not on the same scale as in 1557 when the arrival of in-fluenza had sent mortality soaring (Figure 17). That the 1597 harvest crisis hit hard is therefore not in doubt, although its mortality impact was no greater than the immediately preceding and succeeding plague epidemics of 1592–3 and 1603–4, demonstrating once again that pesti-lences were potentially far more deadly than famines.

65

The harvest crisis of 1623 was on a lesser scale than that of 1597; the grain price did not rise as high nor did the purchasing power of manual workers fall as low (Table 1). The as-sociated inflation of the death rate was also less marked, with many of the excess deaths concentrated in the north and north-west of England where the food scarcity was most acute.

66 The fertility response was, however,

pronounced and the reductions in births and marriages were both greater than in 1597, which lends support to the view that fertil-ity rather than mortality was at this time be-coming the principal mechanism by which population growth was kept within bounds.

67

So great was the reduction in births that the rate of natural increase fell below zero for the

first time since 1597 (Figure 17); two years later the rate of increase sank still lower under the impact not of dearth but of plague.

68 This

provides further testimony of the capacity of disease to kill on a scale which simple scarcity could rarely if ever match, as well of the ten-dency for epidemics to break out in the after-math of dearth and famine.

Crises 8, 9 and 10 – 1727–30, 1741–2 and 1800–01The spectre of famine might appear to have disappeared from England following the 1623 crisis, but it reappeared a hundred years later.

69

The demographic crisis of 1727–30, the great-est of the eighteenth century, shares many of the same characteristics as that of 1623–5 (Ta-ble 1) and looks like another double disaster characterised by dearth and disease operat-ing in tandem. The heightened grain prices, lowered real wages, raised death rate, lowered birth and marriage rates, and negative rate of natural increase all lend 1728 the appearance of a classic famine year, except that the death toll was heavier and net loss of population greater than is consistent with the scale of the price in-flation and absolute level of real wages (which remained well above that of 1623). Certainly, tithe receipts for the Swedish province of Scania identify the immediately preceding harvests of 1725–7 as the worst of the eighteenth century and 1726 in particular stands out as one of the thirty worst harvests on record in Sweden be-tween 1539 and 1830.

70 The same year, yields of

wheat and barley were also well below average in England.

71 Yet in England, although grain

prices began to subside in 1729, deaths contin-ued to mount (Table 1). These years, therefore, began hungry but then became increasingly unhealthy, resulting in a cumulatively large loss of life.

72

Disease evidently played a different role in the crisis of 1741–2, when the grain-price inflation was more marked but the excess mortality was significantly lower (Table 1). In its economic and demographic profiles this



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crisis exhibits the classic symptoms of fam-ine. These conditions had been brought on by an extreme short-term weather anomaly of at least three-years’ duration whose com-mencement was marked by the exceptionally severe winter of 1739–40 and whose impact is writ large in the dendrochronological record of European oak growth (Figure 11).

73 As John

Post has demonstrated, the crisis was pan-Eu-ropean in its extent and the years 1740, 1741, and especially 1742 witnessed increased death rates in most countries.

74 In Ireland this was

a time of acute famine, with an overall loss of population of at least 10 per cent.

75 Condi-

tions were less critical in England, although few earlier, and no subsequent, subsistence crises have left as conspicuous a demographic imprint (Figures 15, 16, and 17).

76 This was the

last occasion when the rise in the Crude Death Rate exceeded 25 per cent and when a sharp inflation in grain prices was accompanied by

a corresponding surge in death rates. Substan-tial reductions also took place in birth and marriage rates (Table 1). Consequently, there are grounds for claiming that this, and not the 1623 crisis, was the final English famine. Certainly for Post “the mortality wave of the early 1740s marked the last occasion when a surge in the number of burials simultaneously reduced population growth in all regions of western Europe”.

77 Dearth, however, had not

been banished.The final English grain-price inflation on a

pre-industrial scale occurred in 1800–01 (Fig-ure 1). Real wages, which were already abso-lutely low, were squeezed hard and reduced to a level not experienced for a century and a half (Figure 14). War with Napoleonic France and rapid industrialisation at home greatly com-pounded the economic difficulties created by the substantial harvest shortfall. Once again, birth, marriage, and death rates were all direct-

figure 17. England: estimated crude rates of natural increase, 1550–1849.

source: Calculated from Wrigley and Schofield 1989, pp. 531–5.




ly affected (Figure 16). Nevertheless, although the curtailment of fertility was as marked as in some other crisis years the accompanying rise in the death rate was not (Table 1). Con-sequently, notwithstanding the sky-high food prices, there was no major mortality crisis and no net loss of population (Figure 17). Certain-ly, the rate of population was slowed but the crude rate of natural increase remained well above zero. A major harvest shortfall, which in any earlier century might have resulted in famine, was on this occasion contained with-out significant loss of life.

Famine, dearth, or pestilence?On this evaluation, 1315–21 was certainly a famine, possibly the greatest that England has ever experienced. 1349–52 was not, because the negative impact of the inclement weather upon the supply of food was entirely eclipsed by the disproportionately greater impact of disease mortality on the demand for food-stuffs. In effect, pestilence forestalled famine by killing on an even greater scale. Likewise, in 1557 disease intervened and transformed a nascent subsistence crisis into something far deadlier (Figure 17). On this reckoning, the crisis of 1594–7 was the only genuine fam-ine of the sixteenth century and is described as such by Andrew Appleby.

78 It looks as

though famine conditions returned to at least parts of England in 1623, maybe also in 1727–8 and certainly in 1741–2, but in almost every other instance when a serious subsistence cri-sis threatened disease supervened with dead-lier effect. Overall, this yields a tally of four – or perhaps five – famines of very unequal scale and nature. Without the Great Pestilence (alias Black Death) there would undoubtedly have been another, in 1349–52, potentially the greatest of them all. All other mortality crises, of which there were many (Figures 15 and 17), were more complex and composite in origin and character and for a variety of reasons, as 1800–01 exemplifies, not all harvest crises nec-essarily resulted in major mortality crises.

The historical significance of major harvest crises:

Each of these acute short-term crises had their own unique character, not least because the relevant environmental forcing agents – about which much more remains to be known – were themselves one-off events. Prevailing demo-graphic, economic, and institutional condi-tions were also material to the human impact of extreme environmental events, since some societies were clearly better able to cope with sudden food shortages than others.

79 And

biology mattered, in terms of the pathogens that accompanied and were released by physi-cal shocks and the susceptibility of humans – a function in part of nutritional levels – to those pathogens. In the long run, exposure to most diseases bred a degree of immunity and techniques were evolved of inhibiting their spread. Governments also learnt to curb fam-ine-induced migration and the congregation of paupers, since this fuelled the spread of dis-ease.

80 It was a rare harvest failure which was

neither accompanied nor followed by some kind of epidemic, whether of humans or live-stock: strikingly, the pan-European rinderpest epidemics of the 1310s and 1740s both occurred in the immediate aftermath of extreme weath-er anomalies. Harvest failures un-reinforced with disease were far less lethal than epidem-ics unaccompanied by scarcity. War, however, could and did magnify and compound the impact of famine, as in Ireland in the 1310s, 1590s, and 1650s.

Extreme events naturally arouse curios-ity. All, in a variety of ways, were major so-cio-economic events in their own right. Each exposes society’s inherent strengths and weak-nesses and raises important explanatory issues concerning the independent power of natural agency versus the calamity-sensitive constitu-tion society. For instance, the back-to-back harvest failure of 1437–8 would have assumed an entirely different significance had it struck a population double the size and with half



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the per capita purchasing power. Given that natural hazards have occurred sporadically throughout time for mostly exogenous rea-sons, can any of these disasters be diagnosed as simple Malthusian positive checks? Were any of them disasters just waiting to happen, borne more out of socio-economic stress than environmental instability? Or do most of them merely illustrate the puniness of human forces when pitched against those of Nature?

Few were watershed events, for in the medium to long term England’s population proved to be remarkably resilient in surviving and surmounting all but the very greatest of natural disasters. Thus, away from the arena of war, the demographic effects of the agrarian crisis of 1315–21 seem to have been felt for no more than a generation. Likewise, the massive mortality crisis of 1557–9 proved to be no more than a temporary set back to the newly initi-ated trajectory of demographic and economic expansion. In its aftermath population growth reasserted itself (Figure 17) and, paradoxically, maintained its momentum for most of the rest of the century notwithstanding a well-at-tested general deterioration of weather con-ditions throughout northern Europe (Figure 10) and a steep decline in real wages (Figure 14).

81 The major subsistence crisis of 1594–1603

proved to be just as passing in its effects (Fig-ure 17), slowing but not halting the upward trend in numbers. The impacts of later disas-ters seem to have been just as transitory. Only the greatest disaster of them all – the Black Death – brought about an enduring systemic shift in the socio-economic status quo (Figure 14), partly because of the sheer scale of the de-mographic shock but also because it initiated an entirely new biological era.

It was, however, a rare disaster which left no legacy to posterity. The early fourteenth-cen-tury agrarian crisis exposed the inadequacy of Christian charity and parsimony of ecclesiasti-cal almsgiving to contemporaries and thereby undoubtedly contributed to a growing disil-lusionment with the Church and quest for al-

ternative sources of welfare and support.82

The Black Death begot the Statute of Labourers, which laid the basis for English employment law for centuries to come.

83 In the aftermath

of the 1437–8 crisis the City of London in-vested in its first public granary as a means of guaranteeing the capital’s food supply against a recurrence of dearth.

84 Hereafter, in towns

and country alike, parishes and guilds began to put in place methods intended to relieve and succour the poor during hard times. In 1536, following a succession of crisis years, the worst in 1528 (Figure 1), a parish-based system of poor relief was first enacted by the Tudor state and over the course of the sixteenth cen-tury, prompted by the conspicuous hardship which occurred each time that prices soared, developed that legislation further.

85 It was be-

tween 1598 and 1601, in the immediate after-math of the greatest of those crises, that this body of legislation was re-codified into the Elizabethan Poor Law, which embodied the revolutionary principle that welfare should be funded by all with the means to contrib-ute and that contributions were obligatory and not voluntary. Over the course of the next century each episode of want stimulated wider adoption of this decentralised system of welfare relief whose growing effectiveness is borne out but the falling death rates which ac-companied successive harvest failures, except when disease intervened (Figure 16).

86

Collectively, the Poor Law, wider adoption of fertility controls, and a greater readiness to resort to the new opportunities for emigration to Ireland and the New World, began to con-tain the threat of famine. Economic progress also played a crucial role, both in creating the employment that alleviated poverty and in generating the resources required to finance the mounting burden of the Poor Law.

87 A

key contribution of agriculture to that process seems to have been a reduction in the variabil-ity of harvests via a general improvement in the standard of husbandry coupled with the selection and cultivation of sounder seed.

88




Famine (the Third Horseman of the Apocalypse) as depicted by an East Anglian artist either im-mediately before or during the Great European Famine of 1315–21: And when he had opened the third seal, I heard the third beast say, “Come and see.” And I beheld, and lo a black horse; and he that sat on him had a pair of balances in his hand. And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts say, “A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny; and see thou hurt not the oil and the wine.” Revelation, Chapter 6, verses 5 & 6. TCD MS 64 folio 4r., reproduced with the permission of the Board of Trinity College, Dublin.



bruce m.s. campbell

Nevertheless, for England the escape from famine came later than has often been ap-preciated and it was not until the second half of the eighteenth century that serious harvest failure ceased to trigger significant surges in mortality. This breakthrough is clearly exem-plified by the harvest crisis of 1800–01, when the purchasing power of wages was reduced almost to the level of the worst years of the sixteenth century but without any equally atavistic rise in the death rate. The material lot of manual workers may have advanced but little between 1597 and 1801 but by any standard their greater resilience to scarcity represents a significant gain.

89 Poverty had not

been eliminated but for the English working poor harvest-induced famine was no longer to be feared. The contrast between 1801 and 1316 is even greater and highlights how much had been achieved over the intervening five centu-ries (and long before the industrial revolution had begun to deliver sustained material gains to wage earners – Figure 14). Slowly but surely society had evolved ways of coping with ma-jor back-to-back harvest failures, not without hardship and sacrifice but, progressively, with-out major loss of life.

Notes

Janken Myrdal’s research has ranged widely in sub-ject, sources, and period. As a tribute to him this paper attempts both to emulate these qualities and address a topic upon which he has researched and written with distinction. I am grateful to Britt Lil-jewall, Mats Morell, and Johan Söderberg for the invitation to contribute to this Festschrift.

1 Much of this research has been published in the journals Climatic Change and The Holocene, first published, respectively, in 1977 and 1991.

2 For a pioneering study of English harvest fluc-

tuations using prices see Hoskins 1964. On the proportion of the population most vulnerable to harvest failure see Slack 1988, pp. 53–5; Hind-le 2004, p. 4.

3 Kennedy & Solar 2007. 4 Edvinsson & Söderberg 2007. 5 Thorold Rogers 1866–1902; Phelps Brown and

Hopkins 1981; Munro 2008; Clark 2008; Farmer 1988 and 1991.

6 For a recent re-evaluation of the crisis of 1647–50 and its political implications see Hindle 2007.

7 The problems of analysing and interpreting tithe data are discussed by Leijonhufvud 2001 and Dodds 2007.

8 Leijonhufvud 2001, pp. 197–205. 9 Dodds 2004 and 2007.10 Spanish tithe records are a potentially even gre-

ater source of evidence of annual variations in grain harvests, although converting this infor-mation into a usable format presents a formida-ble logistical challenge: Pérez, Jerónimo López-Salazar, and Galán, Manuel Martin, “La pro-ducción cerealista en el Arzobispado de Toledo. 1463-1699”: [WWW document]. URL http://www.ucm.es/BUCM/revistas/ghi/02110849/ar-ticulos/CHMC8181110021A.PDF [accessed July 2008]. I am grateful to Dr Ben Dodds for this information.

11 For full details of these data see Campbell 2007.

12 Outhwaite 1982. The derivation of annual mean yields from data contained in probate in-ventories using the method developed by Mark Overton and Robert Allen may soon provide a comparable national yield series for the period 1550–1750.

13 Baillie & Brown 2005.14 On the American GISP2 Greenland ice-core

project see http://www.gisp2.sr.unh.edu/ [ac-cessed April 2008]. On the European GRIP Greenland ice-core project see http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/icecore/greenland/ sum-mit/document/ [accessed April 2008].

15 van Engelen, Buisman & IJnsen 2001; Pfister, Schwarz-Zanetti & Wegmann 1996; Chuine, Yiou, Viovy, Seguin, Daux & Le Roy Ladurie 2005

16 Britton 1937; Pfister & Brázdil 1999, pp. 10–13.17 Briffa, Jones, Schweingruber & Osborn, 1998;

http://www.volcano.si.edu/world/find_erup-tions.cfm. [accessed July 2008].

18 Stothers 2000; Oppenheimer 2003; Briffa, Jo-




nes, Schweingruber & Osborn 1998, pp. 452–3; Edvinsson, Leijonhufvud & Söderberg, this volume. But see Baillie 2006, pp. 59-62, for a sceptical view on the capacity of eruptions to leave a conspicuous signature in the dendroch-ronological record.

19 The influence of seasonal variations in weather upon harvest quality is explored by Edvinsson, Leijonhufvud & Söderberg, this volume.

20 See note 18.2 1 Baillie 2006, pp. 143–52.22 Dawson, Hickey, Mayewski & Nesje 2007, p.

431.23 For evidence of a significant worsening of win-

ters in central Europe at about the same time see Pfister, Schwarz-Zanetti & Wegmann 1996.

24 Brown 2001, pp. 251-4.25 Baillie 2006, pp. 41-50.26 Campbell 2008.27 Dawson, Hickey, Mayewski & Nesje 2007, p.

428; Overton 1989, pp. 80, 85.28 Campbell 2008.29 Baillie 2000, pp. 62-5; Baillie 2006, pp. 33-8.30 Cohn 2002.3 1 Briffa, Jones, Vogel, Schweingruber, Baillie,

Shiyatov & Voganov, 1999; Pfister & Brázdil 1999, pp. 23–6, 29.

32 Briffa, Jones, Vogel, Schweingruber, Baillie, Shiyatov & Voganov 1999, p. 157. Both the 1590s and early 1600s do, however, show up in the Swedish pine dendrochronological series for Torneträsk: Edvinsson, Leijonhufvud & Söder-berg, this volume, Figure 2. The record of first sailings from Stockholm nevertheless brings out the contrasting character of these two crisis episodes, with sailings taking place relatively early in 1597 but late in 1601: Edvinsson, Lei-jonhufvud & Söderberg, this volume, Figure 1.

33 Kalela-Brundin 1999, pp. 14, 15–16; Edvinsson, Leijonhufvud, and Söderberg, this volume.

34 Kalela-Brundin 1999, pp. 20–2, 199–203.35 Briffa, Jones, Schweingruber & Osborn 1998, p.

450.36 Leijonhufvud 2001, pp. 255-8.37 Edvinsson, Leijonhufvud & Söderberg, this vo-

lume, Table 1.38 Phelps Brown & Hopkins 1981; Munro 2008.39 Clark 2007.40 Farmer 1988, pp. 759, 809-10.41 On the plight of market-dependent petty pro-

ducers at times of subsistence crisis, see Hindle 2007.

42 Tuchman 1979; Tawney 1912, pp. 35.43 On the long-term trend of English population

see Hinde 2003.44 Wrigley & Schofield 1989.45 For example Razi 1980, pp. 34–50.46 Kershaw 1976, pp. 106–8, 111; Campbell 2008.

The cattle plague appears to have originated in central Europe at the height of the harvest crisis in 1316 and reached England 3 years later: Newfield 2005. The chronology and pattern in the 1740s outbreak was remarkably similar.

47 Slack 1988, p. 49, estimates that the death rate from the 1597 ‘famine’ may have reached 6 per cent across the country as a whole.

48 Wrigley & Schofield 1989, pp. 333–5, 651–3, 663, 668.

49 The Black Death is generally considered to have killed over 30 per cent of the population: Hatcher 1977, pp. 21–5; Hinde 2003, pp. 45–6.

50 Britton 1937, pp. 133–4, 177; Kershaw 1976, pp. 88–98; Jordan 1996.

51 Campbell 2008.52 Razi 1980, pp. 27–32; Poos 1985.53 Campbell 2008.54 Hanawalt 1979.55 McNamee 1997, pp. 72–122.56 Newfield 2005.57 Campbell 2007.58 Hatcher 1977, pp. 21–5; Benedictow 2004. 59 Hinde 2003, pp. 53–64; Hatcher, Piper & Stone

2006.60 Wrigley & Schofield 1989, pp. 333–5 and 651–3,

rank 1557–9 as the deadliest years on record over the period 1541–1871. Moore 1993, nevertheless argues that Wrigley and Schofield have under-estimated the mortality of these years.

61 For a description see Fisher 1965, pp. 125–7; also Moore, 1993.

62 Slack 1988, p. 48–9.63 This is a preliminary result from the project:

Reconstructing the National Incomes of Britain and Holland, c.1270/1500 to 1850, funded by the Leverhulme Trust (Reference Number F/00215AR) and directed by S.N. Broadberry, B.M.S. Campbell, M. Overton and J.L. van Zanden, with research assistance provided by B. van Leeuwen.

64 Pfister & Brázdil 1999, pp. 23–6; Appleby 1978, pp. 109–25, 133–45.

65 Wrigley & Schofield 1989, pp. 333–4; Scott & Duncan 2001, pp. 162–5, 169–70, 181, 193–8, 226–7.



bruce m.s. campbell

66 Slack 1988, p. 49; Appleby 1978, pp. 125–32, 145–54.

67 Wrigley & Schofield 1989, pp. 320–32.68 Wrigley & Schofield 1989, 333–5, 664; Scott &

Duncan 2001, pp. 199–205, 240–3.69 The conventional historical wisdom is that Eng-

land became immune to famine over the course of the seventeenth century – Laslett 1971, p. 120; Slack 1988, pp. 45–6, 48–50 – although this may partly be because from mid century the popula-tion ceased to grow. For an alternative view see, Outhwaite 1991, pp. 22–9.

70 Olsson & Svensson 2008; Edvinsson, Leijon-hufvud & Söderberg, this volume, Table 1.

71 This is a preliminary result from the project: Reconstructing the National Incomes of Britain and Holland, c.1270/1500 to 1850. See note 63 above.

72 Wrigley & Schofield 1989, pp. 333–5, 651–3.73 Post 1985, pp. 51–76.74 Post 1985, pp. 31–43. 75 Dickson 1997.76 The local demographic evidence is more equi-

vocal (Wrigley & Schofield 1989, pp. 669–70). 77 Post 1985, p. 17.78 Appleby 1978, pp. 133–54.79 Arnold 1988.80 Post 1985.81 Briffa, Jones, Vogel, Schweingruber, Baillie,

Shiyatov & Voganov 1999.82 Kershaw 1976, pp. 93–4.83 Cohn 2007.64 Campbell, Galloway, Keene & Murphy 1993, p.

104.85 Slack 1988, pp. 113–37.86 Hindle 2004, pp. 10–13, 452–5.87 Slack 1988, pp. 173–82.88 Edvinsson, Leijonhufvud & Söderberg, this vo-

lume, also draw attention to the socio-econo-mic benefits deriving from a reduced volatility of yields.

89 For a similar conclusion respecting Sweden see Edvinsson, Leijonhufvud & Söderberg, this vo-lume.

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Documents

Four famines and a pestilence: harvest, price, and wage