While matters of the state and its leaders tended to dominate such narratives, an often fairly formulaic description of famines and dearths appears from time to time in the chronicles. In medieval society, commentators, chroniclers, and annalists, were both aware of famine and prepared to report it as part of their year-by-year narrative of key events.

However, we can say little about the everyday experience of the poorest – and by extension the most famine-vulnerable – members of society, and that poses something of a problem for historians of medieval famine. Despite this, we can still say quite a lot about aspects of life amongst the medieval peasantry and we can gain some useful insight into some features of their response to famine and similar crisis events. In particular, we know more about a small percentage of elites at the very top of medieval society than we do about the bulk of society, and we know little about the poorest 40 percent or so-in other words, those most likely to be vulnerable to famine events. In fact, our ignorance in regards to famine reflects a more general gap in our understanding of medieval society. While we have a general sense of famine events in this period and some inroads into exploring the extent and impact of famine and dearth, there is also a great deal we do not know about famine in the middle ages. A combination of narrative accounts of famine, and a more general mapping of harvests through yield and price data, indicates that twenty-three of the 140 years between 12 experienced poor harvests in one or more grains, and approximately half of these were sufficiently extreme and their consequences sufficiently severe to be counted as crisis events (Dyer 1989: 262-3 Hoyle 2017: 148). This is part of our special feature on Food, Food Systems, and Agriculture.įamines and lesser dearths were frequent threats to medieval English society, especially in the century and a half before the mid-fourteenth century crisis of the Black Death, and during a period when population grew to such an extent that it outstripped society’s capacity to feed itself.

Pestilence by Edward Jarvis