Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Richard Britnell: An Appreciation
- 1 Unreal Wages: Long-Run Living Standards and the ‘Golden Age’ of the Fifteenth Century
- 2 Minimum Wages and Unemployment Rates in Medieval England: The Case of Old Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 1256–1357
- 3 Crisis Management in London's Food Supply, 1250–1500
- 4 Grain Shortages in Late Medieval Towns
- 5 Market Regulation in Fifteenth-Century England
- 6 Self-Government in the Small Towns of Late Medieval England
- 7 Marketing and Trading Networks in Medieval Durham
- 8 Peasant Opportunities in Rural Durham: Land, Vills and Mills, 1400–1500
- 9 The Shipmaster as Entrepreneur in Medieval England
- 10 Cheating the Boss: Robert Carpenter's Embezzlement Instructions (1261×1268) and Employee Fraud in Medieval England
- 11 The Public Life of the Private Charter in Thirteenth-Century England
- 12 Luxury Goods in Medieval England
- Index of People and Places
- Bibliography of the Writings of Richard Britnell
- Tabula Gratulatoria
3 - Crisis Management in London's Food Supply, 1250–1500
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 February 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- List of Tables
- List of Contributors
- List of Abbreviations
- Richard Britnell: An Appreciation
- 1 Unreal Wages: Long-Run Living Standards and the ‘Golden Age’ of the Fifteenth Century
- 2 Minimum Wages and Unemployment Rates in Medieval England: The Case of Old Woodstock, Oxfordshire, 1256–1357
- 3 Crisis Management in London's Food Supply, 1250–1500
- 4 Grain Shortages in Late Medieval Towns
- 5 Market Regulation in Fifteenth-Century England
- 6 Self-Government in the Small Towns of Late Medieval England
- 7 Marketing and Trading Networks in Medieval Durham
- 8 Peasant Opportunities in Rural Durham: Land, Vills and Mills, 1400–1500
- 9 The Shipmaster as Entrepreneur in Medieval England
- 10 Cheating the Boss: Robert Carpenter's Embezzlement Instructions (1261×1268) and Employee Fraud in Medieval England
- 11 The Public Life of the Private Charter in Thirteenth-Century England
- 12 Luxury Goods in Medieval England
- Index of People and Places
- Bibliography of the Writings of Richard Britnell
- Tabula Gratulatoria
Summary
As in the ancient Graeco-Roman world, subsistence crises were common in medieval Europe, but famines, defined as food shortages that occasioned large increases in mortality caused by hunger and disease, were relatively rare. Famines usually arose from harvest failures in a succession of years, in most cases the outcome of abnormal weather and sometimes exacerbated by warfare or political breakdown. Contemporary descriptions did not always make such a precise distinction, but in the commercialised conditions which prevailed from the early eleventh century onwards it was common to characterise the severity of a crisis or famine by reference to the price of wheat. This was the premier and most widely marketed grain and of special significance for the supply of cities such as London, where grain probably contributed about seventy per cent of the calorific requirement of the average inhabitant. Using a new series of wheat prices for London, this essay explores the relative significance of three fairly well-recorded episodes of famine in the later-medieval city — those of 1257–60, 1315–17 and 1438–40 — and the nature of responses to them. Those reactions highlight aspects of the political and moral economy of urban famine and of civic developments over the period.
Several earlier famines recorded both in England and in other parts of Europe are likely to have had a serious effect in London. These were in 793, 975–6, 1005–6, the mid 1040s, 1124–6 and the years 1193–8.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Commercial Activity, Markets and Entrepreneurs in the Middle AgesEssays in Honour of Richard Britnell, pp. 45 - 62Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2011