Buchanan Sharp. Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England: The Regulation of Grain Marketing, 1256–1631.

Abstract

In Famine and Scarcity in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, a book of impressive chronological sweep and well-nigh exhaustive research, Buchanan Sharp sets out to describe the public impact of food scarcity in England across the centuries from the thirteenth to the sixteenth. His focus is twofold: first, on the evolution and effect of government responses to harvest crisis, including the evolution of mechanisms to regulate the marketing of grain, which began in 1315; and second, on popular reactions to these crises, especially in the shape of crowd disorders, whose first occurrence he finds in 1347, and whose character resembles those which occurred in the eighteenth century and famously led E. P. Thompson to identify a “moral economy of the crowd.” A final chapter, briefly taking his story from 1547 up to the Elizabethan book of dearth orders, is entitled “The Moral Economy, 1547–1631 and Beyond,” and will ensure that this work is not read solely by medievalists.