Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain by Philip Slavin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain by Philip Slavin Barbara Rouse Slavin, Philip, Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain (Environmental Histories of the North Atlantic World, 4), Turnhout, Brepols, 2019; hardback, pp. xxiv, 442; 24 b/w illustrations, 47 b/w tables, R.R.P. €100.00; ISBN 9782503547800. Famine is currently a major risk in war-torn Africa and the Yemen, and drought-stricken areas, despite global relief mechanisms, and climate change may exacerbate future harvest failures. Philip Slavin proposes that investigating the Great Famine of 1315–17 can enhance our understanding of the mechanisms that escalate historic and modern food shortages to famine levels. Many studies of premodern famine take a broad view, either geographically or examining both famine and disease across the late medieval period. Examples include William Chester Jordan’s The Great Famine: Northern Europe in the Early Fourteenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1996) and Bruce Campbell’s The Great Transition: Climate, Disease and Society in the Late-Medieval World (Cambridge University Press, 2016). Other researchers have investigated specific aspects such as crop yields or grain markets. Slavin builds on existing research and focuses in-depth on the British Isles and the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317. This enables him to dig deep; how deep is indicated by his acknowledgements showing the enormous range of unpublished archival sources that he has uncovered, particularly English manor records. Other sources, too numerous to list, include sheriff’s and customs accounts, and subsidy, goal delivery, and coroners’ rolls. Slavin uses this information to investigate his premise that food shortages, precipitated by extreme wet weather causing crop failure, only become famines when human factors are considered. He investigates current theories on why famines happen, concluding that neither the environmental nor the demographic (Malthusian) approaches are sufficient. Nor can the institutional approach, based on Amartya Kumar Sen’s entitlement theory (Poverty and Famines, Clarendon Press, 1981), fully explain why some shortage situations become famine and others do not. Slavin proposes a complexity model based on a combination of these approaches, focusing on climate, food production and supply, management [End Page 266] practices, market factors, transportation, storage, and the impact of external factors such as war. Slavin then embarks on a rigorous and detailed account of this complexity model. First, he explores the effects of the extreme wet weather of 1315–17 on harvest failures and food production. He then examines the factors leading from shortage to famine. Inclement weather contributed to transportation and storage problems and escalating costs of basic foodstuff, compounded by piracy and theft. Focusing on grain, he finds that management practices reduced the calories available to the peasant population. Relevant factors include retaining a high proportion of the harvest as seed, high tithes, and a large proportion of the population having insufficient landholding to feed their families. He finds that market practices and market failures also contributed to the transition from shortage to famine. Warfare was a major factor in the north of England, Scotland, south Wales, and parts of Ireland in the famine years, decimating crops through pillaging and chevauchée, and increasing demands on taxation and food supplies. Analysing the relationship between population levels and available land and food resources, Slavin proposes population losses in England of up to seventeen per cent. The most fascinating aspect is his discussion of coping strategies of individual famine victims, backed up with facts and figures. In conclusion, Slavin reiterates the complexity of factors tipping this medieval food shortage into famine. In his final chapters, Slavin advances theories on how the famine may have affected the health and resilience of survivors and their offspring, leading to reduced resistance to Yersinia pestis in 1348. New studies and analytical techniques are constantly enhancing the understanding of this topic. Slavin’s notes that environmental lead pollution was more prevalent than previously thought and would have affected health. While it undoubtedly would, lead may be less important than the health burden of localized fine particulate emissions from coal used in lime-burning and indoor pollution from domestic heating in poorly ventilated spaces, as documented by Peter Brimblecombe in The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times...