Farming, Famine and Plague

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. The Historical Climatology of Late Medieval England

   • Kathleen Pribyl

   Pages 1-7

3. The Keeping of Agricultural Records in Late Medieval England

   • Kathleen Pribyl

   Pages 9-40

4. The Medieval Grain Harvest

   • Kathleen Pribyl

   Pages 41-64

5. Farming in Norfolk Around 1800

   • Kathleen Pribyl

   Pages 65-75

6. A Reconstruction of Medieval April–July Temperatures for East Anglia

   • Kathleen Pribyl

   Pages 77-93

7. Temperature Extremes 1256–1431: Independent Evidence and Context

   • Kathleen Pribyl

   Pages 95-141

8. Harvest Length – An Indicator of Late Summer Precipitation

   • Kathleen Pribyl

   Pages 143-159

9. Harvest Length and Precipitation Extremes 1256–1448: Independent Evidence and Context

   • Kathleen Pribyl

   Pages 161-185

10. Climate and the Grain Price, 1264–1431

    • Kathleen Pribyl

    Pages 187-198

11. Climate and the Plague, 1348–1500

    • Kathleen Pribyl

    Pages 199-223

12. The Dance of Death – A Synthesis

    • Kathleen Pribyl

    Pages 225-233

13. Back Matter

    Pages 235-307

    PDF

This book is situated at the cross-roads of environmental, agricultural and economic history and climate science. It investigates the climatic background for the two most significant risk factors for life in the crisis-prone England of the Later Middle Ages: subsistence crisis and plague. Based on documentary data from eastern England, the late medieval growing season temperature is reconstructed and the late summer precipitation of that period indexed. Using these data, and drawing together various other regional (proxy) data and a wide variety of contemporary documentary sources, the impact of climatic variability and extremes on agriculture, society and health are assessed. Vulnerability and resilience changed over time: before the population loss in the Great Pestilence in the mid-fourteenth century meteorological factors contributing to subsistence crises were the main threat to the English people, after the arrival of Yersinia pestis it was the weather conditions that faciliated the formation of recurrent major plague outbreaks.

Agriculture and harvest success in late medieval England were inextricably linked to both short term weather extremes and longer term climatic fluctuations. In this respect the climatic transition period in the Late Middle Ages (c. 1250-1450) is particularly important since the broadly favourable conditions for grain cultivation during the Medieval Climate Optimum gave way to the Little Ice Age, when agriculture was faced with many more challenges; the fourteenth century in particular was marked by high levels of climatic variability.

• climate and agricultural vulnerability
• East Anglian grain producing area
• extreme weather
• famine
• grain harvest-date information
• Medieval Climate
• East Anglian agriculture
• climate change impacts
• water policy

• Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

  Kathleen Pribyl

Kathleen Pribyl is an associate fellow at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, UK. She has a background in medieval and environmental history and holds a PhD from the University in Bern, Switzerland, for which she received the Eduard Adolf Stein Award 2012.  Her interests lie in environmental, economic and agricultural history and in particular in the vulnerability of pre-industrial societies to environmental risk.

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