Experiencing Famine in Fourteenth-Century Britain
By (author) Philip Slavin
The agrarian crisis of 1315-17, known to history as the Great Famine, was one of the most devastating environmental crises to hit Europe within the last two millennia. The almost biblical flooding of 1314-16 brought about a series of crop failures, triggering a widespread agricultural crisis that unfolded into a catastrophic famine, which hit both human and animal populations with unprecedented force. The impact of this crisis, and the major long-term environmental consequences that followed, thus mark a truly watershed moment in European history. This volume provides an in-depth study of the Great Famine as it affected the British Isles, but through this focused approach, it also offers new insights into the late-medieval North European economy and society at a time of political, socio-economic, and biological shocks and crises. Close analysis of contemporary archival sources reveals that the Great Famine was a highly complex phenomenon made by both Nature and man; and this is reflected in a highly interdisciplinary approach that studies climate, economy, demography, and health, as well as the way in which human behaviour further exacerbated the impact of famine.
- By (author) Philip Slavin
Other Titles in this Series
Ecologies of Crusading, Colonization, and Religious Conversion in the Medieval Baltic
Terra Sacra II
Volume 3
Landscape and History on the Medieval Irish Frontier
The King's Cantreds in the Thirteenth Century
Volume 1
‘With Our Backs to the Ocean’
Land, Lordship, Climate Change, and Environment in the North-West European Past: Essays in Memory of Alasdair Ross
Volume 5
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