Romola Davenport

Berhardina Midderigh-Bokhorst and Smith’s Fine Arts Publishing N.V. – The Hague. Hansel and Gretel (1937). Image credit: Russell-Cotes Art Gallery & Museum.

In the story of Hansel and Gretel, a famine drives a father to abandon his children in the woods, where they discover a house made of gingerbread and a cannibal witch. In the Magic Porridge Pot tale, a young girl forced by poverty to search for food in the woods and hedgerows is given a magic pot that produces abundant staple food on command.

These types of stories about hunger and famine abound in the folklore of most European societies, and embody folk memories of food scarcity. However, as the historian John Walter noted, these tropes are curiously absent from English fairy tales. Why? 

Otto Ubbelohde. Residents eat their way back to the town through a mound of porridge. Illustration to the fairy tale “Sweet Porridge” (1909).

Walter speculated that this reflected the exceptionally early disappearance of famine from England, centuries before the risk of famine had subsided in the rest of Europe. Famine remained a threat in most of Europe until the mid-18th century, and persisted in some areas into the 19th century and even the 20th century, especially in association with war. In England, on the other hand, the last national famine occurred in the 1590s, and the last regional famine in the 1620s. 

Famine and dearth

Famine is generally defined both in historical accounts and by historians as a ‘killing event’, that is, an episode of substantial excess mortality caused directly or indirectly by a lack of food. Dearth, on the other hand, refers simply to a scarcity or costliness of food, a much more common occurrence in historical populations.

Historians have argued that while a poor harvest often caused dearth, it required at least two consecutive harvest failures to produce a famine, a relatively rare misfortune.  

Jean de Wavrin, Figures lying in the road, by the fields, due to famine. S. Netherlands (1470-1480). British Library, Shelf mark Royal 15 E. IV.

English famines

Famine was clearly a major concern in medieval England. The “Great Famine” of 1315-22 accompanied three successive years of crop failures (1315-17) and a subsequent cattle plague (1319-21), and is estimated by historians to have resulted in the deaths of around 10 per cent of the English population (and similar proportions elsewhere across France, northern and eastern Europe).  

Harvest failures and famine accompanied the Black Death in England in 1349-51. Further famines have also been identified in 1437-38, 1557, and 1597.

The famine of 1597 was caused by a run of extremely wet growing seasons that caused widespread crop failures across western and central Europe. In England the famine was most intense in upland and remote areas, and killed around one per cent of the English population.

Two Englands?

After the 1590s, famine seems to have receded from southern and eastern England. Severe harvest failures and famine struck many communities in the northern and upland parts of England again in the early 1620s. But at the national level the mortality impact was relatively slight.  

Famine finally retreated from the north and uplands of England after the 1620s. In the 1690s, a series of exceptionally wet and cold growing seasons affected most of western Europe and killed perhaps 10 per cent of the populations of France and Scotland. Remarkably, despite suffering similarly dire weather conditions, the English population experienced no excess mortality. As Walter put it, England had decisively slipped the shadow of famine by the mid-17th century.  

The escape from famine

Why did famine peter out so precociously in England compared with other European societies that were often subjected to similar weather conditions and even similar levels of harvest failure?  

The answer probably depends on what caused famines, something historians continue to debate.  

Jan Steen, “The Lean Kitchen” (c.1650-1655). Image credit: Bridgeman Images.

It is now widely recognised that modern famines often reflect a failure to redistribute existing food supplies, rather than an absolute lack of food availability.

However, it remains unclear whether historical famines were generally caused by natural and manmade disasters (harvest failures or warfare), or whether they could have been averted in many cases by political interventions to obtain and distribute food where it was needed.  

In the English case there is evidence for the contribution of both redistribution and increased food production in averting famine. Key factors were the agricultural revolution and the introduction of the Poor Laws. 

The agricultural revolution

Improvements in agricultural production since the 17^th century are very likely to have contributed to the decline of famine. These improvements resulted from innovations in farming practices and animal breeding, as well as reclamation of heath, moorland and especially marshes.

They also reflected the progressive commercialization of English farming and the incentives provided by the development of a national market for grain and meat. 

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, “The Harvesters” (1565).

 This economic integration of the country encouraged regional specialization and trade. Upland areas increasingly specialised in pastoral agriculture and imported grain from areas of intensive arable farming. This specialization increased average yields in both types of area, and stimulated trade.  

However, this specialization may also explain at least partly the later disappearance of famine from the north and west of England, where the soils and topography favoured meat and wool production. In times of harvest failure, demand for grains went up, and most people could no longer afford meat. In pastoral areas which depended on imported grain, this meant that the price of grain rose just as demand for their own exports fell, dealing a double blow to their purchasing power.  

Pellizza da Volpedo, Weary limbs (1906).

The poor laws

In tandem with developments in agriculture and trade, England developed a system of poor laws that required local communities (parishes) to raise taxes to support their poor.

Parish officials distributed food or cash to enable the poor to buy food. This provided a safety net for many of the most vulnerable, and helped to reduce famine-induced migration that spread epidemic diseases. The implementation of the poor laws seems to have been more rudimentary in northern compared with southern England in the early 17th century, and this may have contributed to the later persistence of famine there.   

Why did the English peasants not starve?

It is likely that all these factors played important roles in securing the English population from famine. Even Thomas Malthus, usually an implacable opponent of the English poor laws, was driven to commend the operation of the English poor laws in averting famine. Returning from a tour of northern Sweden in 1799, where harvest failure had forced families to resort to grinding birch bark to make bread, Malthus noted that the price of grain had doubled there. However, in England, where similar weather conditions had caused widespread crop losses, the price of grain had tripled, but there was no starvation.  

Illustration of starvation in northern Sweden, Famine of 1867–1868.

Malthus explained this apparent paradox in terms made famous by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen, that the poor laws, by providing the poor with cash to buy bread, ensured that even the poorest retained purchasing power. This drove up the price of bread for everyone but also ensured that food was widely distributed and that no-one starved.  

As Malthus put it, without the operation of the poor laws the consequences of the harvest shortfall ‘would have fallen exclusively on… the poorest inhabitants, a very considerable number of whom must in consequence have starved. The operation of the parish allowances, by raising the price of provisions so high, caused the distress to be divided among five or six million, instead of two or three’. In Sweden on the other hand the poor had no money to buy grain, and so their starvation had little effect on food prices.  

Crucially, the English poor laws did not extend to Ireland, where the British administration oversaw one of the last great famines in western Europe in the 1840s.  

Further reading

John Walter and Roger Schofield (eds), Famine, disease and the social order in early modern society (Cambridge University Press, 1989). 

Guido Alfani and Cormac Ó Gráda (eds), Famine in European history (Cambridge University Press 2017).  

References 

Healey, J. (2014) The first century of welfare: Poverty and poor relief in Lancashire, 1620–1730 (Boydell & Brewer) .

Hoyle, R. (2017) ‘Britain’, in Alfani, G. and Ó Gráda, C. (eds), Famine in European history (Cambridge University Press).  

Smith, R.M. (2017) ‘Contrasting susceptibility to famine in the early fourteenth- and late sixteenth-century: the significance of the late medieval social structural and village governmental changes, in Braddick, M. and Withington, P. (eds.) Popular culture and political agency in early modern England and Ireland. Essays in honour of John Walter (Boydell & Brewer). 

Walter, J. (1989) ‘The social economy of dearth in early modern England’ in Walter, J. and Schofield, R. (eds), Famine, disease and the social order in early modern society (Cambridge University Press), pp. 75-128. 

Wrigley, E.A. (1999), ‘Corn and crisis: Malthus on the high price of provisions’, Population and Development Review, 25, pp.121-128. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1728-4457.1999.00121.x 

Wrigley, E.A. & Schofield, R.S. (1989) The population history of England 1541-1871, 2nd edn. (Cambridge University Press).