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1 Introduction
The problem of dearth in early modern England
After the notorious dearth years of the 1590s, a poetry anthology Englands Parnassus was published in 1600. This period was marked by four consecutive years of harvest failure, leading to possibly the most prolonged of the economic crises that afflicted England (and other parts of Europe) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Englands Parnassus, compiled by Robert Allott, a central figure in the world of Elizabethan literary anthologizing and public circulation via print of privately collected texts, was part of an early modern tradition of collating, which attempted to “rewrite commonplaces in the language of a new canon of modern poets” (Moss, 1996: 210).1 It printed extracts from the poetry of Shakespeare, Spenser, Jonson, and other authors, arranged under thematic headings. In the context of the 1590s crises, the selections titled “Of Dearth,” “Famine,” and “Gluttonie” were especially significant. The compiled poems presented vivid pictures of the starving human body, thus activating, and not just reflecting, contemporary fears of dearth. The texts were part of a complex cultural discourse on economic and ecological crisis, which employed contrast and paradox as its predominant figurative strategies, and articulated anxieties about the future.
The personified figures of Famine and Dearth in Englands Parnassus had the physiological symptoms of “famine edema”, a condition where fat and muscle were “consumed” to feed the vital interior organs, leading to loss of hair, greying skin, dental decay, swelling limbs or stomach, and general lassitude (Appleby, 1978: 7–8). Dearth yawned wide “with lothsome stinking breath”: she had “hollow eyes”, “meger cheekes and chinne”, “sharpe leane bones” that pierced her “sable skinne”, and one might plainly spy her empty bowels “Cleane through the wrinckles of her withered hide”. And yet, her knees and knuckles swelled “very great” (256). Grouped as they were, the selections emphasized that the famished body was a contradictory sight, emaciated and bloated at the same time, an irony extended through the observation that Famine and Dearth starved even as they devoured like gluttons. In fact, the two figures shared the same iconography as Gluttony, a thin-necked beast with a belly “vpblowen with luxurie” (87; cf. Spenser, FQ I.iv.21). As the “greedie gorge” of Dearth consumed her “owne deere babes” and, indeed, her own flesh, the irony of her self-defeat was that she “lessen[ed] her selfe, her selfe so to inlarge” (256). The description of the physiognomy of Dearth was taken from Joshua Sylvester’s translation (1598) of Du Bartas’ La Seconde Sepmaine (1584) where Dearth appeared in an account of the destructive operations of the Furies. Allott’s anthology invited the comparison of this extract with a similar picture of Famine (69–70) taken from Thomas Sackville’s “Induction” to The Mirror for Magistrates (1563). This work had appeared soon after the dearth of 1555–57, and we find it incorporated within the thematic arrangement of Englands Parnassus, published after another series of failed harvests from 1594 to 1598. Spectres of dearth persisted in public memory, and literary texts helped to circulate recollections of similar past experiences. The intertextuality of these selections, reinforced by the tradition of anthologized dissemination, introduced a critique of the human inability to learn from destructive consumption patterns and crises of the past. Dearth was anxiously conceived as a repetitive crisis, and the interrelated Dearth-Famine-Gluttony groupings of Englands Parnassus underlined the complexity of dearth-related distress as a social phenomenon.
The compiled texts of Englands Parnassus obviously acquire a specific resonance in a historical period characterized by dearth, but they do not, it might be argued, constitute “evidence” of starvation. In many studies of early modern dearth, historians have treaded carefully around Peter Laslett’s famous question: did people “really starve”? As John Walter and Roger Schofield noted in their influential book of essays on famine,
If we want to investigate questions such as how often people went so short of food that they were malnourished and starved to death, we need to find evidence recorded on a regular basis so that we can assess the typicality of our observations over time and space.
(1989: 4)
They continued that neither the nutritional status, nor the cause of death, was regularly recorded in early modern England, and pointed instead towards available evidence of grain prices and parish registers, evaluating the limits of each. Their assessment implied the need to probe beyond quantifiable kinds of evidence to other kinds, which underscored “the reality of the threat of harvest failure” and “the distress that dearth occasioned” (48). It may be argued that the clearly interrelated Dearth-Famine-Gluttony selections of Englands Parnassus give “real” evidence of such distress. As the extract from Sackville highlighted, “dearth” was “the liuely form of death”. The (in)distinction between dearth and death, in the minds of poets, compilers, and readers, was represented by merely a single letter. This signalled an easy conflation of the meanings of the two words in their minds. Poetic description could evoke death from malnutrition and its symptoms with just the precision and graphic detail that parish register accounts tended to lack. This naturally compounds the problem of what should be considered evidence. In early modern literary texts, dearth and famine were not only recorded on a regular basis, the themes also affected the rhetoric of these texts in typical ways that can be mapped. Such evidence, however, needs to be more fully studied, historicized, and theorized. The Englands Parnassus extracts provide a useful point of entry to understand the psychological and practical impact of the crisis they evoked. They call for an investigation of the widespread fear of the “famine” (the words “famine” and “dearth” were interchangeable in early modern England) and the effect of such fears and bewilderment on mundane activities, as well as on writing and language. It is apparent from the paradox exposed by these texts – the paradox of Dearth-as-Glutton – that the simultaneous existence of wasteful consumption and shortage in the contemporary national economy was investigated by poets and worried over by their readers. But what the poems also, more subtly, expose are the principles underlying remedial measures both executed and imagined by the early modern English. The fundamental aim, expressed by Sir Hugh Platt, a contemporary whose works this book will consider in detail, was to “turn this our penurie into plenty” (Famine A2r). To activate this aim, one did indeed have to “lessen to inlarge” as the poem on Dearth observed, but in a way that would invert the self-defeating pattern of self-enlargement embodied by the personified figures of Famine or Dearth. Platt, simultaneously a poet and a scientific practitioner, was not merely speaking in rhetorical tropes but expressing the pragmatic thrust of early modern measures for coping with economic and ecological crisis.
In this book, I will analyze the anxieties, poetics, and knowledge-making practices that constituted the cultural discourse of dearth in England at the turn of the sixteenth century. It is thus necessary to situate the 1590s crisis in the wider context of theoretical understandings of famine causation and historiographic developments in the analysis of early modern dearth, while looking more closely at the range of literary evidence of dearth from this period. This evidence is important for understanding early modern dearth-time practices. Further to Laslett’s question, one may ask: what did people really do when faced with the threat of starvation? How did these practices alter the course of knowledge making? What can we learn from early modern modes of survival in a difficult socio-economic environment? After discussing theoretical, historiographical, and literary issues that underpin these questions, I will introduce, through the works of Hugh Platt, who sought to turn penury into plenty, the pragmatic evidence of how knowledge-making practices in the late sixteenth century were consistently inflected and motivated by pressures of dearth, as well as communal discussions of dearth-time anxieties. Much of this book is devoted to recovering the processes and practices of making knowledge in a moment of acute economic shortage and strain in English history. I will term this knowledge-making process “dearth science” and argue that the concept of dearth science can be a framework not only for understanding how early modern principles of making knowledge were created within a dearth-driven context, but that it may prove relevant to other historical and social contexts where the problem of dearth was, or is, operative.2
Writing histories of dearth
Historiographies of dearth and its alleviation in early modern England have a complex trajectory and rich scholarly tradition on which this examination of the subject relies. Studies of dearth undertaken in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the findings of historical demography and asked fundamental questions about quantifying dearth, national and regional price fluctuations, population levels, wages rates, nutritional standards, and the relationship between starvation and disease. In 1965, when Peter Laslett asked “Did the peasants really starve?” he pointed out there was little work in British historical demography on the subject in comparison with the French demographical studies to which he referred (repr. 2000: 122–52). By the time he published the revised version of his book in 1983, much had changed. While Laslett was raising fundamental questions of historical demography in the 1960s, agricultural historians were evaluating food scarcity and/or plenty regionally and nationally. Drawing on the Beveridge index of prices, W.G. Hoskins (1964–68) mapped harvest fluctuations in England between 1480 and 1759.
Peter Bowden’s price series also appeared within the wider enterprise of the Agrarian History of England and Wales, volume IV, edited by Joan Thirsk (1967: 814–70). These works showed that, while economic stability in pre-industrial England depended on good harvests, the latter part of the sixteenth century recorded the most serious dearths: 1555–57, 1586–88, and 1594–98. The turn of the century was a period of gathering crisis: not only did crops fail, but the population increased. With consequent pressure on food supply prices rose, and there were outbreaks of disease and war. Among these years, the 1590s presented a particularly dismal picture. Three good harvests of 1591–93 were followed by four disastrous years (1594–97) when food prices were driven up by the failure of the wheat harvest. In 1596, according to Hoskins, the average wheat price was 83 per cent above the norm (1964: 38; cf. Outhwaite, 1985: 23–43). Later analyses, by the Cambridge Group, of the geographical distribution of local crises in the 1590s showed that mortality rates during these crises were between 21 and 26 per cent above the trend (Walter and Schofield, 1989: 34–35).3 The “famine” (as it was called by contemporaries) extended all over Europe, where it was rumoured that the poor in Italy and Germany consumed fungus, cats, dogs, and snakes, while women in Hungary ate their own children (Hoskins, 1964: 38).4 Hoskins’ commentary, sometimes dramatically correlating price data, demographic pressures, disease, politics, and anecdote, was subsequently qualified (Harrison, 1971; Outhwaite, 1981: 389–406; Walter, 1989: 84; Wrigley, 1989: 244; Wrightson and Levine, 1995: 46). Nevertheless, his “harvest-sensitive” model, and attempt to quantitatively define the term “dearth”, marked a significant development. The Bowden indices assimilated information from a range of sources, enabling a more detailed analysis of movements in national and regional agricultural prices and wages in the long term (865–70). At the same time, this work drew attention to the fact that available data came largely from the south of England (there is no national grain price series for England before 1884) and from institutional records (Mitchell and Deane, 1981: table D2). The wage data were based on rates rather than earnings and focused on the adult male. The nature of the data thus raised further questions about representing individual and household incomes and expenditures, and about regional variation and gender. The mapping of available price and wage data showed there were periods of sharp price rise and of dearth, perhaps most clearly indicated by Hoskins’ wheat harvest graph; but one still needed to tread carefully around the question of how far people “really” starved.
Figure 1.1 “English Harvest Fluctuations 1480–1625”. From W.G. Hoskins, “Harvest fluctuations and English economic history”, Agricultural History Review 12 (1964): 28–46, Fig. 1
Andrew Appleby’s seminal study Famine in Tudor and Stuart England (1978) looked beyond the south of England, focusing on famine-prone areas of the northwest – Westmorland and Cumberland. Appleby offered two related lines of enquiry: first, he queried how one could know about the physiological and nutritional aspects of starvation in this early period; second, he asked what were the “economic and social conditions that allow[ed] enough people to starve to qualify as famine”. He defined “famine” as “a crisis of mortality caused by starvation and starvation-related disease, a crisis measured by the increase in the number of deaths” and further emphasized the necessity of regional studies (1–3). He described regional population, local agriculture and economy, and ways in which social structures (such as landlord-tenant relationships) affected the distribution of agricultural yield. The three severe crises in the northwest, in 1587–88, 1597–98, and 1623, identified by Appleby, correspond to the periods of national crisis and dearth identified by Hoskins and indicated by the movements of Bowden’s indices. In short, Appleby’s answer to Laslett’s question was positive, and his methodology for detecting famine was centred on the fulfilment of carefully defined criteria.5 Thus far, the historical study of dearth had revealed not only particular crisis-driven moments in time, but specific points of regional vulnerability, which Appleby compared to the rest of England and Europe.
Apart from providing a basis in historical demography for the study of famine, the work of Appleby and others also conveyed the importance of studying famine in its wider social, geographical, and ideological context. Subsequent studies, relying on these findings, expanded the picture in linked directions, by investigating poverty and policy, social disparities and dislocation, and elite and popular perceptions of dearth. This work demonstrated the significance of studying both the social economy and the ecology of dearth, for in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, England saw increased levels of vagrancy, destitution, and food riots, especially in the uplands of the north and west, which suffered owing to the inaccessibility of markets. Appleby observed there seemed to be “two Englands”: one in the south and east that was able to avoid widespread starvation despite trade depression and failed harvests, and another in the uplands, which was pushed below subsistence level by the same crises.6 Local case studies, such as Rogers’ work on Lancashire and Slack’s analysis of crisis mortality in Devon and Essex, suggested systematic ecological differences between the crisis-free and crisis-prone areas. In upland areas, as one might expect, soil and climate were hostile to arable agriculture and there was a tendency to specialize in pastoral farming. In Westmorland and parts of Yorkshire, people depended on rural industry, which was itself dependent on harvest quality (Appleby, 1978: ch.12, 1973: 430; Wrigley and Schofield, 1989: 670–85; Rogers, 1975: 11; Slack, 1979a: 34–35; Walter and Schofield, 1989: 23–25). But, as Walter and Schofield commented, it was not as though “everyone in the apparently famine-free ‘southern’ communities was able to avoid a higher risk of mortality”. If there were “two Englands” geographically, that this was also true socially complicated the picture. Southern parishes that were predominantly woodland, or based on rural industry, had vulnerable ecologies similar to the northern ones, and there were impoverished individuals and marginalized social groups who were vulnerable to harvest failure. For example, in the 1590s, there was higher mortality in poorer areas of cities like Bristol, and the bad harvests of the early seventeenth century showed a more acute impact on the poor in the woodland area of the Warwickshire Arden (Slack, 1979a: 38; Skipp, 1978). Moreover, vulnerability to famine could be a function of not only social position but age and unsettledness.7 As Wrightson and Levine showed in their study of Whickham, vulnerable communities often comprised large numbers of transient, migrating members whose records were not perfectly maintained in local registers. Deaths of migrants could be registered in parishes through which they travelled, or in cities and towns to which subsistence migrants would flock in dearth years. Anonymous parish register entries revealed that bodies of the displaced rural poor who were mostly drifting to the south and east were found under hedges, in barns, or on the roadside. There was a substantial increase in the level of burials, as the old, the very young, and the marginalized died of starvation, or from eating inferior food (Wrightson and Levine, 1989: 129–65; Sharpe, 1995: 195–98; Appleby, 1978: 109–54; Wrightson, 1982: 121–48; Beier, 1985: 79).8 Studies of social dislocation and vagrancy in particular appeared to give renewed credence to Hoskins’ surmise, “Death [by starvation and disease] must have been as common a sight as on a battlefield” (1964: 32).
Closer investigation of the social economy and ecology of dearth brought questions of social differentiation and access to resources to bear upon questions of food availability and productivity. This theoretical and methodological shift is apparent in the questioning of the familiar speculation that famine disappeared from England owing to advances in agriculture – larger cultivation areas, improved techniques, and greater productivity lifted population pressure and ensured that England, by the late seventeenth century, became an exporter of grain. Real wages improved, and consumer demand for non-agricultural products promoted mixed farming and diversified rural occupations. Improved transport and better market integration helped to address regional differences. As net yields outstripped population growth, harvest failure had a diminishing demographic impact over time (Wrigley and Schofield, 1989: ch.7; Hoskins, 1968).9 This narrative raised questions about broader sociological patterns of change. Although increased agricultural productivity would raise the available food per head, the changed structures of landholding and employment that achieved this increase may have made one section of society (the landless, smallholders, cottagers, and labourers) more vulnerable to harvest failure and high prices. Thus, to explain the absence of famine or low mortality rate, one would have to explain how these social groups survived despite their wors...
