As early as 1196 there is the significant incident, in the city of London, of the rising of the poorer class and the middling class, headed by Fitzosbert Longbeard, himself one of the privileged citizens, against an assessment in which the class represented by the mayor and aldermen were alleged to have been very tender of their own interests[88]. Longbeard was hailed as “the friend of the poor,” and, having lost his life in their cause (whether in the street before Bow Church, or on a gallows at Tyburn, or at the Smithfield elms, the narratives are not agreed), he is celebrated by the sympathetic Matthew Paris as “the martyr of the poor[89].” That historian continues, after the manner of his predecessor Wendover, to speak of Londoners as on the one hand the “mediocres, populares et plebei,” and on the other hand the “divites.” In 1258 the latter class overreached themselves: they were caught in actual vulgar peculation of money raised by assessment for repairing the city walls; some of them were thrown into prison and only escaped death through the royal clemency at the instance of the notorious pluralist John Mansel, and on making restitution of their plunder; but one of them, the mayor, never recovered the blow to his respectability, and died soon after of grief[90]. Whether it meant a wide-spread spirit of petty fraud, or some unadjusted change in value, the young king in 1228, during a journey from York to London, took occasion along his route to destroy the “false measures” of corn, ale and wine, to substitute more ample measures, and to increase the weight of the loaf.
The scarcity or famine of 1234, to which the Abbotsley incident belongs, was accompanied, says the St Albans annalist, by a mortality which raged cruelly everywhere. On the other hand the annalist of Tewkesbury may be credited when he says that, although the year was one of scarcity, corn being at eight shillings, yet “by the grace of God the poor were better sustained than in other years[91].”
There was an epidemic in 1247, but it is not clear whether it was due to famine. Although Higden, quoting from some unknown record, says that there was dearth in England in that year, wheat being at twelve shillings the quarter, yet he does not mention sickness at all; and Matthew Paris, who was then living, is explicit that the harvest of 1247 was an abundant one, and that the mortality did not begin until September of that year. There does appear, however, to have been a sharp famine in Wales; and it is recorded that the bishop of Norwich, “about the year 1245,” in a time of great dearth, sold all his plate and distributed it to the poor[92]. All that we know of this epidemic is the statement of Matthew Paris, that it began in September and lasted for three months; and that as many as nine or ten bodies were buried in one day in the single churchyard of St Peter’s at Saint Albans[93].
Matthew Paris notes the quality of the harvest and the prices of grain every year, and his successor Rishanger continues the practice. The prices noted appear, from comparison with those tabulated by Thorold Rogers from actual accounts, to have been the lowest market rates of the year. The harvest of 1248 was plentiful, and wheat sold at two shillings and sixpence a quarter. In 1249 and 1250 it was at two shillings, oats being at one shilling. But those years of exceptional abundance were followed at no long interval by a series of years of scarcity or famine, which brought pestilential sickness of the severest kind.
The scarcity or famine in the years 1256-59 was all the more acutely felt owing to the dearth of money in the country. The burden of the history of Matthew Paris before he comes to the famine is that England had been emptied of treasure by the exactions of king and pope. Henry III. was under some not quite intelligible obligation of money to his brother, the earl of Cornwall. The English earl was a candidate for the Imperial crown, and had got so far towards the dignity of emperor as to have been made king of the Germans. It was English money that went to pay his German troops, and to further his cause with the electoral princes; but the circulating coin of England does not appear to have sufficed for these and domestic purposes also. The harvest of 1256 had been spoiled by wet, and the weather of the spring of 1257 was wretched in the extreme. All England was in a state of marsh and mud, and the roads were impassable. Many sowed their fields over again; but the autumn proved as wet as the rest of the year. “Whatever had been sown in winter, whatever had germinated in spring, whatever the summer had brought forward—all was drowned in the floods of autumn.” The want of coins in circulation caused unheard-of poverty. At the end of the year the fields lay untilled, and a multitude of people were dead of famine. At Christmas wheat rose to ten shillings a quarter. But the year 1257 appears to have had “lethal fevers” before the loss of the harvest of that year could be felt. Not to mention other places, says the St Albans historian, there was at St Edmundsbury in the dog-days so great a mortality that more than two thousand bodies were buried in its spacious cemetery[94].
The full effects of the famine were not felt until the spring of 1258. So great was the pinch in London from the failure of the crops and the want of money that fifteen thousand[95] are said to have died of famine, and of a grievous and wide-spread pestilence that broke out about the feast of the Trinity (19 May).
The earl of Cornwall (and king of Germany) who had relieved the country of a great part of its circulating coin, took the opportunity to buy up corn in Germany and Holland for the supply of the London market. Fifty great ships, says Matthew Paris, arrived in the Thames laden with wheat, barley, and other grain. Not three English counties had produced as much as was imported. The corn was for such as could buy it; but the king interposed with an edict that, whereas greed was to be discouraged, no one was to buy the foreign corn in order to store it up and trade in it. Those who had no money, we are expressly told, died of hunger, even after the arrival of the ships; and even men of good position went about with faces pinched by hunger, and passed sleepless nights sighing for bread. No one had seen such famine and misery, although many would have remembered corn at higher prices. The price quoted about this stage of the narrative, although not with special reference to the foreign wheat, is nine shillings the quarter. Elsewhere the price is said to have mounted up to fifteen shillings, which may have been the rate before the foreign supply came in. But such was the scarceness of money, we are told, that if the price of the quarter of wheat had been less, there would hardly have been found anyone to buy it. Even those who were wont to succour the miserable were now reduced to perish along with them. It is difficult to believe that the historian has not given way to the temptations of rhetoric, and it is pleasing to be able to give the following complement to his picture. After some 15,000 had died in London, mostly of the poorer sort, one might hear a crier making proclamation to the starving multitude to go to a distribution of bread by this or that nobleman, at such and such a place, mentioning the name of the benefactor and the place of dole.
In other passages, which may be taken as picturing the state of matters in the country, the historian says that the bodies of the starved were found swollen and livid, lying five or six together in pig-sties, or on dungheaps, or in the mud of farmyards. The dying were refused shelter and succour for fear of contagion, and scarcely anyone would go near the dead to bury them. Where many corpses were found together, they were buried in capacious trenches in the churchyards.
We come now to the harvest of 1258. After a bleak and late spring the crops had come forward well under excessive heat in summer, and the harvest was an unusually abundant, although a late one. Rains set in before the corn could be cut, and at the feast of All Saints (1 November) the heavy crops had rotted until the fields were like so many dungheaps. Only in some places was any attempt made to carry the harvest home, and then it was so spoiled as to be hardly worth the trouble. Even the mouldy grain sold as high as sixteen shillings a quarter. The famishing people resorted to various shifts, selling their cattle and reducing their households. How the country got through the winter, we are not told. Matthew Paris himself died early in 1259, and the annalist who added a few pages to the Chronica Majora after his death, merely mentions that the corn, the oil and the wine turned corrupt, and that as the sun entered Cancer a pestilence and mortality of men began unexpectedly, in which many died. Among others Fulk, the bishop of London, died of pestilence in the spring of 1259; and, to say nothing of many other places, at Paris —— thousand (the number is left blank) were buried.
The vagueness of the last statement reminds us that we are now deprived of the comparatively safe guidance of Matthew Paris. His successor in the office of annalist at St Albans, Rishanger, is much less trustworthy. He sums up the year 1259 in a paragraph which repeats exactly the facts of the notorious year 1258, and probably applies to that alone; for the year 1260 his summary is that it was more severe, more cruel and more terrible to all living things than the year before, the pestilence and famine being intolerable. There is, however, no confirmation of that in the authentic prices of the year collected by Thorold Rogers. Parcels of wheat of the harvest of 1259 were sold at about five and six shillings, and of the harvest of 1260 at from three shillings and sixpence to six shillings. For a number of years, corresponding to the Barons’ war and the war in Wales, the price is moderate or low, the figures of extant bailiffs’ accounts agreeing on the whole with Rishanger’s summary statements about the respective harvests[96]. The years from 1271 to 1273 were dear years, and for the first of the series we find a doubtful record by the Yorkshire continuator of William of Newburgh that there was “a great famine and pestilence in England and Ireland[97].” The harvest of 1288 was so abundant that the price of wheat in the bailiffs’ accounts is mostly about two shillings, ranging from sixteen pence to four and eightpence. Rishanger’s prices for the year are sufficiently near the mark: in some places wheat sold at twenty pence the quarter, in others at sixteen pence, and in others at twelve pence. From that extremely low point, a rise begins which culminates in 1294. The chronicler’s statement for 1289, that in London the bushel of wheat rose from threepence to two shillings, is not borne out by the bailiffs’ accounts, which show a range of from two shillings and eightpence to six shillings the quarter. But these accounts confirm the statement that the years following were dear years, and that 1294 was a year of famine prices, wheat having touched fourteen shillings at Cambridge, in July. Rishanger’s two notes are that the poor perished of hunger, and that the poor died of hunger on all sides, afflicted with a looseness (lienteria)[98]. The two years following are also given as hard for the poor, but not as years of famine or sickness; the country was at the same time heavily taxed for the expenses of the war which Edward I. was waging against the Scots. Ordinary prosperity attends the cultivators of the soil until the end of Rishanger’s chronicle in 1305; and from the beginning of Trokelowe’s in 1307, the year of Edward II.’s accession, there is nothing for our purpose until we come to the great famine of 1315[99].