Famine in medieval England

Historians of the Middle Ages have, with some notable exceptions, tended to address the issue of famine often only obliquely; this is in no small part a reflection of the changing approach to the study of the medieval past and the kinds of source types that encouraged and directed initial studies in this area. In addition to a range of narrative sources, historians of high and late medieval England are particularly advantaged in having at their disposal strong series of grain yield, price and wage data that allow a more quantitative mapping of famine chronologies and the likely pressure points when prices moved to unusually high levels; this is especially the case from the second half of the thirteenth century when there appears to have been a significant increase in the use of detailed written accounts for the manor and higher institutions. Both contemporaries and modern historians agree that the immediate cause of famine in the Middle Ages was weather.