ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the importance of popular agency in the politics of dearth in maintaining in the face of economic and social change forms of societal and governmental responses that offered protection against subsistence crises. Famine had been a recurring reality in medieval England, and it was an ever-present fear in early modern England. By the period at which parochial registration of vital events begins, years of high food prices were already not always years of mortality crises. Improvements in agricultural productivity, storage and distribution, helped to lift the threat of national famines by stabilising food prices and moderating the exogenous shock of extreme weather events. Nationally, the growth in the number of land-poor and landless forced to buy their food in the market made food security a pressing problem, making them more vulnerable to the doubling or even trebling of food prices that harvest failure of transition.
