ABSTRACT
The French historian, Pierre Goubert, who had analysed the evidence in the 1950s, certainly believed that the peasants and the craftsmen living in this region were liable to starve at times during the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, and that starvation also occurred in other parts of France. The risk of ‘starvation’, as we have hinted, would not necessarily show itself in conspicuous events, the famines of the history books. Now our present information goes to show that the death of one-third of the population in a matter of months from any cause, pestilence, famine or war, was unknown in any English community, in city, town or country during the parish register era. Once having begun to respond to them, we are only just beginning to recognize the implications of such queries for human association altogether, and that not only of the English people in their pre-industrial past.
